shoulder on a docket

Good. I said good. I don't know what good meant. Come at me, or: good, now I have to break you so I can stop thinking about my own shoulder. Both true. I said it because if I'd said anything else my face would have done something I couldn't take back in a public hall. Voss tapped the apron twice and walked back to his corner like a man who had already won something. Maybe he had.

Tom Vass's text sat in my phone like a small bomb. Lev at Voss's gym three times this week. I read it in the ute. I read it again. I didn't reply because there's no reply that doesn't make me sound like a man who is scared, and I am not that man on the phone to anyone except Zoe, and even Zoe doesn't get the full version. Yesterday I didn't tell her about the bump. Today I told her about Cotton and Lev. I don't know if that's progress or if I just wanted someone else to know so I could stop carrying it alone. Briggs saying my shoulder doesn't extend past round four means somebody in Voss's corner has been watching me tape.

I drove past the gym in Preston on the way home. Don't know what I thought I'd see. Roller door shut, office lights on. I sat with the engine running and felt like the twenty-two-year-old kid who used to drive past his old swim club at midnight to check if anyone had left the pool lights on. I was checking whether the water was still mine. It wasn't then either. The water is never yours again.