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struck Clinton’s already bruised body. Each blow Ewart dealt was a warning of the consequences of failure.
    Once they had finished and Ewart had left, I walked over and placed a hand on Clinton’s hunched shoulders when I saw how gloom-laden he was. I asked him what had gone wrong during training.
    â€œBesides Ewart thinking I’m useless?”
    â€œYou and everyone else below black belt,” I said, in an attempt to offer him some comfort.
    He laughed and playfully punched me in the stomach. “I can’t seem to get my fighting right,” he said, “nothing I do lately seems to work. Trog was all over me today. I just couldn’t keep him off.”
    I felt my eyes water as I tried to mask the discomfort his light tap on my belly had caused me. Fate had definitely smiled on me that night in preventing me from training. “Is that all you’re worried about?” I said, trying to lighten his mood. “Here’s me thinking you were just distracted.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” he replied, glancing at me quizzically.
    â€œYou know, the girls were standing on the corner outside and while you were sparring you were wondering how much they would charge a really ugly guy like Trog.”
    Laughing out loud, we made our way to the changing room. Leslie rushed towards us, pulling dry clothes over his still wet body. He said to me, “Don’t forget, tonight we have two nice-looking girls waiting for us. I told them we would pick them up for nine.”
    I had completely forgotten about the double-date Leslie had previously arranged for the two of us. I suspected he had only involved me because the car he had recently bought was not yet roadworthy and he needed a lift. Although I knew Leslie would object, I felt Clinton would benefit from tagging along and as he got changed I told him he needed to come with us for a relaxing night out.
    Clinton was chuckling while Leslie was cursing as the three of us finally clambered into my car.

– Chapter Four –
    We shout during a fight according to the situation. The voice is a thing of life.
    Miyamoto Musashi –
The Fire Book
    AT NINETEEN I struck out for independence and got a place of my own, although this was not entirely by choice. On learning that a friend of his was planning to return to Jamaica, my father suggested that I should take over the tenancy of his flat. It was on the twelfth floor of a high-rise block on the other side of town, about five miles from my parents’ home. Dad was showing me the door, in a gentle, roundabout way, mostly because the house in which I had grown up had become too small for the six of us, particularly as I was the only boy and so had a bedroom to myself. As my three younger sisters became adolescents and had started to bicker in their cramped space, my presence in the home was viewed as problematic.
    I did not mind in the least, and Clinton and Leslie positively celebrated when I told them the news – they still lived with their parents and had notions about turning my second bedroom into some sort of ‘love nest’. I made sure that never happened. The flat was empty but for a bed, a wardrobe and an old three-piece suite, and I had not got around to putting much more furniture into it. The floor remained uncarpeted and was covered by hard, grey, vinyl tiles and the only source of heat was an ineffectual two-bar electric fire. My own ideas about using the flat for romantic liaisons had also come to nothing. I had recently split up with a girl I had known from school and there was a part of me that feltas empty as my flat. But I turned my life of temporary solitude into an opportunity to train even harder. I used all the empty space as a training area, I ran up and down the flights of stairs rather than use the lift and I went out for either early morning or late evening runs. I pushed myself, just as I imagined my rivals for a first team place were pushing