Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

‘You must know somebody.’

‘It’s a dirty business.’

‘He hasn’t been murdered or anything like that.’ She recalled with shock that the word ‘murdered’ referred to something that was now actually within the range of her experience.

‘Still, it’s not just a matter of—’

‘Listen to me. I have him in a taxi at the end of the road.’

‘You what?’

‘If you don’t help us, then my friend and I will have to do it ourselves. And something will go wrong, and someone will find out, and I don’t know what will happen to the two of us, but more importantly my brother will get Sinner, and if only you knew how desperately Sinner didn’t want that to happen. …’

Frink stopped her. ‘All right. All right. I do know someone. And as luck would have it — pretty bad luck, I’d say — he’s here. But he’s not a bloke you want to get involved with. You understand me?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s on your own head.’

‘Yes.’

‘Come on, then.’

Frink led her through the crowd to the back room of the pub, which, having no bar of its own, was not quite as crowded. Inside, a buxom girl in a torn dress giggled as she danced a parody of a waltz with a stocky man in a suit. Frink tapped the man on the shoulder.

‘All right, Albert. There’s a lady here for you to meet.’

‘Happier words were never spoken,’ said Kölmel. After apologising with exaggerated politeness to the buxom girl, he turned to Evelyn. ‘What’s your name, precious?’ he said.

‘Evelyn Erskine.’ His gaze alone was ten times worse than the pinch on the bottom outside the pub. Even the most loathsome boys at Lady Molly’s dances merely looked at her as if they wanted her, but Kölmel looked at her as if she already belonged to him and he was proud of it. She imagined it must work on quite a lot of women.

‘Erskine?’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’

Kölmel smiled and started to say something, but then stopped, as if he’d decided to hold that particular information in reserve for the moment. Instead he said, ‘What can I do for you?’

Three hours later, she was climbing up the treacherous slope of the rubbish dump on Back Church Lane. Darkness had fallen, with not much of a moon, and she was almost glad that she couldn’t see where she was putting her feet. She carried a spade, and beside her, carrying a mallet, was Tara, and behind them, bearing Sinner’s body rolled up in a blanket, were Frink and Kölmel.

‘You serious about this place?’ said Frink, who had a scar, Evelyn had noticed earlier, on the palm of his right hand. ‘I thought we’d go out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. This is in the middle of … everything.’

‘Yes, I’m fucking serious,’ said Kölmel. ‘Don’t mean to be indiscreet, but I used to use this place all the time in the old days. You go out in the middle of nowhere, you usually get nicked on the way.’

‘Kids play here, you know.’

‘Don’t worry, I bury ’em deep. Kids shouldn’t be here, anyway. Unhygienic.’

Earlier, a handful of cash from Evelyn and a quiet word from Kölmel had been enough to make sure that the taxi driver wouldn’t tell anyone about the drunkard in his car who never seemed to snore or sober up. Now, with a combination of mallet and spade, Frink and Kölmel began to gouge a space out of the festering debris. Occasionally there would be a clang as they hit a bed frame or a bicycle or some other big skein of rusty metal, and they would have to put down their tools to haul it out of the way. The two men kept digging in this strange soil until their heads were level with Evelyn and Tara’s feet, and then for quite a while afterwards. Finally, when Kölmel was satisfied that the hole was deep enough, they climbed up out of it, panting with exertion, and got ready to hoist Sinner’s body down into the stinking entropic unconscious of the city. Their trousers were splattered with some sort of poisonous black ichor.

‘No, please, wait,’ said Evelyn.

‘What’s the matter, precious?’ said Kölmel. ‘No use blubbing. You know the old Yid curse? “ Vi tsu derleb ikh im shoyn tsu bagrobn .” “I hope I outlive you long enough to bury you.” That’s good sense.’

‘I just want to. …’ Evelyn knelt down beside Sinner and pulled the blanket aside. She checked his fingers for rings and his chest for a locket or a good-luck charm, but there was nothing, so she went through his pockets, praying for even the most trivial souvenir. All she found was a crumpled-up piece of paper, and it was too dark to make out what was written on it, so she stuffed it into her purse. If she could have taken a lock of hair without the others seeing, she thought, she would have. But then she felt pathetic, because the urge reminded her of Morton, who had saved a ribbon that had fallen from her hair the very first time they met, and had often reminisced about how it was obvious even then that they would fall in love, when in fact she knew perfectly well he had only started talking to her because he’d just been humiliated by a prettier girl whose name she couldn’t now remember, and had only picked up the lost ribbon because it was an easy way to start flirting. Suddenly, Evelyn felt desperate that her memories of Sinner should never get a squirt of disinfectant or a coat of paint; that in ten years’ time she should not think of their time together as any less trivial, their conversations any less stilted, their coupling any less clumsy, his sentiments any less obscure, his death any less contemptible, than they really were; that all those fascinating dissonances not be transmuted into bland harmonies; that she should never give in to time, which was not the great healer, as everyone said, but the great bowdleriser; that as one of only four people in the world who knew where Sinner would rest, she should not betray the jagged truth of his life by writing herself into a beautiful tragic romance.

But perhaps there was no danger of that. ‘Anyone want to say anything soppy about him, then, before he goes?’ said Kölmel. He looked around for a moment, snorted, and spat on the ground. ‘Thought not. The boy always was a bit of a putz.’

Back Church Lane was a curved street of ugly brown-brick offices and warehouses. ‘I just don’t see the point,’ I said to the Welshman as we drove down it, looking for the address. The dusk was seamed with glowing aeroplane contrails, and, to the west, skyscrapers blocked out most of the soft band between the upper blue and the lower gold that is the closest the sky ever comes to evading the notion of determinate hue. ‘It’s been seventy years,’ I went on, as we passed an incongruously grand wooden doorway flanked by ornamental marble columns and, above, the inscription BROWNE & EAGLE LIM.D, which I recognised as an old wool company. ‘There won’t still be a rubbish dump there. There’ll be flats or a car park or something. We can’t just demolish whatever’s there.’

But when we got there, we didn’t find flats or a car park. Nor did we find the old rubbish dump. Instead, there was a building site. And attached to the wooden fencing around the site, next to the usual warnings about hard hats being worn and children not playing nearby, was a familiar placard:

GRUBLOCK HOMES

It is our tomorrow that commands our today

The slogan was an unattributed quotation from the preface of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human . Grublock’s marketing department had loved it. I recalled, now, seeing a computer mock-up of this project on Grublock’s desk: it was to be a block of luxury flats with a rippling turquoise façade and a vegetable garden on the roof, full of young bankers who didn’t mind living in a grotty bit of Whitechapel if it meant they were only fifteen minutes’ walk from work.