Chapter 72: Ukemi
He put me in a corner, two metres from the edge, with my back to the wall and nobody working behind me.
“Sit. Legs out in front. Heels on the mat.”
I sat.
“Chin on your chest.”
“I know how to do it.”
“You knew how to do it,” Tobias said. “Show me.”
Ukemi is a breakfall.
It is the first thing anybody is taught and the last thing anybody gets right.
From sitting, you round your back and roll down along your spine, your chin stays on your chest so your head never touches, and both arms come down flat at about forty degrees a fraction before your back lands.
The arms are not there to stop you. They spread the landing and give the ground something to hit that is not your spine or your skull.
It takes half a second.
Children learn it in a fortnight.
I rolled back.
And my right hand went out behind me and put itself flat on the mat and took my weight.
I stopped, propped on a straight right arm, with my body half down and my head up.
That is the error.
That is the single error the whole thing is designed to prevent. A straight arm behind you takes the entire load through the shoulder and the elbow, and it is how people break both.
I have not done that since I was twelve years old.
“Again,” Tobias said, and did not explain it, because he knew that I knew.
I sat up.
My face was hot.
Here is what my body had done. It had put out the bad arm to protect itself.
Not the good one. The right.
The one with three scars and four anchors and fifty-two degrees.
Twelve years of not using it had left it as the one that reaches when nobody is thinking, because it had no idea what it was for.
I rolled back a second time.
Chin on. Both arms. But the slap came after my back landed instead of before it, which meant the mat got me first, and the sound was wrong. Flat. Late. One noise instead of one noise.
“Nearly,” he said. “Your arms are asking permission.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you are waiting to see whether it is safe. Don't. The arms go because the arms go.”
He crouched down on his heels, which he can still do at fifty-five, and put one finger on the mat about forty centimetres from my hip.
“There. Both hands. That is the only thing you have to think about.”
I sat with my legs out and my heels on the mat and my chin already down.
Then I rolled back.
Chin on the chest. Spine down along its length, one part at a time, the way you would lay a rope down.
Both palms came down flat at forty degrees, together, before my shoulder blades arrived.
The sound was two palms on a mat. It is a single flat crack and there is nothing else in the world that sounds like it.
My head did not touch.
My right shoulder took its share and it hurt, from the front of the joint down towards the elbow, and it was dull and it was everywhere and it was already fading before I had stopped moving.
Sore is allowed. Sore is information.
I stayed down.
I lay on twenty-four mats on the first floor above a carpet warehouse on Vernon Street with my chin on my chest and my arms out at forty degrees and my palms stinging.
Above me the strip light flickered on its two-second cycle.
Tobias stood up.
He looked at me for about two seconds and then he said the only thing he said about it.
“Yes.”
Then he walked up the mat, because eleven other people were in the room and one of them was doing something with his feet.
I lay there for maybe fifteen seconds.
Nobody came over. Nobody had watched. In that room, on that night, a woman had done one backward breakfall from a sitting position, which is a thing a nine-year-old does forty times in an hour.
I want to be exact about the size of it, because I have spent my life around people who make things bigger than they are and I am not going to start now.
I am thirty-four.
My right shoulder is at seventy-one per cent and will not go past eighty.
There is a hearing on the eighteenth of September at which a judge will decide whether a man put his hand on my dress, and if it goes badly I will be sentenced by somebody who has decided I lied about it.
There are twenty-two witnesses and three of them say playfully.
None of that moved one centimetre that evening.
What happened was that I sat on a mat and rolled backwards and put both hands down at the right time.
I got up on my own.