by Takis Würger
“Nothing.”
“Don’t be stupid. It changes everything.”
He looked as if he were searching for words and failing to find them. How much harder must it be to have this conversation in a foreign language? I put my hand on his cheek.
“I showed you the woman’s steps.”
“I know,” he said.
“You don’t understand, Hans. I was the one leading. You were dancing the tango the wrong way round.”
He’d known all along. I could see it in his eyes.
Charlotte
The morning before the night that changed everything, I was nineteen years old and at the end of my first year. I’d got up early that day because I wanted to go riding. In my pigeonhole in the porters’ lodge there was a thick envelope with no name on it. I turned the envelope over and saw on the back a yellow wax seal stamped with the shape of a butterfly.
I pushed my little finger under the flap and opened the letter without breaking the seal. Inside was a card on which was written, in blue ink and rounded letters, “Charlotte Farewell, we are expecting you. Tonight is your night.”
When I read those lines, I laughed. I wanted a boyfriend, and the note sounded as if it had been written by a man; the writing looked like a man’s, anyway, though I might have been wrong. I’d been invited to a party at the Pitt Club that evening; a girlfriend had begged me to take her, and it was the last big party before the summer holidays, so I’d accepted. The letter probably had something to do with the party, I thought.
That evening I put on one of my black dresses and a pair of ballet tights, because they were tougher than ordinary ones and made your legs look good. I didn’t want them to ladder tonight. My friend came round; we drank vodka with cranberry juice and ice and talked about who might be behind the butterfly seal, and how my friend was going on holiday to the Maldives in the summer and was going to do an internship at Vogue afterwards; her father knew the editor-in-chief. We drank half the bottle and listened to the ice cubes clinking in our glasses.
Outside my window Chapel Court lay bathed in moonlight, paved with little stones. I hadn’t anticipated it, but I was now so happy to have the chance to study here that I sometimes felt I wanted to hug a tourist. It was a warm evening and the air was soft, the way it usually only is in August.
“I’m so grateful to the universe for everything,” I said.
“Let’s party,” said my friend.
The next morning I woke up in a field behind my college. I lay there like a piece of driftwood, unable to remember a thing. When I sat up I saw the blood that had soaked the ballet tights all the way down to the knees.
The morning after that night four years ago, I dug my fingers into the grass and closed my eyes. I hoped that the grass would stop spinning. After a few minutes I got to my feet, walked back to my college on trembling legs and asked the porter for a spare key to my room. He glanced at my torn dress and looked at me as if I were a prostitute.
When I got there I went to the bathroom and threw up in the loo. I washed my mouth out and propped myself up on the basin. I lay down on the floor and tried to remember the previous night. I could see into my room through the open door; the two wine glasses from which we’d drunk the vodka were on the windowsill, but the alcohol couldn’t have knocked me out like that. My memory took me as far as the Club, then it broke off. I felt as if I’d been cauterized inside.
I crawled back into my room, found my phone, and Googled “Cambridge rape.” The third hit took me to the site www.cambridgecrisis.org.uk. It said: Wrap up in something warm and have a hot drink, which will help if you are in shock. I picked up a sweater, pressed my face into it, and hoped the porter wouldn’t hear the screams.
Victims of rape were advised to report immediately to the police. Try not to eat, smoke, wash yourself, change your clothes, go to the toilet, or clean up the scene of the crime. Don’t go to hospital first; go straight to the police. The police would contact the forensics department at Peterborough City Hospital and arrange an examination that would document all traces of rape. The victim would have to file a report.
The victim. That was me.
I curled up on the floor. I remembered watching a documentary about women in Rwanda who’d become pregnant as a result of rape. The program was called something like The Enemy in the Child. The women were ashamed because they hadn’t fought back, and because they thought they had somehow provoked the perpetrators to do what they had done. There must still be flakes of his skin under my fingernails, I thought. I clung to a single thought: I would not be a victim.
I knew the number of the taxi firm by heart. I wanted to go to hospital and get medicine to prevent possible HIV infection. And I needed the morning-after pill as well. I would get through this on my own. I didn’t need the police, I needed a doctor. Something was wrong. The bleeding wouldn’t stop.
Billy
There was an unfamiliar but blissful smell that evening: soy sauce, fat cooling in the deep-fat fryer, sweat, beer, smoke, and blood.
I was sitting in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant called Sing Sing in Hackney, East London, bleeding from the mouth. No idea where exactly the blood was coming from. I’d just had my first fight in the dining room. The tables had been pushed aside and a ring set up in the middle. The kitchen had been converted into a changing room.
A friend had told me about these fights. They took place at night; there was no doctor and no official weigh-in, because the fights were illegal. You wrote a few e-mails to an address your friend had given you, and you met a man who wore a trenchcoat and smelled of peanut butter. The meeting took place in a café in London, and the man looked like an insurance salesman but didn’t talk like one. He said he would find an opponent. He explained that fights took place in warehouses, in restaurants, in backyards in summer, sometimes in private flats. The spectators and the fighters received a text shortly beforehand giving them the place and time. It all sounded very dubious and I knew it wasn’t a sensible thing to do. But if a boxer didn’t box, what was he? Something like alcohol-free beer or decaffeinated coffee. I didn’t want to be like that. For a long time all I knew was what I didn’t want to be. That evening I knew what I did want to be.
My opponent was experienced; he must have weighed at least a hundred and twenty kilos and he called himself “The Baker.” It sounded daft, but you just had to look at the man to see that he was far from amusing.
The fight lasted more than six rounds. I knew I would lose, but I’d been training all year and I wanted a fight. You go into the ring and all you can make out are silhouettes, no faces. The main thing is just to get through it; that’s the only thought in your head. In the front row was a woman in a bikini who was staring at me and stroking a pug on her lap. Why was she wearing a bikini? The brass bell was dull; I liked the sound. I took a lot of punishment; the referee should have stopped the fight. In the breaks between each round I stared at the pug.
After the fight, a few more boxers were warming up in the kitchen; everyone was preoccupied with himself.
I’d wanted to take Hans with me, but I hadn’t dared because I didn’t want to lose in front of him. He was so good.
Recently I’d often wondered whether Hans had turned into someone else. He went to the Pitt Club a lot, cooked meals with Josh, and had started wearing fancy shirts and leather shoes every day. He looked like a twat now. I somehow got the feeling he was embarrassed when we met. Perhaps I’d been wrong about him.
I showered in a side room off the kitchen. A man had given me a hundred pounds cash for the fight; I was planning to spend the rest of the evening in the company of various alcoholic drinks. As the water started falling onto my head, rinsing the Vaseline off my eyebrows, I realized how good I felt.
My head was ringing a bit, but I’d held my ground. I’d landed a few punches against The Baker. My senses had been heightened in the ring: I’d been able to smell the pug, the cigarette smoke, the alcohol fumes; it was insane. I knew that none o
f the spectators were thinking about whether any of us were gay. Poor, rich—didn’t matter. Tonight I was a boxer. While we were still in the ring The Baker had said I was a bloody hard little fucker. No idea what he meant by that, but it sounded like a compliment.
I went back into the restaurant in jeans and a flannel shirt. I didn’t want to watch the other fights because I was too tired and the people in this place made me nervous. They were smoking and yelling at the boxers.
“Hey, Billy. Bloody good fight, my son.”
It was Priest, my coach. He was leaning against the wall by the entrance, smelling of beer and fish and chips.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m a boxing coach. Boxing coaches watch boxing matches. Fancy a beer?”
He patted my face, quite hard, and we left the restaurant. The lights were off, the curtains drawn; from the outside the restaurant looked as if it were closed.
“The other guy must have had at least ten fights already,” said Priest.
I looked at him: leather jacket, slightly drunk, shoulders hunched, chin always lowered. I’d heard from one of the former boxers that Priest had once been England’s great light-heavyweight hope, but when he was twenty-five he had an accident. He’d wanted to go to a disco but the bouncers wouldn’t let him in because he was wearing cream-colored shoes. He decided to climb in over the roof. He was working as a roofer at the time; heights didn’t bother him. He climbed up a fire escape, removed a couple of pantiles, and got into the building from above. Then he slipped, fell three meters, landed on his back, shattered a vertebra in his neck and broke his hip. That was the story, anyway. His friends thought he’d gone home. No one heard him shouting. Two days later a cleaning lady found him when she went up to the attic to get some bleach. Priest had ripped the thermal insulation out of the wall and wrapped himself in it so he didn’t freeze to death. It was January. When he arrived in intensive care he was incoherent and his body temperature was 31 degrees Celsius; they said he’d stopped shivering hours earlier. His doctor said he shouldn’t box anymore because he ran the risk of injuring the cervical vertebra again and ending up in a wheelchair. The following year Priest raided his first kiosk. His weapon of choice was a vacuum cleaner tube.
How I would have loved to walk into the ring against Oxford with this man at my side.
We went to a pub beside the railway. Priest said he knew the area pretty well; he used to do business here. He gave the woman behind the bar a kiss on the cheek and called her Mimi; she was old, peroxide blonde, and looked like a prostitute. He ordered three beers and three gins and told Mimi I’d just had my first fight.
“D’you win?” she asked.
I think it was Nietzsche who once said the best thing about a great victory is that it rids the victor of the fear of defeat. Somehow that’s true of the loser as well.
I stared into my beer.
“Yes,” said Priest, “but not on points.”
We sat there in front of our glasses. I thought about the fight and tried to put the individual rounds in order. In my memory it was all a mixture of sweat, anger, and fear. I drank and looked through the glass. Priest appeared to be thinking of nothing at all, which I thought must be an enviable state.
“D’you know why it’s so hard to make boxers out of you lot?” he asked, as the night wore on. I’d never considered it. Priest took a large swig of his beer.
“You got it all. You got money, houses, gorgeous girlfriends, healthy bodies, you’re all at that fucking uni, in a couple of years you’ll all be driving Bentleys.” I wanted to say something, but Priest went on talking.
“But you ain’t got no anger. You can’t teach people that. I had anger, still got it. The German’s got anger, but he’s not right in the head. You got anger too, son; you’re not like those spoiled softies, I saw that tonight. Win, lose—fuck it. You got fire in your belly. I wanted you to be on the team, almost came to blows with the boss about it. Sorry, mate.”
I leaned back, tipping my bar stool. Priest went on staring straight ahead.
“I don’t give a fuck that you like men, Billy.”
I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, trying not to cry, but my eyes were glistening.
“Is that the reason?”
Priest slammed his glass down on the table.
“Fuck, yeah, that’s the reason. The boss never liked you; now you’ve given him a reason. You would have destroyed that Oxford bastard. The boss is an arsehole. Total pigot.”
“Bigot,” I said, and was immediately ashamed of myself.
“Yeah, fuck you—bigot, then, who gives a shit. Don’t put on your fancy student airs round here.”
I slapped his cloth cap. “Thanks, Priest.”
I didn’t need the team to be happy; The Baker had shown me that. I would watch the match against Oxford; I wanted to be there when Hans won, and I wanted to see the rest of the team lose.
Priest paid for the drinks. “I’ll get it,” I said, but he just smiled and put a couple of notes on the bar.
I gave Mimi a kiss on the cheek. “I’m off soon,” she said in my ear. I winked at her and left.
We staggered down the road for a bit, arm in arm. Priest was singing a song in a broad Cockney accent; I didn’t understand all of it.
“I’m gonna kip round the corner. Still got a few little pigeons in the loft here,” he said.
“Pigeons?”
“Los Taubos,” said Priest.
I walked alone through the streets of London, spat a little blood out onto the pavement and felt good. I was a boxer, a man. A slight drizzle set in, the best weather in the world. I was carrying my sports bag with my damp gloves inside.
Magic Mike
Seven o’clock, the morning of the match. I liked to go to King’s College Chapel before the tourists arrived. I’d been waiting for this day for weeks. I was looking forward to the fight, but right now, more than anything, I was looking forward to eating. I’d lost seven kilos in the past four months. I was sixty kilos at a height of six foot one. The last few weeks all I’d had to eat was boiled chicken breast and eggs. I started salivating at the thought of a slice of toast. The last few days I’d passed out a couple of times; once I woke up on the living room floor. I’d dropped the last two kilos through dehydration. In the past twenty hours I’d had just two sips of water and had spent a lot of time in the sauna. My head was throbbing, but I weighed 59.8 kilos. Amen.
That morning I’d looked in the mirror and all I’d seen was a skeleton. Now I was wearing a black suit and the boxing club tie.
I knelt on the flagstones in front of a painting. The cold floor hurt my knees a bit; that was good. The painting showed the newborn Jesus on his mother’s lap. Jesus looked all plump and cute. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like all the modern church stuff that made Jesus come across like a communist and God like the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, but it was quiet here in the morning and a bad church was better than no church at all.
I believe in an avenging God. Back home in Florida I went to a church housed in what used to be the go-cart track, opposite a bookie for greyhound races. When the preacher found out the walls were fireproof he started burning mansized wooden crosses during services. I thought it was awesome. He preached clutching a wooden hammer he’d bought in a hardware store, shouting through the smoke that God would cast all people who disobeyed His word into the eternal flames. The preacher slammed the hammer down on the altar; I felt the heat and knew there was a God.
God was with me when I stormed Fallujah. Once, two men in front of me stepped on mines and lost their legs. They smelled like grilled meat but a bit sweeter. Since then I’ve lost my appetite for steak. I fought in Iraq for a whole year and the only injuries I sustained were a couple of scratches from kicking in wooden doors. Afterwards I knew that I would dedicate my life to God in gratitude. I was writing the last chapter of my dissertation about the Vatican’s influence on Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph Maria of Austria, the man who w
as emperor of Mexico for a couple of years, cool guy. After university I was going to go back to the States and go into politics.
I didn’t like the boxing team. Priest was a criminal, Josh a psycho, Billy a fag and Stichler a Kraut. They were a bunch of weirdos.
And why did they call me Magic Mike? I watched the film and all I saw was a musclebound homo dancing around waving a welding torch. At moments like these I wanted to give up boxing, but then I realized God had given me this team as a test.
In Iraq I’d learned parts of the Bible by heart, from an old translation Reverend Whitler had given me. It was a leather-bound edition. I was holding it in my hand that morning.
My father had told me that Reverend Whitler had recently burned a Koran during a service and had had to leave town as a result, but I don’t know whether that’s true. All I know is what it says in Hebrews 12: Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.
I would run the race that was set before me. I would fight the good fight. I stood up; a sprinkling of dust clung to my knees. Outside the chapel I turned my on cell phone and found a message from Priest: Ready, Magic?
I was ready. I’d always won all my fights. In the army in Iraq, and in the boxing ring: seven victories, no defeats. The weigh-in was at midday. I would walk into the ring tonight and win. Beforehand I would eat five cheese sandwiches and a big bowl of Cocoa Krispies. Right now I wanted to go home and sleep with my wife, maybe father my first son, God willing.
Billy
The morning smelled of the dry wood of the wall paneling, of the unwashed clothes on my floor, of being at home.
I was still half-asleep when I heard the phone. I reached down beside the bed and pulled it out of my jeans. I felt a bit dizzy.
Priest’s voice on the line was soft, which made me uneasy. I’d never heard him like this. It was the day of the Varsity match; my ticket was pinned to the board above my bed. He was talking too fast; he said a friend who worked with the English boxing association had told him there would be unannounced doping tests at the weigh-in today. The Zambian guy was pumped up to the eyeballs with clenbuterol and there was no other heavyweight, only me. Priest asked if I was at fighting weight.