Coronation Summer

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘THE FIGHT’S LISTED AS BEING BETWEEN ANYONE ARCHIE DUKE CHOOSES TO PUT UP AGAINST ANYONE FROM THE EMBASSY BOXING CLUB,’ the compère was reminding the vociferous section of the crowd who knew that already, but who hadn’t expected The Embassy to produce such a nasty surprise.

  As Arnie and Zac walked out into the centre of the ring to face each other, everyone, even those standing on beer crates at the back of the crowd, could see Zac’s grin. It wasn’t a pleasant grin. And what those nearer, by the ringside, heard him say, wasn’t pleasant either.

  ‘The compère may think I’m fighting for Jack, you lily-livered pile of shit, but I’m not. I’m fighting because you’re the swine who shoved a broken glass into my girlfriend’s sister’s face. When I deck you tonight, I’ll be decking you for Mavis.’

  Leon, in his corner as his chief second, merely thought Zac had meant to say ‘in my girlfriend’s mother’s face’. As did Ted and Beryl and nearly everyone else from Magnolia Square, sitting or standing near them. Lettie Deakin knew differently, though. And so did Danny. He wasn’t in the ring, as Leon was. He was standing close up to the ringside, at Zac’s corner, and he stumbled against it, dropping the water bottle he had been carrying, his face ashen.

  ‘Blimey,’ Nellie said to Charlie, chewing on a chocolate caramel, ‘Danny needs ter steady ’is nerves a bit. The fight ain’t started yet!’

  ‘SECONDS OUT!’ the compère yelled as Zac and Arnie returned to their corners, Arnie blaspheming viciously, Zac cucumber-cool.

  ‘Don’t be too over-confident,’ Leon said urgently to Zac as, in the seconds before the bell went, he popped a rubber gumshield into Zac’s mouth. ‘He looks like he has both power and speed. Be defensive till you get his measure!’

  The bell went, and the split second it did so, Arnie was across the ring and on Zac like a human torpedo.

  Beryl screamed, and buried her head in her grandad’s shoulder. Nellie choked on her caramel and had to be pounded on her back by a man from a north-of-the-river boxing club, who was standing behind her.

  Carrie’s nails dug so hard into her palms they drew blood.

  ‘He’s got big legs and thick ankles!’ a voice she didn’t recognize was yelling close by her. ‘It’s a great foundation.’

  She knew he was talking about Arnie, not Zac.

  ‘Hit! Don’t get hit!’ Someone else was yelling, this time to Zac as Arnie leaned on him, holding him round the neck with his left arm while he punched away at Zac’s ribs and stomach with his right.

  ‘Referee! REFEREE!’ Leon yelled, trying to draw the referee’s attention to this flouting of the rules and knowing, even as he did so, that he was wasting his time. In an illegitimate fight, the niceties of the rule-book went out of the window.

  Arnie was now thumping Zac with the butt and edge of his glove and Danny, jerked out of his torpor of shock by sheer professionalism, began yelling at the referee with as much, if not more, outraged indignation as Leon. Until the fight was over, it was going to be as if he had never heard what Zac had said to Arnie. It had to be that way. Any other way of reacting would be to risk scuppering Zac’s chances of winning – and if Zac didn’t win, both Mavis and Jack would be shamefully let down. Afterwards, however . . . Afterwards would be a very different matter.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, ref! Open yer bleedin’ eyes!’ he yelled to the referee and, to Zac, ‘Drive ’im back across the ring! Otherwise the fight’s goin’ to be over before it’s bleedin’ well started!’

  The warehouse was in uproar, Arnie’s supporters raising the roof because they were now sure Zac was a turkey and that their bets were, after all, going to be made good, Zac’s supporters howling outrage at the dirty play going unreprimanded.

  ‘I fink you’ve said goodbye to yer ’ousekeeping money,’ a man standing behind Pru Lewis shouted gleefully in her ear. ‘It’s goin’ to be bread and jam for the old man next week – an’ mebbe not much jam!’

  ‘That’s it, Zac! Show him what you’re made of!’ Nibbo suddenly shouted, and Beryl opened her eyes to see Zac’s opponent staggering backwards under the force of a blow that had taken him completely by surprise.

  A second later, Arnie was delivering a left-right combination of punches so vicious that Zac was again sent skittering back against the ropes.

  Beryl screamed and buried her head once again against Albert’s shoulder. ‘Please God, let it soon be over!’ she prayed, tears soaking Albert’s well-worn jacket as whistles, cheers, boos and catcalls rained in her ears. ‘Please don’t let Zac be hurt! Even if it means he doesn’t win, please don’t let Zac be hurt!’

  When the bell rang to signal the end of the round, the only person in Zac’s camp not stunned with horror at the way things were shaping was Zac himself.

  ‘Yer got to stagger ’im and drop ’im with a quick left ’ook,’ Danny instructed urgently as at lightning speed Leon cleaned Zac off and wiped his gloves and greased him. ‘Yer not goin’ to be able to play around with this geezer . . . ’e’s the one who’s playin’ with you!’

  Zac spat out his gumshield. ‘You think so?’ he said in what to Leon seemed almost like amusement.

  ‘Christ all-bleedin’-mighty! ’E nearly ’ad you down in the first five fuckin’ seconds!’ Danny exploded, thinking of all the hopes Jack had had; knowing that Mavis was lying in her hospital bed, thinking of nothing but the fight and its outcome.

  Zac took a swig of water from the bottle Leon raised to his lips, winked at Leon and, as the opening bell for the second round rang, sprang to his feet and was out of the corner like a bullet from a gun.

  ‘Is your girlfriend a tart like her sister?’ Arnie taunted, as he lashed out with a left hook. The words were muffled by his gumshield but, as Zac ducked the blow, perfectly audible. The word that Zac spat back at him was also perfectly audible. And obscene. Vaguely surprised that Zac avoided the blow he hooked at him, Arnie hooked at him again. Still his fist didn’t contact with muscle or bone.

  There were hoarse cries of encouragement from the ringside, but who for, Arnie and Zac neither knew nor cared. Arnie followed three more blows up in quick succession. Zac ducked them all.

  ‘Oh, YES!’ Daniel Collins exulted as he avoided being knocked in the eye by the decorative cherries on his wife’s hat. ‘This is style Zac’s showing! This is the ticket!’

  Ginger thought so, too. The fleet-footed way Zac was now avoiding every blow Arnie tried to plant, showed very clearly he wasn’t the dummy he seemed to be in the previous round. And if Mavis Lomax was his girlfriend’s sister, then he wasn’t in the ring for money. He was out to give Arnie the kind of pasting even he had to admit Arnie deserved. ‘This is goin’ to be a bugger of a fight, Archie,’ he said grimly as if Archie were by his side to hear him. ‘And if we’re not careful, we’re going to lose a shocking amount of ready cash!’

  Pongo, who had positioned himself well away from the ringside, up on the warehouse catwalk, grinned. He knew exactly how much ready cash Archie stood to lose if Zac Hemingway won the fight. His grin deepened. He felt no allegiance now to Archie. None whatsoever. And where money was concerned, his was on Hemingway!

  In the final second before the bell for the end of round two sounded, Zac unleashed a ripping left to Arnie’s body. ‘Tart, did you say?’ he snarled as Arnie gasped with shock and pain. ‘Is that what you called Mavis when you got your jollies by marking her for life?’

  As he headed gratefully for his corner, Arnie, who had never before been seriously hurt in a boxing ring, or anywhere else for that matter, continued to gasp for air like a beached fish. ‘I’ll fucking crucify Duke for setting this one up!’ he panted to Ginger as Ginger did his stuff as his chief-second. ‘And who the hell let slip to this goon it was me that glassed Robson’s bird’s face?’

  ‘How the bleeding hell do I know?’ As Ginger worked with sponge and grease it was a question he, also, would have liked the answer to. ‘But if you’d kept your mitts to yourself when we did Robson’s club, this wouldn�
�t have happened, would it? You’d be facing dogmeat Big Jumbo and we’d all be quids in!’

  ‘Oh dear Lord! Here we go again,’ Hettie said to anyone who cared to listen as the bell for round three clanged, and Zac and Arnie loped from their corners.

  ‘Deck him, Arnie!’ one of Archie’s crowd, with a lot of cash at stake, bellowed.

  ‘Make mincemeat of him, Zac!’ Nibbo exploded. ‘Give him a bit of what we gave old Hitler!’

  Carrie didn’t utter a word. She was beyond speech. Her hands were deep in her coat pockets, knuckled into fists, her eyes fixed on Zac, not moving from him for a second.

  ‘Oh my giddy aunt! He’s got him!’ Queenie Tillet shrieked, jumping up and down and clapping her hands as Zac drove Arnie across the ring and into the ropes.

  Danny’s desire that Zac should stagger Arnie was now amply fulfilled. He didn’t only stagger, he tottered. As he did so, Zac followed his advantage up with a quick left hook that dropped Arnie in a heap on the deck.

  There was a sharp intake of breath from the crowd. From the Magnolia Square contingent, shouts of excitement went up and then, even before the referee’s count really got underway, Arnie was on his feet again, and though the pandemonium was such that no one, not even the chief-seconds, could hear what was being said, everyone could tell that Zac was not only fighting Arnie, but was giving him plenty of verbal as well.

  ‘So you enjoy beating up women, do you?’ he demanded as he drove the mountainously muscular Arnie backwards again, this time with three vicious lefts to the body and three simultaneous rights to the jaw. ‘Well now you’re going to pay for your enjoyment!’ As the warehouse roof practically lifted, he beat Arnie down on to one knee.

  ‘Finish ’im, Zac!’ Danny bawled. ‘This ain’t no time for stringin’ fings out!’

  Whether Zac would have taken his advice or not, he never knew, for the bell sounded, saving Arnie’s bacon.

  ‘I think Archie Duke’s camp have got the message,’ Leon said gleefully as he pushed Zac’s sweat-soaked blond hair away from his eyes and sponged his face. ‘They look sick as horses.’

  ‘Yer’d like to be somewhere else now, wouldn’t yer, yer bastard!’ Miriam Jennings was shouting at Arnie from where she was sitting. ‘It was my daughter yer carved with glass an’ I ’ope Zac punctures yer bleedin’ kidneys fer yer!’

  ‘Blimey,’ Nellie said to Hettie, impressed, ‘Miriam ain’t ’alf got ’er gander up, ain’t she?’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ Arnie gasped tersely to Ginger. ‘I want out!’

  ‘I dare say you do, but the only way out before the final bell is to KO Hemingway or throw in the towel,’ Ginger said, granite-eyed. ‘And if you throw in the towel there’s an awful lot of mean people who aren’t going to be at all pleased. It isn’t only our mob who have money riding on you. The biggest gang in the East End is here, and so is half of north London’s Enterprise Boxing Club and The Langham.’

  The bell sounded. Wishing he’d never heard of Archie Duke, wishing he’d never gone with Archie to do over The 21, and certainly wishing he’d never laid a hand on Jack Robson’s tart, he propelled himself once more into the centre of the ring where Zac was already waiting for him.

  ‘It’s only round four,’ Leon said to Danny as Zac jabbed and hooked and feinted Arnie into knots. ‘What kind of a state do you reckon Arnie’s going to be in by round eight? Or ten?’

  ‘I doubt it’ll go that far.’ Danny was so lost in admiration as a swift left-right combination by Zac nearly had Arnie not only down, but almost out of the ring, that he almost forgot Zac was the man trying to take Carrie away from him. ‘It’s certainly not goin’ to go the full fifteen, no matter ’ow much Zac might want it to.’

  ‘Crikey, I wish Mavis was ’ere to see this!’ Miriam said in high satisfaction, her beefy arms folded across her roll-top desk of a chest.

  ‘She’ll know exactly how it’s gone, round for round, before she goes to sleep tonight,’ Nibbo’s companion promised, accepting the offer of a peppermint from Albert.

  Ted, standing close by her, was too intent on what was taking place in the ring to even notice Albert’s offer of a peppermint. Zac Hemingway was meting out to Arnie exactly the kind of punishment he’d hoped he would mete out to him. All Arnie’s dirty tricks – the elbowing, the thumb in the eye, the head butts, were falling on stony ground. Zac seemed impervious to them. Relentlessly he worked in close to Arnie’s body, not letting him back away, not giving him breathing room. And all the time, he was talking. Ted couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he could guess. That this phenomenally powerful young man was enamoured of his Beryl was still pretty hard for him to grasp, but why else would he be in the ring instead of Big Jumbo? As Zac bombarded Arnie with a rain of crucifying blows, he shook his head in wonderment. And he’d thought Beryl was trotting off to The Embassy to meet a boy scout!

  By the end of the round, Zac was nailing Arnie with every jab he threw, and was absorbing Arnie’s blows without any noticeable effect.

  ‘I ain’t never seen nuffink like it,’ Charlie said to Nellie, a bottle of milk stout in one hand, a bag of sugar-coated shredded coconut in the other. ‘’E should be fightin’ for the ’Eavyweight Championship of the World! ’E could take on Rocky Marciano with one ’and tied behind ’is back and still win!’

  ‘Is it over yet, Grandad? Oh, please, is it over yet?’ Beryl pleaded into Albert’s tear-sodden jacket.

  Albert, standing with his legs apart, the better to balance the weight of his paunch or, as he preferred to call it, his ‘corporation’, patted her shoulder. ‘Yer shouldn’t ’ave come, pet. Rose and Daisy aren’t ’ere, are they?’

  ‘It wasn’t their mum he hurt,’ Beryl responded with a sudden surge of fierceness. ‘It was my mum, and Zac’s doing this for me, remember?’

  Albert didn’t remember. He’d been under the impression Zac was fighting for Jack, and why Beryl should think any differently was a mystery to him. It wasn’t, however, a mystery he intended mulling over. Not now the bell sounded for round five.

  Arnie could hardly walk right. His hands hurt. His body hurt. He hated the human cannonball who was giving him such a public humiliation and hiding. He hated Archie Duke, because if it weren’t for Archie he wouldn’t be in the ring at all. He hated all Archie’s mates who had put money on him and who wouldn’t take kindly to losing it. He hated the overweight woman seated at the side of the ring who said she was Jack Robson’s bird’s mother and who kept hollering insults at him. He hated all south-Londoners, and the sooner he could put some distance between himself and them the better he would like it.

  ‘This isn’t as easy as smashin’ a broken glass into a woman’s face, is it?’ Zac was spitting at him as, using both his right hand and his left hand to equal effect, he bombarded him with blows, punching and swinging, hacking and chopping.

  Arnie wanted the referee to stop the fight, but as the fight wasn’t a legit one, knew there wasn’t a hope in hell that the referee would do so. He wanted to throw in the towel, but, because of the number of mobsters who would be out for his blood if he did so, didn’t dare. He wished he’d never set eyes on Mavis Lomax. He wished himself a million miles away.

  ‘And this . . .’ Zac snarled, ‘is for all the other women you’ve cut and hurt!’ The blow sent Arnie spinning glassy-eyed back against the ropes.

  ‘Zac ain’t goin’ to be able to make this last for much longer,’ Danny yelled to Leon above the roar of the shouting, stamping crowd. ‘And I don’t fink ’e needs to. I fink ’e’s made ’is point, don’t you?’

  Arnie spat out his mouthpiece – was slithering out of the ring, beneath the bottom rope. Amongst utter pandemonium, Miriam rushed across to where he lay sprawled on the ring apron and clouted him around his head with her handbag.

  ‘Churchill should have had Miriam in his War Cabinet,’ Daniel said admiringly to Hettie. ‘The war would have been over by 1941!’

  There was a commotion to the rear of the ware
house almost as noisy as the commotion taking place around the ring. ‘POLICE!’ an authoritative voice bellowed. ‘Remain where you’re standing!’

  ‘Rozzers!’ went up the cry of a hundred or so people who had no intention of remaining anywhere any longer. ‘Scarper!’

  Danny’s and Leon’s reactions were of exasperated irritation more than real alarm. Pirate fights got busted all the time, the adrenalin-charged risk of a police raid being part and parcel of their attraction. The worst that would happen was that they’d have to take a day off work to appear in court and that they’d be slapped with a fine. A fine Jack would pay.

  ‘The fight was over, anyway,’ Leon said to Danny with a grin. ‘Arnie couldn’t crawl to his knees now, let alone his feet.’

  As the police began arresting anyone who stayed still long enough for them to be able to do so, Zac ducked under the top rope and sprang down to the ring-apron. A police raid might be neither here nor there for Leon and Danny and the punters, but it was a matter of grave concern to himself. Once under arrest, he’d stand no chance of leaving the country aboard the Orion – and with his past record there was no telling what cock-and-bull charges the rozzers might drum up against him.

  As people rushed for the doors in the hope of avoiding having the long arm of the law laid on their sleeves, he yelled to Carrie above a sea of heads. ‘The Greenland! Pier 25!’ and then, with an indecent amount of spring in his legs for a man who had just fought like he had fought, he was dodging anyone in blue and haring towards the rear of the ring and the room that had served as his dressing-room. There was a window in it that led out into a back alley. He’d have to grab his clothes from wherever Leon had stowed them and dress on the hoof if necessary. Running half-naked, wearing only a pair of black satin boxing trunks, was not how he’d imagined setting off for the docks, but it was better than not setting off for them at all. And Carrie wouldn’t have trouble leaving the warehouse and joining him at the pier. The chances of a woman being arrested were surely pretty slim.