Peter Corris - The Marvellous Boy

‘Mr Green, there’s a gentleman to see you.’

The shortest man in the group, a chunky guy with crisp curling grey hair, jerked his head around impatiently.

‘Not now Ronnie, tell him to come back later.’

I moved around Ronnie and stepped up to him. He was about five ten and four feet across the shoulders; muscles bulged everywhere under his black singlet. He was middle-aged but the skin on his face was tight and smooth. The other two were carbon copies — six-footers with waved hair and vacant expressions. Their muscles looked to be trying to burst out of their singlets and shorts and run away to start life on their own.

‘Let’s make it now,’ I said. ‘It won’t take a minute and then you can go back to playing ball.’

The Adonis on the left suddenly flicked the medicine ball at me, I moved aside and it hit Ronnie in the stomach. She collapsed and coffee from her cup flew everywhere and her cigarette dropped onto a canvas mat. Green swooped on the butt and snarled at the ball-thrower.

‘You fuck-wit Kurt, go and get a mop.’

The other man helped Ronnie up; her spider eyes blazed and she shook off his hand. Green was holding the smoking butt between two fingers as if it were a dead mouse.

‘I’ve told you not to smoke in here Ronnie,’ he said. ‘Go away, I’ll talk to you later.’ He passed the cigarette to her and bent down again to pick up my card which the girl had dropped. He read the card and clapped his hand to his forehead theatrically.

‘Oh my God, what do you want?’ He eyed me professionally and noticed the bulge. ‘Keep the gun where it is will you? I’ve got some sensitive people here, they’re likely to faint at the sight of a gun.’

Kurt was back with a mop soaking up the spilt coffee. The other he-man had wandered off towards a wall. He picked up a small bar-bell and began moving it one-handed from waist level to shoulder; he turned sideways and looked lovingly at the overblown muscles in his upper arm. I pulled out the photographs and gave them to Green.

‘I’m looking for this man. Do you know him?’

He gave them a bored glance. ‘Hard to tell, I don’t think so.’

‘Look again, it’s important.’

‘Just who do you think you are? I’ve said I don’t recognise him.’

Raised voices and a flurry of movement took our attention to the end of the room.

Green groaned, ‘Not again,’ and hurried off towards the commotion. Kurt shouldered his mop and followed; his mate moved in front of the mirror like an entranced Narcissus. At the far end of the room, away from the windows, four men were gathered around two who were lying on a canvas mat. A big, fat character who was polishing one of the mirrors stopped work and turned to watch the others. The men on the floor were stripped to their athletic supports and they lay in a line with the soles of their feet touching.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Green.

‘A bet,’ he said grudgingly. He addressed one of the men on the mat. ‘What is it this time Carl, five hundred?’

Carl put his hands out behind his head and took a grip on a medicine ball. ‘Seven fifty,’ he grunted. Green shrugged. ‘Fifty against,’ he said.

‘You’re on Leo,’ said one of the watchers, a tall, heavily muscled citizen with a widow’s peak of slick black hair. Kurt and one of the other body-builders got their bets down and Carl’s companion flipped himself up into a squatting position, still keeping his feet braced against Carl’s.

‘Carl’s betting he can get the medicine ball up to where Saul can touch it and back above his head seven hundred and fifty times. It’s murder on the laterals, want to bet?’

‘No,’ I said but despite myself I was interested. Carl looked to have the equipment for the job; his stomach was quilted with muscle and his neck and arms were grotesque storehouses of power.

The mirror cleaner had let the fluid dribble down the surface and there were bubbles of spittle beside his mouth which was slack and open; fat clustered around his neck and sat in a great roll around his waist under a stained T shirt. Apart from me he was the only man in the room without perfect muscle tone.

Carl came up in an easy, oiled movement with the medicine ball outstretched, Saul patted it and down he went and up, and down and up like a machine set to stamp out a thousand identical parts. After a hundred, great ropes of veins stood out in his neck and forehead and sweat ran in the clefts around his perfectly defined muscles. At two fifty his breath was coming in short gusts and I was betting mentally against him; everyone in the room was riveted except the mirror-gazer who kept on pumping and admiring the result. I glanced across and saw Ronnie, on tip-toe looking over the partition. A man came past her and up to Green but I was too interested in the contest to notice him: Carl had passed five hundred now and the spectators were counting, softly, rhythmically, five sixty-one, five sixty-two, sixty-three..

I saw a movement in the mirror and moved but I was too late to miss the punch altogether; Leonidas Green’s fist took me under the ear and toppled me sideways. I fell sprawling over Carl and Saul and the rhythm was broken and the men started to swear. Green came at me again and I ducked and rolled over and was on my feet. I moved into him and hooked him in the stomach and it was like punching a tree. He came on and I kicked him in the knee. He buckled and I hit him flush on the nose. Carl and Saul were on their feet shoving at each other and yelling and one of the muscle men came at me with a short, chromium bar in his hand; I let him swing it and put the heel of my hand hard into his face when he was off balance — blood spattered from his nose over the mirror. For a measureless instant I saw it all in reflection — Carl and Saul wrestling, and another man on the floor with blood welling through his fingers and Green on his knees yelling for someone to take me out. Then I was spinning around, backing up to the glass and pulling one of the muscle men with me when something sailed over my shoulder and shattered the mirror. The glass showered us and big sections of the mirror split and felt like guillotine blades. The noise stopped the action and I got my gun out and pointed it at Green’s gut.

‘Tell them to give us room Green,’ I panted, ‘or I’ll blow a hole in you. Tell them!’

Green waved his arms like a man signalling a plane in. ‘Go away,’ he moaned, ‘go away. Oh Christ look at the place, what a mess.’

The fat man had melted away somewhere leaving his mirror clouded and streaky, another six-foot stretch of glass was blood spattered and broken pieces littered the floor. There was a deep gouge in the polished boards where the thrown bar-bell had landed after it hit the mirror. I wasn’t feeling so good myself.

Green got up off his knees and I signalled him with the gun to move to a corner where there was a chair and a low bench. He moved and did some more arm waving.

‘Leave us alone. Kurt, Carl, get this mess cleaned up and piss off. We’re closed.’

He seemed to have the authority he needed and some to spare. Two of them picked up the man whose face I’d smashed and carried him like a baby. A section of the mirror swung out and led to a locker-room and storeroom evidently, because they came back with brooms and wet towels and got to work on the devastation.

Green plonked himself down on the bench and gave me and my gun an ugly look.

‘Do you know what those mirrors cost?’ he barked.

‘I didn’t throw it,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want any trouble. Now I’m going to ask you again, do you know anything about the man in those pictures?’

He paused and looked keenly at me; his eyes seemed to be mocking me or maybe they were just hostile. ‘I said I didn’t know him,’ he said deliberately.