Headshot E-Book

Rita Bullwinkel

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 235

Beschreibung

Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls' pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight. This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we've been given, and what does it mean to use whose bodies with abandon? Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the ring and above and beyond it, examining closely the eight girls' lives, which intersect for a moment – a universe that shimmers and resonates..

Leseprobe

‘Extraordinary … with prose as muscular and gleaming as a body in motion, Bullwinkel drops readers into that roaring, incandescent universe that is young womanhood.’ C. Pam Zhang

‘Luminously unsentimental … Literature at its vital, primal best.’ John Wray

‘Celebrates unsung lives lived boldly and bloodily, uncovering something surprising and profound for every punch landed.’ Lisa McInerney

‘An expertly crafted psychological study of girlhood, and of the women who emerge from its stranglehold.’ Madeleine Gray

‘Headshot feels perfectly unprecedented. A total killer. I almost can’t believe it exists.’ Amina Cain

‘A knockout, a novel as fierce and vibrant as its girl boxers.’ Rachel Khong

‘It’s controlled violence and uncontrolled ambitions, coming-of-age and coming-into-self … I loved it.’ Jon McGregor

‘Kinetic, suspenseful … Brilliant on the physical collision, at once strategic and feral, that is a boxing match.’ Laura van den Berg

‘Genius … brilliant, perfect … As devastating and inventive and philosophical and playful as you could imagine.’ Deb Olin Unferth

‘Brutal, tender, and completely surprising.’ Rebecca Perry

‘Bullwinkel, like the finest of fighters, wields grace and vision.’ Samantha Hunt

‘I loved it.’ Charlotte Mendelson

‘A shot to the head, a cumulative wallop to the senses. Bullwinkel’s prose jabs, spars, feints, floats, stings, and slowly floods us with the force of the fact: time and will can make the dust of an ordinary life sparkle.’ Namwali Serpell

HEADSHOT

RITA BULLWINKEL

v

for my sister, Audrey, witness to it all

vi

vii

From ‘Games for Girls’ by ancient history scholar Thomas F. Scanlon

Only after the classical period did Greek girls come to compete in men’s athletic festivals. References to this are few and late, suggesting exceptional social circumstances … A first-century AD inscription found at Delphi records young women who personally competed in chariot races or footraces … Yet these girls probably competed only against other girls, as in a race for daughters … viii

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONEPIGRAPHJULY 14ARTEMIS VICTOR vs. ANDI TAYLORRACHEL DORICKO vs. KATE HEFFERIZZY LANG vs. IGGY LANGROSE MUELLER vs. TANYA MAWNIGHTDEEP NIGHTJULY 15ARTEMIS VICTOR vs. RACHEL DORICKOIGGY LANG vs. ROSE MUELLERJULY 15RACHEL DORICKO vs. ROSE MUELLERA NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGTHE FUTUREACKNOWLEDGEMENTSABOUT THE AUTHORALSO BY RITA BULLWINKELCOPYRIGHT

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JULY 14

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ARTEMIS VICTORvs. ANDI TAYLOR6

7

Andi Taylor is pumping her hands together, hitting her own flat stomach, thinking not of her mother sitting at home with her little brother, not of her car, which barely got her here, not of her summer job, her lifeguarding at the overcrowded community pool, not of the four-year-old she watched die, the four-year-old she practically killed, and his blue cheeks. They shouldn’t give teenagers the job of saving children. It doesn’t matter how many CPR classes you’ve taken. She killed the boy with her wandering eyes. His swimsuit had small red trucks on it. He looked like he was made out of plastic. The feel of his thigh when she pulled him 8from the bottom of the pool, already dead, and the way it was so easy to grip, because it was so small, she’s not thinking about it. She’s looking at the skylight and the light it’s letting in on this shit-hole gym and she’s thinking about the things she always does wrong when she fights, her lazy left guard, the way her left hand slips away and doesn’t protect her face if she’s not thinking about it. She is also thinking about the way Artemis Victor will get her. If Andi Taylor doesn’t think about this, this fight will be over in a matter of seconds. Andi Taylor needs to think about her spacing and her stomach. Andi Taylor needs to think about her stance.

They’re still sitting and looking at each other meanly. They know each other but have never fought before. When you join the women’s youth boxing league this facade of a sports association makes you pay two hundred dollars and then you get a ‘free’ subscription to their magazine, which profiles its members, young girl boxers, one by one, so you see who’s out there, even if they are across the country, and you get a good sense of who you’re up against, and you know who they’ve fought and who they are going to fight and what their favourite hobby is because god only knows what kind of a journalist writes this excuse for a magazine, but whoever it 9is seems to think it is valuable information and that it should be included in every athlete profile, because in every issue there it is: name, hometown, favourite colour, hobby, wins and losses, photo of the girl in gloves. The photo is a wild card because some girls choose to take it in their gym clothes, while others choose to take it in halter tops, their hair down, their heads tilted, and their gloves resting on their hips.

Andi Taylor would know Artemis Victor anywhere because Artemis Victor is the youngest of the three Victor sisters, a family of boxers whose parents come to every single one of Artemis’s matches with shirts that say ‘Victor’, which is, of course, ridiculous, their proclamation of their daughters’ winning records on their chests.

Everyone knows the Victor sisters and what they’ve won and what they’ve lost and the judges treat Artemis’s family like old friends, which, in boxing, is especially infuriating because the grey area of a call is often so present, and if you know a judge has a special relationship with the participants, you can’t help thinking, I’m being slighted, this is the end of me, if only I had parents willing to befriend my coaches, if only I had parents who could get off work, who didn’t work, who could come see me win.10

•

Mr and Mrs Victor sit in folding chairs next to the ring. There are barely over two dozen other onlookers: judges, other girl fighters, a journalist from the local paper, a journalist from the Women’s Youth Boxing Association magazine, parents, a grandmother, coaches, and Bob, the owner of this gym.

•

Bob is also a coach, but, as a rule, doesn’t coach women. He has no particular fighter he’d like to see win. His gym was just the right location for the tournament to take place. All the coaches are men and all the coaches own gyms, and all the coaches collect fees from the girls to, in part, pay the Women’s Youth Boxing Association, who, in turn, pays the coaches for hosting regionals at their gyms. Some of the coaches were amateur boxers, but many of them have never competed at the level that these girls are fighting in. The girls’ coaches travel to the tournament to get their cheques from the association. In between rounds, Artemis’s and Andi’s coaches do speak to them, but the coaches speak only in clichés and useless information. Everything the coaches have taught the girls is in the past. The language of the coaches inside Bob’s Boxing Palace is like the sound of the loud 11overhead fan. Artemis and Andi wish they could fight with less sound pollution. Every sound other than the smack of a hit is only a distraction.

•

Artemis Victor is rolling her shoulders. She’s looking at Andi Taylor and thinking, You are ugly. I am prettier than you and I am going to beat you, too.

Artemis sizes up other women physically everywhere. I’m the prettiest woman in this room, she thinks. There’s one woman, over there, who may be prettier, if you like girls who look like drug addicts. There are men who like girls who look like drug addicts. When Artemis Victor thinks of herself in the future, she thinks of herself as wildly successful in a big house, maybe in Miami, not a drug addict. Artemis Victor has a teddy bear that has a doll’s shirt that says ‘Victor’.

‘That’s my girl!’ yells Mrs Victor.

•

Artemis Victor always thinks she is going to win. It’s not a bad habit to get in. If one is capable of throwing self-doubt out the window, this power can be a beneficial weapon to deploy. Artemis Victor hates her oldest sister. Her oldest sister won the Daughters of America Cup four years ago. Her middle sister got a silver. Even if Artemis 12wins the whole thing, wins the whole tournament and becomes the best in the country, the best woman under eighteen in the United States at boxing, she’ll still be second best to her oldest sister, Star Victor, because Star became the best in the country before her and is now married with a husband and a child and well on her way to owning a house if not being rich.

•

Artemis Victor has no idea what it takes to own a house, but she knows what it takes to beat other people, which is what owning property seems like, beating other people at owning a piece of the earth and making that piece of earth yours, not to be shared with other people, because the owning of the property is a product of your victory over other humans, as in, you won more dollars than them so now this slice of land is yours for keeps.

•

It’s not that Artemis Victor is stupid. She’d make an excellent banker, though she’ll become a wine distributor. It’s just that her values are very narrow. She has an insanely good eye for reading people, for knowing what they are thinking under the words they are speaking, for watching how people hold themselves when they talk to you, whether or not they are interested in you. She 13knows which of her high school teachers to feel bad for: the ones whose eyes dart around looking for someone to listen to them. She knows the right way to say a thing to make people think she is interested in hearing them speak.

Artemis Victor is also a vegan. She genuinely feels bad for animals. This was part of her profile in the Women’s Youth Boxing Association magazine (the WYBA). Artemis Victor loves animals. She watched a documentary on the abuse of whales in theme parks and also thinks they should be set free.

•

The referee is in the middle of the ring and is saying things to the girls about rules that they already know and have heard a hundred times before. They nod their heads and get up off their stools and begin to bounce up and down. Andi is bouncing much more than Artemis. Artemis paces forward, steady. They’re both wearing silk shorts and sports bras and tank tops. The elastic on their waistbands makes dents in their skin that will last for hours after they take their shorts off.

A week ago, Andi came home and took off her shorts and looked at the red ring of gullies the shorts had left on her stomach. She fingered the indentations with her 14hands. When the marks disappeared an hour later she was sad to not have them. They seemed like evidence of the work she’d done. She wished she had a black eye from a winning fight to wear around, to show people she was fighting, to show people her body was doing something that was hard.

•

Andi’s knee is out too far and Artemis moves in to force Andi to retract it back under her hips. These are the size-up seconds – the moments a fighter has to see if and where their opponent has weaknesses.

If Artemis has a weakness it is in the fact that she is a legacy. Her sisters’ wins hang over her. She is reminded of them constantly. This is the tournament where she can be as good as her eldest sister, or the worst boxer in their family. The type of legacy that is the Victor family is rarer in boxing than in other kinds of sports, but not unheard of. Youth women’s boxing is a world small enough that the Victors could conquer it.

•

Andi Taylor’s knee is still not in the right place. Artemis lifts her lip up to her nose to show her red mouth guard-covered teeth.

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15Artemis’s biceps are balls of muscle. She can hit things harder than most people can throw a ball. Her back muscles are arched in two small hills on either side of her neck. Artemis begins to see a weakness in the way Andi moves where Artemis thinks she can place a hit. Artemis Victor thinks she can touch Andi Taylor. Just as Artemis thinks this, Andi hits the left side of Artemis Victor’s ribs.

It’s a hard blow that the judges call a hit immediately. The score is yelled loud enough so everyone can hear it. This is a point-hitting game, after all. That’s why they wear padded headgear that circles their ears and cheeks and foreheads and buckles under their chins. This is target practice.

Andi had seen a tunnel of a vacancy between her right fist and Artemis’s left rib cage. It had looked illuminated, like it was just begging to be filled with Andi’s fist. Andi had put her hand in the hole to Artemis’s body, that tunnel of vacancy, and then was filling the hole again, and again, until the referee got between them.

•

The referee had checked the inside of Andi’s gloves before he taped them onto her wrists. He was checking to see if she had put lead in them. They always do this before a match. It’s part of the rules of the association.16

•

Andi loves when the referees reach into her gloves. She likes watching their hands go into a hole where her hands are about to go. The fact that they check every time makes Andi feel like she is capable of murder. She loves having an adult confirm that her fist could be a weapon. Maybe she could put a rock in there. Maybe she is capable of killing the girl she is fighting. Every time the referees look in her gloves it is like they are saying, You are capable of killing, which feels good to Andi. Most people in her life don’t seem to believe she is capable of anything, let alone killing someone with purpose, and with the wandering-eyes murder of the little boy, she wonders if she is also capable of killing someone with her fists.

•

The boy with the red-truck shorts Andi wasn’t thinking about him, was not even the worst thing that had happened to Andi, or the first dead body she had seen. But, it was the smallest (the other dead body had been her father’s). The smallness of the dead boy had seemed especially disgusting. The day had been so clear and dry. She hadn’t cried. She vomited after it was clear that the red-truck kid was not going to come back to life. The vomiting made Andi feel like she herself was a small 17child. She was surprised by her body’s visceral repulsion to the dead red-truck kid. It was the image of his small, corn-dog-sized thigh that made her vomit. Andi hit Artemis again, this time on Artemis’s shoulder. How long could she get away with hitting Artemis Victor?

•

Bob’s Boxing Palace had been selected for the Daughters of America Cup because of its central location, the fact that it was vaguely in the middle of the American heartland, or was, at least, not near an ocean, and because Bob was the brother of the head of the Women’s Youth Boxing Association, which collected one hundred dollars from each entrant to pay the referees, the judges, and the facility fees, and the association officials for their time.

•

Andi had used her lifeguarding money to pay the entry fee, which now seemed like blood money.

•

There was always a qualifying, regional Daughters of America Cup before the national one, so the WYBA collected fees from over one thousand young women, which means that they did make a profit, usually fifty or sixty thousand dollars, and Bob got to take some of that home for having it at his run-down gym.18

•

The difference between Artemis Victor’s and Andi Taylor’s bodies was that Artemis was thicker. The muscles stuck out from her arms and her back like there were ropes under her skin. In Artemis’s forearms there were clear lines of sinew from her wrists to her elbows. Her shoulders were broad, and looked especially large when she crammed them into strapless dresses. During fights she always wore makeup. Artemis wore waterproof mascara and a red stain on her lips.

•

Andi was tall and gangly. She had a cross-country runner’s body. People were always telling her she should try running long distances. She wasn’t interested.

•

Artemis Victor had the archetype of a ponytail. She had so much brown hair it barely fit in one rubber band. When she wasn’t fighting she wore it either on the side or in a big bun on top of her head. Even up, it was still long enough to brush against her shoulders. She always said she was growing it out to cut off and give to a girl with cancer, but she never cut her hair except in small, two- or three-inch trims.

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19The stylists at the salon Artemis goes to never seem to listen. Don’t cut too much, she tells them. I need it long, she says to them. She always leaves the salon feeling like some part of herself has been stolen.

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Andi Taylor’s hair was so thin that when she braided the whole of it, the braid was as small as her index finger. When her hair got wet it felt slimy. Andi Taylor worried about her hair breaking off when it was really cold out. It had happened once, just with a couple of strands, but she had so little hair that it felt very dramatic, like she had lost something in short supply that she would never get back.

•

The fact of the two girls’ bodies was not lost on Artemis Victor or Andi Taylor or on any of the young women in the Daughters of America tournament. Their bodies were the only tools they had at their disposal. This wasn’t lacrosse or tennis. There were no rackets. They had their arms and their legs and their headgear-clad heads and their glove-covered hands, although the gloves and the headgear were just there as protective measures, to make sure they didn’t kill each other. The gloves and the headgear weren’t something they needed to perform the skill 20they had practised, though they did, in their separate states, in their separate gyms, all practise with gloves and headgear. The gloves and the headgear were like clothing. One could box with them, or without them, just as one could, technically, swim naked or in a suit.

•

Andi Taylor and Artemis Victor looked at each other’s bodies under the roof of Bob’s Boxing Palace and tried to figure out how they could make their fists touch each other’s faces. This was the first match of the tournament, the semi-finalist round. If you lost, you were out. There was no back door in the Daughters of America.

•

Andi advanced towards Artemis with her right foot out in front, dragging her left leg behind her. It was an inelegant, inefficient strut that got her where she needed to go, just not very prettily. Andi had never been concerned with the brokenness of her form. She didn’t know about the many problems that could come with advancing so off-balance. Andi opened so much of her right side up to her opponent this way. She was walking like a crab. It was a stupid way to box. It was weird. As in, it looked weird to Artemis. None of Artemis’s sisters boxed like this. Andi was tremendously off-balance, so 21Artemis swung at her. Artemis’s glove touched Andi’s chest. The referee called the hit.

•

The way Andi’s body recovered from the blow was even stranger than her off-kilter advance forward. She had leaned into it, which seemed somewhat impossible. But Andi had, in fact, seen the hit coming, and, though too late to move her whole body, she had been able to move back, slightly, out of the way of the full impact of Artemis’s fist.

•

Andi saw Artemis’s glove hit her chest more than she felt it. She saw the red fabric of the glove move under her eyes and in between her shoulders. It was like she was flying over a red piece of fabric. Andi was on top of the red ocean. She pulled away and started her advance towards Artemis again.

•

The difference between them as fighters was greater than the difference between them as people. Artemis’s form was polished and calculated. Andi hit carelessly. Her hands moved slowly, but in strange directions.

•

There is a glorification, in the world outside of boxing, of desperation and wildness while fighting – this notion that 22desire and scrappiness can and will conquer experience. No boxing coach has ever asked their athlete to be more desperate. Control and restraint are much more valuable than wild punches.

•

Andi wasn’t sure why the sight of her father’s dead body had upset her so much less than the sight of the dead red-truck kid. It could have been because the boy’s body was evidence of an unlived life. Perhaps it was also because Andi felt she had killed the boy. Had Andi killed the boy? Both bodies had been obvious surprises. Her father had died on the couch watching television. He had lived in an apartment, divorced from Andi’s mother, and lived alone. When Andi found her father it was just her and the dead version of him, her alone with the corpse upon entry. She thought of them there together, her entering the apartment and her father having missed the last hour, his favourite hour, of television, already dead before the episode had even had a chance to begin.

•

The fact that Andi had felt two corpses (Artemis had felt zero) mattered zero while they were trying to hit each other’s bodies. They were both young girls who grew up 23being treated as young women, which unified their lived experiences more greatly than any family (or witnessed) tragedy. It was not as if women’s boxing was, or ever had, or ever would be something respected enough to put every ounce of your energy into. The practice took its toll on both Artemis’s and Andi’s bodies. The sweat that hung in between Andi’s forehead and her headgear gave her acne that she had to cover up with foundation. She looked terrible in bangs, but she cut her hair with bangs anyway, to hide the way the headgear plastic made her break out into deep, subterranean zits. She’d got a staph infection in one of the zits once, from touching her face after touching some of the lifting equipment at the gym where she practised. The bacteria had rotted a pea-sized hole into her forehead for a full week before her mother insisted she go to the doctor. The doctor had to shoot Andi up with extra-strength penicillin and then the staph infection had scabbed over, leaving what looked like a dead bug on her forehead for nearly six weeks.

And not to mention the broken bones they both have, mostly in their fingers. Both Artemis and Andi have broken their fists loads of times, but Artemis’s fists have been broken a dozen more times than Andi’s, and, though Artemis doesn’t know it now, this additional 24dozen number of finger breakings has already pushed the fragility that is her human hand over the bridge and into the realm of permanently damaged. When Artemis is sixty she won’t be able to hold a cup of tea.

•

Artemis will be at home, alone, her husband long dead from something, and her hands will be so spoiled that it will be hard to open the refrigerator door. No one in her life at that point, including her daughter, will have any remembrance of the meaning attached to what it means to be a boxer. And the boxer part of Artemis will be long gone, too. She will have had four separate lives since the Daughters of America, not one of them involving boxing, and so her injury, these un-closable fists, will not be some battle relic, but, rather, a sorry, pathetic disability.

•

In the Daughters of America Cup every round is two minutes. There are eight rounds per match in this tournament. Artemis Victor hits Andi Taylor hard on the left side of Andi’s head, throwing the round into ambiguity. It’s the best punch that’s landed. The bell rings and the judges stand and call the round for Artemis Victor and the two girls go sit in their separate corners.25

•

As they sit on their stools, legs spread and red-faced, Artemis’s and Andi’s minds spin like wind turbines. The inside of both of their heads feels like rushing water. Their processing functions are working in overdrive. Sensory input has been delayed. Verbs are the only things that they can clearly hear.

•

Andi Taylor’s thoughts travel in neuron buckets from her spine, up, in between her ears. In the bucket she sees her father, dead, watching television. His corpse is soaking up the blue rays of the light of the big screen. It’s like her father is sucking at the void behind the screen of the television and the blue is streaming out of the screen, broadcasting into his corpse.

•

Artemis Victor’s mind is a dull pink as she sits and thinks about her next move. Artemis Victor is like a battery that is recharging. All that skill, and practice, and physical Victor inheritance is building back up while she rests. She’s going to come back into this round fresh, stronger than she started. Artemis Victor is going to hit Andi Taylor until she wins.

•

26Get her, says Artemis Victor’s coach to her. Hit her, Andi Taylor’s coach says. Artemis and Andi, and all the girls of the Daughters of America tournament, wish their coaches weren’t here with them, that they were allowed to fight each other without these embarrassing, know-nothing attachments. The coaches really are useless, like stoned older brothers getting paid by their parents to chaperone a middle school dance.

•

Outside of the ring are the two journalists and the other coaches and Bob and Mr and Mrs Victor and the other girls, who will be boxing later. The other girls are scattered in the vast warehouse of the gym. They’re standing, staggered, not looking at each other. They don’t talk to each other. They all look like separate witnesses. All of their arms are folded. They’ll be in the ring soon enough, later today. There are four fights today. The other girls need to start worrying about how their own first rounds are going to start and end.

•

The Victor family teaches their daughters to visualize their winnings. Artemis Victor sees herself holding the Daughters of America Cup in her right hand above her head. She sees her left hand held up by the referee. Andi 27is nowhere. She’s vanished. She evaporated when Artemis won the last round. There’s one beam of light from the skylight and the beam is falling directly on Artemis. Artemis cradles the cup and shows it to her parents. In this vision there are people in the crowd who would have never come to one of Artemis’s matches: girls from school who she competes for the same boys with, boys she’d like to sleep with, her older sisters, who rarely come see her fight.