Fighting Talk

Your strategy to win the crowd over with a dazzling display of fancy footwork and lightning-quick jabs has changed, just this second: now it’s close your eyes tight and swing wildly in every direction until you hit something. One of your corner boys slaps you on the back, rubs an entire tub of petroleum jelly into your eyes, and whispers superfluous last-second advice into your ear, while you try and get rid of a persistent case of the hiccups. Then a disproportionate gum shield is shoved deep into your mouth before you stumble onto a disconcertingly soft canvas (think children’s bouncy castle) and while you’re at it, visualize all those chin ups and repetitive gym visits to pound the bag, all those sparring rounds with the doubters and naysayers.

The bell goes clang-a-lang-a-lang-a-lang and out you come in your best pair of spangly oversized shorts. The stadium appears deserted apart from an old man sweeping around the ring with a toothless sweeping brush. It drags litter nosily along the bare concrete ground, but you make it your business not to be distracted. Although there is no actual opponent inside the ring, you feel obliged to throw punches. It elicits an ironic cheer from a passing tradesman. He wears a work-belt under his cascading belly, laden with useful tools; a hammer, a screw-gun, a nail-bar, variously sized chisels. He chuckles and shakes his head dismissively at your puny efforts: he could do it way better, one hand behind his back, blindfolded!

Ignore him.

You try out all the combinations you have been endlessly practicing, a left-right-uppercut, then a hard left hook into the fresh air, followed by a clinch; and without landing a punch on anyone or anything, you begin to feel so dreadfully weary. So, so, dreadfully weary. Other combinations follow in a less than dazzling display as you slump all around the outskirts of the ring throwing one haymaker after another until every imaginary foe would be knocked out cold by now if there was even one of them you could fully imagine or realize in a way that hasn’t been done countless times before by far more talented and hard-working fighters than you.

End of the first round: to stop yourself from looking like a complete chump, before returning to your corner you hit yourself in the face, good and hard, until your nose is bloodied. The team in your corner at the start of the fight have all deserted you. There is nothing to meet you but a spit bucket and a moldy wet sponge. You try picking up the sponge, but it keeps slipping out of your grasp on account of the cumbersome gloves. The spit bucket is no good to you because if you take out your gumshield it won’t go back in again. That’s why you pay them: your corner boys, to be there when you need them. Instead, they’ve buggered off to a pub around the corner.

The bell goes and you want to stay where you are but that’s not going to be possible: the bell will keep on clanging and clanging-a-lang-a-lang-a-lang until you get back up off your backside and up on your feet and start fighting again. So you dance around the ring some more and throw a few feeble right-hands, when out of nowhere a powerful blow catches you on your glass chin.

Whump!

Both knees buckling, you slump to the canvas to the sound of a referee counting you out. Suddenly the whole auditorium feels crammed to the rafters. Everyone is cheering for you to be bludgeoned again. The count is so deliberately slow that it gives you every opportunity to get back on your unsteady feet and when that happens you immediately batter yourself from every conceivable angle and using both fists until you begin to see stars, at which point the lights are dimmed and you realize that to get home you will need to leave very soon or risk missing the last bus.

The towel: if you can get to your corner and find your pristine white towel then all of this will end but guess what – somebody has removed the corners and packed them away – the national anthem is playing from the public address speaker – the tradesman is untacking the canvas – and whosoever your towel is toweling these days, it sure as hell isn’t you. Another thing: you won’t be able to open the locker holding your items unless somebody helps you to remove at least one of your gloves. You could ask the tradesman to help cut them off using one of his tools, for instance one of those chisels, but you’re too embarrassed to go anywhere near him. Instead, you continue to pummel yourself until it’s deemed that you are no longer able to defend yourself and the referee appears out of nowhere, eating a ham and cheese sandwich, to raise the invisible glove of your non-existent opponent.

After the fight you join your corner boys in the pub. No hard feelings. They buy you a pint of warm beer and you all sit there with nothing to say. You hope to Jesus nobody will mention the fight. Nobody does. Instead they lend you money for a taxi home, which is actually pretty decent of them, especially since you are now completely skint.

Wake up in the morning and start preparations for the next fight. Your opponent stares at you from the bathroom mirror. He’s brushing his teeth, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, bursting a pimple on his chin. He spits blood and turns on the tap to watch it disappear down the plughole in a swirling manner.

Then the thought occurs to you – hit him now when he’s not expecting it!

Too late, you hesitated, he’s already gone into a rope-a-dope against the shower curtain.

Not exactly as dumb as he looks, unless of course he’s punch-drunk, or unable to think straight, or tired and confused, or exhibiting chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or, or, or something else…

Brian Coughlan is a short story writer based in Galway, Ireland. His first collection of short stories Wattle & daub was published by Etruscan Press in 2018 and was a Foreword Indies Finalist that year. His most recent collection Don’t Mind Me was published by Etruscan Press in 2024.