Joe Speedboat (24 page)

‘Islam Mansur,' he said. ‘That's our man, the ab-so-lute king of arm wrestling. Only one metre seventy-seven tall, but oh what a monster. What do you think, might that be something for Frank the Arm, just by way of something to shoot for?'

We both laughed in relief at that: from Hennie Oosterloo to Big King Mansur, that was a good one. I couldn't wait to see him in action, though: Islam Mansur, the Libyan who beat heavyweights with ease. During our training period Joe had regularly come up with tidbits of information about him: he was said to have been born in a tent in the Sahara, but the date and year were unclear. He had discovered arm wrestling in the Foreign Legion, while stationed in Djibouti. In cafés he had sometimes won from four men all at once. After his second tour of duty he left the Legion and started bodybuilding in Europe. Arm wrestling was something he did just for fun, on the side, and it was with the same nonchalance that he became world champion. Mansur was a hero in his own country, but these days he lived in a Marseille suburb. It excited me just to
hear his name; I associated him of course with Musashi: Islam Mansur was the Arm Saint who, just like the Sword Saint, had never lost a contest.

We stopped at a Shell station. The Oldsmobile was a guzzler, so we'd be pulling into plenty of gas stations before this trip was over. In the outside mirror I saw Joe put the nozzle in the tank and turn his head to watch the digits roll around on the pump. A couple of minutes later he stuck his head in the window.

‘You want something to drink, Frankie, or a Mars bar or something?'

I watched him as he went into the station. Again I felt that empty melancholy I'd been having lately, whiny feelings, as though something bad had happened. Like now, when my eyes suddenly started smarting at the sight of Joe's jeans sliding off his hips. His trousers were always loaded down with all the things he had in his pockets, so full they almost fell off, but at that given moment, when the sliding doors opened and he passed through between the cut flowers and the windscreen fluid, I couldn't help being moved. There was a connection with the Strategy of Becoming Stone. Strangely enough, since I had started trying to achieve greater distance from P.J. things, I actually felt moved much more often. Sometimes I experienced things as though they were already in the past, and then I got this way. The rest of the time, though, I was like stone. Or tried to be. Which was hard work.

Joe came back and climbed in.

‘If you need to piss, just tell me, OK?'

The Oldsmobile's lazy motor made a deep thrumming that worked its way up through your tailbone. We only braked again when we got to Maastricht, because for some crazy reason the motorway there was interrupted by stoplights – after that
there were signs saying that Liège was only twenty-seven kilometres. I was having trouble keeping my foot still.

‘You need to go to the toilet?'

I shook my head. Neither of us said anything for a bit.

‘It's only a game,' he said then. ‘All a game. If we come home with a good story, that's plenty.'

We looked at each other and smiled the way old people do at a shared memory. The only thing I wondered was: what made something a good story? Going down in disgrace in Liège was definitely not one of them. There was more at stake here. Something that had to do with believing, about whether we could turn an idea into flesh and blood, whether we were slaves or masters, even about ‘fighting for survival, discovering the meaning of life and death, learning the Way of the Sword', as the
kensei
says.

We drove into Liège. I was jittering terribly now. Joe asked for directions a few times in his schoolbook French, and the closer we came to our destination the worse the nervous cramp in my limbs became. We were really going to do it, and no matter how many matches I lost that day, I was going to sit down at a metal table and pit myself against men I'd never seen before. Joe repeated the last set of directions he'd heard and steered the car – generally known in Lomark these days as ‘Speedboat's grave-mobile' – down the gloomy streets. We took a wrong turn, Joe tried to remain calm and murmured, ‘Three times to the left is also right.' He seemed as nervous as I was. OK, not quite, but definitely nervous. He had a lot riding on this.

One hour before the tournament started we got to the Metropole Café with its meeting hall for billiards, darts, dance parties and arm wrestling. It took us a long time to find a spot that was big enough for the Oldsmobile. Parked around the café I saw number plates from France, Germany and England.
My left arm had convulsed into a stick, the other one kept twitching up and down, making it look at times like I was doing the fascist salute.

Joe rolled me across the street, up onto the curb and through the swinging front doors. We found ourselves in a narrow hallway with a set of stairs going up in front of us and the open door to the café on our right. Behind the bar a man with an oversized moustache was polishing the mirror. Joe asked the way, he pointed up. I tilted myself out of my seat and began climbing the stairs. Step by step, I worked my way up. Joe had folded the cart and was carrying it up behind me. By the time I got to the top the sweat was running down my back – all beer and tobacco toxins leaking from my pores. The stairwell was filled with the odour of smouldering cigars and old carpet.

I found myself in a shadowy entranceway with brown panelled walls. At the end of it a door opened and a wave of noise came rushing out. We heard the tinkling of glassware, raised voices and heavy objects being slid across a wooden floor.

The meeting hall was a low room with dozens of chairs scattered around, and there were at least a hundred people in there. A mist of cigarette smoke hung just below the ceiling. I saw tattooed men with bulging muscle groups beneath their tight mesh vests and sleeveless T-shirts. At the centre of the room stood the altar of this fringe cult: the metal table with its upright pegs. Joe went looking for the organizers in order to sign in. I squeezed the armrest of my cart to stop the uncontrollable jerks rolling through my body. Oh cigarette, oh beer . . . I didn't seem to remember anything about having come here of my own free will. When Joe came back I gestured for a cigarette, he lit one for me and wedged it between my lips.

‘Knock-out system,' he said. ‘Lose once and you're finished. They start with the lightweights, then the big boys. The betting
begins right before you do, and you start on “Ready? Go!” How you doing?'

I nodded.

‘You start against . . . look here, Gaston Bravo is the guy's name. I heard someone say he's a hometown boy, so don't let yourself be distracted by the cheering. I'll help you onto the stool, all you have to do is concentrate on that first match. Tut-TUT, OK?'

He took the cigarette from my mouth and knocked off the ash. Waiters were running back and forth with trays, everyone was talking loudly to be heard above everyone else who was talking loudly, the atmosphere was like a sideshow. Right before the first match started the noised swelled even further, two men left the crowd and sat down at the table. There was some heavy betting going on. The referees assumed their positions on both sides of the table, and at ‘Ready? Go!' the men went for it. The room was too small for the noisy tempest that burst loose then, it was enough to wake the dead. One of them was obviously a bodybuilder, the other a stocky farmhand with a tanned, healthy face. I was pleased to see the farmhand win the first match; he hadn't looked like the strongest of the two, and it was in my own interests that appearances be deceiving.

The ease with which he won threw the bodybuilder into a poisonous rage, the same kind that overcame Dirk whenever someone got in his way. The second round took longer, but the farmhand won again and went on to the next round. The loser stalked out of the room, pushing a slender, good-looking girl rather heavy-handedly toward the door.

There were another five contests to go before it would be my turn. I saw crude-bodied, potato-faced bastards who you could tell had ploughed on through to this competition table by means of dirty schoolyard tricks, men whose entire lives had
consisted of leaning on others, of which arm wrestling was the literal expression. Those who lost had to stifle their swagger for the moment, but you sensed that would be only temporary; before long, to salvage their injured self-image, they would be blaming it on the bad shape they'd been in that day, on a cheating opponent or a referee who was blind as a bat. And their wives and children would go along with the ruse, to avoid incurring worse.

Well OK, maybe they weren't all that bad, but half of them were for sure. It was a pleasure to see a number of them hit the table.

‘You ready?' Joe asked at one point.

Yes, that's why we'd come – for a moment I thought about refusing, or about throwing the match right away. Joe pushed the cart up to the table. It grew quieter, we could feel the people around us hesitating about which of us was the wrestler. And if it was Joe, what the hell was I doing here? When I lifted myself out of the cart, leaning on the stool for support with one hand, a whisper ran through the ranks and grew in volume as Joe helped me onto the hot seat.

‘
Mesdames et messieurs!
' the announcer reverberated, ‘
François le Bras!
'

François le Bras, was that me? Apparently it was, because he went on to announce the other man as Gaston Bravo. I looked at Joe, he was laughing. What a scream. The only problem was, my opponent didn't come to the table. I could see him in the front row. I knew it was him because the other men were pushing him forward.

‘
Allez, Gaston!
'

I made a quick estimate: an immigrants' son, too young to have worked in the mines and therefore now holding down some menial job (later I heard that he worked on the line at a
munitions factory in Liège). He was what they called ‘good looking' (black hair slicked back and big, sentimental eyes).

One of the judges went to see what was keeping him. Bravo pointed at me and gesticulated wildly. I understood, he didn't want to go against me. Not against a wheelchair case, the same way footballers wouldn't want to play against a girls' team. I tried to make eye contact with Joe, who signalled to me to stay calm; confusion worked to our advantage. After some coercion, Bravo came to the table. He didn't meet my gaze, just sat down and planted his elbow in the box. I did the same and seized his hand. It was a frightened hand, and a wave of disappointment rolled over me. Because of his opponent, the man sitting across from me was no longer taking the game seriously. It was painful and insulting. I had counted on plenty of setbacks, but not this one. I kept myself from looking to Joe for support, I had to do this on my own.

‘Ready . . . Go!'

I struck hard, to avenge the insult. He was already halfway to defeat by the time he seemed to wake with a start and tried to resist, but it was too late: 1–0. The howling of the crowd was terrible to hear, they had all put their money on Bravo, they egged him on with the fury of floor traders at the stock exchange. For the second round, Gaston Bravo seemed prepared to do things differently.

‘Ready . . . Go!'

And there he was, his hand on top. He certainly had impressive biceps, my, and oh, such a finely sculpted torso to put behind them; I had to surrender almost ten degrees, but that was it. Without anger I forced him slowly and without a smidgen of doubt onto the table. Then I held his hand beneath mine for a couple of tormenting seconds before letting go. François le Bras 2–Pretty Boy 0. My first official victory, and I
felt no joy. He hadn't looked me in the eye once, he hadn't evaluated me as a person but as a defect, and I had defeated him with the power of hatred. I think he didn't even care; my entire person was
hors concours
to him.

‘François le Bras!' Joe crowed, ‘the man of the hour! He didn't have a goddamn chance, not a chance . . . What's wrong?'

I averted my gaze, which was full of rage and frustration. Joe gasped.

‘You don't get it, do you? He wins his first fight and he's disillusioned about the way it went . . . Frankie, listen to me, the only reason we're here is
because
you're in a wheelchair, do you understand? Without that thing you would never have had a miracle arm, it's a direct result
of
, so if some prick draws that to your attention in his own pricky fashion, that's nothing new to you, is it? Think about the Strategy! Jesus, by the time they get used to a guy in a wheelchair it's already one–nil! You just fought against some dickhead from the barbell club and you kicked his ass! Would you please try to understand that?'

I tried to smile. Maybe I shouldn't resent being seen as a freak in these surroundings. Maybe I needed to make that my forte. A bitter pill, but there you had it. ‘Today is victory over yesterday's self, and tomorrow is victory over what you are today' –
Go Rin No Sho
. When would I really start understanding things like that, instead of just toying with the words because I found them so impressive?

‘You want a beer?' Joe asked. He could see that the arm had started shivering again.

Yes, I wanted a beer, and again I felt that fathomless friendship.

The next match was against the farmhand I'd seen doing his stuff earlier. His kind of strength was different from that of
Hennie Oosterloo or Gaston Bravo: more sinewy, as though he could keep it up for hours without getting tired, like a pack animal. The only thing was – and I noted this with a mixture of triumph and regret (because he seemed like such a nice guy) – it wasn't enough. I crushed him in less than one minute. He sort of smiled, slid around on his stool until he was comfortable, then put his arm back in the box for the second go. Once again, I got on top right away.

‘You must learn the spirit of crushing as though with a hand-grip.'

Again I pushed through his resistance.