But that one early photograph of a man lost in violent exercise, and the label ‘palooka’ had branded me by then, and duly rose again on every anniversary of my family’s disappearance.
Everyone could and many did slice and dice my life apart with their opinions and reactions, often to my face. Naturally the public believed what they read. The old maxim, ‘It was in the paper, on the radio, on tele, it must be true,’ holds sway. After a score of public insults and conflicts in shops, supermarkets and even the library, I took on the daily existence of a recluse, avoiding human contact and possible insult as far as I could.
A directive from on high then said I had to see the Police Psychologist. I refused but then had to obey in order to return to duty and be paid as my compassionate leave ended. The shrink pronounced me fit for non-front line activity. As a compromise, I headed up the newly formed Intelligence Unit, a quiet backwater, and was known in the force and out as ‘palooka’ ever after but never to my face.
Until today. Twice.
34
Round two is more blows ricocheting in even as I feebly try to concentrate, watching the other’s eyes as an indicator of where his fists may go, keeping my guard tight, flicking away most of his jabs, almost warding off a cross which still makes me flinch as it glances off the side of my head guard by my jaw. A flurry of his jabs follow, with another sliding through my defences to glance my chin. I recover in a clinch, I will not let go, despite the odour of dried sweat, powder, and defeated deodorant on my opponent, who sneers insults I cannot decipher as my hearing reverberates pure echo.
I push him away, hard, retreat and dance on. A left jab comes then, followed by a straight right, with a left hook homing in almost immediately. All three bounce off my arms, but their sting is lost in the process. I can feel blood above my eye and bruises blossoming on my face once more. I have still not thrown a punch in anger, let alone landed one. He surprises me then with an unorthodox push punch, getting through and using the bottom side of an open glove so that his laces rub my face and cut my cheek.
I vaguely hear Daniel’s growl of disapproval and catch Edge baying for more of the same to ‘Smash the murdering palooka. Remember what we talked about.’
I clinch again, feeling Jason’s energy levels rising as he struggles to disentangle. He crouches down, bringing his head forward, swinging it left and up so that it strikes me sharply under my chin. My eyes literally fill with stars on a background of velvet darkness even as I avoid his attempt to use the other side of his head as a weapon a second time. I stumble, we break apart on the referee’s order and Daniel barks complaint and disapproval.
The young boxer steps too quickly back, half readies his stance before we face each other squarely once more, and sends a haymaker swinging fresh and wide with all his weight behind it towards the side of my head to finish the bout.
Pain resounds. I am out of my body, watching my battered self as I ease my head away from that killer blow. I almost skip backwards as a cacophony of sound erupts with boos and whistles stringent as the haymaker sails by within inches of my head.
***
The bell rings for the end of the round. Daniel is out in the ring roaring complaint to the referee, Edge and Jason about both the push punch, the illegal head butt and the frowned upon haymaker blow thrown after the referee called break. The official shrugs that all three could have been accidental. One maybe, two unlikely but three? His back to proceedings, my opponent is arrogantly still bouncing on his feet.
Edge, I notice, watches me with a leering contempt. His eye twitches, he rakes his hand across his throat like a knife and whispers to his boxer who turns and jeers with his face.
“Shad na have agreed to their refaree,” Daniel mouths as he helps me back to the corner. “Thought it weird. One ti go. Stop if youse want?”
My ears are screeching with the echoing sound from the blows, but then all is silent. I realise the sounds of skipping, bag punching, medicine balls and exercise have ceased entirely. Everyone is stood around the ring warily watching the contest.
Daniel busies himself with my face and eye as I spit water and blood into a bucket. Jason’s eyes snap on my face like pliers, promising more pain while Edge and his trainer whisper instruction in his ear.
Pain and anger, yet oddly not fear, are in me now even as I force myself to finally plan the next three minutes, hoping I have not left it too late.
***
The bell goes, round three. I mumble to Daniel before he puts my mouth guard in.
“R ye mad boy, you want me to do what, r ya listening ta me at all,” Daniel grunts in disbelief as my eyes focus hard on the here and now.
Finally, he nods as I do not get up until he says, “Tek it to him, I’ll see to the other as ye ask.”
I move slowly, almost laboriously to the centre of the ring as Jason dances forward, his face eager, lips already salivating for the moment when he drops me and the referee stops the fight as too one sided. He and I both know he wants to knock me down or out, to humiliate, not merely to win an overwhelming points victory. All pretence of sparring to give him technical awareness has died.
I roll slowly to the side of the ring near Daniel, and lie back on the ropes, shelling up with my arms and elbows and allowing Jason to throw punches that bounce off my outer cover. I clinch with him, my eyes rolling, and he hisses through his mouth guard, ‘What you deserve, ya murdering bastard.’ Why such venom from someone I have never met or heard of? Without thinking he explains, ‘I’d gladly do it for free.’ He has been paid to do this? He must see I am defeated. My legs almost gone and I need him or the ropes to keep me upright. Or so he needs to think though it may also be true.
My eyes dismiss his threat and him as I lie back again, adopting ‘rope a dope’, as used by the genius Muhammad Ali in his famous 1974 fight against George Foreman, that wonderful fighter now more famed for his cooking equipment. ‘Rope a dope’ tires the opponent out and then exploits his defensive frailties and exhaustion. I do not have long enough to fully wear Jason down, but I can make him over-confident and eager.
In the next clinch, I throatily ask through my mouth guard if he has always thrown ‘Pitty pat punches.’ I am not joking. His efforts are seen more in amateur bouts, racking up points but hardly to the destructive effect of a professional. He is a light puncher. I have never had a glass jaw, but with the sheer weight of blows he has landed, I should be out of it by now.
Control is all now. I clinch, spin him violently round and clumsily throw him off balance as I move away to the centre of the ring, concentrating all my energy as he recovers, follows after. His eyes are less watchful, his dance flatter, his stance less balanced. For him it is almost over, he does not need to finesse any further. He is the paid executioner about to chop off my head and hold it aloft, metaphorically.
My feet are embedded in the canvas as I move slowly, despairingly jabbing long range with my left, then stepping back to evade Jason’s instinctive on-rush to pay back for the impertinence as one and then two of my punches strike home. Why is the old guy prolonging the inevitable? I can see the question in his eyes.
“Finish it,” Edge growls even as he makes a call on his mobile. “Now.”
***
It all comes down to Jason’s sense of easy superiority, you take the weakness, any weakness and play on it. I can take a few blows still, but not too many, weak as they are. I draw Jason to follow me into a neutral corner, clinch, ‘rope a dope’ again. He works with a will but nothing gets through and his punches are more tired now, he has put too much into enjoying the apparent easy demolition.
I clinch, roll him out and off balance again, murmuring an apology even as I push forward so he is hemmed in against the ropes and corner cushion. I hear shouts from the crowd urging me on now. I step back and Jason moves forward again, his feet shuffling eagerly. I just need to punch crisply, keeping each hand to the same power as I have been taught.
Surprise is everything. Suddenly I do n
ot back away, move forward quickly, smashing in a combination of a left hook to the right side of his muscular flat belly, an inside power punch, thudding short and sideways with the elbow bent so the arm is literally the shape of a curled hook. I feel his ribs buckle, his breath driven out of him, even as Sugar Ray Robinson’s ‘candy cane’ punch with my right hurtles to the left side of his body, the fist turning over and downwards for added bite.
Jason stands, gasping, his gloves only mildly protecting his head and face as my left jab deflects his guard away even as the right uppercut thunders in and oh so sweetly catches his chin. His mouth guard spins out, floats all blood and spit haze in a slow motion arc to the scuffed floor. He is down, unable to rise from his knees, with the referee instantly moving to his assistance, waving me away, bout over.
I stagger over to Edge, spit my mouth guard into his bucket and gasp out, “That scrote is ‘The Sweet Science.’ Palooka style.”
I only hear the applause then as Daniel and three others help me to the dressing room. I lay on a bench for half an hour, before spending fifteen minutes under a hot shower, five under a cold one, a statue with water streaming down my face and neck. I crave a beer in a country pub and wonder where I might find one without bringing even more trouble down on myself.
Daniel whispers to me that that they looked as I requested. A photographer and a journalist had crept into the gym during all the excitement, waiting to capture my demise. They had been stopped, held in a corner, stripped of their cameras and dignity.
As I lay on a massage table, I mentally thank Lucinda’s timely warning of media intrusion as Daniel tends to my cut eye and bruised face, with liquids and ointments galore that sting. A masseur is called in from somewhere, softly strokes and sometimes knuckles out my exhaustion and tense pain from head to toe, I can only nod unseeing to those who come to congratulate me.
The crowd had dispensed justice, the masseur says. Edge, his chauffeur, the trainer, corner man, referee, a minder and Jason were thrown out instantly with the boxer’s clothes dumped in a rubbish bag after him. I learn the next day that Edge rings from his hotel to formally complain about my, and the club’s, lack of respect for the chivalry of boxing. Daniel tells him no money will be reimbursed, that he would welcome legal action. ‘Bring it on laddie.’
The gym is empty as I make my way out, past various framed photos of famous boxing moments into the half-lit car park.
My car is in the far darkness. I do not see or sense the figure as I stoop to open my door before I am suddenly falling, dizzily, helplessly, seeing only a dim shape above me. Like a numbing animal trap of old, the hand comes without warning and I am just too weak to resist its iron grip.
Wednesday
35
Midnight is behind me, morning far far away. From the sunlight of my dream, I spin to the sunless land of horror. Phantoms tramp, ogres trudge, like walking corpses in the entombed trench. Distant figures, Bess and Grace dance into my sight, look wistfully back, beckon, point, begin to fade even as I crash into darkness to reach them. The skull beneath my skin reverberates with pain.
Grace’s pleading hands grasp mine, her tiny fresh fingers clinging, whispering ‘Daddy.’ But Bess I cannot see or hear, even as my daughter’s soft touch slips away. Leaves me. Bereft. The skeletal grim reaper, eye sockets staring empty, the scythe of death at the ready, swoops? My pulse accelerates, falters in my swollen iced flesh. Bess and Grace scream to gash my ears. My cry that is not born of man brings forth a figure to hover above my shallow grave.
Hours, days later for all I know, I count the long tedious strikes of the clock. Six a.m. Dream fissured to nightmare and now I have returned to the land of the living and possible sanity.
But where am I gone to? Shapes become clearer. I recognise the place, yet it is strange. I am laid abed, beneath a duvet in my and Bess’ room, not slumped as normal at my desk.
The figure from my recent dream is here, holds my now flailing arms, bids me drink water. His face, I cannot see. The spectre settles back, sits by my bedside, his featureless gaze switching constantly from me to outside through the window.
He speaks my name then and warmth flows through my mind and body. My oldest friend of almost twenty years save for Val.
Embrace ‘the soothing cave of sleep’ as the mellifluous words of Ovid the poet describe. I do. And for once go so deep that no nightmares intrude.
***
Hours later I look to move, feel my head, arms, body stiff, burning, am aware of my face ablaze under a layer of stinging ointment.
Cellos quiver repetitively in unison, a deep sonorous elegance, a majestic undertow that soothes.
My mind slips through to a universe parallel to mine. My friend Jerry lifting me up in the boxing club car park, the smell of brand new leather, a car so quiet I could hear the winking illuminations of its digital dashboard. He bathed and tended me, presumably sat watch, for how long? The bells toll nine, the silver-grey light bright to my pained eyelids.
His voice is soft, almost sultry with pity above the cellos’ warmth, “Watched your fight Caleb. Caught you before you fell in the car park. Daniel and three others were there ready too for possible repercussions. The wee Scot said he thought you had it in you.”
He imitates the rasping Daniel, “Aye, a heavy hitter who can tek light punches, warks it all out, soake it up and strike back. I knews he wod come good.”
My head gives me pained pause as I shake it. Jerry is gone and I float once more. ‘Street Hassle,’ the Lou Reed pop opera we both love rolls on, cellos and orchestra give way to acoustic and bass rock guitars and the final prayer of a penitent man, forged of tears.
Terror strikes and I rise, or make to, as Jerry cradles me in his arms as horror screams, “I cannot see Bess, I cannot see her face any more.”
***
Towards noon I fully wake, rise, go downstairs, slowly, gingerly, wrapped in my massive dressing gown.
Jerry has porridge glowing on the stove, with the embrace of hot coffee brewing and freshly made bread to welcome me back to the land of the living. I sit, spoon my mother’s home-made blackberry jelly in, slowly eat and drink. Raspberry jam sinks into warm bread and I feel almost whole. Almost.
He watches all this like a mother hen, and then leads me upstairs to my Incident Room, insisting that we speak on serious things only in there. He supports me into my deep leather chair at the desk, and sits close on a small stool he clears of files. Our beloved Rolling Stones play softly raucous from my computer. ‘Street Fighting Man’ gives way to irony, “Gimme Shelter’ before he begins as he must, it seems.
Jerry is quietly angry - with me, for his aged gran - even as he points to the computer screen which screams that an update to the alarm system is three weeks overdue for download.
“I know,” I say weakly, stretching my arms and legs, not for sympathy but to see if they still work properly. “I forgot.”
From caring medico to scary boss in moments, “I put in fancy alarms on your house, your car, your Incident Room, and you cannot be bothered to do the monthly updates?”
There is reason for his anger. He announces someone has put listening devices through my wall, one into the kitchen and another into the lounge but none are in the Incident Room.
His voice is even more scathing now, “Must have done it when you were in, with the alarms off, otherwise the exterior lights would have come on, the alarm sounded and the CCTV recorded them. Always set it as you enter. If you activated the checks and updates they would have found these bugs, blocked their Wi-Fi links.”
“I cannot live like a prisoner ….,” I trail off, after all I do live that way. “But why am I worth listening to?”
“The bugs were only inserted on Monday,” he says, “Very effective, transmit up to three miles. Not every day items, heavy duty, if I did not know better I would say a foreign intelligence service or big corporation.”
His words echo with my pain, “Suddenly you are of great interest to someone
somewhere my friend.”
***
I am baffled, need to sleep. ‘Far weltered,’ is beating its rhythm in my mind. The local phrase for sheep that have fallen on their back, cannot get back up and in wintry conditions fade and die. I feel just so, long for that permanent peace.
Yet my family calls. I need to live. For them. To stay awake and think. I need to go to work. A hot then cold shower make me semi-human before I return downstairs, suited and booted, muscles aching, face a mass of yellow and black in places, ready to scare the world.
Jerry is pacing the Incident Room, constantly viewing the CCTV images on his phone from the eight cameras he installed several years ago. I am moved by his concern, brush away a tear, accept his formal hug of greeting now I am human.
I study him for the first time in many a year. We never pay enough attention to our closest friends. Grey flecks are in his crinkly fair hair, his deep brown eyes do not smile as easily as they once did. Life is a serious business for him now. As it was growing up. An orphan boy from Ister, he was brought up by his aged grandmother in a tiny terrace house on the town’s East Marsh. Then a tough area of hard working labourers and their families in row after row of small terraced houses. Now a festering bog of crime, drugs, domestic violence, prostitution, unemployment and people forgotten with hope lost.
Nobody liked books or schooling on Jerry’s estate then, his loving numbers and Maths meant he was genuinely crazy to most and an easy target. Ever sharp Jerry avoided trouble by helping people, kids and grown-ups, with anything involving numbers, calculation and money and so found safety in the services he could offer. Boxing protected me, numbers him. He has never confirmed it but rumour still holds that local crime lord Steve Rankin even tried to recruit the youngster as his book keeper and numbers man.
Bitter Pastoral_A DCI Caleb Cade Crime Thriller of rural Ancaster County. Page 21