The Back Of The Head
Theo can’t recall his favourite colour. It’s just one of those things, he tells himself, that slips away the older you get. Years pass and those crumbs fall away. Like which smells you like or who every player on your team is. You get older and older, Theo thinks, and you forget that you like cedarwood and lavender. You get older and older, Theo thinks, and you can’t recall who that blonde kid with the ears wearing number 4 is. That happens to people, he agrees with himself. The scratches on the back of his neck start to itch, a murmur of pinpricks that shoot from his left earlobe to his left shoulder. He bites at their feint, he obliges the sensation automatically and he scratches them despite Sadie telling him not to at dinner. Well, Sadie isn’t here, he thinks. A moment passes, his fervent scratching just now beginning to cross the rubicon between satisfying him and paining him. He doesn’t like that he thought that about Sadie, just now. Sorry, he says aloud quietly to nobody in particular, but to Sadie nonetheless. A few small pebbles of yellowed scab break off beneath his fingernails, and soon follows the gentle, localised heartbeat of fresh bleeding tickling him. Four uneven scratches wrapped around the rear left quarter of his neck, nine o’clock to six, four skinny red trenches dug into him by four untrimmed toenails. He does not remember how that kick felt, that knocked him out last night. But he thinks he will always remember how badly these crooked, ugly scratches stung when he put on his cologne this morning. That’s the stuff I’ll always remember, he thinks. Always.
Theo can’t recall his favourite colour. He wore a lot of blue as a teenager, he remembers, but he never felt any which way about it. It was a little brighter than black but didn’t draw eyes. He could disappear in it, not be too much in it. His Mother’s favourite colour was green, the brightest green you could find, the shade of green God paints as a warning on tree frogs so they may never be swallowed. The most venomous green… or blue. Pink? Maybe pink? The beige PVC cladding of the garage wall before him seems to swallow colour, it swallows even the very memory of colour. It eats vibrance greedily. The wall is barren, unadorned, save for the Championship belt hanging in its centre, just inches from Theo’s face. He hung it with just one small, cheap nail, hammered through one hole of twenty four, running in two parallel lines through the centre of one leather strap. He did not want anything excessive on the wall, he wanted as little as possible around it. This wall is its wall. This surface is its surface. Just one bent, red nail, pried from a rotting floorboard pulled up in his Grandmother’s old bedroom, keeps it company. ‘World Middleweight Champion’ spells the gold lettering stamped on further gold. ‘2015 - 2015’ beneath that. It was less of a romance than it was an affair, thinks Theo. Five long months in the sun, where children ask for your signature and how they can get as good at fighting as you are. Just five months, remembers Theo. Five long months, then one short round, and endless platitudes about how nothing lasts forever. Being told that history has him now, as if it were a comfort. Wait, no, thinks Theo. No, it was six months, not five.
Theo can’t recall his favourite colour. He hopes it isn’t gold. He has fought thirteen times since this belt saw him for who he really was and found him wanting. Danielle is old enough now to know what’s going on. She knows what he is and knows it well. She was just a baby the first time she sat on her Mother’s lap in a distant lockeroom backstage, letting her young gaze dance with vacancy and smoothness over brick walls tarred in thick white paint, glanced with brand new eyes full of the vaguest curiosity at the small television screen in the corner of the locker room, recognised that shapes and colours were moving, and two grownups were grabbing and hitting each other, and that they were making her Mother cry and say please and fuck and no and yes under her breath. She’s old enough now to be the first to tell Theo she loves him when he limps back to the locker room. She’s old enough now to tell him he had a great couple of rounds once he figured out his distance as Theo peels spit, sweat and blood-tinged shorts from his swollen purple legs. She’s old enough now to know that every time she says these things to him, every time he returns to her all wet and bloodied, to do it quieter and softer every time. Theo runs his fingers over the embossing and debossing of the belt’s gold face. It feels warmer than the last time he touched it. She’s old enough now to have this, if she wants it. But Theo knows she won’t. She’s old enough to know what it did to him. She’s… twelve, he thinks. Yeah, twelve.
Theo can’t recall his favourite colour. Red? When he signed his contract release this morning, an old callous on the side of his little finger had split at the seams in the night without his knowing and drew a faint line of twisting, looping blood beneath his signature as he wrote it. It wasn’t even red, really. It was weaker and paler than red. Sadder than red. Old blood, he thinks. The waters of tired flesh. He apologised when he noticed and asked if that mattered and the representative told him that it didn’t, then smiled and told Theo that it’s the least amount of blood he’d seen on a contract in a while. Theo laughed too and then said that it wasn’t a contract, it was a contract release. The representative laughed a little, then he shrugged, then he told Theo maybe that was in fact the most blood he’d ever seen on a contract release. Sadie just called Theo’s name. He turns his head towards the garage door that leads to the house. Nothing. He imagines hearing things sometimes, the daily tricks of hot water pipes and fidgeting timber. Theo reaches up to the nail, ignores the bite of its head into the crease of his first knuckles as he wiggles it free of the PVC cladding and watches the belt fall like dead weight to the concrete floor. It fell faster than the nail could be all the way removed, its sharp tip having scratched a perfectly straight line from the hole it was nestled in up to the seam of the strap. Theo curses under his breath. He didn’t want to hurt it. He didn’t know it could be hurt.
Theo can’t recall his favourite colour. Who cares, he thinks. Who gives a damn. Flecks of plastic leather seem to spiral in the air before him, released by the tip of that old nail. He could breathe in deep, take the flecks inside him, feel them almost imperceptibly scratch the flora of his lungs, nestle into the crevices within him, migrate over the years into the lining of his organs. Crumbs of black plastic leather, stalwart, making the pilgrimage to his veins over the years. Flowing through him in his blood, doing circuits of his sinew, finding a home somewhere inside his heart one day, some tiny indented burrow in the cartilage of his aorta. Just breathe in, he thinks. Take a part of it with you. Take it to the grave and make the worms choke on it, take it to the crematorium and have it melt into black plastic pinpricks upon the slab. His favourite fucking colour… White. Why not, he thinks. Why can’t it just be white? Sadie calls his name again and he takes a step towards the door before pausing. The pipes. Those old water pipes. Grunting in the night, tricking him, taking him somewhere warmer inside his head for a moment. The four thin toenail gouges on his neck throb, they remind him they’re there. They pulse with heat outwards through him, warming him under the muscle, like ripples in a lake. It will be a chill by the time it reaches his fingertips and toes. It hurts. Theo can’t believe how much it hurts, even now, even after all this time. The pipes must groan again, because Theo hears his wife call once more. He can’t remember how old his Father was when he died but he thinks it was some age around where he is now. The flecks of black plastic leather have dissipated and fallen to the ground by now. The pipes go quiet.
Theo can’t recall his favourite colour. He looks down at the belt, folded upon itself and looking suddenly very cheap at his feet, half leant against the chalky beige cladding of the garage wall. It is covered in small amounts of plaster dust, the grey fabric showing itself through the scar scraped into it by the old, bent nail in Theo’s hand. The nail from his Grandmother’s bedroom. The nail he will keep on his bedside table. The nail he will polish and attach to a keyring he keeps on his house keys. The nail that will go with him most places in his back right pocket for the next nine years until he loses it on a fishing trip. The nail he will have forgotten the significance of two years before that. The toenail gouges flare up again. He feels tired. He is almost overwhelmed by the desire to go lay down and close his eyes, the same desire he felt immediately after he was carried backstage with an oxygen mask strapped to his face the night prior, the speech of his opponent turning into mere bass in his ears, garbled and fuzzy and far too loud. The feeling he always feels whenever he comes to backstage recently. Theo asked where he was to nobody in particular, once the urge to sleep had passed after a few minutes. A man in blue latex gloves and a white polo shirt told him he was in Madison Square Garden, and that he had just been knocked unconscious. Theo asked why he had been knocked out. The man put a hand on his shoulder and told him he had just lost a fight.
Theo can’t recall his favourite colour. He makes a fist around the old, rusty nail and turns away from the wall. He starts punching a hanging heavy bag lazily, short little punches, not extending his arm but putting his legs and hips into them. Body shots. Kidney hunters. The kind of hits that make you piss blood and make the sides of your thighs feel tight. Theo feels himself getting angrier. For a moment, he thinks he forgets whose house he is in, but he does not linger on that thought. This is his house, his, all his. He breathes heavier and heavier, the groaning of the heavy bag’s leather falling into a familiar rhythm, a rhythm he has known for a long while, a consistent percussion of creaks that sneak into his dreams often. He is angry. He is confused. He wonders if he’ll remember to pick up that cake tomorrow for Danielle’s birthday party on Sunday. His head throbs, his gouges ache, he wants to sleep. He thinks that he definitely will remember to grab the cake. That’s the stuff I’ll always remember, he thinks. Always.
Theo has just lost a fight.
