Coach Deb

The gym was above a tyre place in Walthamstow and smelled, honestly, like a tyre place. You went up a metal staircase that rang under your feet and pushed through a door with a sign that said NO FLIP FLOPS in marker pen, and then you were in a room full of bags hanging from chains, a ring in the corner with one sagging rope, and Deb. Deb was about five foot two. Sixties. Grey crop, gold hoops, forearms like a docker. She looked at me over her glasses. "You're the one who emailed." "Yes." "You said you'd never done anything." "That's right." "Good. Nothing to unlearn. Wrap your hands. No, not like that. Come here." She wrapped my hands for me, fast, talking the whole time. Knuckles, wrist, thumb, don't cut off the circulation you're not a sausage. When she finished my hands felt like they belonged to someone braver. There were seven of us. Two lads who clearly did this every week and bounced on their toes to prove it. A mum and her grown-up daughter doing it together. A bloke my dad's age in a Fred Perry. A woman about my age called Nkechi who caught my eye and mouthed help. We skipped for three minutes. I have not skipped since I was nine. My shins went through about four stages of grief. "Stop stamping," Deb shouted at me. "You're not killing it. Kiss the floor. Kiss it." Then the bags. She showed us a jab. Simple, she said. Everything in boxing is simple, that's why it's hard. Turn the fist over. Shoulder to your chin. Back where it came from before anyone knows it left. I hit the bag. It made a sad noise. "Again." I hit it again. "You're punching with your arm. Your arm's got nothing in it. Where's your power?" "I don't know?" "Your feet. Your power's in your feet. Everything's in your feet." She took my hip and turned it. "Now." I hit it and the bag made a completely different noise, a proper thud, and something in my chest lit up like a pilot light.

"There she is," Deb said, and moved on to Nkechi. By the end I was wet through and my arms were made of custard and I had hit a heavy bag with a left hook that Deb described as "not nothing", which I have since learned is her highest praise. Nkechi and I went for a drink after, both of us walking down the ringing staircase like our legs had been borrowed. "Same time next week?" she said. "I can't feel my shoulders." "Same time next week." That was in February. It's September. I've got my own wraps now, red ones, and Deb has stopped telling me I'm stamping. Last week she said my footwork was "getting there", and I thought about it all the way home.