Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

The following month, he learnt that one of the cooks in his boarding house at Winchester had been committed to an asylum after trying to attack a boy with a skillet, and he became interested in insanity. So the next time he was in London he went on a walk from Rutland Gate in Kensington to the cabstand at the east end of Green Park, and on the way he pretended that everything he saw, human or animal, animate or inanimate, was a spy sent by a foreign power. By the time he got to the cabstand, he could divide the horses into those with pricked-up ears who were openly watching him and those with floppy ears who were pretending not to. Terrified, he ran back to the United Universities Club. He didn’t feel better until the next day, when he began his fourth experiment, which was to investigate idolatry. He put a calabash pipe on his desk and stared at it, insisting to himself that it had the power to reward or punish the behaviour of all men. Very gradually, as the hours passed, he felt a sort of reverence developing for the pipe, but he had to go to dinner before he could really bring himself to get on his knees before the thing.

In the end, these experiments frightened him. He didn’t like to think about how easy it was to demean and diminish the human intellect. More and more often, as he fell asleep after a difficult day, a particular image appeared before him. It was of a great noble building on top of a hill, a marvel of pillars and turrets, somewhere between a castle and a monastery and a stately home. But through every room and hall and corridor and staircase in the building ran a bloody, translucent, glistening tube as thick as his torso, with no beginning or end, that shuddered in a constant squelching peristalsis, staining the carpets and smearing the windows. And every so often, for no apparent reason, one knot of this intestinal beast would contract, tighter and tighter, until an entire tower or wing of the building cracked and crumbled and then toppled down the hill. The place could be rebuilt each time, but you never knew which section you would lose next, and if you tried to hack the viscid worm in half with an axe or a hammer it would just regrow, and the following day you would find it blocking the door to the pantry or twisting beneath your bedsheets. Even when he deliberately tried to picture the tube withered away to dust and the building unbesmirched, he couldn’t hold the thought for more than an instant before he saw its red flesh again.

By the time Sinner was living in his flat, however, this image didn’t come to him nearly so often, but only because now, if he was specifically trying not to think about something, it tended to be the angel child.

After that trip to Poland in November, and the terrible incident in bed with Gittins, he had for a short time returned to self-experimentation, determined that it should be possible never to ejaculate in his sleep or wake up with an erection again. Eating half a pound of liquorice a day had failed to muffle his libido, but he had discovered that if he masturbated about once every ten days he could achieve a sort of homeostasis.

Masturbation, however, was troublesome — though not, to Erskine, for the traditional moral reasons. He found the Bible unpersuasive, and the only reference his housemaster at Winchester had ever made to the male sexual urge was one short, uneasy interview in his study: Dr Paisey had asked Erskine, ‘Do you understand the difference between a bull and a bullock?’, and when Erskine had said, ‘Yes’, he had sent him away, apparently satisfied that he had done his duty. Still, Erskine had read a lot about masturbation since then, because it often came up in older books about race improvement. Joseph Howe, for instance, claimed that masturbation caused acne, pallor, dull eyes, a furry tongue, constipation, tuberculosis, epilepsy, hypochondria, insanity and, worst of all, ‘debilitated sperm’, which would in turn produce nothing but runts, weaklings and females. It was largely because of the influence of Howe and his faction that even the richest boarding schools in England refused to give up their open dormitories, coarse linens, doorless lavatories, cold showers and exhausting timetables of physical exercise, although of course these measures were generally now attributed to the toughening of the manly character rather than to the prevention of self-abuse. Rationally, Erskine knew there was scant medical evidence for Howe’s claims, but he still couldn’t help feeling that as a pioneer of eugenics he shouldn’t be so careless with his procreative serum (although he often reminded himself that Galton’s own marriage was childless). So sometimes he masturbated and sometimes he didn’t, and when he did, it took great discipline to prevent either the bloody worm in the castle or the angel child from coming into his head uninvited, to the point where he would begin each reluctant session with the self-defeating declaration, ‘I must not think of. …’

But of course the trip to Poland had renewed his experimentation in more ways than one. He had brought back to England dozens of live specimens of the beetle he had discovered. At first, because of the swastika, he had wanted to name it Anophthalmus hitleri — but then he decided that this species was not quite a supreme leader like the Reichsführer, but rather a forerunner, a John the Baptist, a hymenopterous herald. So instead he called it Anophthalmus himmleri , and hoped that Anophthalmus hitleri would come later, somehow. Five or six days a week, he studied the beetle in his laboratory in his new flat in Clerkenwell. That was also where he studied Sinner.

He could still hardly believe that the boy was here in his flat. On his return from Poland in the autumn, Erskine had noticed that Sinner never appeared in Boxing any more. So, even though after his humiliation at Premierland he’d promised himself that he would never try to see the boy again, he went back there, hoping to speak to someone who might know where Sinner was; but he couldn’t bring himself to approach any of the seedy figures hanging around the gates, so the only conversation he had was with a newspaper hawker who stood outside a secondhand furniture shop shouting, ‘ London Jewish Sentry , one penny! For Jews only! One penny! London Jewish Sentry , strictly for Jews!’ As Erskine went past the hawker broke off his stilted patter and said, ‘Would you like one, sir?’

Erskine turned. ‘Is that a joke?’

‘I’m sorry, sir?’

‘Do I look Jewish to you?’ said Erskine angrily, although he now noticed that the hawker didn’t look Jewish himself and also didn’t sound anything like a Cockney.

‘It’s only a penny.’

‘Are you mentally deficient?’

The hawker just cringed and thrust the newspaper at him. Erskine took it, intending to fling it pointedly into the gutter, but instead of asking for money the hawker thanked him, turned away and resumed his shouting.

Sitting in a cab on the way back to Clerkenwell, Erskine glanced over what he’d been given. Written for some reason in English, not Yiddish, it was really no more than a pamphlet, with about half a dozen articles and no advertisements. The main headline was ‘JEWISH-RUN MERCHANT BANKS FIND GREAT SUCCESS IN LONDON — Celebration across Hebrew world as permanent conquest of financial markets now assured, achieving in Britain what has already been achieved in Germany.’ There was also a cheerful report on the spread of Bolshevism in certain Welsh mining villages, a leader exhorting Jewish shop owners not to give jobs or fair prices to non-Jews, and on the back page some ‘frank advice’ to Jewish men on how to marry a girl from a rich English family, including a warning to ‘taste the fruit before you purchase the orchard’.