Fight Like a Girl

by Sheena Kamal

  I send him some videos, and a clip from my last fight. It takes him a long time to respond. “You look like Dad.”

  The way he says it confuses me, like we shared him or something. Like he belonged to the both of us. This had never occurred to me, before, but I guess that’s what you’d think, maybe, if you didn’t know what it was like in that co-op townhouse me and Ma share, and sometimes shared with him. That we’d been a family of a kind, and that he’d been a big part of it, or had an equal third. That some part of him belonged to me as much as it did to my brother I’ve never laid eyes on. I don’t have any pictures of Dad handy, but I have an image of him in my memory, so I dredge it up and hold it in my mind. I look closer at the video but I don’t see it, this resemblance that my brother believes is there. I don’t look like Dad at all. I don’t look like anybody.

  * * *

  But what Junior said gets me thinking about Dad. Then I start on the service after the cremation, and the moment in the kitchen just after Ma, Aunty K and Pammy looked at each other in that strange way.

  I make myself remember that it wasn’t just the look that bothered me. There was a banging at the door and a woman downstairs, a polite young man next to her. The woman’s hair was wild, flying everywhere, and she wasn’t dressed for a Toronto fall. She looked like she’d just stepped off a plane. Neither of them was wearing a jacket. I saw them from the kitchen window. Saw Aunty K go down to speak to them. I opened the window, but I couldn’t hear anything Aunty K was saying, only that whatever it was, she was mad as hell. Ma went out and approached the woman, but Pammy pulled her back. Seeing Ma shocked the woman, who stumbled back into her son’s arms.

  Her son, my brother, Junior.

  This moment, so fresh in my mind. The woman was talking, blubbering, and I thought she was saying to Ma “You kill him?” over and over.

  I was so sure it was a question but now…now, I’m not.

  twenty-two

  Against an indigo backdrop, Noor’s got her guard up. It looks like she’s standing against the night, like she’s part of it and it’s part of her. She’s sporting brand new leggings under her Thai shorts and a long-sleeve top that covers her from neck to wrist. She shadowboxes for a few seconds and then turns to the camera and says her name, a bit about her journey to becoming a fighter and what the Florida tournament means to her.

  The camera guy asks her if her family’s traditional and what they think of her fighting. What that means in a cultural context.

  She slaps him with a glare so gangster he takes a step back. Kru tries to hide a grin, badly. With Noor, like with me, family is a no-fly zone. When she steps down from the little platform in the lobby she rolls her eyes at me and I roll mine right back. As with discussions about who’s more likely to be a ho based on skin colour, there’s no space for conversations about family and traditions here.

  Amanda’s next and she pretty much does the same thing as Noor, only she’s wearing a sports bra and her shorts, wraps and ankle sleeves. In her little video spiel, she just says her name and, with a fierce frown, challenges the camera guy to ask for more. He’s learned his lesson, though, and just thanks her.

  Kru gives her an exasperated look, but doesn’t push her to say anything else. When I get up there, the camera guy sighs heavily. He’s clearly over the novelty of doing promo shots for female fighters. He runs a hand over the springy hairs threatening to escape from the top of his T-shirt. “Take your mouth guard out, please.”

  I do, but I have nowhere to put it so I hold it since I’m just wearing wraps. Kru gives me a shooing motion, which I take to mean “do something” even though what he’s indicating is the exact opposite. It’s a lot harder than it looks, mugging for the camera, so I start to shadowbox.

  “Turn more to the camera…oh, Jesus. Don’t look like someone just murdered your family.”

  There’s a moment of horrified silence. “What?” says the camera guy.

  Amanda and Noor are looking like they want to murder him, but Kru clearly wants to get on with the day. “Give her a minute,” Kru says.

  The camera guy frowns. “I’ve got another job right after this.”

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the small mirror over the reception desk. Who is this girl, with her hair coiled into a neat braid? Even more important, who does she think she is? Not a fighter, that’s for sure! Look at her technique. Look at how she can’t even say her name for the camera. How she pulls faces, trying to convince the lens that she’s stronger than she is. Okay, so maybe there’s been a murder in her family, but is that really an excuse here?

  She doesn’t look like a fighter to me, this girl.

  Also, she isn’t really a girl anymore. I mean, she isn’t young. She’s old enough to know better, be better. Her guard keeps dropping. She taunts me with her lack of ability to do even this simple thing. Pretend for the camera—how difficult is that?

  No matter how hard I try, I can’t get it right until Kru takes me aside and says, “Think of something that makes you feel like you’re on top of the world. That makes you feel powerful. Or made you feel that way once, even just for a moment. You got something like that?”

  I nod. My right hand is oddly numb, until I realize it’s wrapped around my mouth guard. So I loosen it up, scratch at an itch I’ve got on my neck, and think about the night Dad died. I guess the talk about murder in my family gives me what I need, some kind of fierceness. I put my guard up and tuck my chin in.

  “Better than nothing,” says the camera guy.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, that’s what you need to take with you into the ring,” Kru says while the camera guy packs his gear. He pats me on the back. “We’re going to put these photos and the videos up in the next couple weeks, right after your school break, to get people excited for the fighters going to Florida.”

  That’s what I like about Kru. He could have said “girls,” or even the more generic, genderless “guys.” He could have said “young ladies.” He could have said any other thing but he calls us the thing that we want to be, even if we might not be quite there yet. He calls us fighters, and that’s just about the best option. It’s enough to make me forget, for a long spell afterwards, that I look like there’s been a murder in my family. That despite all my attempts to push it down, bury it deep, I’ve been wearing it on my face all this time. In plain view, for everyone to see.

  * * *

  I remember the exact passage where I stopped reading the soucouyant book that I gave back to Mr. Abdi.

  “Your history is a living book…Your history is your grammar for life…”

  My history is a travel guidebook. My history is a creature nobody really believes in. My history is a foreign word.

  My history is so fucked up, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

  twenty-three

  I’m looking forward to New York for March Break next week. I definitely don’t want to stay here with Ma and Ravi. I say so to Junior, up in my bedroom. We’re on video chat, which we’ve started to do. It’s pretty late but Ma is at work and I don’t know where Ravi is, so it feels safe to talk to him.

  He’s wearing a bright blue T-shirt and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He looks so much like Dad, way more than me. I don’t know what he was talking about with my fight video.

  Junior and his uncle on his mom’s side run Dad’s garage now, in Trinidad. After a while of talking about that and his plans to go to university in the fall, I ask Junior about the time about a year ago when Dad was attacked.

  “Everyone was gone from the garage for the night and Dad was just coming out from upstairs—”

  “Upstairs?”

  “Yeah, there’s an apartment above the garage.”

  “So he was on the second floor?” I hadn’t heard that part. I thought he was attacked right outside the garage.

  “Yeah. The man was trying to drag him down the sta
irs to the car, but Dad had a wrench on him and got in a few knocks. Still, he said he almost fell down those concrete steps and broke his neck. We went to the hospital with him, me and Mom. The man busted up his eye real good, but he wasn’t getting in nobody’s car. They kidnap you like that down here, get your family to pay the money to get you back. Sometimes they pay the money and you don’t come back.”

  “So he was at the top of the stairs when he was attacked? Why didn’t the attacker wait until he got down the stairs?”

  Junior shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  “What did Dad say about it?”

  “He didn’t say anything. But he was real careful after that. He thought they would go after me or Mommy next, but they never did. Everybody knows everybody in this place. It’s hard if you not from around here to get away with anything. Only time anybody free up is at Carnival.”

  It doesn’t make sense that someone would try to attack him from the top of the stairs, right? Not when you could fall so easily. I don’t want to think this, I really don’t, but what if that was the whole reason for the attack? Columbus said that you wouldn’t get the insurance money if someone died during a murder. But you would if it was an accident.

  Like a fall down some concrete steps.

  I’m so lost in thought that it takes me a moment to realize that Junior is still talking about Carnival, about J’ouvert last year and how much fun it was. “If you want to come back for Carnival next year, I’ll take you. My friends have a band, so we can get a costume and everything for you if you want. You ever play Mas in Toronto?”

  Me, play masquerade in bright, bejewelled underwear? There’s a Caribbean festival in Toronto every summer, but you’ll never catch me there. I shake my head, but I say I’ll think about it anyway.

  Then something unexpected happens.

  His mother comes in. Junior doesn’t look embarrassed or hide or anything. He turns the screen toward her so that she can see me. “Is that Trisha?” she asks.

  I wave at her. She looks so different from that time she came to the house after Dad’s funeral, when her hair was all wild and she looked like she was going mad with grief. Now, she seems…really, really nice. She’s got this kind, open face. I can almost read every thought on it. If you’ve ever summoned up an image of a perfect wife from Trinidad, she would be it.

  Right now, Dad’s perfect wife is staring at my neck. “Soucouyant biting you,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Soucouyant come at night, you know? Shed she skin, turn into a vampire and bite people.” She points to my throat, where the base of my neck meets my collarbone. There are some scratches there that have scarred in a way that almost look like freckles. One of them is even fresh.

  I don’t remember how I got these scratches but they must have been from training. “But that’s…that’s a story.”

  “Ma, stop it,” Junior says. He grins and it’s like watching Dad. That’s why they call him Junior, I guess. He’s a little Dad, everyone’s pride and joy. That smile and the way his eyes crinkle when he does it. Dad didn’t smile like that often toward the end because he and Mom were complicated. But seeing how happy my brother is, how sweet his mom seems…I wonder why Dad ever came up here to mess with me and Ma.

  If he hadn’t, he’d still be alive.

  Junior’s mom waves goodbye to me and leaves the room. Junior is still smiling. “You know what you have to do now, right?”

  I pull up the neck of my hoodie a little and try to hide the marks. Maybe I got them clinching? “What?”

  “You have to put a line of salt down by your door so the soucouyant has to stop and count each grain. Then she can’t get back to her skin before the morning comes and she dies.”

  “I heard you have to find the skin and put it in salt.” Did I read that in the soucouyant book or did I hear it in the roti shop?

  “What? No. Trust me, I’m an expert.” He says it in this braggadocious way, but I can tell he’s joking. It’s another part of my brother that I file away. How easily he laughs and jokes around.

  “Your mom seems nice.”

  He gets shy all of a sudden. “Yeah, she alright.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “About Dad. And how you couldn’t come to the service.”

  “We didn’t find out until the day before. Man had two families. Nothing to be sorry about, really. Ma had a prayers for him here. I tried to call the phone to invite you, but it was turned off.”

  Hindu prayers after someone’s death isn’t the same as a funeral, giving last rites to a body. It should have been here, for him. He should have been in Trinidad with these people who lived with him and loved him, instead of in Toronto with me and Ma. What was he doing with us, anyway, when he had Junior and his wife back home? It must have been some voodoo Ma put on him. Whether she wanted to or not.

  “You gonna come and visit, right?”

  I lift my shoulder and let it fall back. “I don’t know.”

  “I understand,” says Junior, this new brother of mine. “Trinidad ain’t for everybody. When was the last time you came home?”

  “When I was a kid. I barely remember it at all. It just felt that I didn’t belong there.”

  He laughs. “You don’t have to belong to visit your brother.”

  Now I’m laughing, too, even though I don’t know why. There’s something easy there, an easiness of the people, of life—

  When you’re not busy getting kidnapped for ransom or murdered by gangsters or worn straight down to the bone by corrupt politicians.

  —but it’s not mine. Easy doesn’t suit me particularly well, I don’t think. But I laugh with him anyway because he’s my brother and, right now, maybe I don’t feel so alone.

  Junior goes quiet for a moment. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What really happened that night?”

  I know which night he’s talking about, but I still say it. “The night Dad died? It was raining. And the car…”

  And I hear something. Something I shouldn’t. A footstep at the door.

  I look up and see Ma’s face, staring at me from the hallway. She’s shocked. More than that, she’s angry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so mad. She turns and leaves, her footsteps padding down the stairs. I don’t hear them like I usually do because somehow, somewhere, she learned how to sneak around a lot better.

  And I’m scared, because she wasn’t supposed to hear me on the phone, talking about Dad.

  Especially not talking to my brother about him.

  twenty-four

  Because I’m a coward and I don’t want to face Ma yet, I run a bath and pour some Epsom salt in to help with my sore muscles. Then look at the bag of salt and remember what Junior said. It sounds insane. If I was a mythical demon creature, I’d try to have a less common weakness. Like something you can’t buy at any grocery store, maybe?

  Eventually, after my bath, I work up the courage to go downstairs. Ma’s on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor, scrubbing the corner of the room. When she sees me in the doorway, she gets to her feet and pulls the latex gloves from her hands. “Come here.”

  Like a zombie, I do. I stand in front of her with my hands curled into fists.

  “Who were you talking to?” she says, her voice so quiet I almost want to lean in to hear her better. But even I know this is a bad idea.

  “A friend.” I make this sound as breezy as I can, but I can tell right away that I’m in more trouble than I’d thought. And I’d thought I was in a lot.

  She gives me the look. You know. The look. She comes toward me. Fighting the urge to glance at the dent on the wall, I just back into the hallway…

  But she blocks the stairwell going up the stairs before I can get to it.

  “What friend were you talking to about the night your father died?”
<
br />   “Someone from school.” I try to move past her, but she grabs my arm.

  “You feel I’m stupid or what? I heard the voice! Who’s the boy?”

  “Nobody!”

  “You want to play woman? Well, go be woman then. Go be woman in your own house!” When she’s mad like this her accent gets thick and her voice is rapid-fire. I can barely keep up. “All this time I think you was in school and going to that gym, and now I find out you have some boy you keeping from me? Talking about things you have no place to be saying? Telling people our business? You been whoring about this town, Trisha?” And then, even worse, because she’s gone this far and isn’t backing down: “Me, raise a jamette?”

  I don’t know how to explain what it’s like when your own mother calls you a skank, but I’m suddenly a little girl again with hot, bitter tears washing my face.

  “You’re one to talk! You and Dad weren’t even married!” I try to wrench my arm away, but she’s too angry to be shaken off. She hangs on for dear life. Mine and hers.

  “You know what it was like when I met your father! You saw what happened to me…why would you…Tell me, who is he? Who’s this friend?”

  So I’m the one to blame for her shitty life? I think of Junior’s mom, with her sweet round face and her nice smile. Why couldn’t she be my mother? “Let go of me!” I could push her off, but I don’t want to hurt her. I know I’m stronger than I look. But, I guess, so is she.

  “What’s his name, Trisha?”

  And now I’m so mad. It’s like something’s burst inside me, so I tell her. “Junior. His name is Junior, and he’s my brother.”