by Peter Murphy
‘Don’t look, John, but some old bird is staring holes in you through the window.’
Slowly I eased around in my seat. There was a woman there, sure enough. A tall woman in a wool-knit cap. Mrs Nagle. She averted her eyes and moved off, pushing one of those shopping bags on wheels. Jamey watched her go.
‘Who was that nosebag?’
‘Oh, just the old woman who lived in the woods,’ I said. ‘A weela weela waile.’
Jamey gathered his papers and put them into his schoolbag. As he got up, he slid a large manila envelope across the table. I picked it up and peered inside.
‘What’s this?’
‘One of my stories. Don’t read it now. Wait till I’m out the door.’
He shouldered his bag and left, sharp as a blade in his three-piece suit.
The envelope contained a number of A4 sheets, handwritten and photocopied. I counted out my change and ordered a cup of tea and read through the story.
The Grace of God
by Jamey Corboy
The two o’clock extraction cancelled, so Maurice went back to his book about the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire. When was that? 1972? ‘74? He could remember watching it through fuzzy reception on the black-and-white television set in the kitchen of their old bungalow. It was a tradition, staying up with his dad until the early hours to watch the big fights, the Rumble in the Jungle, the Thriller in Manilla, the Olympics, the sad travesty of Ali versus Spinks.
Maurice lived for boxing. He was barely out of short trousers when he joined the local club, St Anthony’s. They said he was a natural. The old man was proud of him. Not only could he take punishment as well as dish it out, but he loved to train too, the roadwork, the thud of the bag, the smack of the pads, the slappeta-dappeta of the overhead ball, the smell of sweat and leather gloves.
But what he saw one afternoon in Ballo changed everything, left him so shook he never climbed inside a boxing ring again. When his father quizzed him about it, he just clammed up. Said he was done fighting and no more about it.
His mother made no secret of her relief. She’d been a bag of nerves ever since a local boy collapsed and died after a bout in Balinbagin. Fifteen years old. What was the chap’s name? He couldn’t remember. The post-mortem revealed some sort of blood clot on the brain that probably would’ve done him in sooner or later, but you couldn’t tell that to all the concerned parents and protestors who wrote to the papers and lobbied the council about it. As a result, all the amateur clubs in the county came under pressure to make protective gear compulsory.
Like most of the boys, Maurice hated those big bulky headguards. He’d worn them during sparring matches and it felt like trying to fight while wearing a crash helmet. The club’s mentors could only shrug and say they didn’t like it either, but what could they do? The tourney that day in Ballo was one of the last where the boys were allowed to go bare-headed.
The venue was a draughty old school hall. By the time the St Anthony’s contingent arrived Maurice still wasn’t assured of a match, so he tried to relax and watch the junior bouts, red-faced little urchins with snotty noses throwing wild barnyard swings. As the afternoon wore on the boxers got bigger and the quality of the fights improved. Maurice was about to start packing up his gear when Andy, one of the club’s trainers, brought word.
‘We’ve found a lad for you,’ he said. ‘You’d better get togged off.’
The dressing room was cluttered with stacking chairs and kitbags and towels. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and Deep Heat. Maurice got out of his tracksuit and into his singlet and shorts. He could feel his stomach tighten, a tingling around the back of his neck. He thought of Our Lord in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood, and then of the old saying about how you should never bet money on a boxer who crosses himself before a fight, because any fighter relying on the grace of god is a dead duck.
‘Let’s get you bandaged up,’ said Andy, a spry man in his thirties, wiry and small as a jockey, a handy bantamweight in his time. He took two new rolls of bandages from his tracksuit bottoms, tore a hole in the end of one of the rolls, slipped it over Maurice’s thumb and began wrapping the knuckles with practised expertise, swaddling between the fingers, encircling the wrist, tying off the ends.
‘Make a fist.’
Maurice flexed.
‘Too tight?’
‘Nope.’
Andy started on the other hand, talking as he worked.
‘This chap’s name is Timmy Breen,’ he said. ‘He has a few inches on you, so you’ll need to be nifty. Don’t go toe to toe. Jab and move. If you land, don’t stand there like a daw admiring your handiwork. Jab, jab, jab, then a right hook to the ribs. Boom-boom!’
He bounced back on his heels and mimed a flurry of lethal-looking punches.
‘Where’s your gumshield?’
Maurice took it out of his kit bag and gave it to Andy, who slipped it into his shirt pocket.
‘Get warmed up there. Do your shadowboxing. I’ll go see what the story is.’
Maurice danced around the room throwing phantom combinations, monitoring his stance, body angled, guard tight, elbows protecting the ribs, chin tucked in, knuckles touching cheekbones.
Andy stuck his head in the door.
‘You’re on.’
Maurice followed him out into the hall and stood by the ringside, limbering up. The crowd consisted of other boxers and their families and friends, children running around, old lads wrapped up in overcoats, the back-row experts. Andy held the gloves open, big red and white 14oz pillows. Once he was laced up, Maurice clambered onto the platform and slipped between the ropes. The canvas felt hard and unyielding through the thin soles of his boxing boots. The other boy, Breen, was already in the opposite corner, dancing on the spot. He had broad shoulders and thick legs and a ruddy farmer’s face.
Andy rinsed the gumshield in the water bucket and popped it into Maurice’s mouth. The feel of it against his palate always made him want to gag.
In through the nose, out through the mouth.
‘Keep that chin tucked in,’ Andy was saying. ‘He’s got reach, so try and get under his left and work inside.’
Maurice nodded, slapping his gloves together, bouncing on the balls of his feet. The ref climbed into the ring, a bald man in a white shirt. He called both boys together, barked out the rules and sent them back to their corners.
‘Bring the fight to him,’ Andy said, his voice charged with urgency. ‘Good lad.’
The bell clanged. Maurice quickly crossed himself and moved to the centre of the canvas. The ref’s hand was out in a suspended karate chop.
‘Box!’ he barked.
The two boys tapped gloves and began to circle each other. Maurice looked for an opening in the other boy’s guard. He feinted a couple of left jabs, gauging Breen’s reflexes, but something distracted him from getting stuck in.
Out the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a boy about his own age, standing slumped and slack-jawed in the neutral corner, gloved hands dangling limply round his knees, gumshield jutting out from his mouth like one of those Amazonian tribal faceplates. Drool ran down his chin.
A succession of hard jabs snapped Maurice’s head back and then Breen was all over him. It felt like a wall falling in. A right hook to the gut left him winded and gasping for breath. His ears sang, shrill alarm bells jarred by the impact, his brain in scramble mode shrieking fight-fight-fight but all the connections were down, he couldn’t get his guard up. He was dimly aware of Andy bellowing from the corner, instructing him to tighten up his guard.
A blow to the jaw sent Maurice’s gumshield flying and his nose began to spout blood, blood running down the back of his neck like snot, spread all over his face and staining his singlet. The ref stopped the fight to retrieve the gumshield and handed it to Andy to rinse. Breen stood in the neutral corner. The apparition had vanished. The ref grabbed a towel and wiped blood from Maurice’s face and instructed both boys to box on.
Breen came a
t him even wilder, throwing haymakers, determined to finish the job. Maurice barely landed a punch. He threw his arms around the other boy’s arms, trying to get his breath. His gloves were too heavy to lift, scalding tar in his veins. He couldn’t breathe through the gumshield or see through the stinging sweat. They clung to each other like a pair of drunks trying to slowdance, then Breen disentangled himself and hemmed Maurice into a corner and unleashed a barrage of jabs and hooks and uppercuts.
The ref stopped the fight and sent Maurice to his corner.
He sat down hard on the stool and his chest heaved and burned as Andy held his head back and sponged blood from his face and said, Good lad, hushed as though in church. Maurice couldn’t speak, all he could think of was that slow-eyed boy swaying on his feet in the neutral corner.
The referee beckoned both boys back to the centre of the ring and grasped their wrists. Maurice didn’t even hear the verdict. All he could remember was the sinking feeling as the ref let go of his arm. He climbed down from the ring and hurried into the dressing room and sat slumped and dejected on the bench, trying to swallow the lump in his throat. Andy came in and undid the gloves.
‘What happened, son?’ he said.
Maurice couldn’t answer.
He was quiet on the long drive home. The old man appeared at the back door when he got out of the car. Maurice shook his head and the crestfallen expression on his father’s face was too much to bear, so he went straight to his room and lay on his bed, head splitting, the taste of blood in his mouth.
He could still taste it now, more than thirty years later. He put the book away and tried to recall the name of the boy who died in Balinbagin. He gazed into the swirling waters of the spit-sink beside the big green leather chair. There were traces of dried blood under the rim. He removed a packet of antibacterial wipes from one of the presses.
The boy’s name was on the tip of his tongue. Something beginning with O.
He set about scrubbing away the stain.
***
On the way home I decided to take a look at the new African shop Jamey had mentioned. The market square buzzed with Friday afternoon shoppers, cars double-parked all over the place. I walked down Barracks Street, Jamey’s envelope tucked under my arm. The shop wasn’t hard to find. There was a stepladder splayed on a spattered tarpaulin in front of the main window display. A freshly painted sign hung over the door.
AFRO-KILCODY SUPERSTORES
Afro-Euro-Asian Goods
I stepped through the doorway. A dark-skinned man in a colourful shirt stood by the till talking to an old bloke in overalls. The shop swam with strange smells, paint and sawdust and the scorched scent of grain. A drill whined somewhere. There was a table set up near the back where a few young black men in football jerseys and baggy jeans sat around an ashtray, smoking and playing cards.
Under a handwritten sign, Afro-Caribbean Foodstuffs, there were labelled bags of maize and pounded yam, flour and goat meat, ground rice and bunches of coal-black bananas. There was a glass display stocked with videos with names like Panumo and Gazula and Ayefele. A rack of newspapers and magazines: African Soccer, African Expatriate, Black Perspective, Nigerian Trumpet. Brightly coloured bags and prints and batiks depicting tribal scenes. Displays of trinkets and medallions and ethnic jewellery. African drums. Sculptures and statuettes in the shapes of lions and elephants. Rastafarian coloured hats and scarves. Ornamental letter openers shaped like knives, Easter Island faces carved in the handles.
The man on the counter cleared his throat.
‘Can I help you?’ he called over, in a pronounced accent.
I mumbled something about just browsing and hurried back out into the freakish heat.
The moon comes out from behind a cauliflower-shaped cloud, and its super-trouper lunar beam makes the crow glow, a tiny troll dandied up in top hat, spats and cane, ruffling his wings like jazz-hands and (doing a tap dance on the road.
And he opens his beak and sings:
‘Who’s that a-writing?’
IV
It was the bank holiday weekend and there was a disco on in the Rugby Club. Jamey was intent on celebrating the end of his exams and insisted I come along. I waited for him at the gate to the club grounds and watched the big moon glow over the fields until he finally swaggered down the road muttering excuses.
We fell into step with the other shadowy stragglers making the pilgrimage up the long drive toward the lights of the clubhouse. The bass signature of a song boomed and throbbed from the building, growing louder as we approached, drawing us to it like a homing signal.
‘I should warn you, this place is a kip,’ Jamey said. ‘Rugger buggers and bogmen.’
The girl at the booth took our money and the cloakroom attendant tore tickets from a raffle roll, pinned them to the collars of our jackets and handed us the stubs and a couple of dinner vouchers. We stepped into the commotion and heat. Disco lights flashed and blinked and fragments of light refracted off the revolving mirror balls and swam around the walls like shoals of fishes. The music was irresponsibly loud, the air thick with beery smells and body odour and an underlay of piss and disinfectant.
‘See if you can find us somewhere to sit,’ Jamey yelled into my ear, then plunged into the bodies packed three deep at the bar.
The room was a split-level discothèque and lounge area. The mirrored walls were fogged with condensation and the floor sticky with spilled drink. UV light made specks of dandruff glow on people’s clothes. Frugging bodies elbowed into each other. A balding man with hair grown long at the back and a woman in a yellow jumpsuit did the twist. A huge African-looking chap stood in front of the speakers, oblivious to the volume, surveying the floor like some rich rapper checking out the talent from behind a velvet rope. His skin was so black it was almost blue, shot-putter’s shoulders and arms like legs and a barrel chest squeezed into a white T-shirt, hair cropped close to his head. Girls ogled him like they wanted to eat him up, and I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy and awe.
I found a couple of grey stacking chairs and set them up at the edge of the dance floor. Jamey came back with a pint of beer in each hand and two more wedged between his forearms and ribs. He weaved carefully between tables laden with glasses filled to various levels, like receptacles left out for gathering rain, and carefully placed the drinks under our chairs.
The shirt was already stuck to the small of my back. I grabbed one of the glasses and gulped beer and grimaced at the bitter gassy taste and watched the dancers. A man in a swanky blazer-shirt-and-tie combo did a duck-walk. Jamey nodded at a big square-headed lump of a lad dressed in a shirt and slacks. Despite the heat, he had a jumper knotted around his neck. Car keys dangled from his belt loop like talismans for attracting girls. Jamey pumped his knee in time to the rhythms pounding from the sound system.
‘What do you think of this music?’ he shouted.
Some hyperactive dance track, repetitive beats, vocal speeded up.
‘I told you, music’s not really my thing.’
Jamey affected his sceptical look.
‘For someone who claims he’s not interested in music, you seem to pay very close attention to it.’ He shook his head in lamentation. ‘Sometimes I think you were dropped here in a Martian pod.’
Jamey was right, but I couldn’t explain how I felt. Something about music seemed dangerous to me. It felt as though if I wasn’t careful, it might overwhelm my senses, swallow me up.
Sunburned mountainy men slouched on the periphery of the floor, arms folded or hands thrust in their pockets, observing the action like sad silverbacks. Girls strutted and gyrated. Discombobulated lads tried to get their attention by mincing and face-making and throwing mock Travolta shapes. Jamey scrunched up his nose, obviously unimpressed by their moves.
‘You ever notice how posh people can’t dance?’ he said.
I didn’t answer. I’d always thought of Jamey’s family as kind of posh.
There was a guy with crutches sitting
on a corner bench. His right leg was in a cast and his face was pinched and coated in straggly red beard. A white singlet exposed wiry arms crudely tattooed with Indian ink, and he cradled a large bottle of Smithwicks between his thighs. Every so often he used one of his crutches to hike up dancers’ skirts, and they recoiled and cursed at him.
I nudged Jamey.
‘Who’s the gimp?’
‘Billy Dagg. Nasty piece of work.’
‘What happened to his leg?’
‘He got impudent one night upstairs in Donahue’s.’
A sort of window hatch opened beside the bar, and within seconds a queue had formed.
Jamey handed me his meal ticket.
‘Dinner is served,’ he said. ‘I got the drinks in.’
I was going to ask him why they served food this late, but didn’t want to appear like more of a hick than I already was. Something to do with the licensing laws I figured. I lifted my pint and hurried across the floor to get in line for the hatch. The queue shuffled towards the window like convicts on a chain gang. Somebody jostled my elbow, spilling beer over my wrist and hand. I turned and saw the big African-looking bloke towering over me.
‘Howya,’ I said.
He nodded.
I wondered if any girls saw me talking to him, would they think I was his friend and ogle me too. We shuffled forward a bit more.