The Worst Week

On Monday they made Callum Reid redundant.

They did it in a glass meeting room on the fourth floor of an office in Sheffield, with a woman from HR he'd never met and a box of tissues that nobody touched. Restructuring. Not a reflection on your performance. Very generous package. His manager, who'd been to his thirtieth birthday, looked at the table the whole time.

On Wednesday, Jess told him she was leaving. Not because of the job. She said that clearly, twice, which made it worse. Because of him. Because of the man he'd become over the last two years: snappy, closed off, scrolling, angry at the football, angry at the traffic, angry at her for asking what was wrong. "I'm lonely," she said, "and I'm living with you. Do you understand how that feels?"

He didn't understand. He shouted. She cried. She went to her sister's.

On Friday, his dad had a stroke.

Callum sat in the relatives' room at the Northern General at two in the morning, under a poster about hand-washing, holding a vending-machine coffee he couldn't drink, and he realised that he was thirty-four years old and he had absolutely nothing holding him up. No job. No partner. No friends he could ring at this hour, not really: there were the lads, but the lads were for the pub and the five-a-side, not for this. His body felt soft and old. His head was a washing machine. He wanted, very badly, to punch the wall.

He didn't. He threw the coffee in the bin and went outside and sat on a bench in the dark and rang the only number he could think of.

"Hello?" said his mum, from the ward upstairs.

"Mum. I'm outside. I don't know what to do."

There was a pause. His mum was a practical woman. She'd been a dinner lady for twenty-six years and could quell a hall of four hundred children with one look.

"Go home and sleep," she said. "Your dad's stable. And Callum, love? On Monday, go and see Frank."

"Who's Frank?"

"Frank Doyle. Your grandad's old trainer. The gym on Staniforth Road. Your grandad always said Frank fixed more men than any doctor in Sheffield." She sighed. "I should have sent you years ago."

The Gym on Staniforth Road

The gym was above a carpet shop. There was no sign, just a faded red door and a flight of narrow stairs that smelled of liniment and old leather and, faintly, of chips from the shop next door.

At the top was one long room: a ring in the middle with grey ropes, six heavy bags hanging from chains, a wall of fading photographs, and a radiator that clanked. Two teenagers were skipping in the corner. A big man in his fifties was hitting pads held by a small, wiry, white-haired man in a tracksuit who must have been at least seventy-five.

The old man saw Callum in the doorway. He didn't stop holding pads. He just said, "You're Tommy Reid's grandson."

"How did you know?"

"You've got his ears." The old man caught a hook on the pad without looking. "And his face when he was in trouble. Sit down. I'll be ten minutes."

Callum sat on a bench under the photographs and looked at them. Young men in boxing poses, decades of them, in black and white and then faded colour. Near the end of the row, he found his grandad: Tommy Reid, 1971, nineteen years old, gloves up, grinning.

Frank Doyle sat down beside him eventually, towelling his hands, not even out of breath.

"Your mum rang me," he said. "Told me about your week."

"I'm not here to box."

"Didn't think you were." Frank looked at him sideways, a long, steady look, the kind a mechanic gives an engine. "You know what I see? I see a man who looks strong from the outside and is shaking on the inside. Am I right?"

Callum opened his mouth to say no. What came out was: "Yeah."

"Good," said Frank. "That's the first true thing you've said to yourself in a long time, I'd bet." He stood up. "Six o'clock, Monday to Friday, for ten weeks. You'll hit some bags, you'll skip, you'll be sick in that bucket at least once. And every day, before you go, I'll give you one thing to work on. Not boxing. Life."

"Why would you do that for me?"

Frank looked at the photograph of Tommy Reid, nineteen years old, grinning.

"Because forty years ago your grandad did it for me," he said. "Monday. Six o'clock. Don't be late. Late's the first thing we fix."