Do not go gentle into that good night

Right, let’s get it out of the way. I don’t talk pretty like Mr Charlie. Don’t mean I’m thick or nuffink, I just don’t have his way with words. Mr Charlie, he knows his way round a thesaurus. Half the time I don’t know what he’s on about. Then again, suppose that’s what a first-class education does for you.

Not that I’m complaining.

I might not have book smarts, but I’ve got common sense. More than can be said for your average Tom, Dick or Harry. Common sense has got me this far, and I can’t say education’s done Mr C much good. Just look at the old sod. Fat, fucked and pushing fifty.

Here’s how I see it. On the one hand you’ve got me. Poor kid from Hackney, raised in a two-up two-down my folks didn’t even own. School dropout, zero prospects, spent a good part of my life doing mean things to “nice” people just to pay the bills. And where am I now? Livin’ it up on the other side of the world, takin’ the Yankee dollar. Sounds like winning to me.

Then you’ve got Mr C. Born into money, the lot of it. Best private schools, steady household. And where does he end up? Same place as me, only worse. While I’m out here keeping calm and looking cool (and getting paid for it), he’s inside getting seven bells knocked out of him week in, week out in some shit hole in Slagheap, Nowheresville.

He’s a sensitive old boy, is Mr C. Talks a good game, but he ain’t half as sure of himself as he lets on. You lot see the dandy clothes and that fruity way of speaking and think he hasn’t got a care in the world. Well there’s a lot more under the bonnet than you’d think.

Thing is, I give the old man stick, but I don’t half miss what he used to be. Back in the day, Mr C was something else. He’d stroll into a room, all charm and swagger, like he owned the bloody place. You couldn’t take your eyes off him.

People talk about charisma, but most times they mean a pretty face. As soon as the poor sap opens their trap, you realise they’re just as dull as dishwater. Not Mr C. Words used to roll off that posh tongue of his like nobody’s business. Didn’t matter if you hadn’t the faintest clue what he was harping on about, you could see he meant it. Every bleeding word.

Some power, that.

Nowadays, I struggle to get a peep out of the fella. He just sits around in his dressing gown all day, swigging whisky and flicking through his scrapbook - reliving all his yesterdays. Pitiful really. 

Not that I blame him. 

One look at him these days and he blends right in with the pudgy middle managers who plague this fucking country: slicked-back hair, suit, tie done up to eleven. Back then, he was something else. Not your typical strongman, never a “body” guy, but he could fucking go. An athlete. Built to kill.

Now, well, he’d just as soon cut his fingers off than take a look in the mirror. He’s like a ghost of himself. Seen it in his eyes. Three losses out of four will do that to a man. I tell him it’s just a bad patch, that every fighter hits the skids now and then, but he don’t believe it. Not really.

Truth is, he ain’t just losing matches. He’s losing the thing that made him him. The strut, the spark, the daft grin when the crowd booed him. Used to be he’d come back to the locker room bruised to buggery and still have a joke on his lips. Now he just sits there, quiet as a church mouse, staring at his hands like they’ve betrayed him.

I dunno. Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s life catching up. But I’ve seen what he’s got in there. Somewhere under the bruises and the whisky breath, the old fire’s still smouldering. He just needs a spark to set it off again.

***

“Mickey, be a sport and fetch me that bottle of Dalamore, would you?” I pretended not to notice my manservant’s pitying look and focused instead on the task at hand, sifting through the pro-wrestling ephemera I’d scattered across the coffee table in front of me.

Over the years, I’d amassed quite the collection – ticket stubs, promotional flyers, clippings from newspapers and magazines – a living testament to my time in the industry. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Not really. Perhaps just taking inventory of my own decline. As I flipped through the old programmes, hunting for something, anything that might remind me of who I once was, I found nothing that felt like me. Each photograph stared back like a stranger wearing my face, the smile too confident, the eyes too bright.

Funny, how you can forget whole years until a scrap of paper reminds you you were there. Glasgow, ninety-seven. Chicago, the night the ropes snapped. Tokyo, when the crowd actually chanted my name. For a moment I could almost hear them again, that peculiar blend of adoration and bloodlust that only wrestling crowds can muster.

And yet, as I sat there amid the yellowed clippings and bent ticket stubs, all I could think was how thin it all seemed now. Like it belonged to someone else. Someone fictional.

I poured another measure of the Dalamore and raised it to no one in particular. “Here’s to you, old boy,” I muttered. “Wherever you ended up.”

“What’s that, Mr C?” Mickey asked, craning his neck around the kitchen door.

“Nothing, Mick. Just paying a little tribute to an old friend.”

He arched an inquisitive eyebrow but said nothing, wisely retreating to the kitchen and the far more pressing business of preparing my dinner.

Signing with PRIME after my misadventures in HOW had seemed the next logical step. I mean, really, how many more years can I be expected to subject my body to the rigours of the road? Four? Five, at most. Lindsay Troy had offered me a short-term contract at a very competitive rate, and after my experiences in Chicago I had anticipated a rather smoother ride. Three losses in four quickly disabused me of that notion.

I hadn’t come to PRIME for the glory. Wins and losses were of far less importance than the paycheques each performance would bring. After all, there are bills to pay. But I’d underestimated how demoralising defeat can be. I am, after all, a proud man.

I had always envisioned riding off into the sunset after one last big payday. Perhaps a much-hyped pay-per-view appearance, the kind that would allow me to bow out in style. But lately I’d begun to realise that with every loss my stock was falling at an alarming rate. Who, after all, would pay to see a Charles de Lacy tribute act?

A middle-aged pretender to the once-fearsome technical maestro, fumbling for past glories beneath the harsh light of an indifferent crowd. I used to command that light. Now it merely exposes the cracks.

So imagine my delight at the prospect of fighting fellow Brit Danny Christie. From what I could ascertain from his brief tenure with the company, Danny – while no spring chicken himself – is still several years my junior, and a fearsome fighter in his own right. But then again, professional wrestling isn’t bare-knuckle boxing, and while I wouldn’t want to deride his viral fame, slugging it out with Wrexham junkies in search of their next fix is about as far removed from what I do as a fry cook is from a Michelin chef.

I don’t deny the man’s pedigree. His record no doubt reads like a love letter to head trauma, and one can hardly fault his commitment to the art of concussing strangers for sport. But I can’t help wondering if poor Mr. Christie quite realises what he’s gotten himself into. The ring is not a car park, and the crowd at PRIME are not a pack of baying lads filming on their Nokias. Here, brutality without grace is simply vulgar and severely punished by veterans such as myself.

Still, I’m rather intrigued by him. There’s something almost biblical about the man. A kind of blood-soaked asceticism. He strikes me as one of those noble savages Kipling might have written about had he been raised on Strongbow and heroin. And then there’s his father, a monstrous sort of stage parent, by all accounts, hovering over his son like a spectre in a wife-beater, equal parts Svengali and social worker. It’s touching, in a feral way.

I suspect Mr. Christie believes himself to be fighting for pride, for legacy, for the honour of his peculiar clan. I, on the other hand, have long since abandoned such frivolous notions. No, these days I fight for something far more prosaic, a paycheque and perhaps the faint, foolish hope of dignity. There’s nothing noble about it, nothing that will make the history books. But it’s what’s left of me and I’ll be damned if I let it slip away quietly.