duct tape on the floor, the ropes and the posts
—but the mats aren’t revolting and the gear is disinfected at least once a week.
There isn’t much more you can ask for, really. Kru does his best, but he’s pretty busy, what with his plans to expand across the city and spread the joy of connecting shinbone to ribs. Fist to chin. Knee to solar plexus. Elbow to…you get it.
We call each other gladiators because we go out and fight for reasons beyond us. Reasons that nobody else can understand if you’re not part of it. We don’t even understand it, not really. Nobody is from here, or from Thailand, even, the birthplace of our sport, Muay Thai. Some people call us nak muay farang—foreign boxers. We’re from a couple dozen other countries at least, the knot at the centre of Canada’s cultural mosaic, where everybody is from somewhere else. Our origin stories are irrelevant here, because we all want the same thing.
That rush.
The Art of Eight Limbs, the Thai words that stutter off our tongues. They don’t sound right, even to us, but none of that matters. Not really. As long as we pay our respects, we get a pass to train. To fight.
I’m in the ring right now.
I do my Wai Kru, the pre-fight dance, and bow to my Filipino coach, who was made Kru ten years ago in Thailand, the only place where it matters. The mecca of warriors like us, in our bright shorts and with our hard bodies. Kru is there in my corner and our team is behind him, cheering. He gives me that look, the one that says You got this, Lucky, and steps back. The rest of the team melts away and it’s just me and her. My opponent. There’s this calm that comes over me, this peace. I see the fierce look in her eyes but I make my own go soft so I can see her whole body, trying to sense her weakness.
Then one of us moves, and it begins. A dance. Brutal, but beautiful, too.
When it’s all over, after a left hook catches me at the precise spot that my headgear shifted, plowing through my temple and leaving me face down on the bloody mat, I sit alone on a bench in the locker room of my gym, smelling of sweat and tangy Thai liniment. After all the consolation hugs and smacks on the back, my team has left me alone. Which is how I like it best.
A fallen gladiator. Beaten but not defeated.
Undoing my wrist wraps. Pulling off my compression sleeves. Taking the braid out of my hair. I step into the shower and feel the heat of the water sear the pain away and I feel fresh. I forget that my dad is arriving from Trinidad tomorrow, for about a month (as usual), bringing with him a suitcase full of frozen food, made by the hands of women I’ve never met, blood connections who will never stop cooking for other people until the day they die. Food parcelled out in little baggies just so and wrapped up tight for the trip. Frozen coconut water in plastic Coke litre bottles, sealed with duct tape. There will also be tamarind balls for me, because he knows how much I love them.
That’s the only thing he knows about me.
He brings nothing for Ma, nothing but his fists.
three
I don’t go with Ma to pick Dad up from the airport because she usually does that alone. Dad never talks about anything interesting anyway, and he definitely doesn’t talk about his life back in Trinidad. So what I know about Trinidad isn’t much. To tell you the truth, my knowledge about the island my parents were born on could probably fit in an A-cup sparkly Carnival bra with tassels.
This is the whole of it: When Columbus discovered Trinidad, he saw three big hills and thought of a trinity, an inverted triangle that his fellow Europeans could fuck until the Amerindians were gone and they were free to populate their sugar cane plantations with slaves. When slavery was abolished, the need for sugar was still there, so they took indentured labourers from India who lived and worked like slaves for years, though you’ll never get a coolie today who’ll admit that their people were actual coolies.
Like there’s something wrong with being poor and without better options.
So you have to get on a boat and lose your identity, your culture? So you were led astray by false promises? That shit happens. Get over it. Everything I learned about Trinidad I learned from Ma, and she’s never had any time for history lessons, what with her long shifts at the hospital and all the effort she spends trying to make my father happy.
Now that Dad’s here, I can’t wait to get out of the house. Ma, too, it seems. We’re at the mall, getting a dress for my graduation ceremony, which will happen in the fall.
“Stand up straight,” Ma says, smacking me upside the head with her open palm. The usual. “What are you, a child? Sometimes I think you’re seventeen going on twelve.”
“Ow,” I say, even though I don’t mind. The insult or the smack. This is what Amanda from the gym calls a love tap. Her family is from Jamaica, so she’s well familiar with the Caribbean style of love.
The store is filled with dresses, not someplace I usually go, but Ma has the money now, so we’re buying the dress now. Not off the sale rack, because this is a special occasion. My first full-price dress. A milestone as important to her as my graduation, which is waaay off in the future—
So why are we here exactly, Ma?
—but I can’t think about that now because I’m trying to find my balance in something a five-year-old at a princess party wouldn’t look out of place in. I stare at myself in the mirror, my muscular shoulders and thighs ruining the drape of pink she’s chosen for me.
“You are so dark,” she says softly, as though this is a crime. Her expression in the mirror is one of pity, because she is fair and she thought her daughter would be, too. But I’m not. I look like my dad.
Once we get the dress, Ma’s in a better mood. She even takes me for lunch, but she can’t resist reminding me that there’s enough food at home. We eat tacos at the mall food court and I try to forget what she said about my skin. Other people sometimes comment on it, especially when they see me and Ma standing together, but she doesn’t usually. I think maybe it reminds her too much of Dad.
After the mall, I ask her to drop me off at the gym. She’s probably feeling guilty about the “you’re so dark” thing, so she does.
“Trish, you know you’re beautiful to me, right?” she says, when she pulls into the gym parking lot.
“Ma.”
She ruffles my hair. “You are. Go have fun.”
Finally, she lets me out of the car so that I can work up a decent sweat and try to forget about how pink dresses look on my dark skin. Plus, I don’t really like being at the house when Dad is around. I think Ma knows it, too.
* * *
Whoever said The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice never met me, or my sparring partner Amanda Finch. Amanda, with her hair forever pulled back in neat cornrows and her limbs so long and strong that if you let her get a lock on you, you’d be on the mat forever, being squeezed to a pulp. Sweetness never even comes into the picture. I’m having serious doubts about my own levels.