Chapter 85: A Hand Arriving
On the Saturday Tobias took the tape off the half-mat and laid the eighteen out in one square, which he only did when he wanted people to move.
“Grips,” he said. “No throws. Nobody leaves their feet today.”
There were eleven of us.
Three of the beginners' line had stayed on to watch from the bench. Esme among them, sitting on her hands.
He paired me with a man called Dev, twenty-six, blue belt, ninety-five kilos, who works nights in a distribution centre and apologises when he sneezes.
“Dev takes the collar,” Tobias said. “Nadia does nothing. Four seconds.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Stand there. Let it happen. Then we stop.”
I knew immediately what he was doing, and I resented it, and I have since decided that resenting your coach is usually a sign he has read you correctly.
Dev put his right hand out and took my left lapel.
He did it slowly. He is a considerate man and he telegraphed everything, and it made no difference at all.
The knuckles came in against the front of my collarbone.
I was off the mat before the first second finished.
Not thrown. Gone.
I had stepped back and to my left, both hands up and open at chest height, standing a metre and a half away with my weight on the back foot.
Nobody said anything.
Dev looked at his own hand as if it had done something without asking him.
“Again,” Tobias said.
We did it eleven times.
The first six I moved. Every single time, before I had decided anything.
It is not fear exactly. Fear is slower than that.
This was underneath fear, in the part of me that used to be worth watching.
The seventh time I stayed for about a second and a half and then took his wrist off with a grip break so clean that two people on the bench made a noise.
“That was very good,” Tobias said. “Do not do it again.”
“It was correct.”
“It was correct and it is not the exercise. Anybody can remove a hand. Sit down a moment.”
I sat down on the mat.
My heart was going at a rate that had no relationship to the amount of work I had done.
He crouched next to me. His knees do not like it and he does it anyway.
“When the boy grabbed you at Christmas,” he said, “how long was his hand on you?”
“I don't know.”
“Guess.”
“Under a second.”
“Yes,” he said. “So. Under a second is the whole of the problem. Under a second you have no options, because your body has already chosen. We are going to make it four seconds. In four seconds a person has a choice.”
“And if he isn't going to let go?”
“Then you will still have a choice, and it will be a better one, because you will have made it and not your spine.”
He got up with a hand on my shoulder for leverage, which he has done since I was twelve, and which he has never once acknowledged.
The eighth time I stayed for two seconds.
The ninth I stayed for two and moved.
The tenth I stayed the whole four with my hands hanging.
I was shaking afterwards. I had to walk to the wall and stand facing it for a minute, and nobody came over, because he had told them not to.
The eleventh time I stayed four seconds with my hands open at my sides and I breathed out through it, and when Tobias said stop I was still there.
“Good,” he said. “That is the lesson. Everybody else, pairs, kumi-kata, three minutes.”
That was all. He did not make a speech about it. He went off to tell a fifteen-year-old that his left elbow was in the wrong postcode.
At the end I stayed to sweep the mats. It is a job I asked for in January, and nobody has taken it off me since.
Esme came and swept next to me with a brush the length of herself.
“Why didn't you throw him,” she said.
“Because we weren't throwing today. That was the rule.”
“But you wanted to.”
I stopped sweeping.
“Yes,” I said. “I did.”
“Why is that all right to say?”
Nine years old.
“Because wanting is free,” I said. “It's what you do afterwards that costs.”
She thought about it for a second and a half, the way she does, and then asked whether I had ever broken a bone, because that is a much better question when you are nine.
I walked home along the ring road in the dark with the kit bag over my left shoulder, because the right one carries nothing at all after a session.
Four seconds.
In January I could not have stood still for one.