Pads, Then Bag, Then Whatever's Left

The leaflet said "Women's beginner boxing, Tuesdays and Thursdays, no experience needed." It fell out of a magazine in the dentist's. I put it in my bag and left it there for six weeks. The gym is above a tyre place. You go up a metal staircase that rings when it rains and through a door with a boxing glove painted on it, and inside it smells of rubber and something older. There are bags hanging from the ceiling in a row like enormous sausages. There is a ring, an actual ring, with ropes, that I did not for one second believe I'd ever get into. The coach is a woman called Bev. Bev is sixty and about five foot one and has forearms like rope. She fought, she said, "back when they didn't let us," which I didn't fully understand and didn't ask. The first night there were seven of us. A nurse. A woman who ran a nail bar. Two friends who'd come together and kept looking at each other. A very tall quiet girl of about twenty-five. A retired teacher who was sixty-eight. Me, forty-four, an accounts manager for a firm that sells industrial flooring, who had never in my life hit anything on purpose. Bev wrapped our hands. She did it herself, each of us, the strip of cloth going round and round and between the fingers, and while she did it she talked to you low, like a hairdresser, asking what you did and why you'd come. I said the leaflet. She said, "That's what they all say. What's the real reason." I said I didn't know. She said, "That's a good reason. Most of them don't." Then she showed us how to stand. And that was it, for the first night. How to stand. Left foot forward, knees soft, hands up. Stand there. Now move. Now stand there again. My legs shook. I hadn't hit anything. Week two, the jab. Just the jab. Into the pads she held up, one-two, one-two, and the sound it made when I got it right, a flat hard slap, went straight through me. I got it right maybe one time in ten. Bev said "there" every single time, just "there," and I'd have done anything to hear it again.

Week six, the bag. You think a bag is going to give. It doesn't. You hit it and it hits you back through your wrist and your elbow and your shoulder, and if you're standing wrong it tells you. The retired teacher hit it and said something I won't repeat and Bev laughed so hard she had to sit down. I'm eighteen months in. Three times a week now. I still haven't sparred. Bev says I could. She says the tall quiet girl would go easy on me, and I've watched the tall quiet girl on the bag and I know exactly how easy that'd be. I've hit the pads until Bev's arms gave out. I've hit the bag until the wraps came through pink. I go up the metal staircase on a Thursday in the dark with the tyre place shut below, and the rain ringing on the steps, and for an hour nobody wants anything from me except that I keep my hands up. My husband asked me what I get out of it. I said, hitting things. He said, "Fair enough," and went back to the telly. I don't know what the real reason is. Bev's still asking.