Boxer, Beetle (3 page)

‘Why?’

‘He might try and get you banned.’

‘I won’t get banned.’

‘No, not this time, and not next time, but the time after that you might.’

‘Bye, then.’

‘Don’t finish that too fast.’

Frink went out. Seth sucked on the bottle of gin and then coughed and closed his eyes.

Sixteen years old; seven professional matches (unbeaten); nine toes; four foot, eleven inches tall. These were the numbers that made Seth ‘Sinner’ Roach, all of them pretty low, but what did that matter? Today – 18 August 1934 – he was already the best new boxer in London. To his opponents a fight with Sinner was like an interrogation, every punch a question they could not possibly answer, an accusation they could not possibly deny.

His nickname, like the armchair, was of mysterious origin. ‘Jews don’t have sinners, Seth,’ Rabbi Brasch used to say, ‘we just have idiots.’ When Sinner was sober, there was an intensity to his expression so fixed that, if you gazed at it for too long (which a lot of people did, trying to understand how such a stunted, thuggish physique could be so beautiful), it began to seem not intense but, on the contrary, blank and inert, as when you repeat a harsh word too many times and it loses its meaning; and this changeless quality seemed to deny even the possibility of sin. But everyone called him Sinner none the less. He had oily black hair and thin eyebrows and long eyelashes and small nipples and slightly protruding ears and still, improbably, a full set of teeth.

There was a quiet knock at the door. ‘Fuck off,’ said Sinner. But the door opened, and into the dressing room stepped a tall blond man in a black overcoat. ‘Mr Roach,’ he said, extending a hand. He wore calfskin gloves with pearl buttons and had a neat moustache that did not make up for a weak chin. He carried himself as if he thought he might at any moment have to dive out of the way of a galloping horse.

‘My name is Philip Erskine,’ he said.

‘Enchanted,’ replied Sinner, without moving.

‘I very much enjoyed your performance tonight.’

‘Brought me some flowers, have you?’

‘I’m sorry to intrude like this, Mr Roach, but I didn’t know otherwise when I might have a chance to speak to you.’ While Sinner’s accent was east London with just a trace of his parents’ Yiddish, Erskine’s was the poshest Sinner had ever heard, with the exception of Danny Gaster’s manager – supposedly a disinherited aristocrat – and announcers on the wireless. Seeing he wasn’t going to get a handshake, Erskine withdrew his hand in a way that seemed intended to give the impression he had never really wanted one in the first place. ‘I’d like to make you an offer.’

‘Pretty sister you’d like me to meet?’

‘Actually, I—’

‘Oh, no, should have known. I’m looking at a hardened gangster. You want me to throw a fight.’

‘No, it’s—’

‘I get it,’ said Sinner, taking a swig of gin. ‘You’re going to be a heavyweight. Need me to find you a good trainer.’

‘In fact I know nothing about boxing, Mr Roach. I am a scientist.’

‘How fascinating,’ said Sinner.

‘May I explain?’ The boy did not immediately respond, so Erskine continued: ‘It’s very kind of you to hear me out. I’ll be extremely brief. For the last four years I’ve been busy with the study of insects. There is very little I don’t know about beetles. But I’ve had enough of beetles now. I want to study human beings. And you are the human being I have most wished to study, ever since I first learnt of your very unusual physiology.’

‘You mean I’m a short-arse?’

‘Yet by all accounts a combatant of remarkable strength and skill. And your father, they say, is equally diminutive, and his father before him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And only nine toes, if I’m not mistaken?’

‘What’s your “offer”?’

‘May I sit down?’

‘No.’

‘Mr Roach, I would like to give you fifty pounds in exchange for permission to conduct a thorough medical examination and interview every month for a period of five or six months. After that, you would never have to see me again, and you would be kept anonymous in any resultant literature.’

‘Fifty quid to prod me like one of your earwigs?’

‘I can assure you that the examinations would not be unpleasant.’

‘What the fuck is this?’ said Sinner, raising his voice for the first time. ‘You think I need your fucking fifty quid? I’m going to be flyweight champion of the world. I’m not on the fucking dole.’

‘A hundred pounds, then.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Two hundred. Mr Roach, you do not realise how perfectly you. … No one can take your place, sir. Wouldn’t you like to accompany your sporting triumph with a scientific one? I hope that my humble work will make at least some tiny contribution to a project which will, without a doubt, be of wonderful lasting benefit to our whole race. The finest minds of Europe and the United States are coming together to—’

‘What are you going on about?’

‘Eugenics, Mr Roach. Have you heard of it?’

‘Is this cunt boring you, Seth? Pardon me, I mean “this gentleman”.’ Kölmel chuckled. He stood in the doorway holding a cigar. Like Frink, Kölmel was stocky and flat-nosed, but fatter and balder than his cousin. ‘That was a hint, mate,’ he added.

‘Is there any chance you might reconsider?’ said Erskine quietly to Sinner.

‘Fuck off back to your beetles.’

‘Very well. None the less, I shall leave my card on the table, in case you should have a change of heart. Goodbye, gentlemen,’ said Erskine, and went out.

‘Why are you wearing a fucking overcoat on a day like this?’ Kölmel shouted after him, but there was no reply. Kölmel turned back to Sinner. ‘Who was that?’

‘Some fucking bum-boy toff.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Put me in a freak show.’

‘You should have someone on the door here, Sinner.’

Sinner shrugged.

‘Anyway, came to give my congratulations.’

‘You taking the piss?’

‘You were murdering him, son. You could see his knees tremble. That’s what counts. Pock joking about at the end like that, that don’t come into it. You know Joe Schmeling actually won a title claiming a foul? They say his trainer had a cup with a big dent in it, kept it in his pocket every day just in case. Came good that time – slipped it in the cunt’s shorts like a conjurer.’

Sinner was seven years old when he first met Albert Kölmel, helping his father pack up the vegetable stall on a Saturday night in February. Until 1927 Kölmel still made his rounds personally, but even back then he behaved as if Spitalfields Market was his alone, strolling around like a factory owner inspecting his machines. One hand held a cigar and the other was permanently clenched into a fist, and the young Sinner was thrilled to think that Kölmel was always so close to knocking someone’s lights out that it wasn’t even worth uncurling his fingers. Only later did he realise that inside the fist was hidden, implied, Kölmel’s weapon of choice: a razor blade stuck into a wine cork, about an eighth of an inch of steel protruding, a sharp tongue, enough to scar a man’s face but not enough to kill him. A man like Kölmel would be an idiot to carry a knife or a gun or anything else that
could get you caught and hanged if something went wrong – better, if you really had to punish a man, to hold him down and cut deep into his upper lip, so that later, when the scar tissue formed and pulled the lip upward, his mouth would be permanently twisted open. Or there were other pranks, without the blade. Once Bryan Harding had tried to make Kölmel pay full price for his portion of fish and chips, so Kölmel picked up Harding’s cat and threw her into his deep fat fryer.

‘This your boy?’ Kölmel had said on that February evening.

‘Here,’ said Sinner’s father, passing Kölmel five shillings without meeting his eye.

‘What’s your name, son?’ Kölmel said to Sinner, who was sorting mouldy turnips from good ones. Around them were the scavengers: first the very poor, the very mean and the very old, who would wait until the end of the day to get the unwanted produce for the lowest prices, and then the homeless, the crippled and the mad, who would scurry along to gather up the detritus on the ground, looking for squashed fruit and vegetables, cardboard for bedding, and bits of broken wooden boxes that would help to make a fire. To Sinner, a market like this was just a ceaseless battle against decay, a mere waiting room for the huge rubbish dump on Back Church Lane: squint for long enough against that high wind of putrefaction, and surely before long it would begin to blow years from your own life, so you’d start to smell rotten yourself; better to work in a chemist’s or a sweet shop, where the shiny pellets in the glass jars could be nine centuries old for all anyone knew. At the same time, there was something lovely about the market in the early mornings, when he was rarely here: everything ablaze with freshness but nobody much around, like the beginning of creation. Except that, at the beginning of creation, God had not yet even conceived of a creature like Albert Minyo, who could shout nothing but ‘Saveloys! Saveloys! Saveloys! Saveloys! Saveloys! Saveloys!
Saveloys! Saveloys! Saveloys! Saveloys! Saveloys!’ eight hours a day for thirty years.

‘My name’s Seth,’ Sinner had replied.

‘You got any brothers and sisters?’

‘Anna’s my little sister.’

‘I’d like to meet her. Well, see you again, Seth. Much obliged, Mr Roach,’ said Kölmel, patting him on the shoulder.

After Kölmel had gone, Sinner knew from his father’s expression not to ask who the man was or why he was taking money; but a few weeks later, when Alfeo turned up on a Sunday with plasters on both sides of his face, Sinner felt almost sure it had something to do with Kölmel. (Sinner didn’t know that, if you had asked Kölmel, he would cheerfully have assured you of his purposes: the money would help to prevent dirty new immigrants from setting up in the market to compete with the established stall-holders.) Either way, he couldn’t help seeing Kölmel as a benevolent figure, particularly since Alfeo loved to give Sinner a hard cuff over the head whenever he went near Alfeo’s cakes. And he didn’t mind seeing his father get humiliated. Intimidation was a kind of conquest, and Sinner liked conquest.

By the time Sinner was nine, he was working for Kölmel at the wet docks. Clutching a rinsed-out petrol can and a ‘rum pipe’ (a few inches of metal pipe glued to a foot of rubber tubing), he and another Whitechapel boy would creep down to the creaking wooden platforms where barrels of rum or port were being unloaded. There, with the other boy on lookout, he would ‘suck the monkey’: jam the metal end of the rum pipe under the barrel’s stopper, suck on the rubber end until liquid began to flow, fill the can, replace the lid, and wait while the other boy filled his own can; then they’d run off – snatching a lime or a banana or even a pineapple from a crate on the way, dockers spitting curses as they passed – slow down after a couple of minutes to walk panting and giggling through Limehouse, and swap their cans with one of
Kölmel’s men for a few pence when they got home. That was how Sinner got his first taste of anything stronger than the froth on his father’s ale. It made you grimace, but if you drank enough it felt like discovering an entire hidden room in your own house that you’d never even known about. You wanted to do more than poke your head through the doorway. You wanted to take its dimensions.

When he needed someone beaten up, Kölmel didn’t use anyone younger than fifteen or sixteen because they weren’t strong enough and they got scared off too easily – and by the time Sinner was twelve, and everyone could see that he was already the strongest boy on his street and that he wasn’t scared of anything, Frink had made his claim on him. But Kölmel had won such a fortune betting on Sinner’s first few Premierland matches, back when no one but his cousin had guessed quite how good this midget newcomer was, that he still saw Sinner almost as an employee, and was officially ‘taking an interest’ in the boy’s career. That meant his men wouldn’t extort any more money from Sinner’s father, even though Sinner told them they were welcome to. Kölmel really only ran his old protection racket for sentimental reasons, anyway – from what Sinner had heard, a hundred times more money now came from whores and marijuana and forged cheques than could possibly be monkey-sucked with a razor threat from the stale loaves and squishy apples and gnarled pigs’ feet of the failing Spitalfields Market.

‘What’s next for you, then?’ said Kölmel in the dressing room. Here they were, today, with Sinner slumped in his green throne and Kölmel standing there like a supplicant; it didn’t reflect how things really were, but it still gave Sinner pleasure.

‘I want to go to America,’ Sinner said. ‘New York City.’

‘I mean your next fight.’

‘Don’t know. Ask Frink.’

‘What do you want to go to America for?’

‘Proper money over there. And you get treated like royalty, they say.’

‘Tossers, Americans. Except my half-brother.’

Sinner shrugged again. He thought of his father, whose journey from a village in eastern Poland had ended at the Jewish shelter on Leman Street only because he’d been thrown off the ship that was going to take him to the United States.

‘You’re talkative tonight, ain’t you?’ said Kölmel. ‘Got a girl waiting?’ He was ugly when he smiled. ‘Course you do. Give her a good hard one from me, son.’ Kölmel didn’t know what Frink knew.

After Kölmel left, Sinner drank a little more gin, got dressed, and then telephoned for a cab to take him from Bethnal Green to Covent Garden.

AFTER THE DAY’S ROUTINE SPEND YOUR EVENING AT
The Caravan
81 ENDELL ST.
(Corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, facing Princes Theatre)
Phone: Temple Bar 7665
London’s Greatest Bohemian Rendezvous
said to be the most unconventional spot in town
ALL NIGHT GAIETY     Dancing to Charlie

PERIODICAL NIGHT TRIPS TO THE GREAT
OPEN SPACES, INCLUDING THE ACE OF SPADES, ETC.

The West End was littered now with these little cards, but Sinner had heard about the Caravan’s opening straight from its founder, Will Reynolds, a gambler, boxing enthusiast and well-known Soho rake who had been determined to make the worst possible use of a £300 inheritance from a Presbyterian great-aunt. The basement club was decorated in a nonspecific oriental style, with lacquered furniture, red hanging lanterns and painted silk drapes. Tonight, as every night, it was teeming. The band played ‘When I Take My Morning Promenade’. Later there would be a drag show.