Scared Yet?

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Authors: Jaye Ford
Tags: Fiction
but still held the gravelly rasp of someone who’d done a lot of shouting in his life. ‘I hope you threw a few, too.’
    She laughed a little, thankful that while he was losing the battle for his body, he hadn’t lost his attitude. ‘Oh yeah. He’ll be hurting today. He should have a fair shiner.’ She held up her taped hand. ‘I hit him hard. Just like you taught me.’
    He nodded. A gnarly hand emerged from under his sheet, took hold of her uninjured one and gripped it like a vice. ‘Good girl.’ His face was as leathery and stoic as it had ever been but there was a wetness in his eyes. More than the moisture from a sick man’s tear ducts and it made Liv’s chest feel like it was being crushed.
    â€˜I was walking back to my car last night and a man jumped me.’ She told him about it quickly and sparely. Then about Daniel Beck, describing him as a heavyweight. Her dad had always referenced a man by his weight division. Sometimes he added an adjective when the guy didn’t measure up, like a porky lightweight or a scanty welterweight. When he’d first met Thomas, he’d called him on the light side of welter. When she told him he’d left her, Dad called him a snivelling runt of a welter who didn’tdeserve to breathe the same damn air as his daughter. If he hadn’t been stuck in bed with the after-effects of chemo, she wouldn’t have been able to stop him paying her husband a visit. Seventy-one and full of cancer wouldn’t have saved Thomas from a smack in the mouth.
    She told him about the TV interview. He remembered Sheridan from her uni days, called her that rich girl who liked to slum it at his gym sometimes. Liv said Sheridan planned to mention him because people still talked about him.
    His throat rumbled a grunt of cynicism. ‘Damn people should find something better to talk about.’
    Liv knew it wouldn’t impress him. It never had. It made her feel good, though. He’d done it the hard way all his life. Harder than most. Harder still after her mother died. But he’d done it his way. He hadn’t left her for others to raise, hadn’t taken the advice to keep fighting while his star was shining. He’d given up a chance at a world title fight and carved out a living instead, made a home for them, rough as it was, and brought her up himself. Made her who she was. Sheridan had taught her how to look like a sophisticated woman, Thomas had shown her how to live like one, but she was still her father’s daughter.
    She told him Cameron’s latest, how he was trying out for striker this afternoon at the local soccer club.
    â€˜He’s scrawny but he’s got mettle, that boy,’ he told her.
    Liv’s eyes suddenly filled with hot, unexpected tears.
    â€˜So have you, luv.’ He gave her fingers a squeeze.
    â€˜I miss him. All the time,’ she whispered.
    â€˜You’re putting up a good fight.’
    â€˜There’s no fight, Dad. There’s nothing to fight. It’s a done deal. He lives with his father every other week. There’s nothing I can do about it.’
    â€˜Sometimes the fight is just to stay on your feet.’
    She smiled. Her father had a life motto to cover every occasion. He’d made a living pounding them into tough-nut boys who needed something to make them feel like men. When she was little, she used to sprout his mottos like a mini-Tony. As a teenager, she’d rolled her eyes and hoped he didn’t embarrass her in front of her friends. In recent months, she’d been trying to live by them, as many of them as she could remember. The Tony Wallace manual of pop psychology. Fighting to stay on her feet. She’d forgotten that one but he was right. It wasn’t always about throwing punches and scoring points. Sometimes it was a huge effort just to make sure you didn’t end up on your arse. Not to sit down and wallow in the grief

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