Ten Stories About Smoking (13 page)

‘Uncle Charlie!’

‘Jackie!’ he said and clambered out of the ring. ‘So you’re finally here, eh? Finally you wanna lose these guts, right?’ He was laughing and holding
O’Neil’s rolls of fat in his hands. O’Neil laughed and raised an eyebrow at me.

‘You’re going to be in a whole world of pain for weeks, you know that? You ready for it?’ O’Neil was on the balls of his feet and already dancing.

‘I am, Uncle Charlie,’ he said as he aimed a comic punch at his temple. ‘I wanna be a champion not a chump.’

‘Good man,’ he said and then the two of them stopped jabbing and dancing and sparring. Charlie was taller than I expected, better looking. He was in his late fifties, lithe, with an
impressive musculature and sharp black eyes. He looked at me then. If he’d worn glasses he’d have peered over the top of them.

‘Who’s this?’ he said to O’Neil.

‘This is my good friend Robert Wilkinson,’ O’Neil said. ‘He’s from England.’

Charlie nodded toward me and held out his hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’

His grip started out limp then got stronger, like he was playing peanuts. His face turned red and I laughed. Eventually he released me.

‘With that hair,’ he said, ‘you look like a little girl, you know that?’

Charlie was serious about O’Neil’s programme. He’d clearly given it a lot of thought. I wouldn’t have thought that getting O’Neil lifting weights
would help him lose weight, but I wasn’t the one who’d owned a gym for twenty years. The first part of the routine was skipping. Charlie showed us both how to do it properly. After my
fifth attempt ended with me almost flat on my back, Charlie stopped me.

‘Your heart’s just not in this, is it?’ he said. He said it kindly enough, though it was hard not to sense that I’d let him down. O’Neil kept going.

‘I’m just not that coordinated, that’s all. I find things like this hard work.’

‘I can see that.’

‘I’m only really here to help O’Neil,’ I said, leaning in closer to him. ‘You know, show him some support. Help him lose some weight.’

‘That’s good that you’re looking out for my nephew. It’s good, but I can’t have you hanging around in my gym not training. This place’ – he shrugged
– ‘has got rules. Boxing’s all about discipline. I don’t let my boys cuss in this gym. My word is law. This place is a temple, you understand? So when I say you train, you
train, all right?’

I nodded and looked around for anything requiring minimum coordination. In the corner was a machine covered with a sheet of tarpaulin. I pointed to it.

‘Is that a treadmill?’ I asked. Charlie squinted.

‘Yes, son, I believe it is.’

‘Can I train on that?’

His shoulders dropped and his weight shifted to the balls of his feet. Charlie looked at O’Neil, then at me.

‘I don’t think it works,’ he said eventually.

‘Really?’

‘I don’t know. You get it to work, you can use it.’

O’Neil came over then, glistening and beetroot-red. Charlie pushed a pair of practice gloves into his stomach.

‘Now you’re going to hit this bag just as I tell you,’ he said, moving us over to the next station. O’Neil made to ask for a break to regain his breath, but Charlie shot
him a look that not even the heavyweight champion of the world would have dared contradict.

I watched O’Neil intently from the other side of the bag. At first his combinations were tired and laboured, but then he began to grasp what he was supposed to be doing. The power in his
shoulders was incredible. It looked like he was trying to stick his fists through the padding.

‘Right-left-right. Upper cut. Jab. Jab. And relax,’ Charlie called and O’Neil responded. Sweat was dripping off him, his arms slick and tensed. He seemed to be enjoying it. I
could barely recognize my best friend in the arms, fist and stance of the man hitting the bag.

‘Left-right-jab-jab-upper-cut.’ O’Neil hammered the bag again. It was too much. I wandered over to the treadmill, took off its wrapper and pressed some buttons. I looked down
and followed the power cord to the wall and flicked the switch. There were beeps and flashes. I waited for it to settle then got on the track. I was still playing with buttons when someone grabbed
me by the scruff of my Ramones T-shirt.

‘What the fuck d’you think you doing?’ the man said. His neck muscles were strained, steely like the spokes of an umbrella. He was a guy in his forties with dark, dark skin. He
wore an LA Lakers vest.

The man was snorting with rage, and I tried to wrestle away from him. But soon Charlie was on him. I didn’t catch what Charlie said, but the Lakers fan apologized straight away, then
headed towards the medicine balls.

‘You okay?’ Charlie said once I’d started walking on the treadmill.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘What was that all about?’

‘That’s enough walking, friend,’ he said with a smile. ‘Time to run.’ He pressed the pace button several times, taking me from comfort to pain in a matter of
seconds. Charlie laughed as I tried to keep up with the rubber track. Eventually I managed to get the speed back to a level with which I could cope, and settled into a light jog, coughing and
hoping I wouldn’t puke on Uncle Charlie’s floor.

Considering the years of inactivity, my body reacted better than I had expected. I wasn’t going too quickly, but I was steady on my feet. Keeping a constant speed, I watched a sparring
contest in the ring, saw a guy drop some powder into a drink, another man spotting for a bench press which looked impossible (he lifted it on the third attempt). And then, as I looked at my shoes,
I felt something swell inside of me, like something was opening and all my body’s molecules were splitting apart. I felt light, unencumbered, as though everything extraneous to the act of
running had been erased. I pushed the speedometer up a couple of notches. And kept to a beat. I felt like I could – no, that I should – run for ever. And then I saw her face, alive and
ahead of me.

She was smiling, beckoning me to follow her. She looked the same as she had the day she’d died, her hair tied up in a bun, no make-up, dressed simply in jeans and T-shirt. For a moment she
seemed so close that I could smell her perfume – Lou Lou in the blue bottle – but then Charlie came over and pressed stop on the machine. I didn’t know where to look.

‘That’s a good first session, boys. Well done,’ Charlie said. ‘Now if you two want to shower upstairs at my place’ – he threw O’Neil a set of keys with
a gold boxing glove fob – ‘I’ll be up in a little while. Make yourselves comfortable. There’s beers in the refrigerator.’

He picked up his focus pads and climbed back into the ring where another heavily tattooed man was waiting for him. I could hear the thudding impacts even in the stairwell.

I expected Charlie’s place to be a shrine to boxing, a museum of signed photos and fight posters, old gloves and imitation belts with gluey fake stones. Instead it was a
strangely feminized space that had been left to moulder. There were scatter cushions on the comfortable-looking divan. There was a gingham tablecloth on the dining table and a bead curtain
separating the kitchen from the lounge. On the coffee table was a vase with some dead flowers inside. The floor needed sweeping and there was dust on the television set. On the wall were three
watercolours of Paris. They were amateurish; and I wondered if Uncle Charlie had painted them himself. Tough guys always make shitty painters.

The only piece of boxing memorabilia I could find was in the bathroom. It was a framed
Esquire
cover from 1968: Muhammad Ali bleeding from various arrow wounds. There was condensation on
the glass from O’Neil’s shower. I wiped it away, showered, then towelled myself dry. I put on my sweatshirt and sweatpants and went back into the living room. O’Neil was on his
second bottle of beer.

‘Boxing makes me thirsty.’

‘Breathing makes you thirsty,’ I said helping myself to a beer.

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ O’Neil said.

After a dinner of steak, green beans, broccoli and spinach, O’Neil fell asleep on the divan. Charlie and I sat at the table: we’d moved on to bourbon and he was
recounting stories of the fight game that meant nothing to me. He’d ask me whether I’d heard of a fighter and I’d say no and he’d go on to tell me all about him anyway. He
was a good storyteller – the kind who would make friends in any bar in any country of the world. As he shovelled some ice into my glass, I remembered the man who’d come for me on the
treadmill.

‘What was that guy’s problem? The one in the Lakers vest.’ Charlie paused and then poured out the drinks. He placed the glass in front of me and took a long sip of his
whiskey.

‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault.’

‘The guy nearly knocked me out.’

He nodded. ‘You know something, Robert. It sometimes seems to me that we’re the unluckiest family in the whole goddamned world,’ he said. ‘It’s like death and bad
luck are lying in wait for us all the time. O’Neil’s told you about his sister, Gloria, right?’

I nodded.

‘Well, everything went to hell that day and nothing’s come back. Even things that seem good one minute, always go wrong soon after. It’s like since that gangbanger shot her,
we’ve been cursed or something.’

‘So why did that guy want to rip my head off?’ I said. ‘Was it to do with Gloria?’

He shook his head.

‘You ever been in love?’ he said.

I said nothing. I thought of Helen’s body in the smashed car, the blood.

‘I fell in love with a woman fifteen years younger than me,’ he said, not waiting for me to answer. ‘And she fell for me too. For other people that would be the start of
something, wouldn’t it? A heatwave in the autumn of life’ – he smiled and shook his head, the smoke pooling around him – ‘but that wasn’t ever on the undercard.
The guy with the Lakers vest is her brother. The whole thing just freaked him out.’

I looked at the table and fingered the cork placemat.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said.

‘I want to tell you.’

‘Don’t tell me. It’s not worth it.’

He picked up the bottle of Jim Beam and poured us two more healthy shots. O’Neil grunted and shifted his bulk on the couch. Charlie steepled his hands and said: ‘She was the most
beautiful woman in the whole world.’ It was the perfect sentence to start a late night confession.