Chapter 71: The Second Time
I went the following Thursday.
I want to put down that there was nothing brave about the week in between. I did the band work three times and I fed sheets into a machine for fifty-five hours and I did not think about it for more than about four minutes a day.
The deciding had already happened. What was left was the walking.
Nineteen stairs.
Wired glass.
Nine minutes past seven, again, because the bus is the bus.
Same smell.
Same flicker on the strip light.
Twelve people this time.
I took my shoes off by the hooks and put my bag against the wall in the same place as the week before, which I noticed myself doing and did not correct.
Then I went to the edge of the mat and stood there.
I did not attempt it. I want to be honest about that. I stood at the edge with my hands at my sides and did not even bring my feet together.
Tobias came down the length of the room.
He did not hurry and he did not look concerned, and he stopped about a metre and a half away, which is further than he used to stand.
“You know what it's for?”
“What?”
“The bow. Do you know what it is for.”
“Respect.”
“No,” he said. “That is what they put on the posters.”
He turned so he was side-on to me, looking down the mat at his class.
“It is a signal. It means: I am about to let you do things to my body, and you are about to let me do things to yours, and neither of us is going to take more than that.”
“It is a contract. Both of you sign it. That is why there are two people.”
He let that sit for a second.
“You have spent three years bowing at a table where nobody was signing anything.”
I did not say anything. There was nothing to say. He had got there on his own, in a car park, with a coffee, months ago.
“So don't bow to the mat,” he said.
“Then what?”
“Bow to me.”
And before I could work out what that would cost, Tobias Lund brought his feet together, put his hands to the sides of his thighs, and bowed to me.
Properly.
Thirty degrees. Eyes down.
About a second and a half.
A man of fifty-five in a worn white jacket, in front of twelve of his own students, bowing to a woman in tracksuit trousers who had not stood on a mat in twelve years and who was on bail for assault.
He came up.
And then he waited, and did not fill it, and I understood that he would have stood there for the whole hour.
I brought my feet together.
My hands came down to the fronts of my thighs and something in my chest went sideways and I let it.
And I bent.
I got to about twenty degrees. Perhaps twenty-five. It was not a bow. It was a bad, shallow, crooked nod from the hips by a woman whose hamstrings had locked again halfway down.
But it was an answer. That is the difference and it is the whole difference.
At the table there was never an answer. That was the entire design of it.
I came up.
“Good,” Tobias said, in exactly the voice he used to use when a fourteen-year-old got a grip roughly right.
Then he turned and walked back up the mat and said something to a young man about his sleeve.
Nobody clapped. Nobody looked over. It had taken eleven seconds and the class had gone on around it the whole time, which is the only reason I could do it at all.
I stepped on.
Left foot first, then right.
Here is what twenty-four mats feel like through a sock, in case you have forgotten or never knew.
They are firm and then they give, about eight millimetres, and then they stop. The give is the whole point. It is a floor that agrees to a certain amount and then refuses.
I had forgotten.
I thought I had remembered it and I had not.
I stood two steps in from the edge with my arms at my sides and did absolutely nothing for four minutes.
My heart rate was somewhere around a hundred and thirty. My hands were cold. My shoulders were up around my ears and I put them down twice and they came back up both times.
Twelve people did drills eight metres away and none of them needed anything from me, and nobody came over to see whether I was all right.
Tobias came back down the room at about half past seven, walking on the join lines the way he always has.
He did not ask how I was.
He said: “Sit down.”