Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,6
he’s gone and done it this time, made her into the woman he’s always wanted her to be. That she sometimes tries to be when she gets that look in her eye with him. All soft and sweet, like one of those prim ladies from movies about the fifties who always have the house kept well, dinner ready, and still manage to stay out of everyone’s way. These days she actually tries to avoid him, step around him when he’s there, turn away when she sees him coming. Maybe she’s learning some defence of her own, but I think it just makes him angrier. I don’t mean to sound judgy…it’s just that her footwork needs some fine-tuning.
* * *
Jab, cross, hook, uppercut. One, two, three, four. Bap bap bap bap. It’s about the rhythm, see?
“Come on,” says Ricky, who’s holding pads for me. “Ten swing kicks.” So I give him ten, and we go back to combos.
Knee. Double knee. Push back, swing kick. Do it fifty times, then join conditioning class for some weight training.
I beg Kru to put me on for a demo coming up.
“You sure you’re ready this time?”
“I’m ready, Kru. I want this.”
He sighs. Rubs at the imaginary hairs on his jaw. “I’ll think about it.”
That night, Kru’s ex from last year comes in like it’s nothing and watches us train from the bench. Nobody can focus because we wonder what he’s gonna do about it. She won’t leave, just sits there painting her nails. In a Muay Thai gym. A drip of electric-blue polish falls on the mat and we hope he’s gonna throw down. But he doesn’t. He’s too busy helping us be the best fighters we can be to even notice that basic shit.
This only makes us respect him more. Train harder, even though it’s almost impossible to ignore the presence of this soft woman with her hard face. We want to be the best for Kru. To be ready to drop and give him fifty push-ups at any point in our day. Train harder. Be stronger. Faster. Control our emotions as he does—ignoring the ladies in our lives that make everything difficult.
Be ready for whatever life throws at us.
“You never know what can happen,” Aunty K said recently. She was talking about last year in Trinidad when someone tried to kidnap my dad, which happens to people there all the time, on account of all the drugs and general mayhem. We’d even knocked Colombia off the list for most kidnappings for a while. Congrats to everybody.
Dad had the sense to defend himself and chase his attacker off, but sometimes I wish he wasn’t so very prepared for what life threw at him. I see the transformation in Ma when he’s around. She becomes smaller and fiercer. She cleaves onto me so tight. At these times, I know there’s a difference between smothering and mothering, but I can’t remember what it is.
I have this fantasy, right. Ma will come to see me fight and Kru will be there and they’ll fall in love and I’ll get a free gym membership forever, with a set of hand wraps thrown in.
This is some childish bullshit, I know. But I can’t help it. When I heard Dad almost got taken, that’s what I came back to first. Ma and me, Kru and the gym. Just us. No one else. Dad like a faded photo from the past, shoved into some dark corner where he’ll never bother us again. Like somebody we used to know. Memories fading with the bruises on her body.
five
My next fight, a demo fundraiser for the gym’s competition season, the one I specifically begged Kru to put me in, is a disappointment. The girl I’m up against doesn’t even show, so I’ve got to spar in the ring with Jason, a Mexican guy a year older than me. A college boy. He trained at another gym in the city before coming here to take advantage of a week free pass, and then never left. We’re the same height and he thinks he’s the shit but his conditioning is lacking at best. Even though he has abs of steel, apparently they’re just for show. He gets gassed in the first round and I just play him until I land a push kick to his stomach. He goes flying across the ring and Kru steps in with a giddy smile and throws both mine and Jason’s hands up in victory, even though everyone knows I won.
Jason