by Takis Würger
“Do you think I’m fat?” she asked.
“No.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“You’re far too young for me, Greyhound.”
“Why?”
She took my head in her hands and kissed me.
“Do you think you could ever find me repulsive?” She looked at me closely. There—in the blink of an eye the darkness had returned.
“No,” I said, and kissed her naked belly. “What goes on at the Pitt Club?” I asked.
“Not now,” she said, and turned away.
We had breakfast in the village—an omelette, with chives sprinkled on it—then got in the car. Near the sign at the entrance to the village Charlotte stopped by the side of the road, got out and hugged an apple tree. She stood like that for a long time, her cheek against the gray bark.
She’s broken, I thought.
Eventually she got back in the car and we drove, too fast, back to London.
Charlotte
My mother wasn’t like my father. She believed that unearned wealth could corrupt a child’s soul. When I was fourteen she got me a job doing a paper round, although I hadn’t asked her to and would far rather have spent all my days riding and eating lemon tarts.
It wasn’t actually newspapers I was delivering, but leaflets advertising a Caribbean restaurant that belonged to my nanny’s brother, and because hardly anyone living in Chelsea had a taste for black beans I distributed these leaflets once a week in East London, in an area where, back then, there weren’t yet any hipsters. I got three pence per leaflet. At first I walked these eastern streets with a pounding heart, but after a few days I lost my inhibitions, and when I finished work I would sit with the big black women in the restaurant kitchen eating all that was put in front of me, listening to reggae and plucking the little feathers from chicken wings, which the women then slid into bubbling fat.
By the time I was sixteen I had plucked countless chickens, slept with the restaurant owner’s son, and learned that life had more to offer than lemon tarts. The white façades of Chelsea began to bore me. When I left school I wanted to cut sugarcane on a farm in Jamaica, then study in London and live in the East End, all the things you imagine doing when you’re young and think it doesn’t matter where you come from.
Then my mother died. In the last days of her illness she couldn’t move her arms or legs any more. A few weeks before the end, when she could still speak, she called me to her bedside one evening and said she was happy with the life she’d led, and could die in peace only if she knew I’d look after my father. He was so alone, she said. I cried for a long time and sat beside her bed all night because I didn’t want to let her die. The next day I promised to look after him, and she died less than two months later.
After that my father more or less stopped speaking. The only times he really talked to me were about studying at Cambridge. He told me about the big ball at the end of the academic year and how he would dance at it with me.
I wanted to make him happy again. I applied to Cambridge, and when we heard I’d been accepted I saw him cry for the first time in my life.
I resolved to steer clear of the snobs and lead a normal life. I thought that this was doable.
Hans
Back in Cambridge I spent a few days in the library, but I couldn’t concentrate because I kept looking at my mobile, waiting for a message from Charlotte. Then I went to a training camp for the university boxing team. The trainer loaded us all onto a bus and drove us out for the weekend to a barracks half an hour outside town, in the middle of the Fens.
Out of two hundred students who had signed up in October because they wanted to box for the university, seventeen were left.
We jumped rope in an empty hall. A coach in a peaked cap walked up and down between us. We all knew that a year ago he’d still been in jail. From time to time a fast-moving steel rope would clip him and he would ignore it. The students called him Priest. I thought it was a religious reference until someone explained it was the word for the metal club anglers used to hammer fish to death. Priest had spent three years in Whitemoor Prison for robbery; since his release he’d been working for the head boxing coach as an assistant trainer.
The match against Oxford was in three weeks. “Twenty days,” bellowed Priest. The ropes hummed. Everyone knew the nine boxers who had made the team would be announced after this weekend. I counted the drops of sweat splashing onto the concrete in front of me. Josh skipped beside me, grimacing. When he saw I was watching him, he winked at me. I thought Josh would probably get to box; even with three broken ribs he was good. There was one boxer, a lightweight, who I was sure would make the team: Michael Foster, a former American paratrooper who seemed to be skipping twice as fast as everyone else. Everyone called him Magic Mike. It was Billy who’d dubbed him that, in reference to a Hollywood film about a male stripper. I was pretty sure Billy had come up with the name because he didn’t like Foster. Magic Mike was a devout Baptist who went to church every day, was married, and apparently didn’t dance because he believed dancing was an expression of lust and therefore displeasing in the eyes of God.
Billy was skipping heavily. I hoped he’d make it onto the team. The other heavyweight was a Zambian guy; he couldn’t box, but he could bench press a hundred and eighty kilos and jump a meter in the air from a standing start.
Beside Priest stood a huge man in uniform. His boot caps shone. I marveled that it was possible for anyone to have such a big head. The man stood with legs akimbo, hands folded behind his back.
“Drop the ropes,” he shouted.
His voice was even louder than Priest’s. He had a moustache, and his neck was shaved so close he’d scraped off the top layer of skin in places. His uniform was stretched so tightly across his sternum you could see the vest underneath, and his chest was decorated with medals of honor for service in Afghanistan and Iraq. I could see that his hands trembled slightly, though he either kept them in motion or held them behind his back. He took a deep breath.
“Boxers. I am Wing Commander Victor Sprat from the Royal Air Force. That’s Wing Commander to you. I’ll be leading the training today. We’ll be doing the RAF obstacle course. It will be hard. You will feel pain. Ignore it. Pain is not important when you’re going into the ring against Oxford in twenty days’ time. You’ll remember this fight for the rest of your lives. You will want to be able to say on your deathbed: ‘I gave that fight everything I had.’
“Come closer, men. You’ve been waiting for this fight. I’ve been in more fucking countries than anyone in this room and I’m telling you, not everyone understands English in Afghanistan but they all understand the food chain. The day has come when you’ve got to decide: are you the predator or the prey? This doesn’t mean you go blundering into the ring like it’s the Middle Ages. You go in there nice and quiet, then you turn into the ugliest beast there is. Understand?”
“Yes, sir!” yelled Magic Mike.
I stared at the wing commander’s neck, where a vein was bulging and throbbing. I hoped that on my deathbed I wouldn’t be thinking about a boxing match.
For the next few hours we crawled under barbed wire and shinned up ropes and over walls. The sun shone on the fen outside the barracks; it was a beautiful day. In my mind I was with Charlotte in the old house in Somerset. The wing commander ran up and down beside me, yelling.
I was in the best shape of my life. Only one wall gave me problems because I was too short. Every time, Billy reached down and pulled me up. He didn’t look good. He was too heavy for exercises like this; his lungs whistled as he breathed. The Zambian sprang over the wall as if it were a warm-up. The wing commander stood alongside, yelling so loudly in his enthusiasm that strings of saliva flew from his lips. Three hours in, Billy twisted his ankle and was lying there in the mud. The wing commander bent down and screamed in his face, “Come on, Fatso, you don’t get this handed to you on a plate like at your poncey uni.”
Billy w
as probably the poorest student I knew. He lived in a tiny room in his college, always wore the same pair of jeans and had a chip butty for dinner almost every evening because it only cost a pound. He once asked me if I could lend him a fiver to pay for the tea we often drank together after training.
The wing commander kicked him in the lateral abdominals with his polished boots and said, “Get up, you spoiled brat. Get up or die.”
Billy lay motionless on his back. The wing commander bent down and whispered something in his ear. I thought for a moment he was about to spit on him.
The straight right punch came out of nowhere, catching the wing commander on the chin. He fell forward and hit the ground face first, medals in the mud.
“Boom,” said Josh quietly.
Billy left that evening. I walked him to the barracks gate. He was crying.
“Priest wanted me to stay, but the fucking wing commander said if I didn’t go he’d have me arrested for hitting an officer. I’m out, Hans. They’re not going to let me fight.”
I put a hand on his shoulder.
“That was a great punch.”
“Do you know what he whispered in my ear?” Billy asked.
I shook my head. Billy started to hiccup.
“‘Your kind are always the first to die, you rich faggot.’”
I hugged him. Billy held me tight, and I felt his chest heaving with every sob. Out of two hundred students who had signed up in October because they wanted to box for the university, sixteen were left.
Peter
Alarm: 7 a.m.
Sport: 50 press-ups, 2 planks 30 seconds each, 40 squats
Masturbation: once in bed, once in the shower
Breakfast: instant noodles with jiaozi
Motto of the day: Opportunities multiply when they are seized.
Aim of the day: Survive the Adonians; make contact with the Pitt Club; be the best.
The invitation to the Adonians lay on my desk, handwritten on white card. I had paid another student five hundred pounds to get me on the list. I kept glancing at the invitation as I put on my dinner jacket and fastened the pink bow tie. Pink was appropriate, I thought.
I didn’t know what awaited me, only that the Adonians were a club made up of attractive, rich gay men. What I did know was that the president of the Pitt Club was a professor of mathematics who loved colorful dress handkerchiefs and was married to a man. I was certain that I would meet him at the Adonians.
The invitation said the evening would begin with a champagne reception, and dinner would be served at seven-thirty p.m. I entered the Peterhouse Combination Room at 7:28 p.m. in order to appear interesting. Besides, I can’t take too much alcohol, and I didn’t want to be drunk when the soup was served. The room was illuminated by candles, the tablecloth starched, the air smelling of cedar. I was the only Asian in the room, and the only man in a pink bow tie.
The man beside me was wearing glittering cufflinks. They were hideous.
“Nice cufflinks,” I said.
He introduced himself as Gilly. The cufflinks had originally been women’s diamond earrings that he’d had refashioned by an Indian jeweler in London. We talked a little about our bespoke tailors. When Gilly put his hand on my knee I wondered whether I should smash in his front teeth with my bread plate. For the time being I decided against.
We ate a lukewarm spinach soup, cured pigeon, lamb with green beans, and Eton Mess, a mixture of strawberries, meringue, and cream; however, I was already so drunk by then that I barely registered dessert. I had spotted the math professor at the other end of the room.
When the catering staff brought in the port, a gray-haired man stood up and gave a speech full of metaphors that probably only British people understand. I endeavoured to laugh at the right moments. At the end of the speech the gray-haired man said we could now either go upstairs and drink more Bardolino or go out into the college garden and enjoy the pleasures of Uranus. Everybody laughed; I slapped my knees, wondering whether other people did that as well or whether it was just a manner of speaking when they said a person laughed so hard he slapped his thighs.
A little later I saw the professor of mathematics going out through a door that led to the garden.
I thought of a quotation from Clausewitz I’d once learned by heart for my exams back home in Beijing: “The end for which a soldier is recruited, clothed, armed, and trained, the whole object of his sleeping, eating, drinking, and marching, is simply that he should fight at the right place and the right time.” This sentence had so captured me that I had downloaded the complete works of Clausewitz from the internet and learned individual passages by heart. The only thing that bothered me was his death. A pitiful demise, getting cholera from a spoiled piece of Prague ham and falling off a latrine in Breslau a week later, completely dehydrated. Apart from that, I had the feeling that I, Peter Wong, and Carl von Clausewitz had a great deal in common.
I went out into the garden. The professor was leaning back against the trunk of an oak. A young man was busy sucking his member.
“Professor, I would like to put myself forward for membership of the Pitt Club,” I said.
The professor studied me from head to toe and smiled. The student gave me a little yellow flask.
“Inhale deeply,” said the professor.
I inhaled and knew that it was all OK; I repeated the same sentence in my head over and over again on an endless loop and felt extremely clever. I had not been gay until that night, and I will kill anyone who claims I am in future. I didn’t enjoy it, but I knew I was doing the right thing. “War is never an isolated act.”
Charlotte
I put on a pair of ballet tights. It was several years since I’d danced, but I had vivid memories of the Spanish dance teacher my father used to invite to come to the house once a week to teach me and three of my friends. Back then I wanted to go to a normal dance school and dance with boys, like all the other girls, but Father said, “You’re not like all the other girls.” The advantage of having lessons with my girlfriends was that I learned to dance the men’s steps and to lead.
I sat on the top step outside Hans’s room; I’d spread my coat over my legs to keep warm. As I waited I thought about our trip to Somerset. He wasn’t like anyone else. Perhaps that was why I liked him. He was only nineteen, quiet, never funny, too short, shy; yet he made me feel a way I’d almost forgotten. There were moments when he was miles away, even though he was sitting right next to me; most of the time he seemed to be only half there. I’d gone to his bed because I felt like it; I didn’t think emotions were involved. He’d held me, and for the first time in ages I’d felt safe, but at the same time I knew he and I could never be happy together.
The following day I’d called Magnus, met him in Starbucks at King’s Cross and told him I didn’t love him. He didn’t cry. His blond hair sat perfectly. He drank a Frappuccino and said that that was regrettable.
Hans came up the stairs, drenched in sweat to the tips of his hair. He wasn’t bleeding this time. I heard myself sigh.
Every time he came back from boxing training I was afraid his nose would be broken. If he’d been hit hard he would put an ice pack on his face and smile. It was a part of him I would never understand.
When I saw him I felt a tingling in my lungs as if I had breathed in smoke. I kissed him on the lips. He tasted of salt. I felt the heat of his skin.
“Hello, Hans. Do you want to learn to dance?”
“Hello, Charlotte Farewell,” he said. I liked his accent.
He showered and put on a tracksuit. It had cambridge university amateur boxing club written on the back in turquoise letters. I could see how proud he was. He’d made it onto the team. Father still wore his old, faded team tracksuit; he’d had the cuffs replaced twice.
I took Hans by the hand. His palms grew moist; in any other man that would have made me cringe. We went to my flat. I pushed the table and a couple of armchairs aside and stood in front of him in the middle of the room. I took his ri
ght hand and placed it on my shoulder blade. Beneath the polyester of his tracksuit top I could feel his shoulder, hard as wood.
“Can you hear the rhythm?” I asked.
He nodded. I didn’t explain much, I just danced. Light-footed, a simple, slow tango. Hans took small steps; he was better than I’d expected. He danced in white socks; he didn’t notice that he was following and I was leading. I felt his palms grow damp again and looked him in the eye. After a few minutes he stopped, still looking at me.
“What did they do to you?” he asked.
I dropped his hand and sat down at the table. He sat beside me and looked at the tabletop. He would never look at me the same way again after this.
I told him everything.
The envelope with the butterfly seal was in my desk in another room, along with the doctor’s report. I fetched them both.
I told the story as if it were a stranger’s; that made it easier. Hans kept nodding as he read the doctor’s report.
“I’m not a victim,” I said.
He went on nodding, as if my words hadn’t reached him. He took the card out of the envelope and looked at it for a long time.
“It’s nice handwriting,” he said.
“Do you find me repulsive now?”
He kissed my fingertips and shook his head. “You’re the best thing about this place.”
I knew he was saying it to make me feel better.
“I’ve read that most women feel guilty somehow, after something like this,” he said.
“Why should I feel guilty?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry.”
Tears rolled down my cheeks.
“What does this change?” I asked.