Claire raised her eyes and forced herself to look.

Inside the ring, Matty and Josh were still knocking lumps off each other. They were both stripped to the waist, drenched in sweat and soaked with blood, their own and each other’s. Josh was tall and muscular but he looked like a no-hoper beside the champ; Matty was squat, solid as an oak door, his red hair plastered to his head as he moved quickly around the ring with Josh dodging blow after punishing blow. Josh was kidding himself, she could see that now. Matty would win. Matty was a legend, he always won.

‘Oh shit,’ moaned Claire, thinking that she was making an awful, awful mistake.

Nanny Irene said she was. Nanny Irene had the Sight; she’d predicted all sorts, deaths and births and all manner of shit. She had it, in spades. Mum had it too, she’d seen Grandad’s death in a dream. Claire was so fucking glad she didn’t have it: the Sight was a curse.

When Claire had said she was going to marry Josh, Nanny Irene had straightaway insisted on a full reading. Nanny was almost the last of the gypsy wise women, regularly prescribing a Traveller’s Joy infusion for rheumatics, henbane for gallstones, belladonna and warty caps for other ailments. She still bound open wounds with cobwebs, and never left a single scar.

The old woman had got out the tarot cards, dimmed the lights. She told Claire to shuffle the pack, then she had stared with her bootblack eyes at her granddaughter. They’d been sitting at the table inside Nanny’s bow-top wagon, which was parked up behind Mum and Dad’s big trailer.

‘Pain, that’s what I see,’ Nanny Irene had said, turning over cards, shaking her grey head. ‘Pain and suffering, girl, you mark my words. Don’t do it.’

Now, almost drowned out by the baying crowds though they were, Nanny Irene’s words clanged around in Claire’s head like death bells. Her mum and dad had laughed it off, of course. But standing ringside, watching the man she was about to marry getting himself beaten in the ring despite all his assurances to the contrary, she could see that Nanny Irene was right. She was marrying a bare-knuckle fighter from a long line of them. This would be her life now, if she went through with the wedding. A life of pain and suffering.

Ah God, the wedding.

It should all be so perfect.

But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. She could see that now. This was what she had to look forward to. A lifetime of living with crippling anxiety every time he stepped into the ring, and then bathing his wounds after fights, or shipping him off to hospital if it was really bad.

‘Come on, our Josh!’ shouted Sam, Josh’s mate who was in his corner, acting as his second. ‘Finish him!’