The Boxer's Dreams of Love

by philip boyle

  There were no handcuffs on his wrist but Eddie was scared to even move his hand to scratch his nose lest Harding pull it back down. If he did try to run, Eddie doubted if Harding was in any fit state to give chase. Where the hell would he run to? That’s all he had done for the last few weeks, months now. How long had it actually been?

  Where was she? Where…was…

  Harding tripped on the edge of the pavement and Eddie moved quickly to prevent him falling. The policeman looked up at him with pleading child eyes.

  He told the girl on reception that Harding was feeling unwell. They were able to organize a room for him. They took a credit card from Harding’s ancient faded brown wallet. Eddie put the man to bed and couldn’t help but laugh at the mystery that had brought him here, that continued to blight his poor life with such strange moments. He kept trying to open his eyes, to wake up, pull himself back to reality. All he wanted, dreamed of, after all those years of pummelling in the slate dull rings, in the arenas of sweat, punches thrown, fallen, taken. All he wanted was to rest for a little bit, move the blinding light away from his eyes, take a quiet dark booth in the corner of the bar, take a slow drink, and be left alone. Left alone to reconstruct a life broken, torn, cut, spliced, shattered, wounded. To dream. Of what was, is, would never be. Dream of love.

  All these thoughts in a second as he lay the heavy body on the soft white bed. Harding was dead to the world, happy for a while and Eddie knew he was safe to leave the hotel at least for a couple of hours. He wanted to walk off the drink, not sleep it away like Harding. He wanted to find his senses again, he needed to be blade sharp for what lay ahead. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind. Shakespeare. Eddie knew that. One of the few things he knew about such fanciful subjects. Told to him by a fanciful dreamer in a stovie hat in a Camden Town bar. The dreamer had written the words down on the back of a beer mat. Eddie had taken it with him, found it a few days later and somehow remembered the words thereafter. They could to apply to every part, every corner, every fallow period of his picaresque life.

  The sun had finally broken through, clear deep blue above, early evening heat and a sobering breeze that lifted all the trails of ennui from Eddie’s shoulders. He had no plan other than to walk, other than to avoid alcohol. He kept seeing Harding awake from slumber and leap into action at the discovery that Eddie had left the hotel. Let him come. Let them all come. What does it matter? That drunker sodden mass on the bed was the person Eddie had hoped might be his saviour, the one who’d find Edie.

  Eddie sat in a café, drank orange juice and ate crumbs from a fresh crumbling scone. An elderly couple sat in silence. Occasionally they’d move but only to lift the cup, spread butter across the bread with a frail hand. Never looked at each other. He knew they did this every day. And then they went home and spent the rest of their time doing the same there. One would be devastated if the other was lost yet they had long since lost the need to talk. All spent, all subjects covered years earlier. Eddie had spent his whole life in fear of becoming his parents. Theirs had been a maelstrom of storms, twisters, with periods of eerie calm in between. And why had they stayed together? Why did people stay together if they made each other unhappy? He looked across the formica tables at the quiet couple who had nowhere else to go anymore. What other choice did they have? Lonely together or lonely apart. And in striving to avoid that, he had ended up – here.

  Out through the window of the door of the café, across the street, a bus stop, people waiting, a cross-section of the whole world, young, old, going home, going back, getting out. And there she was among them. Linda? Yes, Linda, that was it. Lovely Linda from the suburbs, two kids, she came to town to escape once a month. It had only been a few days and here she was again. From where he sat he could only see her shoulders, her pretty head. He stood up, left a two pound tip on the table and saw the rest of her. There was a large bag at her feet. Definitely wasn’t shopping. If she was going far he wondered why she didn’t take the train. What business was it of his? He opened the door of the café. The light was fast fading, he thought he could see bruises on her face but that could only be the streetlamp casting cruel shadows on her face.

  He was feet away from her. She didn’t see him yet or if she did she gave no indication of recognition. He was behind her, he pretended he was looking at the timetable on the bus stop pole. Some of the others cast glances his way but she only looked ahead. The bag at her feet was too big to mean anything other than the fact that she was not coming back tonight. He could reach out and touch her hair. He saw the marks on the side of her face. Brushed bruises only partially hidden by make-up.

  ‘Hello again.’ He had to repeat himself, a little louder this time, before she looked around at him.

  ‘Oh.’ A do-not-disturb utterance followed by a weak smile that made him regret ever approaching her.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t think I’d see you again.’ She showed little interest in replying to this. He looked down at the bag. ‘Going somewhere?’

  ‘Yes.’ He wasn’t going away she realized. ‘A few days. My sister in Kircaldy. She’s not too well.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’ What was he doing here, what did he want with her? Then he knew. ‘Who did that to you?’ Her hand went to her face, to the marks, and he was sure that tears were sheltering at the corners of her eyes. She was going to deny, to bluff her way through it, but something changed her mind, maybe something reflected back from Eddie’s own.

  ‘One of my own. Believe that? He’s bigger than me now. Not afraid anymore. I don’t even know what I did to make him do it.’ She looked sharply around, in hope more than anything.

  ‘There it is.’ Sure enough the lights of a bus were cutting through the gloom. She looked back at Eddie. ‘What can you do, eh?’

  ‘Is there a sister in Kircaldy?’ Eddie asked as the bus pulled up alongside. He helped her with the bag and she smiled.

  ‘Sure there is, always a sister somewhere.’

  ~

  He knocked on Harding’s door but thankfully there was no reply. He locked his own door, stripped as he walked to the bed. He turned off the lights and turned on the TV. Put the letter carefully down on the table by the window.

  Before he slept he counted what remained of his money. It was trickling away, ticking onwards like a clock, or the trigger to a bomb.

  He was gone. With no word, no message. How ironic that Eddie felt a little insulted. Harding had left before dawn apparently, carrying a bottle of water like a gun in his hand.

  CHAPTER 24

  Harding has an accident On the day before he died, Harding thought he couldn’t make it out of bed, let alone make it to work, such was the intensity of his hangover. His wife stayed in the doorway, arms folded in furious form and shook her pretty head. He closed his eyes, tried to push her away. Heard her storming steps on the stairs.

  He shaved for the last time. Felt the blade catch his skin. A prick of pain. His stomach moved as if on the sea, rolled in heaving swells. He caught sight of the breakfast his dutiful wife had prepared for him as he entered the kitchen and prepared himself to look as if he was capable of eating it. He couldn’t remember getting home from Stirling. Just the vague sensation of her perfume as he rode in the car from the station. As he sat now with the knife and fork in his hands and curiously unsure of how to use them he saw Eddie Brogan’s face.

  Harding had faced down, looked down, even smashed down, on many pitiful figures in his career, in the job he called his cruel vocation. Seen all the dark pupils that had direct access to hell. Rapists, reapers of death, radiant shadows of darkness and all species of broken down despair. But Eddie Brogan, Jesus, how could a man who had seen such things, given, taken such blows, money made from throwing punches, inflicting pain, how could such a man have no idea what was happening to him, what was about to happen to him? Unless he was the greatest actor that Harding had ever seen. Al Pacino in a clown costume. He thought of the case, of the man that had made him leave Ireland, leave his wife. L
eave his wife. She had left him and he had hardly noticed. That case, that man, had scared him beyond belief. Had torn though his heart and exposed him to everything.

  He had come to this, here, Edinburgh, stone black granite, sheeting freezing rain, and a woman who pulled him up, shook him, took him to a brighter place, a quieter place. Couldn’t last though. Sooner or later he would take her back down with him. Later was gone and sooner had arrived.

  ‘I hope it was worth it.’

  ‘It was work.’

  ‘What else would it be with you?’

  ‘It’s not as if it happens all the time.’

  ‘How do you know? Do you even remember coming home?’ Brittle, brutal conversations. He loved her, hated himself. Knew it

  would end far quicker than the first one had. Knew that he would marry again, and probably one more time after that. Then the heart attack would come, at fifty-two or three, something crazy like that. Half-burned candle.

  Things had settled enough before he left that he could brush her cheek with a kiss and she accepted it. On his last full day he stroked the orange cat that sat meek and humble by the car door. Stale smell of himself in the car left lingering like unpleasant traces. Papers scattered, shattered, lost thoughts escaped that could never be re-captured. Too many, too much, cases, information, tumbling, falling into each other, he couldn’t see any patterns, connections. He knew they were there, anyone could, the lowest lowly constable could see. It was his job to put it together, explain it to the rest. His job, his cruel vocation.

  The engine was making a funny noise, he was sure. Unless it was the loosened joints of his brain. He turned on the radio. What was it, what the hell was it, he was desperate to remember everything that morning. He even tried to remember his name. Mahler’s fifth. That was it. Alan James Harding, that was it. Thank God. Still something there. He drove past dull green gardens and red houses with no signs of life behind heavy curtains. The castle hovered into view, hanging over everything like a threatening cloud. And it never went away.

  He parked his car in the underground station car park but instead of heading for the grey door that led to the office he headed out to the street. To the early mist, to the Galleon Café on the Royal Mile, heavy already with tourist trade. He loved watching the city through visitor’s eyes. Constantly wondering why they were photographing something that he had never noticed before. He was still a visitor himself. He may have lived here a while but he didn’t belong yet.

  The coffee kicked like a sad angry mule. Sami, Polish waitress, smiled too much as always with him. He thought it less a flirt than a sign of guilt, a secret. She was probably illegal, a prostitute in her spare time, a courier of pleasure pills to the new rich and young down in the renovated docklands. Or maybe she just liked him. If she did it was because she didn’t know him.

  Away from the office, his home, his wife, watching the world through a stranger’s eyes he began to see things as they were. Saw the real shape and form. Was high enough above to see the elaborate crop-circle design, something strange and oddly beautiful. There was no plot or plan that didn’t have structure, a beginning and an end. On the yellow napkin the pen blotted blue like blood. He wrote Eddie’s name. He was a tiny particle in the eye of the storm but he was at the centre of it. Everything flowed through him. Through the caffeine filter his eyes weaved across the Mile to two drunks squaring up. Jesus, it was only mid-morning, if that, and already the alcohol was kicking in. Or kicking out, he thought, these people never drained themselves of alcohol.

  Harding thought of himself, his own bear head, the silent struggle with his wife, and Stirling. Not just what he’d done but what he must have said to that low-life streak of misery from Ireland who seemed to be causing so much trouble. He’d gone there to interview Eddie, not confess all his own personal sins to him. Is that what he had done? He himself had left Ireland to escape the unremitting grime left over from the Ruby Madden case. Grime like mud on the floor of the shallow waters, slowing your movement, halting your stride. Ruby was still out there somewhere. He was no serial killer, Harding comforted himself with that. Ruby wasn’t likely to come after Harding or anyone else for that matter. But where the hell was he? They said nobody could just disappear. That sooner or later he or she turned up, dead, alive, in pieces, without a body, without a mind. But he had disappeared. Off the face of this known earth. And it was like a bullet lodged in Harding’s brain. It wasn’t over, it might never be over.

  His mobile rang, the theme from Braveheart. In his muddled, muddied form he couldn’t quite understand where the sound was coming from. A tourist bus, the café itself, his own mind, what? His phone, two feet away from him, on the counter top beside the cup. Relieved, he picked it up.

  ‘Harding.’

  ‘Alan, it’s Andy.’ Andy Fairweather, Glasgow outpost, fellow drinker, only much more of an Olympic athlete at it that Harding ever would be.

  ‘Hey, what’s up?’

  ‘I’ll fuckin’ tell you if ye jest listen.’ Sarcasm, honesty, all wrapped up in a few choice words. Harding never knew whether to be scared or amused.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘House, Lyndon estate in salubrious part of my city, did you like that big word? No, I’ve no fuckin’ idea what it means either. Anyway, house, we get a call, neighbours complaining. When these neighbours complain about something you know it’s serious.’

  Harding was trying to write all this down, on a napkin for God’s sake, trying to write the streaming words of a Glaswegian with an accent forged in North Sea oil. So he gave up and just listened as he said he was going to do.

  Napkin notes that further illustrated the lack of grip Harding felt he had on this case. It was a multitude of cases all rolled into one. Now added to everything else was a house in Glasgow, his least favourite city, a notionally deserted house where noises of all kinds had been heard in the previous few weeks, on and off. And still the house had looked deserted from outside, certainly in the daylight when no-one was ever seen entering or leaving the premises. The previous owners had long since been evacuated by the police for drug offences. Now, something else was back, new sins unseen, only glimpsed briefly vaguely in the early hours. Car engines running, screaming away and the only faces seen were shadows of shadows. Ghosts. As Andy continued his merry tale, Harding wondered why he was being told this, he had enough in his own city, his own life to be worried about. But Andy wouldn’t call for no reason. And there was a reason, finally. A photograph found by police when they went to search the premises. Amidst the debris of syringes and porn, amidst the dirt and the multiple foul smells, there were tiny traces of those shadow ghosts. And one trace in particular.

  A photograph. And a name.

  Stephen Zinny.

  In the cascade of words pouring out on the other end of the phone, Harding almost missed it. Stephen Zinny. The picture was found under the fridge in a shoe box of filthy images, someone had crudely drawn a Hitler moustache on the man’s face, then obviously dropped it in haste. Perhaps because, Andy ventured, the man in the photograph had just come back into the room, the kitchen, and whoever was lampooning his image had acted in fright, dropping the photograph on the floor where it was lost with all the other dirt. Stephen Zinny, Frankie Noon and the kid Brown. All connected.

  And all connected to Eddie Brogan, Harding thought but didn’t say to Andy. He thanked his friend and promised to buy him a drink. Andy made an obscene comment in reply and slammed the phone down.

  On the day that Harding died, Eddie checked out of his hotel and made his way back to Edinburgh. His muscles ached, his whole body seemed to be in pain although he couldn’t imagine why. He had dreamt of Edie the night before, had woken up from it and then dreamed of her again. Her mouth opening but no sound coming out and she begins to scream. Funny that she could scream but make no sound when she wanted to sing.

  He wanted the train to slow down and never reach Waverly or to continue on and never stop. Always stay in motion, stay
on the train. Never reach anywhere, never have to get off. Because once you got off the train the world came rushing in on you again. He didn’t think he had the strength for it anymore. He would go back to the house, open the curtains, clean it from top to bottom. He would clean himself up. He would find Harding and he would tell him everything.

  The train started to slow. Out of the carriage, through the throngs, up steep steps to the blinding afternoon light. He could walk, take a taxi, he had the money, he could, should go the police station straight away, while his mind was set. Get out of this light, away from all these people first. He stopped for a coffee which made his head swim. An elegant lady sneaked whisky into her cup underneath the table. Assumed her air of middle-class innocence. He thought he knew the way to the station, took a couple of side streets and ended up being lost. He was on the point of asking someone when he remembered. Walked quickly, rehearsing his opening lines over and over. Where to start, at the beginning of course. But where does it all begin?

  Start with Edie. It all begins and ends with her. Brighton. Would he go that far back, tell that shaming story? Not love at first sight, Mr. Harding, not at all. I was so drunk that—

  He was five minutes away from the station, his heart was pounding, his arm weary from carrying the bag. Around this corner and then another. Two minutes and he heard the explosion. The world stopped for a moment. Everyone, including him, ducked a little and uttered some expression of surprise and shock. It was just around the corner.