The following is a sample story from Human Terrain by Emily Bullock, available from our online bookshop.
‘My Girl’ by Emily Bullock
My job is to stop the blood, cool her off, wash her down. Who knows her better than her own mum? I rub the yellow carwash sponge across her head, smooth my fingers over the braids, sweeping away water with the back of my hand. Her coach leans over the ropes, whispering words I can’t hear. All I have to do is make sure the match isn’t stopped for bleeding. I open a jar and rub adrenaline chloride into the cut on her right cheek. Old scar tissue has ripped open, isn’t much blood, but I’m not taking chances. My girl keeps her eyes on the other corner, but she lets me move her face from side to side, checking for fractures. Clean. An eyelash drops and curls onto my finger. I make a wish and send it on its way. The bucket of icy water has clouded pink, but her reflection is steady. Nobody hears my wish.
Time is nearly up. I collect the bucket, towel, and my toolbox of potions. I sit back down on the other side of the ring where it is darker, small pools of pale light collecting under the lamps on each table. I am one of them again: spectator. My girl stretches her arms and legs, letting the ropes take her weight, in the last seconds of rest. But the ring isn’t empty. The men cheer as the bikini-bulging girl, slipping in her white sling-backs, parades with the second-round card held high above her yellow perm; howls loud as dogs left chained in a backyard, the air cold with moans.
I rub blue sanitiser into my hands. I don’t want any dirt to get onto her broken skin. The liquid evaporates quick as tears; it smells tart as the gin and tonics splashed across the tablecloths behind me. This is an exhibition fight, but the money is good, and it will keep her in gloves and membership for six months. My girl watches it all. She shakes her head, and water hits the floor in front of my shoes. The man behind me orders another round of whiskies and a cheer goes up.
The bell for the second round deadens the noise for a moment. My girl comes out tight, keeping hits away from the red lump swelling above her kidney. Her opponent is a swarmer. She comes at my girl again, happy to take hits on the ride in. Whisky splashes against my neck as a man behind waves his glass in the air. But my girl is fast. She blocks the blows without turning; eyes watching her opponent’s muscles. Ready to knock and duck. Bang. My girl lands a punch to the side of the head. She circles and steps off again.
Reach for it, reach for it, a man screams from behind his stack of pints; myopic eyes blinking through the glass.
No backdoor nightclub scratching and slapping here. Some cheer, and some snigger behind napkins as they dab steak juice from their lips. Swift footwork smears blood into the canvas, pinned shadows the fighters move around. A left uppercut to her opponent’s chin silences the crowd. Splatters of red spin over the ropes and smack the front row; a spot balloons on my jeans. The other fighter’s knees lock, a real pro, and stays standing. She pulls back, elbow in for power, and slugs my girl deep in the gut. I can’t breathe for her, can’t feed her from my body anymore. Her eyes narrow and she circles; playing for time as she sucks down air to free the hot cramping pain. Her blue singlet and shorts turn black with sweat. After the fight, tonight, I will tell her. Enough. My girl took the punches even when she was a swollen bulge inside me.
It was a blow to the stomach finally woke me up. I was expecting it, my hands wrapped around her hidden body, leaving my head uncovered. He raised his foot above my face, but something stopped him: the banging from the neighbours upstairs, a siren on the street. He slammed the hallway door so hard it bounced right open again, did the same with the front door. I held on to the broken back of the chair, sat up, and felt my girl kick. I laughed: all those doors wide open.
A draught from the fire exit blows litter in off the street, a crisp packet and burger wrapper circle and settle by the bucket. I boot them away. The cold air is no good for her muscles, but no one will hear me if I shout at them to close it again. The green light glows through the grey soup of smoke and beer belches. I shake the clean towels, plumping air into the folds.
They are locked together, tugging apart at the referee’s shout. Her heart is fair beating out of her chest. She snorts air, nostrils flaring. But she isn’t slowing. Her lip doesn’t droop; her eyes aren’t blinking. It is a good sign. Her coach signals with his hands, their secret language: a combination of hits or a change of tactics. She won’t tell me their code. And that makes me proud. I’m here because she wants me. She’s long past needing me to pull up her socks, wipe her nose, trim her crusts. So I wait for the bell to go, fold my bandages, mix my ointments to stop the cuts flowing. Hands working automatically as I watch her spin and circle around the ring. Her stretched plaits reveal the soft pink of her scalp; fontanelle toughened over the years, but I remember the first warm pulsing.
On the 18th of December 1989, when waves smashed Blackpool pier and leaves whipped against windows, she began to fight. In the upstairs bathroom, on a blue fish and smiling-dolphin beach towel, the ambulance delayed under a falling oak, my girl was born. She came out screaming: fists balled, face red, breathing hard. No one but me to hear her.
The bell goes for the third round. I am back at her side again. I squirt water into her mouth; collect it in the bucket as she spits it up. Wipe down her face and grease her skin to make the leather slide off. My nipples throb under the layers of jersey just like they did when she was a baby. I press a frozen eye iron to the top of her cheek, milking out the swelling. She lets me cradle her head but tilts her ear towards the bell to better trap its sound.
She catches a couple of good hits in the third. One to the ribs. One to the back. A small cut is opening up under her right eye. It will need seeing to. She is hooking with her left, and some of the men lean forward shouting encouragement, congratulating her coach. She’s a born fighter, he tells them and waves his hand to show it is all he has to say.
I stood outside the gates on her first day of school, parents waving all around. And she asked me, What happened to my daddy? He was a fighter, I told her. If there were ever words I wish I could swallow back, they are it. The bruises he left me had long since yellowed and leaked away. She didn’t ask anything else, and I knew she’d get smart enough to fill in the rest. I watched her swing her orange PE bag over her shoulder, and I waved until I thought my hands would drop off.
The fluorescent strip light coats her with its orange glue. With a right uppercut, her opponent stuns her. I see her eyes as they flicker white. She glances over. All I can do is sit back and let it happen. The other fighter presses closer, forcing my girl’s curling spine up against the ropes. Bang. Bang. Bang. A burst of hooks so fast, I’m not sure if I count three or four. But my girl won’t go down. The light swings above the canvas, dividing up the ring, as they circle each other. Matched pound for pound, my girl stands an inch shorter than her opponent; but she meets her in the eye like they are the same height. No one has ever come close to knocking her down. Not that it stops me biting my lip and holding my breath.
When she was seventeen, out of school and out of work, she found her way to the gym. The boys there said, ‘’Er’s a funny ’un.’ She didn’t listen to them and went back every day it was open. She asked Bristol Pete, shoplifter-to-order, to fetch up some Everlast leather gloves, ten ouncers. I used to worry that she never came home until the sky outside the kitchen was one dark bruise, that welts and scrapes on her skin glowed red in the cold night air. I only let myself exhale when I heard her key in the lock. On Sundays she ran along the cold, sucking sand, jumping dog shit the tide wasn’t quick enough to wash away.
She swells in and out of the other fighter’s reach, keeping in close and holding her guard up. My girl feints with a left and follows through with a smack from the right. She doesn’t stay still to soak up the praise from the crowd. Feet seeming to float above the canvas as she pushes towards a neutral corner. My girl is punching smooth and fast, legs wide enough for balance but close enough that the petroleum jelly at the top of her thighs has rubbed off. Her skin will be turning red under those long silk shorts. My girl gets up close, ready to finish it. But her opponent isn’t down yet; feet shuffling, shoulders dipping as she comes back at my girl. A deep blow under the belt, but they are too close, their bodies block the referee’s view. Only I see it. That burning pain in her groin is spreading through her legs, slowing her down. She can’t lower her hands, can’t press the spot to deaden the pain. I crack an ice pack and get the water bucket ready. One sneaky left hook and bang, it could all be over for my girl too. Some punches in life you can’t slip.
They’re calling her The Blackpool Illuminator because she lights up the ring; that’s what she told me over egg and chips, runny not set, a week before her first match. I knew why. It wasn’t in her face, square and blunt like mine, or her hardened body. It was in the way she moved. Fork to mouth, knife to plate: stabbing out combinations, left and right. She pushed off from the balls of her feet as she got up to help me with the dirty plates. My girl balanced like a spinning top. I held my wrists under the cold water until I managed to squeeze out a smile for her.
The ice pack in my hand is numbing my skin. But I suck down hot air, whistling through my front teeth, as my girl takes a jab to the side of the face. Her head snaps back on her neck as the end bell goes. For one moment, I taste the frozen silence of the hall, it fizzes and crackles on the heat of my tongue. But it isn’t a sugared ice lolly taste. The points are totted up. The white-shirted referee lifts an arm. Of course, the hometown fighter wins. Her fist smacks up into the air. The cheers aren’t for my girl. Not this time. She slaps gloves with her opponent and crosses the canvas, back to me. But I keep my arms stiff at my side so they can’t open wide and pull her close.
Sweat runs into her eyes, and she tries to flick at it with her gloves. I hold back her head and wipe her face dry with a fresh towel; press the ice pack to the base of her neck. I dab at the small cut under her eye; red and yellow, congealing already. Maybe if I hadn’t wiped over her beginnings with that word, fighter, if she wasn’t born in the great storm of ’89, she wouldn’t be up there now. But I can’t imagine her any other way. Her opponent is carried off in a whirl of white-teeth smiles, and pumping arms. The audience is leaving, scraping chairs and slapping backs. I rub her down with the towels, cloak her body and legs. The men tug on jackets, sleeves turned inside out, fingers numbed by booze, and legs deadened from steak and chips.
‘I’ll bring the car round,’ her coach says as he gives her shoulder a pat.
A lone flashbulb bleaches her face. It’s all done for the night.
‘I lost,’ she says.
‘You didn’t win this one, but there’ll be others,’ I tell her.
There won’t be any story about my girl in The Echo, not tomorrow anyway. Search for her online and boxer puppies for sale from Blackpool kennels pops up. I hold open the ropes, and she climbs out of the ring. She breathes in the coppery smack of blood, the taste of success. Together we walk through the blue ticket-stub, crumpled napkin dust that the dinner jacket men have left behind.
Sometimes we aren’t the hero in our own stories: she fights, and I stand in her corner, is the way it will always be. Fists balled, face red. Breathing hard.
By Emily Bullock from Human Terrain (£9.99)
Still one of the best short stories I’ve every read. Full of pace, drama, love and emotion, what more could you want? I look forward to reading the rest of the stories.