Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

He sat down heavily on the bed. ‘Or, well, what if it is true? What does it matter? What can anyone do?’

‘Tell them the truth.’

‘Be serious.’

‘What about the maid? What’ll happen to her?’

‘So you’re going to go down there and say, “You’re all wrong, I know what happened, arrest the Master of Foxhounds”? It’s impossible. They’d start asking questions, they’d find out exactly who you are — that you’re not really a valet — that, even worse, you’re a Jew. They’d ignore everything you said and just insist you were part of the plot. You’d end up in the village jail on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, or something like that. That is if Mowinckel or Amadeo didn’t try to stage a summary execution.’

‘I know all that. I’m not a bleeding half-wit.’

‘Good.’

‘You’d have to come with me.’

‘What?’

‘If I go and tell ’em on my own, I’m fucked. If you’re with me, what can they do?’

‘In principle, yes, I might be able to stop them putting you in jail. But they’d ask all the same questions and find out all the same things. Am I supposed to admit I brought an East End Jew into my parents’ house? This week of all weeks? How could I explain it?’

‘What about your sister? What if she knew it was really the fat cunt who’d knocked off her fella, but her maid was going to get done for it? What would she have you do?’

‘That’s a bad example. My sister has no idea what’s good for her or anyone else. What about the trouble it would cause? How could I possibly carry on with my work? How could I do anything at all after that?’

‘There ain’t any other way.’

‘It’s impossible.’

Sinner looked Erskine in the eyes for a moment, then grabbed Erskine’s shoulders and pulled him down on to his back so that Erskine’s legs were dangling off the side of the bed. He got down, kneeled on the carpet, unbuttoned Erskine’s trousers, freed Erskine’s cock, and licked it with his dry morning tongue all the way from the balls up to the tip. Erskine went bright red.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he whispered.

Sinner began to slide the head of Erskine’s narrow cock in and out of his mouth, stroking Erskine’s balls with his nails. Erskine squeaked and slapped the palms of his hands on the bed like a frustrated child. Sinner started to push the tip of his little finger into Erskine’s arsehole. This was too much, and Erskine tried to sit up, but Sinner cuffed him across the face, just as he once had outside the Caravan, and pushed him back down. Before long, Erskine’s trousers were around his ankles, the whole of Erskine’s cock was in Sinner’s mouth, and Sinner’s middle finger was in Erskine up to the second joint. Erskine was making a continuous low groaning sound like the vacuum pump downstairs. Then Sinner got to his feet, took a pot of hair tonic from the dressing table, and flipped Erskine effortlessly on to his front. Outside, the hunting dogs were barking.

Although Sinner tried to be nearly as gentle with Erskine as he’d been with his sister, Erskine soon found himself biting into his own forearm through his shirtsleeve. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he struggled to stop himself from screaming. He felt almost as he had in the cave in Fluek, except that now he was the rabbit on the dissecting table, he was the one getting his little heart squeezed in a grimy fist. He’d fantasised about this moment a thousand times, but only in the most abstract terms, and now the idea was getting fucked by the reality.

But despite the pain, as Sinner thrust faster, the pinched friction of Erskine’s penis against the sheets was bringing him closer and closer to climax, and at the same time he became intensely, deliriously aware of a process going on in his own cells, from his testes up to his brain. Every time a cell divided, it now struck him, a new copy was produced of its codex: all the maps, diagrams, timetables, hierarchies, procedures. Once in a while a mistake was made, and most of the time that mistake was corrected, but if it was missed, then almost anything might happen: a tumour might sprout like a potato in the rich soil of his hypothalamus, or his sons might be born with teeth instead of eyes.

Of course, he also might grow wings from his shoulder blades, or his sons might grow up to catch bullets like conkers. In all probability, though, something would go wrong, which was why the scriveners had to be so vigilant. But, now, for the first time, he wondered: did the tiny scriveners have a choice? When they failed to correct a mistake, was that always a redoubled oversight, or was it sometimes a deliberate gamble? Could a diligent copyist, a decent, responsible man, notice an irregularity, a sin, and just leave it to perpetuate itself, not knowing whether the result would be a swoop of seraphic feathers or a suppurating goitre? As a whole library of these untrustworthy documents were gathered for their dissemination at the base of his penis, and he perceived Sinner approaching a powerful orgasm of his own, he remembered something Amadeo had said about fascism creating a ‘new man’ — and he realised that a new man could be conceived and born here on this bed, a new man who was nothing like the one Amadeo or any of the others wanted, a new man who could see salvation in the imprecise and the illegible — the only sort of new man worth having, the only sort of new man who was really capable of doing anything really new. Tears springing to his eyes for a second time, Erskine began to exult, and he wanted Sinner to exult with him, so that afterwards they could go down hand in hand and tell the truth about Morton’s death and after that who could say what might happen? He was ready. And then he heard the bedroom door creaking open, followed by Millicent Bruiseland’s voice.

‘Just as I suspected!’

Erskine’s heart caught like a toe in a mousetrap. Sinner showed no sign of stopping, and Erskine didn’t have the strength to throw him off, so in desperation he tried to pull a sheet over the two of them, but his arms were trapped.

‘I’m going to tell everyone,’ Millicent said. Erskine, cringing, heard her run out of the room. And just then, with a last excruciating jab, Sinner completed his task.

The boy rolled off his owner and they lay there panting. Erskine smelled the insolent smell he knew from that incident in his lab. He wanted to suffocate himself with the pillowcase, but instead he said, ‘Get dressed. Someone else might come up.’

‘They ain’t going to believe her.’

‘You should have stopped!’

‘Wouldn’t have made any difference.’

‘Shut up.’ Erskine put on a dressing gown. ‘I’m going to have a bath.’ He couldn’t look at Sinner. He spoke in a monotone. Something inside him had drowned like kittens in a sack. For a second time he remembered the cave in Fluek. Why must he be interrupted every time? Were Gittins and the girl in league? ‘If that … act was intended to persuade me of something, then it failed. I’m not one of your nightclub boys.’

‘You liked it.’

‘Shut up.’

‘You think I can’t tell?’

‘Shut up.’

‘What’s that, then?’

Sinner pointed. Erskine looked down. There was a damp patch on his shirt tails and white sap oozing from the pubic hair on his belly. He had been so wrenched with horror by Millicent Bruiseland’s arrival that he had been oblivious to his own choked pointless orgasm. Quickly he closed the dressing gown and tied the cord in a tight complicated knot. He thought of the Australian orchid dupe wasp, which is tricked into ejaculating on a flower because it mistakes it for a female, and even comes to prefer the flower when given a choice.

Two hours later he got out of the bath and went back to his room. Sinner was gone but it still stank. He got dressed. Outside in the corridor he found his mother. She looked as if she’d been left in somebody’s trousers while they went through the wash.