Boxer, Beetle Read Free

Zroszak’s flat. His body didn’t matter any more. But I found nothing.

2
AUGUST 1934
     
    Pock wasn’t just losing to Sinner – he was being skinned, diced, erased. It seemed to Pock that this hairless runt could see inside him – could see Pock’s memory of his first kiss, or his trick of wiggling his ears in time to a song, or his hatred of cats – could see it, take careful aim, and knock it out of his head like a loose tooth. Soon there would be nothing left of Pock but meat. Never had he felt punches so precise and impatient and cruel. And the other boy was impossibly clean – not a speck of blood on him – and although his bony chest did shine with sweat under the lights, it was a thin, efficient, cooling sweat, not the sour chicken soup that gushed into Pock’s eyes and dripped from his chin and gathered in his shorts to make his cock feel heavier than his fists.
    Premierland had once been a warehouse for Fairclough’s, the butcher’s, and if Pock felt like meat then so did many of the thousand people watching him, who were not just packed in together like meat but smoked like meat too, squinting through a blue cigarette fog so dense you could hardly see the steel girders that held up the roof. And if this tiny demon Yid hadn’t decided to give the sell-out crowd a show then Pock wouldn’t have lasted a round, he knew that. But Pock had never, ever been knocked out in the ring, and it wasn’t going to happen tonight, with his husky-squeaky Myrna down there watching – he could never fuck her again if she saw him helpless on his back, fucked. So when the bell rang and Pock staggered back to his corner he didn’t listen to his trainer’s yammering, didn’t take a gulp of water, didn’t even knock his left fist on his right boot like he usually did forluck, he just swore under his breath and stared across the ring at Sinner, who stared back from his stool, expressionless, one arm draped over the ropes, as Max Frink, Sinner’s trainer and manager, splashed him with ice water. Then the bell rang again, and Sinner spat twice and jumped up and skipped forward, already moving (as the young reporter from
Boxing
would put it) ‘like a dozen kind admirers were trying to present him with a garland of poison ivy’. Pock was trudging along with his heels down on the canvas, while Sinner was still bouncing up almost on his toes. They circled each other, and Pock made a few tired jabs that he knew Sinner would dodge, then got a hard right hook to his kidneys in return – he’d dribble blood in his sleep tonight, wake up with stained underwear like a girl – feinted, blocked, feinted, and finally reached way down to thump Sinner in the balls.
    (This, anyway, is how I’m almost sure it must have happened.)
    Even Frink, veteran of a hundred Spitalfields street brawls, winced and clenched his teeth then, but Sinner, who’d actually taken the punch, merely grunted. Rage did come to his eyes, but that was nothing to do with pain: Sinner and pain were long estranged. Instead, Frink thought to himself, it was Sinner’s realisation that he might be about to be cheated out of his knock-out. As the crowd jeered, delighted with this bit of slapstick, Frink looked down at the referee (who in those days stood outside the ring, surrounded by a mob of gamblers determined to make his decisions for him), hoping Mottle would have that brittle squint of a referee who knows he’s missed something important but is too stubborn to admit his error – two times out of three you could stick a thumb in the other man’s eye and not get caught – but to Frink’s dismay Mottle was barking, ‘Foul! Foul!’
    ‘Nah, piss off,’ said Sinner. ‘That weren’t a foul. It didn’t hurt. Fight’s still on.’
    ‘Below the belt,’ insisted Mottle. There was already ascuffle starting among the gamblers behind him. Pock flung his hands in the air and shook his head as if to protest his innocence.
    ‘It didn’t even hurt,’ said