by Tilly Delane
Around the top of the pool, Benson has had benches put up. I look up at the lighting rig above and realise there are cameras there. Actual fucking cameras. What the fuck? I let my eyes search the pit below, and then I see more of them. Tiny black eyes fixed to sides of the pool. Goran follows my gaze and barks a laugh.
“Yeah, man. They’re live streaming this one. There is some serious dosh shifting owners tonight.”
I nod sharply.
“So where do I wait?”
He beckons me to follow him out and leads me across the lawn to a summer house. He opens the door and switches the light on. Once inside, it transpires it is more of a guest cabin than a garden hut.
There is a sofa, which I assume folds out into a bed, a dresser, a corner with a hotplate, microwave and kettle, a toilet and shower. On the coffee table are a selection of protein bars, chocolate, isotonic drinks and bottled water. I dump my bag on the sofa before I look at the brands. I keep my poker face on but inside I’m smiling. George would make a fantastic girlfriend or manager. He knows my preferences.
I look at how the furniture is arranged, and I’m pretty sure the fact that there is enough floor space to warm up is also due to George doing some shifting. I hope I survive the night to thank him.
“Where is Rowan?” I ask Goran, but he doesn’t answer me.
“You have about an hour,” he informs me instead. “Somebody will come and get you when they’re ready for you. Don’t leave here.”
On that note, he turns away and leaves me to it.
Grace
By the time my cab pulls up outside Sheena’s house, it’s nearly eight o’clock and I know I’m too late. I realized a while back that I wasn’t gonna make it. The traffic on the motorway was insane and we were at crawling pace for ages, so I’ve long given up hope but even so, my heart seems to open wide when I see the familiar red door and a sense of belonging washes over me.
I’m home.
I hand the driver my card and he swipes it through the card machine before getting out and unloading my luggage from his trunk. As he shoves the bags at me, I mumble an apology about not having any cash for a tip and he shrugs then gets back into the car and is gone. I knock on the door and wait. After a couple of minutes, the door opens and Kalina is standing in front of me, her eyes wide with concern at first, before she squeals a welcome.
“Sheeena! Sheeeena! It’s Grace. Grace is back!” she shouts into the house then opens the door fully.
I drag my stuff across the threshold and watch Sheena come toward me from the kitchen. I’ve never seen her like this. Kalina has clearly been doing her makeup again and she looks as stunning as previously, but it doesn’t disguise the fact her brow is furrowed with worry or that beneath the foundation her face is ashen.
“Grace,” she says quietly and opens her arms.
I stumble toward her and sink into her hug. We cling together for a few seconds, two women drowning with concern for the same man, and it is then that I know she knows what’s going down tonight. I pull back a little and we look at each other.
“You know?” she asks, and I nod.
Suddenly I feel her back straighten under my hands, until I let them fall away.
“Right,” she says resolutely. “We’re going. We’re gonna stop this fight before it gets out of hand. I’m not letting them tear up my boys, no way. Let’s go.”
She allows me enough time to go for a pee and wash my hands, while she and Kalina get their shoes on.
As we squeeze into the Capri minutes later, I’m woefully aware that I’ve been on the road for nearly a whole day now and I absolutely stink. I’m also insanely grateful for these two women who when I mention it, point out that we have bigger issues than a bit of body odor right now. After that, we all fall quiet.
It’s a tense half hour ride to the long, winding suburban road that Sheena tells us is called Woodland Drive, where the Bensons live. The houses I guess are posh and big by British standards, though no bigger than your average family house in Bethesda. But apparently this is where the rich Brightonians live.
“That’s the one,” Sheena says as we pass a house that has a gazillion cars on the drive.
More line the road all the way up the next slope. You can tell there is a party going on by the sheer amount of vehicles clustered around here. Sheena parks up as soon as she finally finds a space half a mile away, and we clamber out of the Capri.
She doesn’t bother with the normal locking up ritual before we hurry back toward the Bensons’ house.
Silas
I’ve been on my own, warming up and waiting, for about an hour and a half when the floodlights over the garden come on. I stop stretching and watch through the window as the guests are led over to the pool house. There is about forty of them, at a guess, all dressed in evening wear. The men wear dinner suits, the women long dresses and jewellery.
Old man Benson himself and Cecil head the procession. George, Arlo and Goran are at the back, herding any stragglers. Most of the crowd is made up of old man Benson’s, Cecil’s and Mum’s generation, interspersed with some select younger ones who seem infinitely more excited than the old guys. Strictly no under twenty-ones. Of course.
There are a couple of faces among the older lot that I recognize from fightnights but other than that the audience is made up of a completely different calibre of cunts, friends of George senior and Cecil, I guess, rather than regular punters. I’m starting to get the necessity for the cameras now. Gotta make money if money’s to be made is the old git’s motto. Should probably have it translated into Latin and put in a fake family crest. I look around for Oleandra Benson, George’s mum. She’s nowhere to be seen, but I’m not surprised. The woman who gave my friend his gangsta name lives her life at the bottom of a brandy bottle and has probably passed out somewhere already. It’s one fucked-up family.
As the throng of people slowly filters into the pool house and disappears from view, I see George stop and jut his chin out in my direction and say something to Arlo. Arlo peels off to come towards the summer house. Next, George tilts his head in the direction of the main house and says something to Goran. Goran starts retracing their steps. I guess that’s where Rowan is then. George stays where he is and looks over to where I am. He sees my face at the window and lifts his hand in greeting. I appreciate why he is not coming over to talk to me at this point. It wouldn’t be good if he was seen favouring one of us. I salute back and watch him turn to hurry after the rest of the crowd. Arlo opens the door to the summer house and smiles at me.
“Ready, Snake?” he asks.
I can see he is pleased as punch that he’s been asked to assist here tonight. I haven’t seen a single one of the other club fighters here. I wonder if they have been given access to the live stream or if that’s just for the guys with the serious betting money.
Irrelevant.
It’s fight time.
I nod back at Arlo and grab my water, towel and mouth guard off the table. The guard is the only piece of protective equipment none of us at TripleX is too proud to wear. We’ll all happily run the risk of losing eyes, hearing, kidney and brain function but forking out for new teeth every five seconds is too fucking expensive. Me? I also wear a cup. Some of the others don’t. Stupid. I hardly know Rowan these days, but my money is on him wearing protection, too. He loves his dick too much to let anything happen to it.
“Let’s go,” I say to Arlo and push past him out of the door.
In the corner of my eye, I see Goran and Rowan approach from the other end of the garden, but I don’t turn to look. Arlo and I arrive at the entrance to the pool house first and he leads me past the benches and the people to the aluminium ladder.
You can tell these are not the same kind of people who come down for fightnights. There is no roar, more of an awed hush. It’s exaggerated by the fact the lighting rig is pointed at the pool, plunging the benches in semi-darkness. It’s clever because it means the cameras won’t accidentally pick up any faces
.
In the pool pit, some big, stocky guy with a bald head, long beard and wrap-around sunglasses who I’ve never seen before waits for me. He points at a corner to indicate which one is mine.
Over the PA I hear someone whose voice I don’t recognize announce my arrival in the ring. The voice is bigging me up. ‘Undefeated TripleX champion blah blah’. I don’t really hear it because my eyes, my ears, my sense of smell, my entire fucking being is focused on the guy climbing down the ladder now.
Rowan looks good.
Last time I saw him without clothes on was before the Niamh fiasco. Before either of us had bulked out. He’d already stopped seriously training for a while by then, spending most of his time losing money, drinking and not sleeping enough. Pretty sure he didn’t say no to the occasional line of coke then either. And it showed.
Now is a different ball game.
I already knew from our run-ins at the greyhound stadium and in the café that he’s fucking big now, but the bloke coming down into the pool is not just huge, he’s in prime condition. There isn’t an ounce of superfluous fat on his body, not a hint of bloatedness or sleep deprivation. His movements are fluid, his muscles bulging.
Rowan has always been a couple of inches taller and a stone or so heavier than me, but now he’s a fucking monster.
If this was legit, we’d not even be in the same fight. I’m a weight class below him.
Last time I saw him naked he didn’t have any tattoos yet, either.
But he’s gone the whole cheesy hog with a python winding itself around his torso and over his shoulder, where its head emerges across his shoulders, among a huge back piece of jungle flowers and skulls. It pisses me off, because inking that kind of artwork costs a boatload of money.
Money he should have been sending back to Mum to pay his fucking debts off.
I watch him dump his shit in the opposite corner of the pool and put his mouth guard in before he turns around and makes eye contact with me across the diagonal of the pool. In the background, the announcer’s voice is bigging him up now but again I don’t really hear it. My gaze is fixed on my brother’s dark brown, almost black eyes.
Yes, my brother.
There is something in his expression that snaps me out of the red mist I’ve been seeing him through since that fateful day and I suddenly realise it’s him. It’s Rowan.
My Rowan.
My thick-as-thieves stepbrother.
Metal detecting. Watching movies. Playing Grand Theft Auto. Doing homework. Sparring. Cooking together so we didn’t have to endure Mum’s food. I try to push these thoughts aside. They have no place here. But I can’t. There is a glint in his eyes I know all too well. And that I loved once upon a time. Mischief. But not aimed at me, aimed to draw me in.
What the fuck?
The ref, though calling him that will be a euphemism here, there’ll be no refereeing worth shit, beckons us to the middle of the pool. Never once breaking eye contact, we proceed to meet either side of him. He gets straight to the point at a whisper, low enough for the cameras not to pick up the sound.
“Right, there are only two rules. Number one, I stop the fight, you stop. There are some fine ladies and gents here, they don’t want to see too much gore. You got it?”
He makes a pause for us to fill it with our affirmatives, though Rowan mutters something that sounds like, ‘you’re wrong, that’s all they want’.
“Number two,” the ref continues, ignoring him. “One of you taps out, you respect the tap out. You don’t tap out, you do so at your own risk. Are we clear?”
We both mumble a ‘yes’ and split away to take our stances. The ref points at me.
“Are you ready?” he shouts, and I nod.
He points at Rowan.
“Are you ready?”
Rowan nods.
The guy slices his hand through the air like a guillotine.
“Let’s fight!”
And then he gets the fuck out of the way.
Grace
Half a mile can be endless if you are trying to get somewhere fast.
It feels like forever before Sheena, Kalina and I get to the Bensons’ house and weave our way around the vehicles in the drive to get to the front door. Before I can ask how Sheena plans on getting in there, she’s already rung the bell. We wait but nothing happens. She tries the bell again.
“What now?” I ask her, after it becomes apparent that nobody is coming.
“We go around the back,” she answers, already moving around the house to where there is a high gate to the garden.
It’s locked with a code pad and guaranteed to have CCTV pointing at it, but Sheena clearly doesn’t give a fuck.
“Gimme a leg up, will you?” she asks me.
I do, and for the first time in my friggin’ life the three wasted years of being a cheerleading base in middle school finally come in handy. After I throw her up, I realize how seriously fit for her age Sheena is, when she manages to pull herself onto the top of the gate and swings a leg over to sit astride it. She turns toward us, holding herself up on poled arms as she slings the other leg over. Then she slowly disappears from sight as she lowers herself down on the other side. The last thing we see are her hands curled around the top edge of the gate and a second later there is a thud as she lands on the ground.
“Shit,“ she exclaims. “There is a code pad on this side, too. I can’t let you in, girls. I gotta go. I can see them. They’re all in the pool. It’s started already.”
Her muffled voice floats over to us, getting progressively fainter as she obviously moves away. Kalina and I are left behind, looking at each other dumbstruck. There is no way on earth this tiny girl will be able to get me up there.
“You lift me,” Kalina says decisively after a few seconds. “I try let you in house.”
I like the way she’s thinking.
Silas
We’ve been circling each other for a little while now, checking each other out. Testing, looking for weak spots, chinks in the armour.
I can’t see any.
Rowan is a mountain.
He’s managed to land a trio of punches on me, but I mostly ducked out. I’ve given back a couple of leg kicks, an uppercut and decent kick to his right kidney when I was sure he was focused elsewhere and wouldn’t have time to grab me. That’s my one advantage. I’m much, much faster than him. But though the kicks were hard, I’m not sure he even felt them. He’s rock solid. And he hasn’t touched me yet. But that’s Rowan’s M.O. all over. Tire the opponent out, go for the choke.
I’m getting bored now.
Time to go in.
Grace
The minutes between Kalina disappearing on the other side of the gate and me going back to the front of the house and waiting in the hope that she’ll somehow get in and manage to let me inside rank right up there with the longest in my life.
The sense of gratitude when she opens the door and grins at me, while chewing on a piece of cheese, is indescribable.
“Come.” She waves me inside. “Nobody here. All in the garden.”
I hurry after her as she leads the way through the hallway into an open plan living-dining area, where the remnants of the dessert and cheese courses are still laid out on tables. She grabs a couple of French Fancies from a platter of sweets as we pass, not even breaking her stride.
We step through open patio doors, out onto a deserted terrace, and that’s when I see the indoor pool in the distance. The enclosure is dome shaped and fully transparent. It’s filled with people, sitting on benches. The doors are open and the hum of excited voices travels over to us. As we get nearer, I can see Sheena, near the entrance, standing frozen to the spot next to a bench. The tense line of her shoulders tells me that we are too late.
She’s watching the fight.
I run faster, my heart pumping with adrenaline.
Nobody bats an eyelid when I come through the doors, stopping dead in my tracks next to Sheena, or when Kalina follows a few seconds
behind.
Everybody is transfixed by David and Goliath in the pool pit.
I look down and bile of fear rises in my throat.
Silas
He got me.
It was inevitable, really.
Anyone who’s ever watched Jerome Le Banner versus Nokveed Devy could have told them that.
I could have told them that.
Although that’s probably a bad example ‘cause there were no choke outs in that fight.
There is gonna be one here.
I know it, Rowan knows it.
I’m just not quite ready to give up yet.
Still looking for wriggle room.
Not done.
But he’s got me locked down tight in a figure four, and I can feel the fucking oxygen deprivation already.
And I can feel the rest of it, too.
His body against my back, encasing me.
His breath by my ear.
His scent engulfing me.
He smells like Rowan.
Of course, he does.
And as I start to fade, absurdly, that gives me comfort.
But then suddenly, the fear kicks in.
He’ll kill me.
It’s not fucking worth it.
I have shit to live for.
I found a girl.
The girl.
I let her go.
But I can get her back.
Somehow.
But not if I don’t tap out.
“Don’t!” Rowan’s voice is like thunder in the distance in my ear. “Do. Not. Tap. Out. Trust me,” he whispers.
And then he tightens his hold even more.
Blackness.
Grace
I scream when I see Silas go limp. It’s way louder than the rest of the noise made by the gathering, but I don’t care if people are looking at me or not.
All I can focus on is Silas.
And Rowan, letting go of him, laying him back gently onto the mat. He strokes his head and waits.
Seconds tick by.
I feel Sheena, grabbing my hand and giving it a squeeze. There is something reassuring about it.