Boxer, Beetle (12 page)

‘I thought you Jews had rules about touching the dead.’

Sinner turned.

‘Of course, we Christians do too, but we’ve never found it necessary to write them down.’

Connelly, one of St Panteleimon’s priests, stood in the
doorway of the mortuary. He was an Irishman in his forties, so dedicated to his pursuit of contraband tobacco that he reportedly slept standing up in cupboards for no more than ten minutes at a time.

‘Are you his brother, Roach? His nephew? His long-lost son, even? Is that why you’re here?’

‘He had something of mine,’ said Sinner.

‘Oh yes, he owed you some money, I expect? A silver tosheroon?’ Connelly smiled thinly. ‘I have always tried to be charitable with your kind. I have prayed for patience. But after a time the Lord stopped giving me patience, perhaps because you are all so disgusting. I am going to call the police. You will stay here.’ Connelly closed the door and locked it, leaving Sinner alone with Renshaw.

Sinner looked around. One of the mortuary’s windows was probably just big enough to climb out of, but it was too high to reach. So he pushed Renshaw’s body off the trolley on to the floor, then wheeled the trolley over to the opposite wall and climbed up on it. But he couldn’t lunge to break the window without the trolley’s squeaky wheels slipping sideways under him, so he had to get down off the trolley, drag Renshaw’s body across the floor, wedge its arm under one of the trolley’s wheels like a brake, and climb back up on the trolley. By then he was too tired to break the window with his fist, so he took off Renshaw’s boot and did it with that.

The rain and wind rushed into the mortuary like looters into a vault. Sinner was wearing nothing but woollen long underwear. Two years ago he could have climbed a drainpipe dipped in hair pomade, but this window was very small and he was feeling very weak. Finally he got one knee up, cutting himself badly on the rind of broken glass around the edge of the window, and then the other knee, and then he tumbled out on to the wet cobbles on the other side, feeling something crunch in his shoulder and his underwear rip at the groin.

Lying on his side, a crushed snail, he tried to look around,
but the day was intolerably bright after the gloom of the mortuary and the rain stung his face. Then there was a shadow across him. He wondered if this was how his opponents used to feel at the end of a fight. The shadow said, ‘Are you quite all right, Mr Roach?’ Sinner groaned and wiped his eyes. He didn’t immediately recognise the face of the man who stood there with an umbrella, but the voice was familiar – posh almost to the point of parody. It took him a few seconds to locate it in his memory, and then a few seconds more to shake off the feeling of disbelief. It was the cunt who’d come uninvited into his dressing room at Premierland that night after the Pock fight. Bearskin or something.

‘What the fuck are …,’ began Sinner. He tried to get to his feet but he couldn’t.

‘It’s really you,’ said Erskine. ‘It really is you. Well, well. Isn’t this the most extraordinary good luck? And this is only the fourth morning I’ve spent in Blackfriars. I so hoped I’d find you. Although I’d heard you were in a lodging-house, not a hospital.’

‘Ain’t in either, now.’

‘Quite. You haven’t been well?’

‘Middling,’ said Sinner flatly.

‘You certainly look as if you could do with a hot bath and a hot meal. Some good venison sausages, perhaps.’

Sinner hadn’t eaten sausages in months. He was so sick of bread and butter. ‘Where?’

‘Since our last meeting, I’ve taken a flat in Clerkenwell.’

‘Nice, is it?’

‘Indeed, now that I think of it, there’s really no reason why we shouldn’t go there now. I’ve got a cab waiting. It’s the least I can do.’

‘Sounds all right by me.’ Sinner had never begged for anything in his life, but he thought he would be willing to now.

Erskine looked up and down the street, looked back down
at Sinner, seemed to come to a decision, and then said in a harder tone, ‘On the other hand, I think my father would be very upset if he found out he was paying for a vagrant’s bed and board. I feel sure of that, in fact.’

Sinner struggled to his feet at last and stood there with rain dripping from the tip of his nose, his cock like a dead baby mouse. ‘Come on, mate. No use playing about. I know what you want.’

‘Do you?’ said Erskine.

‘I remember what you said before. You can do your experiments and I’ll take your fifty quid and you and me and your dad and your earwigs will all be even, right?’

‘I’m delighted that you remember my proposal, Mr Roach, but I’m afraid that as of today the terms have changed. I think I’m going to ask for rather more, you see, and I’m going to offer rather more in return. I will give you a room of your own for as long as you want it. I’ll give you clean sheets and clean clothes. I’ll give you as many sausages as you can eat, kosher or otherwise. I’ll give you generous pocket money. I’ll even let you continue to destroy yourself with drink, because I know that if I didn’t you’d run off within the hour. I’ll give you very nearly everything you ask for, and, with my help, perhaps one day you’ll be fit enough to return to pugilism. But in return, I don’t merely want to examine you every so often. I want ownership outright.’ Erskine’s voice here was not quite as confident as his words. ‘I want to buy your body as one might buy a dog or an armchair. I won’t restrict your freedom in any meaningful way, but until your death you’ll submit to whatever experiments and observations I wish to perform in the service of my theories. And after that, I will have custody of your remains.’

‘Fuck off, you cunt of a. …’ Sinner couldn’t find the words.

‘Or I’m quite content to leave you here in the rain. It’s entirely your choice. If you don’t want to buy back life at a fair price.’

Sinner thought of Connelly and the police, and also of the sausages again. He could just stay a night or two and then make off with some of Erskine’s money. That would be satisfying enough. He didn’t like to think about how few alternatives he had, and how grateful he was for the arrival of this chinless toy soldier. ‘Fair enough, then,’ he said.

‘Splendid. We’ll shake hands on it.’

Sinner shook Erskine’s hand as firmly as he could manage. Erskine led him shivering and bleeding to the cab, parked out on Bread Street. As soon as he sat down in the back seat, he fell asleep.

Later, he was awoken to be examined by a bearded doctor. He was in Erskine’s flat, in a bed that seemed astonishingly soft and spacious after the cots at St Pantaleimon’s. His shoulder hurt.

‘Malnutrition, of course, and one or two nasty infections, but also severe alcohol poisoning,’ said the doctor after cleaning Sinner’s cuts. ‘How long did you say he’s been missing?’ The doctor seemed to have been told that Sinner was a stableboy who had run away to London from a place called Claramore.

‘Only about two weeks,’ said Erskine, who had sat in a chair in the corner of the small bedroom and watched the examination from beginning to end.

‘Well, he must have been drinking under your noses for quite a while. Not worth the trouble, I dare say.’

‘I promised his father I’d bring him back,’ said Erskine as he paid the doctor. The doctor gave him some packets of powder that he was to stir into a mug of hot water twice a day for Sinner. Not long after the doctor had gone, the landlady, who had evidently been told the same story, came up with a plate of liver and onions on a tray.

‘You said I could have some booze,’ said Sinner when he’d finished eating.

‘Yes. You understand, I expect, that you are speeding your
own death? You understand that you will never be truly healthy again unless you give it up?’

‘You said I could have some booze.’

‘Then I take no responsibility.’

Erskine poured a glass of beer for Sinner, who drained it in one. Before the liquid even hit his stomach he felt an intense relief, as when someone tells you at the last moment that you do not have to do something that you have been dreading. It had a strange taste, though.

‘What kind of beer is this?’ he said, reaching for the bottle.

‘It’s just beer,’ said Erskine, taking it quickly off the tray. ‘You’re probably used to cheaper varieties. Now, in a few minutes I have to go out to a meeting at the Royal Entomological Society. I’ll be back in the evening. I hope you find the bed comfortable, and I suggest you stay in it, but if you wish to get up there are clean clothes in the drawer. You won’t find any money or any more alcohol in the flat, and my laboratory is locked. I can’t stop you from leaving, of course, but if you leave you can’t come back. Do you understand all that?’

Sinner nodded. Just as Erskine turned to leave the bedroom, there was a knock at the door of the flat.

‘Just a minute, Mrs Minton,’ shouted Erskine.

‘Phippy? Phippy, it’s me!’ The voice was a woman’s, but not the landlady’s. Erskine went white and clenched his fists.

‘I’m dressing,’ he shouted.

‘I’ve seen you dressing. Open the silly door.’

‘Just stay here and be quiet,’ whispered Erskine to Sinner, and went out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. Sinner heard him open the front door.

‘I thought you were dressing,’ said the voice.

‘And now I’m dressed. I really wish you’d telephoned first, Evelyn.’

‘Well, I knew you’d be in, didn’t I, brother? You never do anything.’

‘Actually I’m very busy and I have to go out in a moment or I shall be late. Why don’t we just have dinner this evening?’

‘No.’

‘Is dinner too bourgeois?’

‘I wanted to see your wonderfully grown-up new flat. It’s a bit poky, isn’t it? Oh, at least you’ve brought that picture with you. The purchase of that picture is the only concession to good taste you have ever made in your life.’

‘You just like it because Mother says it’s horrible.’

‘A horribly lazy pastiche of the Rembrandt, yes, but apart from that quite striking.’ Sinner heard footsteps. ‘Now, what’s this room?’

‘Don’t go in there,’ said Erskine.

‘Why not?’ said the voice, and the door of the bedroom opened.

Erskine’s sister was twenty-two years old, pretty, with wavy brown hair pinned up behind her head to reveal a dull shine across her cheekbones like old scuffed velvet. She wore a sylphine green dress and lugged behind her a battered antique umbrella with brass fittings that could have sheltered a small village from a mortar attack. Her eyebrows were at a permanent ironic tilt, as if she were waiting patiently for the rest of the world to throw down its cigarette, abandon the charade and admit how absolutely ridiculous it was.

‘Who on earth is this in your bed?’ she said.

‘That’s not my bed. That’s the spare bed.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Oh, he’s my valet. He’s been ill.’

‘Phippy! How long have you had a valet? How absurd! And he looks like a Jew!’ She said this with surprise, not disdain.

‘He is not a Jew. His name is Roach. If one takes a flat one must take a valet.’

‘Boy, are you really my brother’s valet?’

Sinner waited a long time before he replied, enjoying
Erskine’s pleading eyes and gritted teeth. At last he said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Erskine slackened as if shot dead.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘He’s got kidney stones,’ said Erskine.

‘What a bore. Where did my brother find you?’

‘I absolutely must go, Evelyn,’ said Erskine. ‘Come along and I’ll find you a cab.’ Evelyn wasn’t, of course, allowed a flat of her own, so when she was in London she usually stayed at the house of her friend Caroline Garlick near Gloucester Road. ‘Let’s say eight o’clock at the Ravilious, shall we? I’ll book us a table.’

‘I can’t, I’m busy.’

‘With whom? Is Mother making you have dinner with the Bruiselands? She mentioned they were up in town.’

‘With your old friend Morton, actually.’

‘You’re still going about with Morton?’ William Erskine, their father, had briefly forbidden Evelyn to speak to Morton after discovering that Morton had attached himself to the British Union of Fascists, an organisation which he believed gave fascism a bad name; but later he had relented.

‘I don’t know what you mean by that, dear brother, but you ought to be pleased. Remember that, whatever your pettier differences, he shares both your college scarf and your politics. Goodbye, Roach.’

They went out. Sinner got up, put on a dressing gown and looked around the flat. It was clean, well lit and not too cold, but it was also bare even compared to his parents’ flat in Spitalfields: there were no ornaments and only a single picture, the one that Evelyn had presumably been talking about earlier.

Seven or eight doctors with black coats and big sideburns were crowded around a cadaver like ravens around a piece of meat. The cadaver was jaundiced but still quite well muscled, the tendons in its right thigh exposed by a hanging flap of skin and rendered in detail. A cloth was draped across its groin but
you could see the bulge beneath. All around was gloom, like the morgue at St Panteleimon’s, and indeed the cadaver’s face did remind Sinner a little of Ollie Renhsaw. He turned quickly away from the painting, feeling that if he looked any longer the doctors, if they really were doctors, would fall upon the body and devour it. But then, strolling into the bathroom for a piss – what luxury not to be using a bedpan like at St Panteleimon’s – he found himself staring into a mirror, which, if anything, was even worse than the painting. It was weeks since he’d seen his own reflection in anything clearer than a grimy window, and he understood now why the bouncers hadn’t let him into the Caravan. He didn’t want to look like this.

Apart from the sitting room, the bathroom and the two bedrooms, there was just a small kitchen and a mysterious sixth room with a locked door, presumably Erskine’s laboratory. The lock was heavy but he could probably break the door off its hinges if he wanted – maybe not today, but certainly after a bit more rest and a bit more liver and onions. He wondered where he could go to pawn whatever it was that Erskine kept in there. Fifteen minutes later, as he stood at the window looking down at the street and thinking how strange it was that he’d ended up here, there was another knock at the front door of the flat. Sinner opened it. Evelyn had come back, without her brother.