Whitwham Soft Tissue Damage

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-914236-49-5
Verlag: Rough Trade Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 214 Seiten

Reihe: Rough Trade Books

'An astounding book, moving between shadow and light with an honesty and self-awareness I found completely compelling. There is a power to being vulnerable, but also a power to fighting back.Whitwham does both these things with eloquence and fire.' -JESSIE BURTON 'Soft Tissue Damage places Whitwham firmly in the tradition of Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer and other novelists who have evoked the blood and spit of the world's most brutal and beautiful sport.' -SAM PARKER, BRITISH GQ 'A compelling, visceral and tender book about grief and loss, life and death, identity and sexuality, written by a daughter, a mother and an aspiring fighter.' -DONALD McRAE 'This is prose that glints with truth.' -NIKITA LALWANI Soft Tissue Damage tells the story of author ANNA WHITWHAM'S lifelong interest in boxing manifesting itself in the physical act of getting into the ring to fight. From her first tentative training sessions through bruising sparring and building up to a full-blooded fight, Whitwham charts the transformative impact the sport-and all its complicated implications-has on her during a profoundly difficult period dealing with the grief of losing her mother to cancer. Tender, insightful, honest and full of startling and original thought, this is a book that fully examines what the human body is both capable and incapable of, a book that examines what the human body truly means in its capacity for sexuality and violence, love and death, strength and vulnerability.

Anna Whitwham was born in 1981 in London. She studied Drama and English at the University of California, Los Angeles, Queens University Belfast and at Royal Holloway, London where she teaches on the MA in creative writing and runs a course called 'Writing Men: The Burden of Masculinity.' She was an Observer Best Debut Novelist, and the first female journalist to write for Boxing News. Soft Tissue Damage is her second book.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Whitwham, Anna

Leseproben

The gym is like a secret. Small, busy and hidden under arches. The music is loud, and the boxers mind their own business on the bags. The smell of the bleach that strips equipment of its sweat, gets stuck in clean knots at the back of my throat.

When I go there for the first time I think of my grandad, the way boxing found him when he had diphtheria. The way he held himself in tweed, Hamlet cigars between his teeth. I used him for courage. I copied his toughness.

The trainer I met at the fight night isn’t here today. Instead, I have one of the other coaches. He wears a purple beanie and is reading a book on the bike machine when I arrive. He knows it’s my first time. He suggests they’re all learning in this boxing gym. I can hear the whip-quick thrash of fists on a bag and feel brand new to this.

There is a sense of ceremony when moving into the ring for the first time, perhaps every time, the dipping of the body, and standing tall again, the emerging into new space. The light makes spots on the black vinyl floor. I can see myself in the mirror. I wait for him to tell me to start hitting, I’m keen to start hitting. But we don’t. In fact, the gloves I’m borrowing stay outside of the ring. I have to remember this is a trial. It’s not the real thing.

My trainer asks me to show him how I jab, and he looks at the angles, the lines, the way my body turns. His arms are folded, and he steps back. I am corrected instantly, on the way I stand, the way I move when I punch from my elbow—awkward and weak. I laugh when I’m corrected because it is so unusual, to be touched and realigned with such care. My body doesn’t want to be bent this way and rejects the corrections. Springing back to stiffness.

‘You ever shadow-boxed?’

I’m fixed to where I stand—I am only silhouette. I don’t know what shadowboxing is.

This trainer folds his arms and waits. He is calm—serious.

‘It’s just you and your shadow. These are the basics.’

I try to fill the silence, the space, talking to eat up the clock.

‘I did ballet. I used to dance.’

As if this is my excuse to stand still.

But this doesn’t help me now, I’m unable to move my feet and my body looks silly. One of the other trainers sits and looks to see what I might do next. When I do nothing, he turns back to his bag, his face is bruised, glinting fish scales. He wears them as if they are just skin. His ribs like wheels when he hits the bag, his back slicing air when his shoulders roll. The hiss and groan from somewhere in his gut. When he moves, he sings with it, as if he is the only person here.

‘It doesn’t have to look perfect.’

There are three minutes on the clock, three minutes blinking backwards in red lights.

‘Go on.’ And then, kindly, ‘just try.’

The neon numbers are blinking quickly, and the urgency of this presses at something. I am still shuffling, awkward, and now I am aware I am wasting time. As a gesture I try jogging on the spot a little, throwing jabs gently, pointlessly. I won’t be able to fill a minute up. I can’t move into its space. I won’t be enough.

He tells me to try and line the punches up with my own head. To use the mirror as more than reflection. To see myself as an opponent, moving in time with me—my shadow. I have to try and cut into this silhouette.

‘You have to move with her. You have to find her.’

He resets the clock.

‘Go again.’

I am starting to sweat, and I make new shapes. I want to distort the woman in the mirror. She shudders and steps closer. She looks so fucking stupid. I fumble something in the air, making fists and shapes, until eventually these violet beams become moonlight and I am lost in the poetry of this. I can hear my breath when I move, the sound from my mouth. As if I am the only person here.

‘It gets easier. You’ll get the fundamentals.’

Still calm, still serious.

When I collect my daughter from school, she runs out to get her hug. I am pleased to see her so happy and so messy—her hair is out of its band and her hands are tattooed with ink from an art lesson. I buy her a pink, iced doughnut. She leaves me the last bite and shows me a scrape on her hand from a fall at break time. It is barely there, but it stings. She tells me the plaster fell off. I look at her little bruises and scrapes, her knees always healing from some playground game. She demands plasters for all her wounds. She likes to layer them on—three at a time. She is loud about it, when she is hurt, she cries. It is the shock, not the pain. That’s why she cries. I wipe the jam sugar from her mouth and kiss her warm head.

‘There are more plasters at home.’

That is enough for her. The promise that I will cover the places she hurts.

When we get home, she takes off her uniform, grabbing clothes from her dressing-up basket and leaving a trail of slips, fake-fur and my old high heels along the corridor. She settles on a flamenco skirt and a pair of gold heels I found in a vintage shop. Her toes grip the shoes as she walks, and the heels scrape the wooden floor. She knows she is only allowed five minutes in heels. That’s my rule. To save her ankles and back. She lounges on pillows, feet propped up. Only the single scar on her knee from a toddler fall marks her body. She observes her toes, lifting her leg up and down. She seems to know her body so well already.

I see my reflection in the window, as evening falls to dark, spotted in ceiling light. I am cooking, but I pause. I throw a jab; I bow my head. Even alone, I am still self-conscious.

I order my first pair of boxing gloves. They are black, and cheap enough to throw away if I get bored.

I go back two days later. My original trainer is now back, and we have a session together. He was in the Marines and reminds me of my grandad: polite, kind, but tough. We connect, immediately. He is the right fit. He has trained everyone. There is no small talk or fake praise. We focus on muscle memory. I have to throw jabs in the mirror, on a bag, and then pads. Over and over, again and again. Until it’s locked. Built into the tissue. I am sure he has seen the glinting scars on my arm under the pallor of these white lights, but he says nothing. They are twenty years old and have never faded. I did them to myself.

I don’t tell him my knuckles are starting to sting because my wraps are too thin. Each time I hit with my right I shudder a little, but I don’t want him to know it hurts. He can’t know I’m struggling this soon. It is only my second time. He will make me rest, or come back tomorrow, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want him to make me stop—for me to not finish this round—so I punch harder because I think maybe my knuckles just need to be roughened more, made into better fists. I try to train my body to feel pain. I feel pain in silence.
I have just seen the English National Ballet with my oldest friend. The bodies move satin in air, the feet staccato, the muscles ripping silently, beautifully. The toes, bent, bloodied knots. My friend was a ballerina, and I know her feet have been mauled. My daughter will go on points soon if she continues to dance. For a while she will dance on blood as her toes harden.

‘Did you see the way it’s in two parts? The body levitates above the snap of the feet. They move together, like bird wing.’

She speaks this language and I ask her if she thinks there is something linked between ballet and boxing.

‘Oh definitely. There is the pleasure-pain. To make your body do something so beyond what it should. And to make it beautiful.’

She says a boxer is their body. Like a dancer is their body.

When the pain keeps beating in my right hand, I try and read it as growth. I can feel scraped, wet skin. The boys on the bags are punching hard and I don’t want to be the girl who gives up. They are completing rounds of press-ups and planks. Steam rising from their backs, dented, and scalloped with muscle and effort. One has cigarette burns on his back.

‘You have a lot of power. You could hurt someone. Knock them out.’

There is another trainer lost in the bliss and ritual of punching the bag. Each crack on leather takes him out of his head and into his body. Healing, tea-marks of a bruise case his left eye. I smile and stop punching as hard. I move to the floor to try out a journeyman hook—a punch that comes round, wide, in a loop, to catch my opponent in the head.

I find a corner, where they stack the weights, just by the toilet. Away from the boys and their backs. I have halved myself in the thinnest slice of mirror. I have made myself small, a little invisible. I move without commitment, holding my breath. I want this to be over, to go home.

‘What are you doing?’

My trainer has seen me.

‘Why are you standing over there, in the corner?’

It is a...