Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

‘You look like a real tosser, mate,’ said Pock. ‘Got up like that, I mean.’

‘Yeah. Tired of it. Let’s get the shirt off this one. I’ll have that.’

‘How’s he ended up here?’ said Pock’s comrade. ‘I thought they were still all back behind the flatties?’

‘Fucking advance party, I bet,’ said Pock.

All three men loomed over Erskine.

‘No, please!’ Erskine said, struggling to his feet. ‘I’m on your side! I hate Mosley as much as anyone! He’s a … he’s a frivolous nightclub-going popinjay.’ His father’s phrase didn’t seem particularly forceful in the circumstances. ‘I’m only here because Kölmel sent me to help build the barricade.’

‘Oi, Sinner, hear that? He knows Kölmel,’ said Pock. ‘How the fuck does he know Kölmel?’

‘You sure he’s one of the other lot?’ said Pock’s comrade.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ said Sinner. ‘Listen to him. Listen to the way he talks.’

‘No! I promise! I promise!’ wailed Erskine refinedly.

‘Boy’s right,’ said Pock. He stepped round behind Erskine and installed him effortlessly in a headlock. ‘Get his shirt.’

While Erskine wriggled and begged, his snot soaking into Pock’s dirty sleeve, they ripped his coat, jacket and shirt off him, losing most of the buttons in the process. Sinner took off his own shirt, threw it away, and put on Erskine’s, loosely fastening it with a safety pin from his pocket that he usually used to pop blisters. ‘I want to go and find some more of these cunts,’ he said to Pock.

‘What shall we do with this one?’

Sinner shrugged and turned away. Erskine watched in horror, the October cold making the hair stand up on his bare arms, still not quite able to believe that Sinner would abandon him so easily — then lifted his head and shouted, ‘I still bloody own you! I’ll still have your body after you’re dead! And it won’t be long, you leprous little thug!’

‘Yeah? Well, I fucked your sister,’ said Sinner, without looking back. Pock chuckled at the joke and then thumped Erskine in the kidneys.

A few minutes later, back on Royal Mint Street, Albertson was bending down to wipe a speck of mud off his shoe when the first roof tile flew past his head. He sprang back and looked around. Then a second one smashed into the pavement.

‘We’re under attack!’ shouted one of the Biff Boys. ‘Take cover!’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, we’re not being shelled,’ said Albertson. ‘Stand tall.’ But a third tile caught him in the pit of the stomach and he flopped to the ground like laundry.

‘He’s up there,’ somebody else shouted, pointing.

‘Is anyone armed?’

Somebody was caught in the head and fell backward, blood pouring from his temple. After that, there was a general retreat. Albertson, struggling to his feet, tried to throw back a chunk of brick he found in the gutter, but their attacker was hidden behind some chimneys. Several of his men were huddled against the wall of a nearby furniture warehouse, out of range of the bombardment, so he ran over to join them, two more tiles crashing at his heels.

‘This is a bloody travesty. What the hell are we going to do? Can anyone see a way to get up there?’

Nobody could.

‘Did anyone see his face?’

‘It looked like the little blighter with the sneer. Forget his name.’

‘Don’t be a fool, he’s one of us,’ said Albertson.

‘I told you he looked Jewish.’

‘If we just let this bastard get away with this, and the boss hears about it. …’

‘Hey, hey, hey, listen — I said listen — what’s that?’

From directly above them, there was a faint rasp of heel on grit.

‘He’s right over our heads! Climbing around like a bloody tomcat. What the hell are we going to do?’

‘We need a firearm,’ said Albertson, staring grimly upward. ‘It’s the only way.’ The sun was in his eyes, so he had to squint, but he thought he could see movement of some kind. He was correct. Sinner had unbuttoned his fly and stepped to the very edge of the warehouse roof.

‘Oh, shitting Christ!’ howled Albertson as he was blinded by a stream of piss. As he hopped backward out of its golden arc he tripped on the kerb, lost his balance, flung out both arms in the vain hope of a steadying shoulder, spun gracefully on his heel and fell face first into the road — knocking himself unconscious, breaking his nose and embossing his forehead with the geometric pattern of a studded iron manhole cover.

Which was how Seth Roach came to be almost the only Jew in London to see off a Blackshirt at the Battle of Cable Street. Hundreds would pretend otherwise — Albert Kölmel, for instance, would write to his brother Judah in New York boasting that he’d personally given Mosley a thump in the mouth — but in fact, apart from a few unlucky late-arriving fascists who took wrong turns on the way to join the procession, it was only the prophylactic ranks of mounted police who had to face the chair legs and fireworks and rotten fruit. At about four o’clock the demonstrators were sent home, without ever having pushed further than Royal Mint Street.

For a while, after descending from the rooftops, Sinner wandered through the crowds with a bottle of gin. (‘Give me a little swig of that,’ he’d said to its owner, a weedy, trusting butcher’s apprentice he remembered from the old days in Spitalfields Market.) He knew he was back where he belonged, but something still troubled him: Erskine. It wasn’t that he felt guilty for leaving him at the mercy of Pock and Pock’s friend. It was the opposite: he hadn’t done enough. So soon he found himself veering northwest, away from the clashes, back towards the centre of London — back towards Erskine’s flat in Clerkenwell.

By the time he got there he’d drunk the entire bottle of gin and bought another from a shop in Moorgate. Mrs Minton recognised him, but when she saw how drunk he was she wouldn’t let him up into Erskine’s flat, so Sinner told her it didn’t matter because he had a key. Actually, he just waited until Mrs Minton had grumbled her way back into her own lodgings and turned on her wireless, then went upstairs and broke down Erskine’s door, bruising his shoulder.

Inside, the flat was exactly as he remembered it. On the table in the front room there was some unopened post that Mrs Minton had presumably brought in that morning. Sinner ripped open each of the three envelopes. A tailor’s bill, a circular from the Royal Entomological Society, and then this:

Dear Doctor Erskine ,

I have received gifts from popes, tycoons, and heads of state, but none have ever been so singular or unexpected as your kind tribute. It is a reminder that the conquests of the scientist are every bit as important to our future as the conquests of the soldier. I hope you will keep me informed of the progress of your work — perhaps one day the Third Reich will have a position for you. How is your German?

Fond regards ,

Adolf Hitler

Reichschancellor

Sinner couldn’t make out most of the words, and he didn’t know much about Hitler, but he recognised the name, and he knew enough about Erskine to realise that he’d be thrilled to get a letter like that. So he crumpled the letter up and stuck it in his pocket before kicking over the table. He crossed the room, took the creepy painting of the dissection off the wall and flung it out through the window. Then he went into the laboratory, which was unlocked.

The tuck box housing Anophthalmus hitleri was gone. In its place was a tank that looked as if it might have been specially designed. The lid, the base and three of the four sides were made of steel, while the fourth side was made of thick glass reinforced by a steel grille. The tank was full of soil and chicken bones, and through the grille Sinner could see the occasional darting movements of the beetles inside. He closed the door of the laboratory, then went back to the tank, unhooked the catch of the lid, opened it, picked up the tank and tipped everything out on to the floor, just as Erskine had once made him tip it from the broken glass case into the tuck box. Immediately, several beetles shot out of the pile of soil, escaping into the corners of the room; but Erskine, to prevent a repeat of the enicocephalid calamity from his university days, had sealed up every tiny gap in the skirting board, so they had nowhere to go, and Sinner was able to go round crushing them one by one under his boot heel. Often they took two or even three hard stamps to stop moving. Afterwards, he kicked through the soil. All gone.