There's no going back.

“They can rob you of everything but your achievements, lad. Those you’ll keep forever.”

Those were the words my father had told me, sat beside me on my bed the day before my first boxing match. I was bearly sixteen. He wasn’t an acutely educated man; meek beginnings had instilled in him an appreciation of hard work bordering on idolatry. He was quick to speak his mind and quicker still to bow out to the more informed, a humble but strong-willed man. Having said that, there was one thing he would never surrender to anyone, a fact that he held so tightly between calloused hands you could see the bones of his knuckles under his skin: ‘You can’t change the past.’ An uncontentious claim for the vast majority of people, but with the fervency that he gripped the significance of that truism, you’d have thought it to be some new radical, alien philosophy to the world at large. Now that I’m older, I’m starting to think he might have been right to hold that simple truth so tightly to his chest.

Though he would never admit it in front of mum, he did love the fact that his eldest child, his only son, was a fighter. I think he figured me a protector, and, though I hate to admit it, more of an heir than any of my sisters. Another artifact of a childhood spent in the 70’s. Another thing he’d never admit, to his credit. Still, without having ever said it, I could see it in his eyes whilst he tried to knock the nervousness out of my head before a match. The way he’d reassure me that I had the strength, the speed, the courage to face down anything that might come at me next. He made me feel like some knight about to head off for war, an ancient and fabled hero readying to push back the ragged hoards of injustice. At the time, his excitement only threw fuel on to my own fiery, youthful, ignorant enthusiasm for the sport. Pulling the fantasy into reality before I had the chance or foresight to think about what it was that I was actually doing. I didn’t see what the competition measured in lads like myself: how much we could hurt.

Back then I wasn’t hitting anyone, you see. There was an opponent, sure, another boy at the other end of the ring that ducked and hopped around, one that threw punches, took them, then more often than not hit the floor. But it wasn’t a person. There wasn’t any actual pain on the other side of my gloves, no crushing humiliation in the shaking legs that could no longer support a body. There just wasn’t. They were an impressively detailed sparring dummy, or just a faceless target-thing that didn’t bear any consideration between dodging and hitting. There was only dad’s smile at the side of ring, neck turning pink as he held back the screams he’d unleash when we got back to the car. You’d be forgiven for mistaking him for the father of the other boy, the way he’d go on about his “arms like tree trunks” or “bloody big shoulders”, regardless of whether that seemed true of not. That was the way he’d always start his post-bout analysis. It was only later in life, when I found myself studying Romans in history, that I discovered the logic behind the tactic. The old generals and emperors of the empire would always laud their enemies after a victory. There was nothing impressive about squashing a fly after all, whereas wrestling a lion to the floor was a triumph that only gave more pride to the victor. The bigger they were, the easier you rose - to flip a popular phrase on its head. Every time I won he was only proven right: the record kept rising and never went backwards. Even a loss was a point, it wasn’t one you wanted but it was a tally all the same. An act, not an omission; an addition rather than an erasure. They never took your wins away from you, they couldn’t. They could argue about it all they liked, but nobody could contest a result or challenge what you accomplished in the ring. It was unassailable, a fortress cast around a history that could never be re-written. If someone wanted to change the record they had to try again, even the score. They could never go backwards in time. There was only moving forward, building up. From 0-1 you could only get to 1-1, not 0-0. That permanence brought me security, a sense of progression and purposefulness. It wasn’t as if boxing was my life, I was never planning to go pro or anything, but it was something I could always feel at my back when life got confusing. When I wasn’t sure where to go or which way to turn, I never worried about going backwards. Because boxing showed me that was impossible. Because my Dad taught me that that was the greatest gift in the world.

That was the narrow, inequitable opinion and crutch of a younger man than I am now. Looking back, I see now what I lacked. More than I needed the security of that paternal mantra, I needed the understanding of the depth of its truth. That wasn’t something that would come for a long time. Now that I know what it costs to get that understanding, I wish more than anything that I could’ve remained ignorant to it. But the scoreboard never goes backwards, you can learn but you can’t forget. There are things outside of your control that mark you, but the things that stain are the ones you can control. Not all achievements are a good thing.

“Nobody can take your past from you” My father told me. “Not even yourself.”

It's rare that it happens. So rare. Barely more than a hundred as long as I’ve been alive, so they say. They told me that its the fall, not the impact that does it. Doesn’t matter. It happened. I did it. There’s no going back now, not for me and not for him.

Mum cried. There wasn’t much more that she could do. She’s still crying now, so Dad tells me. She finds it hard to visit.

The girls put on brave faces. Sarah keeps a smile on her and comes every week. Theres a plastic to her when shes here. She does it out of duty, I think, more than anything else. Eliza comes with her sometimes, doesn’t say much out of turn. I don’t think they’ve told little Anna the truth yet. I don’t want them to.

Dad’s the worst. Guilt racks his face every time he sees me. He’s deflated, skinny, pale. The balloon laughter that floated in his gut has popped and he’s crinkling around the husk of it, sucked inward by agony. Theres shame in him, such terrible shame. Not about me, he says, about himself. His fault for getting me into 'circus fighting', he says. I wish I didn’t have to believe him but I do. I can’t bear that he blames himself for what happened, it wasn’t his fault. But I need him to blame himself. I couldn’t bare to know that the disgust and regret that glaze his empty stare are focused on me.

You can’t change your past.