A Walk in the Dark

Part Two
24

Left, left, right, another left hook.

Jab, jab, right uppercut, left hook.

Left, right, left.

Right.

The end.

I was lying on the sofa, watching a sports documentary about Cassius Clay/Mohammed Ali. To anyone who has any idea of what really happens in the ring, it’s an amazing thing to watch Mohammed Ali’s fights.

For example, the way he moves his legs. To understand, you need to have been in the ring. Not many people know this, but the surface of a boxing ring is soft. It isn’t easy to skip around on it.

It’s an amazing thing to watch the man – a man now afflicted with Parkinson’s – dancing like that. A 240-pound man dancing with the lightness of a butterfly. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, as he used to say.

Punches hurt, and are usually pretty nasty. Which is why there’s something so incredible about that superhuman grace of his. It’s as if he’s overcome matter, overcome fear, as if he’s making a leap out of the dirt and the blood towards a kind of ideal of beauty.

At the end of the documentary, images of the young Cassius Clay – beautiful and invincible – dancing lightly, almost weightlessly, during a training session were intercut with images of the old Mohammed Ali lighting the flame for the Atlanta Olympics. Shaking, concentrating extremely hard to avoid making any mistakes while performing such an easy action, his eyes staring into space.

I thought of how I’d be when I was old. I wondered if I would even notice. It struck me I was really afraid of growing old. I wondered if at seventy – if I reached that age – I’d be capable of reacting if someone attacked me in the street. It’s an idiotic thought, I know. But it was what I thought at that moment, and the fear of it went right through me.

So I got up from the sofa as the credits of the documentary were rolling, and took off my shoes, shirt and trousers, leaving just my socks and underpants on. Then I took the boxing gloves that were hanging on the wall, put them on, and set the alarm for three minutes: a regular professional round.

I did eight rounds, with one-minute intervals between them, punching as if a title, or my life, depended on it. Without thinking about anything. Not even my old age, which would come sooner or later.

Then I went and had a shower. My arms hurt and my eyes were a little blurred. But the rest of it was over, for that evening.