The North of England Home Service (18 page)

In his corner, Nat Sellers and his seconds tried to revive Jimmy with ice at the base of his skull. He remained unconscious for three minutes. It was seven or eight minutes before they were able get him standing between two of them and assist him from the ring.

Instead of leading, which was his right as the winner, Jackie followed. He saw the empty seats with the strips of white paper saying ‘
RESERVED
’ on. He looked up to the wide perspex window
of the VIP room where none of them had apprehended what had just taken place below, but were only waiting for their name to be called on the public address and listening to hear the volume of cheering which would go up when they stepped into the light and formally bestowed their presence on the fight-goers from the badly sprung and blood-spattered ring. They had been speaking of this or this or looking around to have their drink freshened and had failed to catch the catastrophic moment when a man hurt his brain so badly that he would still be learning to walk and talk and lift a spoon to his mouth in a year’s, even two years’, time.

The brain is a jelly-like mass suspended inside the skull in cerebrospinal fluid. Think of it like this (the white-coated
specialist
in his dusty basement office explained to Jackie): the brain is like a blancmange in a box, connected by thin strings which are the blood vessels. As a punch shakes or rotates the head, those ‘strings’ are being ripped apart. The blood flow puts pressure on the surface of the brain and the pressure of the added blood compresses the brain, causing unconsciousness, coma, and sometimes death. Repeated ‘sub-lethal’ blows such as those
sustained
in training are more dangerous than one-time knockouts. But it is the devastating knockout that most often causes death.

When the end came for Jimmy six weeks later – an end that Jackie would always remain convinced he had contributed to – Jackie was there. It was another small-hall promotion at
Caledonian
Road Baths and Jimmy this time had been put in against a Welshman called Boyo Morgan who was a lanky, unmuscled, string bean of a boy, shy to the point of invisibility outside the ring, but lethal inside it, with a punch like a mule. Jimmy had complained of tiredness and occasional dizzy spells since the KO by Jackie but, always co-operative, amenable, whatever anybody asked of him, he was quite sure he wanted to go on.

It was a hot night at the end of an exceptionally hot summer. All the doors and the windows in the hall had been jammed open
in an attempt to get some air flowing through, but the fight was fought in torpor and strength-sapping heat. (Jackie had a clear memory of glancing up at the dome above the ring and seeing several figures tilted in against the slatted glass and another cobalt summer-night sky.) A number of men in the audience were stripped to the waist by the close of the fight, swabbing themselves with their shirts.

Jimmy gathered himself. He weaved and swerved into and out of distance, and he scored cleanly and well and probably shaved the first two rounds. In the third, Morgan dropped him with a right cross and a left hook to the head, but he was up again after three or four seconds. Honours in the fourth were even, but Jimmy walked on to an arcing right uppercut in the fifth and by the sixth he was already looking spent. From the sixth round onwards every punch thrown by Boyo Morgan jarred Jimmy. In the eighth Jimmy was forced to take two counts. In the ninth it seemed more than likely that the referee would be forced to stop the contest to save him. At one moment he stood defenceless rocking on his heels as Morgan measured him again and again, driving hard rights and lefts to the jaw.

By the start of the twelfth round Jimmy had been on the canvas four times. For most of the audience it was a relief when Morgan chopped him with a hard, loping left to Jimmy’s head, dropping him for the last time. He was unconscious before he hit the canvas and his relaxed neck muscles allowed his head to thud against the boards.

‘It didn’t feel particularly special‚’ Boyo Morgan told the reporters from the local papers who crowded round him
afterwards
. ‘Just everything I had.’

Jimmy was in a coma for a month. He had suffered an acute haematoma, an injury most often seen in car-crash victims.

After a month, he started to show the first signs that he was coming out of his coma. By November, he was able to
communicate
by blinking, and in January moved his right arm and leg slightly for the first time. By May he was able to form sentences and respond to simple commands. After a year he was still
paralysed
and confined to a wheelchair, as he would be for the rest of his life. He was able to feed himself when not feeling too tired, and was learning to talk again although his speech would always be halting and slow.

Jackie brought bulletins on Jimmy’s progress from St
Bartholomew’s
Hospital back to Great Windmill Street, but he very quickly sensed Mr Solomons’ interest melting away. He was a busy man and they were, after all, hectic times with, just in the year of Jimmy Li’s personal tragedy, many wheels to grease and fires to stoke. Mr Solomons had Woodcock-Mills, Mills-Maxim, 50,000-seaters, fights that were energetically promoted to the status of national occasions. Then he had Mills’s retirement which left him with no British-born fighter capable of drawing these full houses of on-the-nose paying customers. But then along came the infant prodigy Randolph Turpin, youngest of the three fighting Turpin brothers and, in spite of being half black, box-office dynamite.

In 1951, Mr Solomons had Turpin-Sugar Ray Robinson 1, an event complicated by the cross-examination of Robinson’s camp followers following the disappearance and murder of a little girl last seen alive near his training quarters at Windsor, and further calamatized by Jack’s brother-in-law Izzey Cohen taking a heart attack and dying ringside. He had the return, Turpin-Sugar Ray 2, and the headaches and
shlemozzel
arising from Turpin’s arrest in New York for allegedly raping a girl in his shower. He had the former high-earning prodigy Eric Boon, who was down but refusing to declare himself out, and this one and that one and the never-ending daily parade of coat-tuggers and
mitt-glommers
pleading special cases for his time. Plus, Mr Solomons had never been under any illusions, as Jackie knew.

‘They want to see it done to you, or you do it to the man. But
they want to see it‚’ he had once told Jackie. ‘Everybody likes to see the fights. You watch the faces in a boxing crowd when it gets exciting and you see expressions on people’s faces you don’t see anywhere else. It’s a different expression. Motor-racing, the crowds are always on the bends. That’s in people. You haven’t got long enough to understand what’s in people. The cameras are looking at you; the people are there howling for your blood. A guy is punching you to pieces. It’s all very basic. There’s just something in all of us.’

It was out in the open where Mr Solomons stood. It was spelled out on a plaque which hung over his head: ‘
WINNERS WIN
.
LOSERS MAKE THEIR OWN ARRANGEMENTS
.’

‘This Jimmy Li. Very nice boy. I’m very sorry what happened‚’ he said. ‘But he knew when he came over it wasn’t going to be no game of doughnuts. Nobody ever told him it was a top-hats and tea party. So?’ He shrugged.

Jimmy Li was still learning to walk and talk when Jackie snagged his foot in the canvas and did his knee and had to stand and watch his own career go down the pan following his title eliminator at the Empress Hall against Alby Ash. He was handed the sponge and the bucket and delegated sole responsibility for Mr Solomons’ wife’s, Fay’s, fight-night needs and hot-dog snack requirements.

So there it was: Jackie and Jimmy gimps and losers both; both relegated from being prospects to a future of small returns and the lowly, grubbing-around end of the food chain. At least Jackie had the compensation of being
mishpochah;
he was still regarded as family.

The fact was that, even when Jackie was being groomed for a champion and still training intensively, Mr Solomons had imposed on him to run little errands on his behalf – take to that person, collect from this person, and a here and a there, no questions. Jackie was part of the special intelligence-gathering
operation that Mr Solomons referred to as his ‘SI6’. ‘Sooner or later‚’ he assured Jackie, ‘every mug, pug and slug’ – he really did talk like this, taking great pride in spieling his own script in colourful Runyonesque words occasionally stretching to more than one syllable – ‘every mug, pug and slug finds his way to the cafés, pubs, milk bars, dance dumps and billiards barns within spitting distance of this office. A million tongues wag there every minute of the day and half the night and if I didn’t plant a smart ear or two to snap up unconsidered trifles for me, well, Mrs Solomons’ little boy would indeed be a sap.’

No matter how on the bottle and given up to the moment Jackie appeared to be at the Latin Quarter or the Modernairre or Club 11 or wherever he happened to have arrived on his nocturnal round, part of him still acted as the boss’s ears, flapping for Jack in the snakepit that was the cradle of the noble art. If there was, say, somebody having trouble making weight for a fight and
weakening
himself with steam baths and laxatives and sucking on copper coins to make spit – that would come back. Or a boxer in training with a damaged eye or fist that he was trying to cover up. Or the wide boys saying for the benefit of the mug punters they had their money on
x
when they were in fact on
y
. Or some
mockie
manager facing up Mr Solomons for £250 for a fight when Jackie knew from Ben and Dolly at the Archer Street café that he would be overjoyed to sign for £150, because he had been in for a tea and a rock bun that morning, that would also count as valuable intelligence and be marked up as Brownie points. Jackie was authorized to slip the odd note to Greta at the Corner House and to any one of a dozen doormen and sharpies around town and had built up an effective, low-level network of his own.

He had been married to Tina from the Greek café in Frying Pan Alley for a little over six months at the time of the accident that forced him to hang up his gloves and living in faraway Streatham with Tina’s mother and father, Mary and Hercules Metaxas, and
the rest of the well-meaning but rackety Metaxas clan. Tina had lost the baby that he didn’t know she was carrying while Jackie was in hospital recovering from the series of operations on his knee. And this, combined with the dip in his professional
fortunes
, had confirmed what they had really known since the day Herky Metaxas had made them legitimize their entanglement: that it wasn’t going to work.

Metaxas wanted to bring his son-in-law into the family business but Jackie understandably wasn’t keen to give up the eventful life he had found for himself in the West End in order to compete with various neck-bracelet-wearing brothers and hairy-backed little relatives to become chief olive-pitter or head griller of the aubergines or staying up half the night basting the slow-cooking knuckles of lamb they called
klephtica.
It was another greasy, heartburn-inducing food and another non-indigenous way of life and Tina was obviously destined to marry the ouzo-importing cousin she did end up marrying just as soon as her brief liaison with Jackie could be pronounced kaputted and officially over and done with, no hard feelings on either side.

His errands, and the closeness they had established, continued to take Jackie back to Whitechapel and Booba, still in the
Buildings
, still observing the ways of the old country with the
exception
of the salty brown shrimps and slippery monster bull-whelks in mustard malt vinegar that Jackie went out of his way to bring for her whenever nostalgia or Mr Solomons’ nipping bad
conscience
put a visit to Booba on the programme.

Down the turning, into the court, up the stairs, on to the faintly urine-smelling landing into the warm encompassing murkiness, the familiar pall and penumbra and Booba’s tin boxes and little candles and gas mantels, a trail of wax collecting on her single treasured Meissen candlestick with the painted pattern of bud flowers, the flames dancing on the walls and leaning and shifting in the wind.

Booba who did not want many pleasures in life; who believed the more pleasure you got out of living, the more fear you had of dying. Booba who was still attached to the economy of scarcity, despite the growing evidence of abundance all around (a
labour-saving
electric Teasmade invention in a box she had never opened; chests full of Egypt cotton, silk and satin, the finest stiff linen; a mink stole, retail value forty guineas, moulting in the wardrobe). Booba who was so different from her son the big
boxing
man and loud presence in the world, always so unashamed, so colourful, so compulsive, and exhibiting such a lack of restraint. ‘This clouding-out ego‚’ she called him now, agitated, black eyes flashing, tough chapped
shtetl
fingers on the table smoothing and smoothing. ‘This bellying blister waiting to drop its dirty load over all our lives, mine and all his brothers and sisters. And yours too, Jackie. Jack was a happy baby. Jack had a normal life as far as I, his mother, is concerned. Never in criminal offences. But now with Jack is all big “I”s and little “you”s. He expects bow and scrape to his whims. Jackie, hear me, you are another being with another life to lead.’

It disturbed Jackie to hear Booba speak like this. Was she dying? Afflicted with an intractable ageing disease? Had
something
happened? (Every grain of Mr Solomons’ life, personal and business, was grist to the rumour mill, exchangeable currency, but Jackie had heard nothing.)

‘He thinks he is good man. He is
rich
man, but this is different. Finance terms, yes – money – when it comes to money, we are all on velvet‚’ the old lady said, speaking half in English and half in the Yiddish that Jackie had come increasingly to understand.
‘Pah!’

She had been shocked by the recognition that such
uninhibition
, if not exhibitionism, of her son’s was allowed in the world; that here a completely different and new content was expressing itself. ‘“All world is fiddle.” Hah! What you do comes back around to you. This I can say,
lobbes
Jackie. This I believe.’