She was wearing a specially made, skin-tight, nipple-pointing, ass-clinging, no-underwear number in the red and yellow stripes of the Catalan flag. Small wonder Everett was jealous, yet, I reminded myself, it was he who allowed his wife to appear in public dressed like that. As she approached the ring, I looked down at Liam Matthews, at the commentator’s table. He was gazing at her with a look of undisguised lust. . but then so was every other man at ringside.
And then the roof rose a couple of feet in the air, before settling back into position. There was no aerial entrance for Daze this time, since the structure of the arena ruled it out. Instead his music played and he marched slowly down the ramp in his ring suit and cape, looking like a small — no, medium-sized — army under a single red spotlight. Reaching the ring, he disdained the steps, leaping instead from a standing position up onto the surround, then stepping over the top rope. Arms raised high, he circled, facing each quadrant of the screaming audience in turn, as a pattern of sharp red and yellow laser beams flickered across his body, creating a flame effect.
The television lights were still coming up, and I was barely out of the ring before Jerry hit him with a spearing shoulder-first football tackle, just above the right hip but below the ribcage, bearing him across the ring and into the ropes. But as they were catapulted back, by their own weight and momentum, Daze caught the top strand, steadying himself as Jerry went flying across the ring to the ropes on the other side. The force of his impact sent Tommy Rockette, who had been standing on the apron holding the tag rope, crashing down on to the floor beside my table, and rebounded The Behemoth back towards the centre.
The black giant caught him in mid-ring, all close on four hundred pounds of him, swept him off his feet and round into a power-slam which sounded like the collapse of a large building. The referee knelt beside them and began to count; ‘One,’ pause ‘Two’. Theatrically, he mouthed the third and winning call, but the sound died in his throat as Jerry thrust his right shoulder off the canvas.
Daze jumped to his feet, hauling The Behemoth upright after him and pushed him into the ropes once again, as if to set him up for another slam. This time, though, it was Jerry who used the top strand as a brake. He grabbed his opponent’s arm and made to hurl him into the corner, but the big man simply braced himself, reversed the hold and sent him, instead, flying backwards with impossible speed into the corner of the ring.
The helmeted monster hit the red turn-buckle pads above me with a ‘Bang!’ which was so loud it was heard even above the howls of the crowd; so loud that it drew a great collective gasp. No wonder they don’t rehearse those, I said to myself. Daze followed up his advantage, sprinting into the corner to crash a lariat blow to the side of the other man’s head, then he stood back, waiting for him to fall forward.
Fall forward Jerry did, but not according to the script, not in the exaggerated way I had seen them rehearse. Instead, his knees seemed to buckle; he began to topple to the ground, but Everett caught him first, turning him on to his back and laying him gently on the canvas.
‘Doctor! Now!’ he roared, as the crowd began to fall silent. ‘Medico! En seguido!’ I had my doubts. Two weeks earlier, when Matthews had needed one in Newcastle, there hadn’t been a single doctor in the house.
I scented it as I ran up the steps into the ring; a sharp, burning smell, strong enough to make its presence felt even over the other odours which hung in the air; sweat, liniment, and humanity in general.
There was yet another smell too. As I looked at Jerry, lying there on the floor I saw the blood as it welled from beneath him and began to spread; I saw it as it began to bubble on his lips. My dad has a thing about first aid. He believes that everyone should learn it, and he made damn sure that Ellie and I did. I knew what that bubbling meant.
‘Turn him over on his face!’ I shouted to Everett, who was kneeling beside his grey-faced friend. ‘I think his lung’s been punctured. Turn him, or he could drown on his own blood.’
He didn’t look up at me, but stared out of the ring, his expression frozen, with shock, I guessed.
‘Do as he says!’ another Scottish voice called out. ‘I’m a nurse! Do it now!’
The evening had become totally surreal. I blinked. It couldn’t be Primavera, there in the ring: but it was. She was tanned; her hair was longer than it had been when I had left her. And blonder; more bleached by the sun, yet it was Prim all right; blue eyes sparkling fiercely, trim little body encased in denim shirt and jeans. She stood beside Everett. Even kneeling he looked almost as tall as she was. Then she slapped him, hard, across the face. ‘Do it!’ she screamed at him.
He snapped out of it at that, leaned over Jerry and rolled him over as gently as he could, Prim kneeling beside him, in the blood, helping him. The Behemoth’s tunic was saturated, but once he was lying face down I could still see the ragged wound in his back, just below the right shoulder-blade.
As I watched I felt a hand on my shoulder; I looked round to see Sally Crockett, with tears streaming down her face. ‘What’s happened?’ she whimpered.
‘It looks as if he’s been shot,’ I answered; cruelly blunt, I know, but I was stunned too. At once I tried to reassure her. ‘Don’t panic though. Prim’s worked in a war zone. She knows what she’s doing.’
As I spoke, my former lover turned and stared up at me. ‘Oz,’ she said, ‘give me a credit card.’ Her tone was so commanding that at that moment, if she’d asked for my right arm, I’d probably have unscrewed it and given it to her. Without a word, I took out my wallet and handed her my Tesco loyalty card.
She took the stiff plastic and pressed it against the hole in Jerry’s back. ‘Thanks. This guy has a sucking wound,’ she explained to Everett. ‘We have to keep the air out.’ A pair of paramedics had appeared in the ring and stood, gazing down at her in professional admiration. She spoke to them in Spanish, astonishing me again, for she had very little when we had split. One of them replied. ‘Nada,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Bloody magic,’ she muttered. ‘Oz, these guys have no bandages. I need something to pack this.’
Sally was wearing a white silk shirt. Without a word she unbuttoned it, slipped it off, and handed it over. ‘Thanks,’ said Prim. ‘Now I need something to make it secure.’
I looked across the ring. Matthews was standing on the apron outside the ropes, grim-faced, watching. I called across to him. ‘Liam, there was a roll of gaffer tape on the commentary table earlier. Find it and give us it in here.’ The Irishman nodded and called down to the commentators, who were still in their seats. A moment later, one of them tossed a thick roll of shiny brown tape up towards him. He caught it, threw it on to me, and I handed it down to Prim.
‘That’s good enough,’ she said, then looked at Everett. ‘You. I need you to get him into a sitting position, so I can strap this up. After that they can take him in the ambulance.’ She was in total command.
Jerry Gradi in normal circumstances was a huge guy to handle. Unconscious, as a dead weight, he should have been virtually impossible, but Everett Davis was superhuman.With Prim still pressing the plastic card tight against the wound, he turned him over again, then lifted his great trunk off the bloody canvas.
‘Oz,’ she called. ‘Get down here and take over pressing on the card while I tape him up.’ Wincing as the blood soaked into my trousers, I knelt beside her, balled Sally’s shirt into a pad as she showed me and used it to force the card as hard as I could against the hole in Jerry’s back, staunching the flow. I held my thumb on it until she had covered the packing completely with the gaffer tape, winding it as tight as she could around the huge wrestler’s ribcage. Finally she tore the tape free from the roll with her teeth and spoke to the ambulance crew once again. One of them jumped down from the ring, and ran off. ‘Gone for a wheelchair,’ she explained.