The Longest Fight Read Free

light. Jack blinked, adjusting to the darkness of the long room, ears still ringing with the sounds of his and Frank’s first fight. Only two weeks of training and already landing knockout blows. An open competition over in Fulham; on the quiet, no brouhaha. The match was over in fifteen minutes, the same length of time Jack’d had to wait before Frank had come running out to sign the contract – that was a sign of some sort, surely? Jack jingled the prize money in his pocket. Picking a winner was hard work, and the hunger churning inside him threatened to spill over into sickness; the smell at the Man of the World wasn’t helping. Beer was soaked into the wooden floor and panelled walls, slowly dripped into place over the years from the sweat of drinkers – no one was careless enough to spill a drop.
    Pearl was up at the bar, her head buried in a comic. She spoke without looking up. ‘Cousin Alf said I could wait here.’
    He sat down next to her, prodded her bandaged finger. ‘How’s the factory?’
    ‘Making blackcurrant pastilles, same as ever. I caught my fingertip on the belt. It’s clean.’
    ‘My new fighter won his first bout. Should have seen him going at it.’
    She nodded, and turned a page.
    ‘Could look a bit more interested. It’ll keep you in Dan Dares.’
    Sixteen, but she still wore those stupid pinafore dresses and long cardigans. All elbows and scuffed knees.
    ‘It ain’t a comic. Newton lets me borrow
Nature
. It’s a science journal. King’s have got plenty of copies. This one’s about families, about their insides being the same, me and you – like twisted threads of spun sugar, they called it.’
    ‘That what you making at the factory, is it? Innards. Tasty.’
    ‘Newton works up at the hospital with all them scientists. He says –’
    ‘Don’t listen to his fairytales. Emptying bins for a living don’t make you an expert. He told me once his uncle wrote a book about boxing. Newton can’t even stand straight on his tin leg, let alone talk straight.’
    Newton belonged with the group of dockers: caps still in place, spines fused to the curve of the wooden chairs. That wasn’t going to be Jack’s life, nursing warm stout until the next wage packet came in. He pushed Pearl off the stool. ‘Exercise cures all ills.’ That was what the trainers spouted down the gym, but nothing was going to fix Pearl.
    ‘I’m fine, Jack. See.’ She swung up one leg at a time, thin ankles and knees on display. ‘Nothing twisted, nothing swollen up. Not today.’
    He looked away from the white threaded scars and green shadows of fading bruises. The new barmaid was in, polishing glasses at the other end of the counter. He lit a cigarette, flicked a stray tobacco crumb off the tip of his tongue. She had flounces on her blouse but he calculated the weight of her breasts to be as heavy as eight-ounce gloves with hands inside.
    Pearl was dragging him back. Telling him there was a reason their hair was the same colour, when he knew it was the rotten cheap soap his mum had used to wash their heads, brown as tar and not as sweet-smelling. When she died hestill kept using the stuff until he and Pearl had hair the colour of winter drain-sludge. At least he used Brylcreem to blacken his down. He smelled the overripe fruitiness of blackcurrant trapped in her clothes.
    ‘You should brush that mop.’ Jack talked to the thin pink line on top of her head, the dark strands hanging over her ears.
    ‘If you buy me a hair set I’ll use it. This new fighter of yours going to make us rich, is he? That’ll make a change.’
    She ran her finger along the page. He studied her reflection in the bottles lined up behind the bar. Her face round and flat, not much of her mother about her, and the thinness of her neck carried straight down to her long fingers. She did have the look of a Munday, though. Maybe that was what those science magazines she read were on about – using the same soap when there was a shelf of