Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

Sinner’s hands were shaking so hard that he could scarcely unbutton Renshaw’s trousers to see if he had any money sewn into the lining. Although he did not have tuberculosis himself, something deep within his body seemed to aspire to that romantic disease and was now guessing haphazardly at the symptoms — so his skin was yellow, he vomited three or four times a day, and he bruised like a ripe peach. If he tripped over in a corridor he would fall to his knees and have to lean against the wall for a minute or two before he could get up.

After things had gone wrong in New York, they had never really gone right again. He recalled the day after Rabbi Berg’s dinner, when he’d spoken to Frink through the locked door of his room.

‘Let me out.’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll get your dinner.’

‘I’ve got to train. Fight’s coming up.’

‘The fight’s off, Seth. It’s all off. You know that.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ said Frink. ‘You’re asking me why? First chance you got, you tricked us, you ran away, you stole Judah’s wallet, you got wankered, and you stabbed me in the fucking hand. You think Judah’s going to have you back in his gym after all that? You honestly think we’re going to let you out in public again? We’re going home before you get yourself thrown in jail, son. And, by the way, the Aloysius Fielding purse was supposed to pay for our ticket back, remember? That’s out. So Judah’s going to give me a few dollars a day to help in the gym, and he’s going to lend me some more, until we’ve got enough. Which is more than we bloody deserve. Especially since I’ll be a fat lot of use with bandages on my hand.’

‘I want to fight.’

‘You could have, Seth. You could have. This was your shot. You would have won, too. It would have been the beginning of something. You knew that. You’ve always been so bleeding predictable, but I thought just this once you might have made an exception. Because it’s not just you that has to deal with this. It’s me. You’ve fucked it all up for me, too. After everything. Do you give a toss about that, Seth? I don’t suppose you do. Little prick.’

Despite Frink’s anger, he seemed to soften before Sinner did; and on the steamboat home, and on the train to Euston, and even as they queued for a bus, he kept trying to strike up a conciliatory conversation. But Sinner didn’t respond. He was so sick of listening to Frink that he almost began to regret not murdering the older man back in the bar. There was only one human being in the world who was allowed to make him feel guilty, and that was his sister Anna. He refused the offer of a spare bed for the night. Instead, he went straight to the Caravan.

Over the next few months, Sinner began to wish more and more that he could have stayed in New York, that he could have got a rematch against the city that had broken his unbeaten streak. All that glory Frink had talked about: he knew he deserved that. How could it possibly have escaped from him for ever in just one evening? He should still have been out there, but instead he was back in London, where every night was different. Sometimes he’d pick someone up and go back to their flat. Sometimes he’d pick someone up and the other man would pay for a room in the Hotel de Paris or another hotel. Sometimes he’d sleep in a park until the police moved him on. Sometimes he’d sleep among the tramps at Embankment. Sometimes he’d catch a few hours’ kip in one of the all-night cinemas off Leicester Square before the usher woke him up with a torch, newsreels playing over and over in the distance, Mussolini and King Edward. Sometimes he’d even spend a shilling to get into a lodging-house dormitory. The problem was that Sinner did have friends, of a sort — Will Reynolds, say, who ran the Caravan — but the moment he had to ask them for help he would no longer be able to tolerate their friendship, so the only people he touched for money were people he didn’t like, and although there were a lot of those, he soon ran out of likely prospects. There were his parents, but he was happy not to have seen them for three years, and if he ever did see them again it would be when he was champion of the world, not when he was broke. There was Albert Kölmel, but you didn’t want to owe anything to Albert Kölmel, however small. And there was Frink, but that was still out of the question. He wished he could see Anna, but he didn’t know where she was.

So before long he started to look around for posh sissies who would not only give him a bed for the night but pay him, too. They weren’t usually hard to find, although once he ended up having sex with an indifferent maid while her master watched from an armchair. He often stole cash and jewellery on his way out, because he knew they wouldn’t go to the police, and with the money he began to drink more than he ever had before, because without Frink he didn’t even need to stay sober for fights or training, and life didn’t really feel any different until one night in December he realised that something pretty awful must have happened to him because not only could he not find any posh sissies in Covent Garden who would stop to talk, but he also couldn’t even get the bouncers to let him into the Caravan. And in fact he couldn’t remember much of what had happened between that day and the day he’d found himself sipping tea in St Panteleimon’s Hospital.

You were lucky to get a bed in St P’s, one of the very few charitable hospitals of its kind in London. But you weren’t expected to keep the bed for long. Every day the trolley was brought into Sinner’s ward to take someone away. Last night it had been Ollie Renshaw, and that was why Sinner was here in the mortuary for the third time since Christmas. On the first two attempts he hadn’t found any money on the corpses, but the schmuck Renshaw was certain to have some stashed away, and then Sinner could leave the lung house and get his first drink for several weeks. Admittedly, he didn’t seem to want a drink quite as much as he had back then — in fact the thought made him feel a little bit sick — but since he’d been promising himself a drink thousands of times a day for all that time, he didn’t really have any choice.

‘I thought you Jews had rules about touching the dead.’

Sinner turned.

‘Of course, we Christians do too, but we’ve never found it necessary to write them down.’

Connelly, one of St Panteleimon’s priests, stood in the doorway of the mortuary. He was an Irishman in his forties, so dedicated to his pursuit of contraband tobacco that he reportedly slept standing up in cupboards for no more than ten minutes at a time.

‘Are you his brother, Roach? His nephew? His long-lost son, even? Is that why you’re here?’

‘He had something of mine,’ said Sinner.

‘Oh yes, he owed you some money, I expect? A silver tosheroon?’ Connelly smiled thinly. ‘I have always tried to be charitable with your kind. I have prayed for patience. But after a time the Lord stopped giving me patience, perhaps because you are all so disgusting. I am going to call the police. You will stay here.’ Connelly closed the door and locked it, leaving Sinner alone with Renshaw.

Sinner looked around. One of the mortuary’s windows was probably just big enough to climb out of, but it was too high to reach. So he pushed Renshaw’s body off the trolley on to the floor, then wheeled the trolley over to the opposite wall and climbed up on it. But he couldn’t lunge to break the window without the trolley’s squeaky wheels slipping sideways under him, so he had to get down off the trolley, drag Renshaw’s body across the floor, wedge its arm under one of the trolley’s wheels like a brake, and climb back up on the trolley. By then he was too tired to break the window with his fist, so he took off Renshaw’s boot and did it with that.