Learning to box

Text 1: Under the Railway Arch, by Helen Marsh

An original contemporary article.

The gym is under a railway arch, and every eleven minutes a train goes over and the whole place shudders, the punchbags swinging gently on their chains like carcasses in a butcher’s cold room. On my first evening I stood in the doorway for a full minute, breathing in the smell of sweat and rubber and old leather, and very nearly went home.

I am forty-three. I work in insurance. Until last spring the most violent thing I had ever done was to slam a car door. But something happened that year, a divorce, a diagnosis, a slow loss of nerve, and I found I had become a person who apologised to furniture. I wanted, quite badly, to hit something.

Ray, who runs the place, is seventy and built like a filing cabinet. He did not ask why I had come. He handed me a skipping rope and said, ‘Three minutes.’ I lasted forty seconds. Then he wrapped my hands in long strips of cloth, round and round, between the fingers, over the knuckles, with the gentleness of a nurse, and stood me in front of a bag and told me to jab.

My first punch was pathetic. It patted the bag the way you might pat a dog you were not sure of. Ray said nothing. I tried again. And again. Somewhere around the hundredth jab, something shifted. My feet started to move under me; my shoulder turned; the punch began to come from the floor, through my legs and hips and back, and land with a flat, heavy thud that I felt in my teeth. The bag jumped. I laughed out loud.

That was eight months ago. I have still never hit a human being, and hope I never will. But I walk differently now. I no longer apologise to furniture. And every Tuesday, when the 7.15 goes over and the bags sway on their chains, I am there, hands wrapped, waiting for the bell.

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