Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

He celebrated with a long swig of gin, and let the empty bottle drop to the floor. He had become tremendously drunk. In fact, he hadn’t felt quite so unsteady since the night of the Polish honey mead, and although he hadn’t had any intention of staying here he decided now that it might be a good idea to lie down for a bit in his old bedroom. After that he would get up, go back east and ask every single person in Whitechapel, every single one of the tens of thousands of men and women and children out on the streets today, whether they had seen Anna in the last three years. And if anyone lied he would know and he would beat them as he used to beat his father.

But as he was about to stagger out of the laboratory, he noticed one last pair of insects cowering on Erskine’s bookshelf. He lunged for them, catching them in his hand, and held them up in front of his face for a proper look. Immediately he felt a stinging pain, and realised with surprise that one of them had drawn blood from his index finger. Since when could a beetle break the skin? They reminded him of Erskine, somehow, as they flounced their little patterned wings and nipped irritably at his grimy hands. He thought of cutting them open to see what they looked like inside, but he’d lost the knife while he was up on the rooftops. On a whim, he stuffed them both into his mouth.

Biting down, Sinner felt black legs crunch between his teeth. Fried and salted, he thought, they would probably taste no worse than pork scratchings. But before he could bite down again his eyes widened and his jaw went stiff. He couldn’t breathe. The beetles were crawling down his throat.

He groped desperately at his neck, and then he gagged hard as he felt them scratching at his tonsils like transubstantiated whooping cough. He staggered forward and leaned against the wall, trying to pump them out like a gob of phlegm, but they were much too big, and they were already moving further down into his windpipe, deeper into the dark wet warmth of him. Even half-chewed, even crippled, they carried on — that was how Erskine had bred them. He tried to make himself vomit but he couldn’t, and he tried to shout for Mrs Minton but he couldn’t. In fact, the only sound he could make was a wet chitinous clicking, as if the beetles themselves were talking out of his mouth; little skittering blurs appeared before his eyes, and they reminded him of beetles too. He tasted blood, and for some reason he thought he could smell fish. Hammering at his throat with his fist, he dropped slowly to his knees, and wondered if he could smash the gin bottle and dig the beetles out with a shard of glass — people had done that sort of thing in the war with shrapnel. If he let himself die he would have delivered his body to Erskine like a birthday present, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. But before he could reach for the bottle his vision went black, his arms went limp and he slumped sideways on to the floor.

Seven minutes later, a twenty-two-year-old girl ran into the laboratory.

To Evelyn Erskine, the ‘laws’ of probability were nothing but playground cant, as tiresome as all her brother’s theories of eugenics. Would she ever see Sinner again? The chances, Philip would probably say, were minuscule. Well, of course they were, but the chances were also minuscule that she should ever have met someone like Sinner in the first place, and it had still happened. So the problem was not simply that Sinner had vanished among the East End’s hundred thousand Jews. That was no real obstacle — there are a hundred thousand seconds in the day, almost, and any one of them might find her bumping into Sinner in the street. The problem was the sadness of those Jews: their children dead of typhoid, their parents at the mercy of some Nazi passport clerk, their lovers NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS nor at any other that anybody knew. There must be so many in the East End who had missed so many others so deeply for so long that, in some stern moral sense, it just didn’t seem to matter a jot that she, Evelyn Erskine, happened to miss somebody too: in this cauldron of tragedy her own little narrative took no precedence, and the reunion she desperately desired did not have the cheering inevitability of the really important things — like becoming a composer.

On top of all that, here was Mosley. When all those legions of anonymous poor were following the orders of history, of proper newspaper history that Evelyn could take no part in, it felt even more plausible that Sinner would just melt into this gigantic neighbouring world, and that the sheer earnest intensity of her desire to see him again wouldn’t be quite enough to make sure that it actually happened. In other words: while, to Philip Erskine, the fascist march through the East End was the first time since Claramore that he really thought he had a chance of finding the boy, to Evelyn Erskine it was the first time since Claramore that she really thought she had a chance of losing him. And yet, despite all that, her basic optimism might still have been enough to sustain her — if only it hadn’t been so badly mauled by what had happened at Claramore.

She’d grieved far more over her fiancé, eventually, than she ever would have expected. One may think one doesn’t care, but one always does — she realised that now. But at least death was final, whereas what Bruiseland and her father had done hadn’t ended with Morton, and might never truly end, because Tara was still in hiding.

Caroline Garlick had telephoned her only a few hours after Morton’s body had been discovered on that day in August. Tara hadn’t told Caroline very much, only that she needed Evelyn’s help, but Evelyn could guess at least part of it, so she told Caroline to give Tara some money and to tell nobody else. Morton’s funeral took place in London the following week, and after hours of begging Evelyn’s parents let her stay on with Caroline afterwards instead of going back to Claramore. So the next day, finally, she had a chance to visit Tara in the boarding-house where she was staying under a false name and to learn the whole story. It was even worse than she’d imagined.

Of course Evelyn wanted Bruiseland and her father to be punished for what they’d done — but she knew that if she went to the police and they didn’t believe her, she might only succeed in exposing Tara. With every hour that passed, justice seemed more impossible: it was as if Tara had her arm trapped between the gears of one of Claramore’s machines and was being pulled further and further in. And so all Evelyn could do was help Tara to lead as decent a life as possible, while inwardly feeling so guilty about her inaction that she could hardly sleep. They spent many of their days together, often joined by Caroline, who was an enthusiastic accomplice and had not yet married her Scotsman. That wasn’t too bad, but she didn’t know what they’d do in the long run. They had to be careful to avoid any acquaintances who might recognise the fugitive maid; once, in the street, a man did remember Tara’s face from a picture in the newspaper, but Evelyn just scolded him until he skulked away, convinced of his unspeakably rude mistake. At least in future, after all this practice, she expected she would have no trouble conducting a discreet infidelity.

So Tara was with her on the Sunday of the march, when Evelyn concluded, at last, that she really might never see Sinner again unless she asked Philip about him. She’d promised herself she’d never stoop that low, because she didn’t want her brother even to suspect how she felt, and it took her the whole weekend to work up the resolve to pick up the telephone. Infuriatingly, he didn’t answer, but she knew he never went out, so he was probably just preoccupied with his insects. Or could it even be that Sinner was living with him again, in secret? She decided to visit the flat in person that afternoon.