Always

by Nicola Griffith

  “Joy?” Pauletta said, sitting up again. “Excuse me, but are you insane? You get off on imagining someone’s about to pin you face-first in the dirt?”

  “The mat’s quite clean,” I said. “Perhaps that’s not what you meant. Except it is, in a way. Lie down again. All of you, lie down. Facedown, arms at your sides.” I sat cross-legged so that I wouldn’t loom over them. “Those of you on the mats, can you smell that sharp scent? It’s vinegar. I wipe the mats down with it after every lesson. It’s a natural disinfectant. Feel the mat, how it pushes back at your hips, how you have to turn your head to one side to breathe comfortably, how that pulls at the muscles that attach to your jaw, that run down your neck, that connect to your arms. Feel it. Feel yourself, your body, your bone and muscle, the blood singing in your veins. Breathe deep. Feel your lungs expand, how your spine lifts another inch from the floor. Imagine your rib cage, what it holds and protects: your lungs, your heart, your spleen, all those blood vessels. It’s a fortress—very, very strong. Feel your knees, delicate and strong and indispensable. It’s all yours, every inch. Even when it feels bad, if you get a bruise, a graze, a cut, a break, a puncture, a sprain, it feels good because it’s yours. You are it, and it is you. Enjoy it at all times. Enjoy using it. Enjoy defending it.”

  Someone had forgotten to wear underarm deodorant today. I tasted it, the tang of fatty apocrine sweat, full of much larger, more complicated molecules than the simple C2H4O2 of vinegar. It was faint, and it was healthy, clean sweat on a clean body wearing clean clothes, but unusual in Atlanta, where almost everyone equated any kind of body odor with filth and wrongness, where people liked to pretend the body didn’t exist.

  “This is your body. Yours. No one but you has the responsibility to keep it, to keep yourself, whole. If someone pins you to the ground, what will you do?”

  The underarm scent grew, perhaps, slightly stronger.

  “So you’re facedown. The first thing you do is protect your throat, and neck, and your breathing. Turn your face forward again. Stretch the crown of your head towards the wall in front of you. That will stop your neck bending the wrong way, it will pull your chin down.”

  “It puts my nose on the floor,” said Tonya.

  “Bring your arms under your body. That will make it harder for an attacker to grab hold of them. But keep them bent, elbows down by your ribs, hands up between your breasts. If you can, while keeping your upper arms close to your body, bring your hands up, like this.” I made the international sign for vulva: palms out, tips of index fingers and of thumbs touching. “Keep your elbows in. Put your hands in front of your face. Put your face in the gap. If your attacker starts banging your head on the ground, it will afford you some protection.”

  This time the strengthened body odor was definite.

  “Everyone, sit up.” They did. I looked from set face to pale face to lightly sweating face. Katherine had carpet fluff stuck to her lip gloss. “Pick a partner. ” Katherine turned to Tonya, Pauletta to Nina, Christie to Suze; Sandra didn’t look at Therese, but Therese understood it was her job to be Sandra’s partner, and sat a little closer; Kim looked at Jennifer and sighed—though, to her credit, silently. “You’re going to learn this together. You’re helping each other learn. When you play the attacker, remember that your partner is a grown woman and needs to know the truth; she needs to know that you won’t let go immediately to make her feel better. She needs to know that in a real situation the techniques she learnt here will work. When you play the one being attacked, try not to panic. This is a controlled situation; you’re safe. We’ll begin with lying facedown and your attacker on top of you because that’s the worst position to be caught in. You’ll learn how to get away from that and then you’ll know you can do anything. A volunteer.”

  No one.

  “Therese.” She had been the most confident tumbler last week. “Come here and pin me. Everyone, move back a little.” I stretched out, facedown, put my face in its protected gap. “Sit on my back. Pin my wrists to the floor.” She sat on me, but carefully. I doubted she weighed less than 120 pounds, but she was keeping about half that on her feet, taking the strain on her quads. “No. Sit on me. The point is to pin me so I can’t move.” She did. “Now pin my wrists. Hard.” She leaned into it. Her hands were cold and slightly damp. “Think you can roll out all right if I throw you over my head?” I felt movement. “Are you nodding or shaking your head?”

  “Yes, I can roll.” She sounded grim.

  “All right. Like a Band-Aid. One rip and you’re off. Ready?” And I breathed out with a whoosh, shot my hands forward, and bucked her off. There was no crash, and she stood about the same time I did, so I assumed she’d landed well.

  “Whoa,” said Suze.

  “Ready to go again?” I asked Therese, and she nodded, though she wasn’t grinning, which surprised me. The first time I’d been thrown and had landed well enough not to get hurt, my exhilaration had been fierce, burning brightly enough that I could have thrown back my head, opened my mouth, and lit the sky. I would never understand these women.

  I turned to the rest of the class. “This time it’ll be slow motion, so you can see for yourselves how easy it is.”

  Therese perched back on top of me.

  “What would an attacker be expecting from me in this position?”

  “Panic,” and “Struggle like crazy,” Nina and Tonya said at the same time.

  “And what would you do in a panic?”

  “Curl up like a bug,” said Nina.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’d be panicking,” she said with obvious patience.

  “And why would you, Tonya, struggle? What’s the ultimate point?”

  “To get him as far from me as I could. Protect myself,” she said.

  “Nina?”

  She nodded. “Get him off of me.”

  “Pin me,” I said to Therese. She did. Her hands were less cold and damp. Perhaps relief and lessening of stress were her version of exaltation. “Now look at her balance. Where’s her weight?”

  “On your wrists,” Jennifer said.

  “Yes. She’s leaning forward, thinking that what I’ll do is pull in like a bug, to protect myself. Or thrash about, to get her off me, away from me, somehow. The last thing an attacker will be anticipating is any kind of move that pulls them towards us, or that appears to spread us flatter to the ground and therefore make us more vulnerable. So that’s exactly what we do. It also happens to work to pull them further off balance. Watch.”

  Instead of the untrained, instinctive move to pull my hands down to protect my belly or breasts and groin, I exhaled and slid them smoothly forward along the mat, wrists first: Spider-Man shooting web at the wall. Therese started to topple forward.

  “Now if that’s all I did, she’d just fall on me.” I turned my face slightly and said to Therese, “Get off for a moment, please.” She did. I got back into my initial position. “What I do is tighten my abdominal muscles and jerk my knees up underneath me”—I showed them in slow motion, pulling into a tight mushroom, then down again, then bunching again—“and I shoot my hands forward at the same time as bucking.” I showed them. “Now watch while I do it at full speed.” I nodded to Therese.

  Even though she was expecting it, she went over. This time she smiled as she came up, a small smile but definite.

  I smiled back. “You want to throw me this time?”

  “You weigh a lot more than I do.”

  “True. But it will work.” Using exactly this technique, on a gravel road in Arkansas last year, I’d thrown a man weighing close to two hundred fifty pounds.

  “All right.”

  She lay down like a woman going to her execution. I sat on her sacrum. “Remember to protect your face.” She did. I pinned her wrists firmly. I could see her pulse thumping madly in her carotid arteries and felt her rib cage swell and shrink, swell and shrink. Then she stilled, and with a cry of despair and rage, she threw me off. She threw me far harder than
necessary and I flew seven or eight feet.

  The class clapped and Pauletta whistled and stamped. As I rolled to my feet, Therese sat up, looking pleased.

  “Man, you practically sent her into orbit,” Pauletta said to her.

  “You can’t do that from a mattress,” Sandra said.

  “You can,” I said. “It’s more difficult, yes, but possible.”

  “Well, I couldn’t.”

  “Perhaps you haven’t, yet, but you could.”

  “I can’t. I’m speaking from experience.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But that was before you had me to teach you.”

  She glared at me. “And an attacker wouldn’t pin you like that, anyway.”

  “All attackers are different,” I said. “But I’ll be happy to show you a way around any pin. What would you like to try?”

  “I want you to tell me what to do when they break down your bedroom door and grab you from behind around the throat with their forearm and pin your arms to your body with their other arm and then push you facedown into the bed so you’re suffocating and while your hands are trapped by your own body they pin you down with one hand on the back of your neck and you can’t breathe, can’t think, and then they have their whole body weight and they have a hand free. Can you picture that?”

  “It’s very clear.”

  “Tell me how to get out of it.”

  “Think of first principles.”

  They all stared at me. First principles when in their heads they were all about to be anally raped in their own beds?

  “First principle: make sure you can breathe. You have time to think, you can keep your head clear enough to think, if you can breathe. Christie”— she seemed to be the least inherently frightened person in the class, perhaps it was a generational thing, “lie facedown on the mat, please.” She did. I sat on top of her. She started to push her hands into the face-protection position. I’d taught her that. She’d absorbed it as naturally as limestone does water. “Very good,” I said, “but let’s pretend for a minute that your arms are trapped down underneath you. Good. Thank you.” I brushed her hair gently out of the way so that I wouldn’t trap it and put my hand on the back of her neck. So small. I felt the sixth vertebra under the web between my thumb and index finger. I knew three different ways to displace it, to sever her spinal cord, to snuff her life between one breath and the next. “If I started to press here, her face would go into the mattress.” I looked at Sandra. “Yes?”

  She nodded.

  “And your attacker would probably be expecting you to try and lift your head to breathe, yes?”

  Again I waited until she nodded.

  “So you would do the unexpected. The opposite of lift. What would that be?”

  “Tuck,” Nina said. “Chin down, try get your forehead to the matt, mattress, and make an air pocket.”

  “Good. Do that, Christie.” And my bright swelling of pride at Christie’s bravery was tinged now with streaks of anger at Sandra. “Now, Sandra, tell me what you’re afraid of in this situation.”

  She shrugged.

  “Are you afraid your attacker will strangle you to death? Tickle you until you’re crazy? Sing Barry Manilow? No? Then what?”

  “What do you think?” Now she was angry, too.

  “I have several guesses, but tell me exactly, specifically.”

  “Rape,” she said, and something in her voice, some solidity in tone, reminded me of con artists I had met who looked you in the eye and spoke firmly, and I knew she was lying, or at least not telling the whole truth. She was less afraid of rape, something that had probably happened to her dozens of times, than of . . . what? I found I didn’t care enough to force the issue.

  Rape was what everyone else was frightened of, so that’s what I would address.

  “All right. So if you’re tucking and bending your spine to protect your breathing, it means you’re also reaching down with your hands. Christie, try that please—just bend and reach down. Reaching down means two things. You’ll have extra leverage—you can use your arms as well as your legs to push against the mattress—and you can reach down far enough to protect your anus and vagina. Christie, can you reach down as far as between your legs?”

  “Yes,” she said, surprised.

  “But he’ll just push the hand away,” Sandra said.

  “All right.” I leaned back and reached down. “But see how that shifts my weight? You could find some leverage now.”

  “Not if he’s breaking your fingers. You won’t be thinking about leverage if you’re in pain.”

  I knew then, as surely as though I’d just watched video, how it would be for her when her spouse started to beat her. She would probably never think of leverage; she would probably not think at all. Maybe she had the first dozen times it happened but now, as with so many people who are habitually abused, she would simply relax when it began because at that instant she could stop waiting, she could stop worrying what form it would take, this time; it would begin, and she would know. It would be a strange kind of relief.

  Most of the class were not habitually abused and I addressed them. “For most people, being in this kind of situation usually leads to a huge gush of adrenaline. We’ve talked about this before. You’ll either panic or your automatic pilot takes over. Either way, it’s unlikely you’ll be thinking or feeling much at this point. You’ll be doing, probably unconsciously. You’ll be focused, as both Tonya and Nina have said, on making your attacker stop, get off, get away from you any way you can. Once you commit to that, once you begin, you’ll do almost anything to see it through. He might break one or more of your fingers, yes, but you’ll feel his weight move. You’ll be on that like lightning—”

  “Well, you might,” Sandra said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I would. Christie, I’m leaning back now, to get at your hands, so what can you do?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see which way you’re tilting.”

  “Backwards,” Suze said.

  “Sshh. Christie, you won’t have anyone to see for you. Feel it, feel where my weight is, which way I’m leaning, feel how easy it would be to tip me one way or another, or to hit me with something.”

  “But you’ve got my hands!” she said. I waited. “Oh.” And she kicked up and back with her heels and thumped between my tipping shoulder blades, and as I twisted to grab her ankles, she yanked her hands from between her legs and, weight on her knees and palms, hurled herself backwards and literally sat on me.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, leaping up, mortified. “Did I hurt you?”

  “You could have. How would you, right now, if you wanted to?”

  “Kick,” Katherine said.

  “Elbow!” “Knee in the face.” “Stomp her like a snake until she doesn’t move anymore!”

  Christie froze.

  “Use them all. I’ve fallen back, on my hands, so if you kick at my face or neck, I can’t grab and trap your leg. Pretend to kick. In slow motion.” She did—a tentative mai-geri to the chin. I pretended to topple sideways. “Now another kick—slow, slow, make it slow—to my face, then, while I’m choking on my blood, you prepare and deliver an axe kick: spine, preferably, or rib cage. Then you run, leave the house, and call nine-one-one.”

  “And your lawyer,” Pauletta said.

  “And your lawyer,” I said. “And don’t clean away any blood on you. Don’t change your clothes, even if they’re torn or soiled. Make sure the first thing you mention is not how you learnt to do this in a self-defense class. Now”—before they could think too hard about any of it—“let’s practice. Find your partner. Try the double-hand pin first. Good. Make sure you’re spread out, that you won’t be throwing your partner into someone else.” I said that particularly to Suze, who tended to forget that others might mind having a body hurled in their direction.

  We ran through the double-hand pin, then the one-handed strangle. They were tentative at first, then began to toss each other about as children would.

/>   “With both, remember what should come next. Think of your bedroom: when they’re down, what can you hit them with easily? Where’s your clock? Your potted plant? Your baseball bat? Where’s your phone, so you can take it with you when you run? Good. That’s good, Kim, very good,” as she sank her nails into Jennifer’s hands in slow motion.

  This was more like it. Even Sandra was mechanically following the plan. Katherine and Tonya were—

  Tonya’s nose blossomed red and she shrieked and clapped both hands to her face.

  “Sit up, put your head back.” Wail. The whole room focused. Blood in the room. “Tonya. Sit up. Put your head back.”

  “Oh, God,” Katherine said, “oh, God, I’m sorry. I just—”

  “Tonya, move your hand.” I spoke slowly and very clearly. “Move your hand. Tonya, please, move your hand so I can see.” The initial spill of blood from her nose was already slowing. Her eyes were wide with pain and panic. Everyone in the room was poised to run, as though blood would make the sharks come.

  “I’m so sorry,” Katherine was still saying, “I didn’t—”

  I tapped the back of one of Tonya’s wrists, then deliberately put both hands behind my back so she knew I wouldn’t be touching her face, and she moved her hands just enough for me to peer at her nose. “It’s not broken. You’ll be fine. The blood’s already slowing. You’re fine. Nice deep breaths. Katherine, are you hurt? No? Good, then I want you and Therese and Kim to help me. Therese, I want you to get me a hot, caffeinated drink with sugar. Kim, your job is to find ice and a soft cloth. Katherine, bring me something to clean the mat before it stains.” Cleaning. Before it stained. Yes. She nodded, followed Therese and Kim like a zombie through the door. “The rest of you, do some stretching, and when you’ve done that, we’ll take it in turns to hit the bag.”

  I waited until they’d started their unwilling stretching, then sat by Tonya.

  “At least you’re wearing a black T-shirt,” I said. “When the ice comes, put it on your face.”