Boxer, Beetle (10 page)

Neither spoke again until Gittins said ‘Good night’ as he blew out the candle, and Erskine stayed silent, feeling there
was something subtly derisive about Gittins’ tone. ‘Good night, Erskine,’ repeated Gittins, louder this time. Erskine stayed silent again. The next morning they went out separately into the forest. On their own they could only collect a fraction of what they could collect together, but Erskine was still waiting for Gittins to apologise.

Around noon, wading through a stream, the rain slathering its cold tongue across his shoulders, Erskine snagged his trousers on something and fell over. Splashing around, trying to regain his footing, he felt a pain in his hand and saw blood in the water. He’d got caught on a coil of rusty barbed wire. Towards the end of the Polish–Soviet War, after the Battle of Warsaw, the Poles had laid miles of it in the rivers to stop Bolshevik stragglers from fleeing their dogs. If he hadn’t known that – if Gittins hadn’t specifically warned him about it – he might have concluded that the countryside itself, sick of soldiers, full of scrap, had learnt to grow its own fearsome iron weeds. What other traps would he find in the grass, in the trees? What was he doing here? What the hell did anyone care about beetles, anyway? Shivering, he half-hoped he would get an infection and die, but felt better after putting on a plaster and eating some tinned beef for lunch.

Returning in the evening, he couldn’t face another four hours of excruciating silence with Gittins so he went for a stroll around the village. As before, it was boring, but on his way back he saw, coming out of a stable, the handsome boy from the previous evening. The boy was probably on his way home too, he thought. And Erskine found himself following. He realised then who the boy reminded him of – the individual for whom he felt such ardour, whose face he had last seen back in London. It should have been obvious, but the conversation with Gittins had jogged his memory. It was Hitler.

He didn’t have to follow far before the boy went into a cottage. He waited for a few minutes, then sidled up to the
window and tried to look inside. He saw a table and a fireplace. He felt a tap on his back.

He turned. There was the boy. ‘I’m sorry, I was just. …’ The boy said something questioning in Polish. Erskine smiled and nodded, not knowing what else to do. The boy tugged on his sleeve.

There was not much light inside the cottage. ‘Are your parents here?’ Erskine said, pointlessly. The boy said something else, and led him through another door. As he followed the boy into a bedroom with a ceiling so low that he had to stoop, in which a reek of urine overwhelmed the beetroot and the woodsmoke, his heart pounded and he tried not to think about what might be about to happen. But then he saw that the boy only wanted to show him something. Tied to the bed, awake, twitching, the boy’s brother. The angel child. As he stared, it whimpered, or perhaps it said his name.

He had nearly got back to the inn before he vomited into the mud. The rain had stopped. He wiped his mouth and went inside. He now felt very much as if he didn’t want to be alone in this place, so he said hello to Gittins and added, ‘Find much?’

‘Not much.’

‘Nor me.’

Later, they went to bed. There was something about the pure anarchy of dreams that Erskine found very alarming. Dreams were bullies. In the middle of the night he crawled up into wakefulness through thickets of barbed wire, knowing somehow that the barbs were nothing but the buds of flowers, and when he felt that the sheet was damp he thought it must be blood. Then he realised with horror what had happened, and he remembered that before the barbed wire there had been the crooked-toothed boy.

He had been afraid of this ever since he’d found out that he would be sharing a bed with Gittins. He wasn’t worried about the stain so much as the possibility that Gittins was
not really asleep and had witnessed Erskine’s murmurs and convulsions. These murmurs and convulsions were only really a speculation on Erskine’s part, but given that boys in his dormitory at school had shouted and kicked in their sleep when all they were dreaming about was a game of football, he didn’t believe that his body could betray itself so revoltingly without giving at least some signal. Of course, he could never know that for sure, any more than he could ever know for sure whether things like this still happened to men of Gittins’ age, or whether, on the contrary, everyone else in the world but him had got their fluids under control long before they even left school. Why couldn’t one just go to the doctor every month to have one’s semen, this irrational fluid, syringed off like the pus from a boil? Perhaps he could ask Gittins all this and then strangle him once he had received some useful answers. In fact, he thought, that was exactly what he would do if Gittins ever acknowledged this episode in any way. At just that moment Gittins shifted, and Erskine had to stop himself from leaping out of bed. Only when the birds began to sing outside did he fall back to sleep again, and as the barbed wire grew over him again like vines he realised that he had not been dreaming before about the crooked-toothed but handsome boy. He had been dreaming about the boy’s brother.

Later that morning he woke up with an erection and could not bring himself to speak to or even look at Gittins, so they set off separately just as if they had argued again. Although they weren’t scheduled to start on the caves for another few days Erskine was tired of the forest, so he set off north towards the hills. Near a pond he accidentally trod on a frog and had to scrape his shoe clean with a stick.

He’d been turning over stones at the mouth of a cave for about an hour when he heard someone coming up the gravel slope from the woods. He rose, assuming it was Gittins. But it was the boy.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said.

The boy said something in Polish.

‘You followed me here.’

The boy looked down at what Erskine was doing.

‘I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean to behave like that. I shouldn’t have been so rude to your brother.’

The boy smiled.

‘And I forgot to ask if you wanted your tobacco tin back.’ Erskine took it out of his coat and held it out to the boy, but the boy shook his head, took Erskine’s sleeve as he had the day before, and led Erskine into the cave.

Inside it smelt of bat guano and mould, not entirely unlike the disused cricket pavilion at school where one had sometimes gone to smoke a cigarette. The ground was rocky and uneven. Within a few yards they were in almost total darkness, and that was where the boy turned his back on Erskine, pulled down his trousers, and bent over. Erskine stood, paralysed, staring at the boy’s arse, at the tip of his long cock hanging between his legs.

It was really happening. Everything around him suddenly felt so soft, a change in the texture of texture itself, so that even the rocks were flesh now; and it was because the unyielding world had yielded at last, yielded utterly, like a rabbit splayed open on a dissecting table, and he could see and touch whatever he wanted, could reach inside and squeeze the rabbit’s heart until it burst in his fist, and nobody could stop him. He couldn’t breathe. After a while the boy looked back at Erskine, and a small part of Erskine was disappointed to see the autocratic face of this anonymous Polish youth and not, impossibly, the face of Seth Roach. His reverie broken, he stepped forward and started to undo his belt. For a moment he wondered what this boy of fifteen or sixteen years old had already done or seen that had taught him to offer himself like this, and for another moment he wondered whether he’d have to pay the boy afterwards or whether this was a sort of free
gift that came with the tobacco tin. But mostly he wondered if he had the right idea about what he was supposed to do. He was just reaching out to touch the boy’s goose-pimpled arse when he heard Gittins shout, ‘Erskine?’

He looked up in panic. Gittins wouldn’t be able to see them from the mouth of the cave, so his first thought was just to keep quiet until Gittins moved on, but then he remembered that all his equipment was still lying around outside; there could be no doubt where he was. For a moment he felt seared to his bones by bad luck and loss, like that day in Cambridge when he had been carrying a very rare enicocephalid across a laboratory to be mounted, and a breeze had blown it off its piece of cork, and they had spent the whole afternoon searching the floor with a magnifying glass.

‘Erskine?’ shouted Gittins again. ‘I expected you might have come up here. Knew you were looking forward to the caves. Can you hear me, Erskine? You forgot your lunch. Thought I’d come and see if you wanted any of mine.’

The boy pulled up his trousers.

‘Erskine, are you in there?’

Erskine got down on his hands and knees and started to crawl deeper into the cave. There were cobwebs stretched between the rocks, spun to trap the flies that came to feed off the bat guano, and he had to close his eyes. When he felt something odd beneath his right hand, he opened them again, but it was blindfold dark, so he took out his battery-powered torch. He flicked the switch, and screamed.

Leaning against the wall of the cave, throwing a monstrous shadow, was a grinning human skeleton. Although its clothes had mostly rotted away, there was a rifle across its knees, a knife in its hand, and a rusted water canteen at its side. A Bolshevik soldier. Erskine looked down, and saw that he was holding on to the fungoid toe of its crumbling left boot. In blind terror he dropped the torch and picked up a stone and hurled it at the skeleton with a strangled grunt. The stone
smashed the skeleton’s ribs, and there was a gush of black blood from where the skeleton’s heart should have been. The soldier’s ghost was coming for vengeance, Erskine thought, or perhaps, thank God, he was still dreaming. But then he saw that it was not the soldier’s ghost. It was a small colony of beetles, disturbed by the stone, fleeing deeper into the cave. He knew what to do with beetles.

Trapping one in his gloved hands, he examined it under his magnifying glass. This species was eyeless, winged, and covered with spines. He was reaching for his notebook, wanting to sketch the unusual diamond marking on its back, when it flew out of his hand, and as it did so he saw something which he surely could not have seen.

Trying to ignore this little hallucination, Erskine searched through his memory. He knew beetles, but he did not know this beetle. And that could only mean that this beetle was new – an entirely novel and distinct species – the first they’d found on this trip, despite all Percy’s promises. He would have to check in his reference books, but he already felt almost sure.

So not only had he beaten Gittins, but it would be his privilege to name this little troglodyte, and then to have the name ratified by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature that Gittins so hated, ensuring that it would keep that name for ever, or at the very least until civilisation was overrun by bigger troglodytes and all science was forgotten – a childhood ambition finally fulfilled.

The genus would be
Anophthalmus
, meaning ‘eyeless’. But
Anophthalmus
what? It could be
Anophthalmus hemmingi
, to irritate Gittins, or
Anophthalmus jakubi
, for superstition’s sake, or even
Anophthalmus angeli
, in tribute to the misshapen child, but he favoured
Anophthalmus erskini
, a chance to immortalise himself at only twenty-five years old. Considering this happily, he picked up another beetle, but before he could get a close look the same thing happened
as before. And a third time, the same. Only with the fourth beetle did he realise what he was seeing. As the insect raised its membranous wings in preparation for flight the diamond pattern on them was disrupted, and just for an instant they flashed a different pattern, an asymmetrical rearrangement of the same four right-angles. A perfect clockwise tetraskelion. A swastika.

Grublock lived in a shining tower on the south bank of the Thames, designed for him by one of his pet Danish architects; a product of hermeneutics and plasticine, it resembled a curvaceous filing cabinet that had been hastily ransacked. At night, from the windows of his triplex penthouse, you could look over the ink-black river to the barges sinking into the sand of the opposite bank and, above them, the twinkle of Chelsea. Far off to the right was the Square Mile, rising in glow as if a drip of light from the stars had built into a stalagmite and then into a mountain range. The view was so spectacular that none of Grublock’s guests ever bothered to examine the small watercolour hung on the opposite wall, a rather pallid and shaky attempt at St Peter’s church in Vienna with the almost illegible signature ‘A. Hitler’ in the bottom left-hand corner.

Grublock’s dream, I had long ago surmised, was to impale the city of London with a structure so grandly inhuman, so potently unreal, that it could be left completely empty for a hundred years and nobody would even know the difference, except perhaps the men who ran the sandwich shops nearby. Like a cathedral in a medieval town, it would be visible from anywhere; and yet nobody would ever be told the reasons for its shape and position, nobody would ever be allowed through its doors, and nobody would ever begin to understand the staggeringly complex financial transactions that were presumed to go on inside, night and day, like arguments between angels; so that although the lights would be on all the time, it would be impossible to say for sure if it was really
inhabited or whether it was just a thousand-foot obelisk, a cryptogram with no meaning, a pure denial. Occasionally, reading about one of Grublock’s projects in the newspapers, I wondered if this prank was one he’d already played. A few years before, scorning any economic pessimism, he had opened property development offices in both Shanghai and Dubai, telling me that he’d wasted too much time in London, where everyone loved to talk about the free market but no one really had the guts to unlock the last of its shackles. Except that the plains of Shanghai and Dubai were still mostly blank slates, and I wasn’t sure he liked blank slates. He liked disruption. But disruption of a special sort. We think of disruption as the assault of the scribble into the grid, of the illegible on the legible; what Grublock achieved was exactly the reverse.