Chapter 70: Rei
Vernon Street is one-way and the carpet warehouse is the third unit along, with a roller shutter and a fire door painted the same green.
There are nineteen stairs.
I counted them going up, which I already knew.
The door at the top has a wired-glass panel and a laminated sheet on it with the timetable.
Juniors five thirty to six thirty.
Seniors seven to nine.
I went in at nine minutes past seven.
The smell arrives before anything else. It is rubber and feet and dust off a strip light and something faintly sweet underneath, which is the disinfectant they have mopped with since 1988.
I stopped inside the door.
Twenty-four mats.
Green, with the join lines running north to south.
A gap of about a metre between the mat edge and the wall on three sides.
A strip light at the far end that flickers on a two-second cycle and has flickered for as long as I have known that room.
A wall of hooks. A scoreboard from 1991 with the numbers painted on and a nail through the middle.
Fourteen people on the mat.
Eleven men, three women.
Two of them under twenty. One man in his sixties.
Tobias was at the far end with his back to me, taking somebody's arm and moving it about ten centimetres and putting it back.
He saw me. He did the smallest possible thing with his chin and then carried on with the arm.
That was correct of him and it cost me more than being greeted would have.
I put my bag down against the wall by the hooks.
I had my tracksuit trousers and a T-shirt on under my coat, because I could not face changing in a room with people in it.
I took my shoes off. Two shoes.
Socks on the floorboards, which are cold.
Then I walked to the edge of the mat.
You do not step onto a mat. You stop at the edge of it and you bow, and then you step on.
It is called a rei and it takes about a second and a half.
Feet together. Weight even. Hands slide down to rest on the fronts of the thighs. Spine straight, not rounded. Bend from the hip about thirty degrees. Eyes go down the line of the floor.
I have done it perhaps sixty thousand times.
I brought my feet together.
My hands came down onto the fronts of my thighs, palms flat, fingers together, thumbs tucked.
And I began to bend.
I got about halfway.
I have thought about this a great deal and I believe it was somewhere near fifteen degrees, which is not a bow. It is a woman starting to look at the floor.
Because that is the position.
Spine straight. Hands flat on the fronts of the thighs.
Eyes down. Held until somebody says.
It is the same shape. Exactly the same shape, and I never once noticed it in three years, because I never did both things in the same week.
Eleven times at a dining table on hardwood, and sixty thousand times on a mat, and the body does not file them separately.
My hamstrings locked. That is what it actually felt like. Not a flood of feeling. Two hamstrings going hard and a stop somewhere in the small of my back.
I straightened up.
I stood at the edge of twenty-four mats in front of fourteen people with my hands at my sides and my heart going at about a hundred and forty.
Nobody looked at me. That is not true. One woman doing a warm-up on the far side glanced across and went back to what she was doing.
The strip light did its two-second flicker four or five times.
I did not step on.
Tobias did not come over. He stayed at the far end with his hand on somebody's elbow and he did not once look at the door.
I picked up my shoes and I did not put them on. I carried them.
I picked up my bag with my left hand.
And I walked out and down the nineteen stairs in my socks and put my shoes on sitting on the second step from the bottom.
Outside it was still light. Half past seven in June.
I stood on Vernon Street with a plastic bag and a towel I had not used and I was not crying and I was not angry.
I was working out the geometry of it, which is what I do, and the geometry was this.
They had not taken judo from me. I gave that up at twenty-one to a torn rim of cartilage.
They had taken the bow.
Three years of a woman at a table saying straighten your back, and the shape had gone over to them, and I had handed it across without ever knowing there was a transaction.
He did not come after me.
That is the only reason I went back.