Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  “You get all the treatment tonight,” he said, “real bandages to stop you cracking your scaphoid against the other fellah’s head. Real sawdust to spit your teeth into. Real blood.”

  “Whose side are you on, Jack?”

  “Don’t be silly now, amn’t I running the t’ing?”

  “Come on, Jack, I mean it. When it’s myself versus Cosby who’d you like to see down?”

  “Did you see your Dymphna out there with old Fergus Cloate?” asked Kerruish. “Isn’t that a bad bit of stage managing on the very night you’re going to show them all what you can do when it’s a question of silence?”

  “Cosby or myself?” John repeated.

  “So long as it’s a good fight—watch me now! Watch me floor that big beef from the Surgeons. I’m going to put a little gold crown on each of his teeth in the middle of the second round just when he t’inks it’s going to be a points win for himself.”

  “Christ! Kerruish! Why can’t you answer my question?”

  “No swearing, Blaydon, in the name of God. If ever you’re feeling misunderstood you’ve to say ‘Holy Mary!’ and say it sweetly.”

  “I’m a Protestant and I prefer to say ‘Christ!’—like that.”

  “Well, God help you,” said Kerruish as they announced his fight.

  After the announcement, made by old Biceps, the surface-anatomy model, Kerruish with his dimples and his peasant shoulders tip-toed forward to meet his opponent, Esmond, from the Irish College of Surgeons. The strategy of pretending to be right-handed was pointless in this fight since everyone at the Surgeons knew of it; it was reserved for visiting middleweights from the English and Scottish Universities.

  Kerruish snorted through his nostrils and so did Esmond: they were like two great heraldic rocking horses trampling for the favours of a mare. And all the mares were watching them, two or three of Kerruish’s, several of Esmond’s and dozens belonging to neither of them. Dymphna was paler than ever with excitement, sawing away at John’s pearls and oblivious of Cloate, Gibson and everyone else. When Esmond put out a tentative left or two and they marked Kerruish’s eyebrow for him, when Kerruish sent out a heavy but late right hook, and they went into a tumble which made old Biceps call out, “Break away! Box on!” it was easy to see that Dymphna was out of her breath with suspense.

  John became so fascinated by her loss of herself, the vacancy which had seized and make a spinster of her, that he forgot to watch the ring during the remainder of the first round. He was not actively thinking about his relationship with her, nor wishing to be Kerruish; he was only wondering who was right, his own sort of person or Kerruish’s kind. From watching Dymphna, seeing her as some sort of a work of art brought into being by no one at all, but by something which made her forget herself so entirely, he concluded that he and Cosby ought possibly to be obliterated immediately and the world left to Kerruish and Esmond.

  And just at this moment, speaking aloud his thought for him, Lynch, who had come unnoticed to prop himself against the wall beside him, said, “The rest of it cannot fail to be an anticlimax: they should have put this fight last.”

  Lynch’s mouth was hanging a little open, and as always was a touch too wet at the corners. His face was as soiled as a white punch bag.

  To be awkward, John simulated attentiveness to the ring and Lynch said, “But don’t the women love it! Nothing like a little blood and bullshit, the best aphrodisiac. You know that Minotaur poem of that b.f. David Green’s? He was right you know—”

  Esmond had landed a right to the jaw and split open Kerruish’s lip, who was shaking himself like a damaged giant.

  “I see Dymphna’s here,” said Lynch, “with Fergus Cloate. You’ve support.”

  “Have I?”

  “They’d all lie down to a bull if they got the chance,” said Lynch. “And never mind the Minotaur.”

  “What about Shelley, Byron, Keats?”

  “Bulls, all of them.”

  “B—” said John.

  “Are you in the next with that poor fool Cosby?”

  “Yes.”

  “How d’you feel about it?”

  The bell rang for the end of the first round. Dymphna leaned back looking to Cloate and back behind her to say something to Gibson. Then she looked round for John. She looked everywhere so he got talking avidly to Lynch as though he really liked him generously.

  “I feel very nervous,” John said, knowing that she had waved to attract his attention, but with his eyes on Lynch’s sweating forehead. “I find it quite impossible to believe that in a few minutes I shall be filled with rage because Cosby has hit me on the nose or somewhere.”

  “You get angry, do you?” said Lynch, losing his malice. “That’s interesting. I shouldn’t have thought it.”

  “Once he’s hit me,” said John, “enough to hurt, I mean, I’d be quite ready to kill him if I could. That’s to say if I had a sufficiently powerful punch to dislocate his neck, I think I’d use it.”

  “That’s it,” said Lynch, his heavy features momentarily lightened with excitement. “You want to hurt him badly if you can. Yes, I think I see that. He’s no one in particular, just an average face and a pretty harmless cod at that. What’s significant is that he doesn’t matter a damn to you! I mean if it was Groarke or Bethelgert or that little clown Cloate—”

  “Or even yourself,” said John.

  “Oh, very good!” Lynch laughed absently as the second round started. “What I was saying was that it’s anonymous man who’s the real enemy. The bloody fool who goes to war in wartime and stays at home in peace, elects governments and appoints police forces, imposes his sexual taboos on the community and—”

  He was interrupted by a communal gasp from the audience as Kerruish took another but more powerful left on his already opened lip.

  “Not mob spirit,” Lynch was continuing, “that’s at least a mass dynamic, but just the bloody unleavened acquiescence represented by average man, by Cosby with his Varsity Buddhism—”

  “And Huxley, Aldous,” put in John.

  Lynch was hurt. “I admit I’ve been reading him, but that’s not the point.”

  “D’you mind awfully if we just watch this round? Kerruish’s supposed to be going for a knockout any moment now; I want to see how he does it.”

  Lynch dried up, not watching the fight but speculating in his slow fumbling way about John’s face and prospects. He wants to see me beaten in any case, John thought, so I’ve lost nothing by cutting through his circumlocutions. I wonder why he finds me so detestable. From this he went on to surmise that Lynch moved from distaste to distaste as other people journey from affection to affection. Had it not been for his loathing of the Bethelgert coterie he would never have encouraged the imprudent rewriting of the paper; but, John concluded, just as lust is a more or less aimless thing which occasionally fixes upon some object to the exclusion of others, so presumably can a man’s unamiability discover someone on whom for a time it is exclusively centred. And he wondered again why Lynch continually sought him out and in what way he could be rid of his uneasy interest.

  Kerruish had been backed onto the ropes by this time, covering up skilfully and taking heavy blows to his head and ribs. But Esmond was excessively cautious; he must have been warned many times by his seconds that his opponent was only to be trusted when he was flat on his back or face. So Esmond did not close right up with him, but executed a half circle round the stooping figure—depositing his blows from the safety of his extra inch in reach, attentive meanwhile to any shift in his victim’s posture that might enable him to deliver the sandbag of his right hook. As there was a full two minutes of the round to run, Esmond’s quandary was quite manifest to everyone. Even Lynch caught the sense of it; he had ceased his close observation of John’s face and had now fixed his eyes on the figure of Esmond, hesitant between triumph and disaster.

  The Bethelgert group began to call out, “Come on, Jack”; old Biceps sprang round the two boxers with gleaming eyes, looki
ng first from his station on the right of them and then moving warily round to the left as though at any moment there was to be a foul blow or a divine revelation.

  Kerruish took no notice of the rising impatience. He kept his head well down, his gloves and forearms adjacent like the brown mandibles of a spider and then began to edge slowly along the ropes. Esmond bounced back, then forwards again, as Kerruish straightened, dropping his envenomed left to show his mouth biting hard on the gag. Esmond took his chance and closed. It was Kerruish’s left glove which flew in to take the brunt of the blow and Kerruish’s neglected right which crossed beneath and sent Esmond a full pace back far too slowly; for the left on its thick arm was there to greet him as Kerruish, catapulting from the ropes, overtook his retreat and then stood back for Biceps to count him out.

  There was a roar from the College of Surgeons, “Foul! Foul! He used the ropes!”

  But Kerruish only waited, giving his Abbey Theatre smile over to the women he’d invited to watch him. The judges passed their notes to one another, Esmond groaned and sat up, Biceps was handed the decision and then raised Kerruish’s arm high in the air. The two middleweights shook hands and Esmond was helped from his corner to the dressing-room.

  When John climbed into the ring in green corner with his back to Dymphna, a quarter of the audience left in the way students do leave meetings, noisily, with as much ostentation as possible. The Bethelgert brothers and their friends pushed back their benches and chairs with so much scraping that Biceps’ announcement could hardly be heard. Talking loudly, they made for the door where they were joined by Lynch, and there, as though they were in a cinema which they were just about to leave, they halted and turned round, hands in pockets, paying no apparent attention to anyone but themselves.

  Cosby looked extremely dangerous. John felt sure he was the better man. Possibly there was something in his Buddhism; he looked most convincingly detached and at ease. His seconds were continuously glancing over at John’s corner and advising him, but Cosby was only sitting peacefully in a modified Lotus Pose.

  When the bell rang for the start of the first round they touched gloves and circled each other with excessive delicacy; each perhaps determined not to make the usual novice’s mistake of too much initial flurry, but by skill and conservation to wring from the encounter some conclusive parable. Watching them, the audience remained quite silent; not threatening, not at first greatly interested; prepared to be bored, perhaps surprised; even, if some singularity presented it with occasion, to be amused.

  After the first quarter-minute with only more circling and an exchange of feint lefts, the mood changed; a dozen people were prepared to call out something, but hesitated in case they were as yet mistaken or unfair in their private impatience. Then someone, perhaps several people simultaneously, noticed an equivocal grace in the contestants’ movements. They were very similar: thin in the leg, narrow-hipped, long-necked. In their circling, their intense concentration on the opening strategy, their earnestness betrayed them into a dance, bird-like, nearly genderless and vain; all the more ridiculous for its sincerity.

  The first person to laugh lacked courage and muffled it. Cosby poked out another left which John gracefully side-stepped; there was a roar from Kerruish who had just come out of the changing room with Esmond, and everyone instantly became certain of the joke. The embarrassment of two such opponents taking over where the previous fight had left off, the distasteful movements of their hips and thighs, coupled with their dedication, were reconciled for the audience in howls and bellows of wordless noise. People were helpless with it, some with amiable delight or malicious astonishment, others with a dismay which, privately and otherwise, might have been pity, but was here and now only relief.

  Of all the people there, only Biceps remained grave and undisturbed. He came up close to them and through the racket of the packed shrieks said, “Get lambasting now, sirs, get fighting.”

  Cosby was blushing with fury, John pale. By some intuition he knew how they were being seen: the audience had become for him a mirror on which all his pretensions were revealed to him, the distortion, if it existed, a fact nevertheless and unchangeable. His first instinct was to drop his gloves and assume dignity like a clown awaiting the death of the laughter he has summoned, the next to jump the ropes and attack the first and loudest fool he found.

  But then he became convinced that it was Cosby’s style—a twin whose physique parodies that of his brother—which by overemphasizing his own, had translated it from simple egregiousness into rank absurdity. The idea evidently was simultaneously Cosby’s too; for just as John decided to make a quick end of him, he was forestalled by a barrage of blows to his face and jaw. He felt only the first one, extremely painful and vertiginous in its effect, the ring spinning, the laughter muted as though a door had closed upon it.

  He was too much dazed by the fury of the assault and its effect to make any counter. He was only determined not to fall down but to hang on, by retreat if necessary, until the bell rang. In addition, the fact that the contest was now being dictated by the audience, that the change in tempo was directly due to its mocking, made him decide not to riposte until the corporate mood had changed. He let Cosby pursue him round the four sides of the ring, only keeping his guard up, watching Cosby’s eyes, his long neck and pear-shaped head, and deducing from these their mutual betrayal of themselves in having been persuaded to fight publicly at all.

  He was aware of catcalls amid the laughter, of the demoniac delight of Bethelgert and Lynch, of Kerruish’s applause for himself for having brought off a comedy which had so far excelled the promises he had secretly been making in the preceding weeks. He felt no venom against Kerruish at all, realizing that the boxer had come fully true for him, magnificently right in his right context, by achieving such a jape. Kerruish had not betrayed himself and would not have allowed himself to be drawn into any intellectual contest, no matter how subtle the preliminary blandishments. He would never have attempted to capture the Bi or the Phil, nor ever published an ode to his mistress’s eyebrow even though he had secretly written it. Kerruish’s joke had its limitations; if its consequences went beyond those he was capable of visualizing, that was not his fault; and by refusing to give his answer before the fight he had demonstrated both the limitations of his honesty and the boundlessness of his humility.

  The bell rang at last and John returned to his corner, oblivious of everything except the towel flapping mockingly in front of him. From the floor, Kerruish, through his laughter, was counselling this or the other strategy, as, long before, Fisher had advised him in his fight with Marston. Then he left John and went round to Cosby’s corner to congratulate him on his points lead and encourage him to increase it in the second round if he could not achieve a knockout first.

  One of the stewards was dabbing a styptic to John’s eyebrow, and the other, having finished his towel-flapping, was applying a cold sponge to his bleeding lip. There was about a minute of the interval left and the audience was greedy for a resumption of the comedy.

  John looked across at Cosby and caught his eye. Cosby was interested in the physical damage he had inflicted. He was much surprised by it, he had not thought that it would be so easy and was busy working out its implications. All this was in Cosby’s expression as he waved his seconds aside and breathed carefully for the remaining moments of the interval. John was sure that he was reminding himself of the unreality of all success, that what really interested him was the Tantric penalty he might incur by victory and the reward he might look for in defeat, even though it could entail a transient loss of consciousness.

  John did not know what Dymphna was thinking. He wanted to look round for her and he did, knowing that it was most courageous so to do; because he argued like this: If she looks back, salutes me in any way, it could mean she is not in the least ashamed of my love, that somehow I have the franchise other people appear to possess when they are loved, never to be wrong, never foolish, never only pitiable. Or it
could mean that she is so incapable of appreciating my feelings about successs, popularity and everything else connected with this moment of my love for her, that she is not worth having. But since I already believe this to be the case and yet must still have her, it makes no difference. On the other hand, if when I look round she pretends not to see me, as I myself pretended not to see her a few minutes ago, I might guess either that she loves me sufficiently to want to avoid the pain of recognition, or else that she hopes to hurt me because my defeat has hurt her. Yet again, her avoidance could mean she despises me. Next, it might so happen that she has forgotten all about me at this instant and that as I turn round to attract her attention I shall only see her talking to Cloate or someone; or listening or smiling or pretending to listen or smile. And since, were I her and she me, I could not for an instant fail to watch her under equivalent circumstances, her inattention might imply that she does not love me as much as I love her, or indeed that she does not love me at all. Lastly, it is possible that though she loves me or does not love me, she might coincidentally fail to notice my gesture because of its brevity, in which case I cannot logically make any deduction at all. So I may be sure that in turning round I am likely to gain nothing, whilst I am more than likely to lose a good deal.

  Later, when he tried to recall in what posture he had actually seen her at the moment of his turning, he was quite unable to remember. But then he could not remember anything significant she had ever done in the way of responding to his love.

  Thinking in this way, overtaken by his perennial need to analyze everything, without ever reaching any advantageous conclusion, he was scarcely ready for Crosby’s renewed attack when the bell rang and they went forward to meet one another.

  When Cosby hit him fairly hard, to his amazement he felt no anger; equating the blow merely with one of the smiles that Dymphna had or had not given him in the past, a kiss received or refused. But after a few more blows he decided that the jolts caused him were facts; they interfered with his thinking; were crudely inconvenient, mechanical interruptions. A blow dodged or received was not the same thing as a kiss given or withheld. Both kisses and blows affected one’s emotions, but it was difficult to differentiate between their significance when one was being punched.