‘Raise the fork right to the top,’ said Marion.
‘Why?’
‘Hey come on, just do it. Bruno showed me it. I don’t know, I like it.’ I raised the empty fork as high as it would go. The forklift made its usual sounds, a humming and a metallic pling, then I let go of the lever. I tipped my head back and looked up at the fork, still swaying slightly. ‘And now?’
‘Let it down again, but really slowly. And then keep quiet.’
I moved the lever a tiny bit, and the carriage with the fork lowered itself down again slowly. ‘And now? I don’t understand.’
‘You have to be quiet. Really quiet. That sound, can you hear it, it’s like the sea.’
And she was right; I heard it now too and I was surprised I’d never noticed it before. The fork lowered with a hissing and whooshing sound from the air expelled from the hydraulics, and it really did sound like the wash of waves in the sea. The fork came lower; I sat in the forklift, my head slightly inclined. She stood right next to me, one hand on the control panel. ‘Can you hear it?’ she whispered, and I nodded. Then we listened in silence.
A SHIP WILL COME
She stands up and walks across the room. From one wall to the other. She raises both fists, looking at the white wraps on her hands. A man signed them, that was … minutes, hours ago? She stops at the wall and throws a couple of left jabs. She keeps her right hand up at her chin and punches left, left, left again. ‘Jab,’ says the old man, ‘keep those jabs coming, don’t show her your right hand too soon.’ She watches her shadow on the wall, she bobs and weaves and moves her torso, jabs left, left, and then a punch with the right, left-right, left-right, and then a right without the jab, ‘Don’t show her your right hand too soon,’ she twists her body into the punch, puts her weight behind it and exhales loudly. She pulls both fists up in front of her face and takes a careful look over her shoulder. The room is empty. She holds her fists in front of her face and dances back from the wall and wonders where the old man is. Sent him out myself, she thinks, that was … minutes, hours ago? She sent him out, sent her brother out too and the trainer, ‘I wanna be alone.’
Still got time, she thinks and goes over to the bench, sits down and leans against the wall. She shifts, feeling the rough concrete through her shirt.
She raises both fists and looks at the white wraps on her hands. The old man put them on for her, holding her arm really carefully, as if her hand were injured. ‘Too tight?’ he asks. ‘No, no,’ she says, moving her fingers. Two men are standing next to the old man, watching every move, and she looks up at them for a moment and then at her hands and the old man’s hands; they’re trembling a tiny bit, or is that her hands? But then they’re still again, and one of the men signs on the white crepe. ‘OK,’ says the other man, looking down at her and raising the corners of his mouth as if he were smiling, and she stares him in the eye until he looks away and turns towards the door. She feels the old man’s hand on the back of her neck and watches the men as they leave the room. You go to her, she thinks, and tell her … tell her I’m weak, tell her there’s no way I can beat her.
Her brother is standing by the door and closes it behind the men. ‘Don’t show her your right hand too soon,’ the old man whispers directly by her ear, and she nods and she’s perfectly calm.
She gets up and begins to run across the empty room again. She stops in front of the big mirror. The glass is flecked with streaks and dots, sweat and water, and in the middle there’s a large crack. She smiles; before her second professional fight she threw a right straight at the mirror, and then, twenty or thirty minutes later, her right fist broke the nose of the girl standing slightly fearful before her — why don’t you move? why don’t you dodge? — she could feel it through her glove, and the fearful girl went down on the floor, crouching down more than falling, and let the referee count her out as the blood seeped over her lips. When was that, a year and a half ago, two years ago? She sees herself smiling in the mirror, she moves her torso to and fro, and when her face touches the crack in the mirror her smile is gone.
She stands in front of the mirror, makes a curtsey and smiles and sticks out her chest; her brother doesn’t like that. ‘You’re thirteen,’ he says, ‘the boys’ll come soon enough,’ but her brother can’t see her now, turning and smiling in front of the mirror and pushing first her left leg and then her right leg forward.
Her brother is somewhere in the big hall, boxing. He took her along the first time, ‘So you get out and meet people, Alina,’ no, he said ‘Alinchen,’ she doesn’t like that, it means something like ‘little Alina’ in German, he told her. ‘Alinchen,’ he said and danced in front of her, throwing straight rights and lefts at the air. They walked there, all the way from the harbour to the training hall, past the big containers and the dockers, the cranes and the ships, then past the market where their father sometimes sends them to buy fish; the fishmongers shout and yell, she’s never seen so many fat women and she presses herself close to her brother as he holds her hand tight. Downtown, between all the people and the shops he doesn’t dance any more, only throwing straights and hooks again in the side streets and alleyways, teasing her: ‘Alinchen, little sister, you’re much too small still.’
No, she thinks in front of the mirror as she moves her hips like a belly dancer and sticks out her chest, I’m not all that small. She dances in front of the big mirror and doesn’t even hear the voices from the hall, the shouts, the trampling of feet and the smack of gloves on punching bags and sparring partners, she closes her eyes and she’s all alone. The woman who used to live in the room next to her and her brother showed her what real belly dancing looks like, but she’s not there any more. She had a cassette recorder, and some evenings they could hear music from her room, strange laments but not sad, not too loud because of the rules, and if they had their window open they closed it because the sea outside roared and the gulls and the ships made all their noise. Sometimes she went over with her brother, very quietly because their father, who lived next door with another man they called ‘Uncle Toni’ even though he wasn’t their real uncle, their father didn’t want them to go out in the evenings. The door is just pushed to and they open it cautiously. The woman is standing in the middle of the room, in the dark, dancing. Alina can make out the slight curve of her belly, moving in circles to the rhythm of the music, the woman holding up her hands next to her face, now she lifts them higher and places her palms together. They stand in the doorway and watch the woman, who doesn’t seem to see them; now her belly is a little round ball, then it disappears in the shadows, and now all they can see is her hips, and Alina puts her hands on her belly and wishes it were so lovely and round and not so flat and thin, she feels her hip bones and wishes she could dance and be one with the music like the woman moving there in the dark. The spotlight of a passing ship falls through the window onto the dancing woman’s face, and Alina sees that it’s twisted, as if she were very sad and about to cry, but she’s silent and dancing. Then the ship’s light disappears, it’s dark again in the room, the floor begins to sway, here come the waves from that other ship, it must have been a big ship, and their ship pitches and tosses, glasses clink somewhere in the room, and her brother holds onto the door frame, and she holds onto her brother, but the woman doesn’t seem to notice anything and dances … quietly, thinks Alina.