The Boxer's Dreams of Love

by philip boyle

  How far was it, she wondered? She thought she could see the lights from the edge of the road, thought she could smell the sea. They had promised so often to take them and only now did she realize that she didn’t need their help to get there. It was down the road a while, a car ride away, the lights, the seafront, the sea, Brighton Pier.

  He could, should just keep going. That had been his plan. On the outskirts now, the land stretched out vague and shapeless. He could slip into it, become indistinct himself. Lose his definition, become unrecognizable. He turned on the car radio and then turned it immediately off. He was afraid of hearing the news. It had become an unwelcome voice in his head. He was afraid of hearing the sad sentimental songs that brought ludicrous tears. He was just circling around, knowing he would end up back in the same place again. He couldn’t leave any more than he could bring her back. On the passenger seat his phone vibrated and lit a warning tone. It alerted him every time, made him edgy, as did the knock on the door and the soft touch at the elbow as someone crept up on him from behind. Looking at the phone caused him to veer to the centre of the road. There was something there, someone walking on the other side. He was still some distance from them but his hands gripped the wheel and his heart beat turned ever faster. He drove past and through the dimming lights of the car the shadow on the road took on the shape of a woman. He slowed down, looked in the rearview mirror and reasoned it was another manifestation of his increasing anxiety at a crazy world that was fast closing in on him.

  She had stopped herself at the sight of his car. She stood in apparent indecision and apprehension. He watched her through the angled crooked narrow mirror and his mixed-up mind screamed her name over and over. He knew it could not be. Knew it could not be. He was glad he was alone, glad that none of the others could see this, although he was sure they were aware of a change in him. They had already changed in their behaviour toward him. More cautious, more afraid, they crept like cats for fear of raising the beast. If they could see, feel, touch, his doubts now, they would actually devour him, cast his remains aside and elect a successor in his place. There were always plenty of those.

  Frozen like an angel in the low sodium lights, she stood, still. He turned the engine off and watched her for a while, waited for her to move. He could see no features, he knew it couldn’t be but his mind wanted to repeat Sarah, Sarah, over and over again. The only way to stop the noise in his head was to keep his body moving, his thoughts moving ahead. Each little detail became vivid and loud. The key sliding out of the ignition, the sweep of the door as it opened onto the cold creeping night. The rustle of the breeze through the mysterious folds of the night field grasses that waited like kneeling disciples. The scraping of his shoes on the tarmac and then the sound of his own scared breath as he turned to face her. He took careful steps in her direction.

  ‘Are you okay? I didn’t mean to scare you. My attention was distracted for a moment and I didn’t see you. I was surprised to see anyone out here actually.’ He sounded so polite to himself. She wasn’t Sarah he was pleased to see. His heart had slowed down, his thoughts were sorting themselves into more rational patterns.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be out here at this time of night. I was probably too dark to see.’ What an odd thing to say, Maggie thought. ‘I was hoping to get a lift.’

  Stephen Zinny lifted his phone from the passenger seat so that she could sit down. He noticed the missed calls on the screen. Tommy fucking Pearson, the last person he wanted to speak to. He turned the phone off and smiled at her as she put on her seatbelt. She was cold and nervous and her mascara had started to run, suggesting earlier tears. I know how you feel, he thought. Within a couple of minutes she had settled into herself, he might not have been there at all. She stared through the windscreen, through the night and beyond. She was much older now, he could see, but serious efforts had been made to stem the flow of time. Make-up caked like careless plaster and hair whose natural colour had long been forgotten. Creased eyes and mouth, lines of eternal regret. She wasn’t looking ahead at all, he realised, she was looking back.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Why hadn’t he asked this before? She inclined her head towards him, eyes arched in surprise as if the question was too obvious.

  ‘Brighton.’

  Brighton. He almost laughed in her face. She wants to go there, I want to leave. If she’d said London, he might have taken her there. He might have taken her anywhere.

  ‘Anywhere in particular?’

  Her delay in responding was less to do with reluctance than having no real answer to give. If Stephen knew anything, if he had learned anything in his chosen poisoned career, it was that trouble had its own unique smell, it lingered, it clung to a person like a leech and nothing could remove it. Except maybe death.

  ‘The Grand,’ she finally said.

  ‘The Grand hotel?’ He couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice. He waited for the follow-up story, the lie upon lie, the fairytale plucked out of the winter night air. But nothing more came. She seemed to shrink back down into her seat, she would offer him no more. ‘Sure,’ he said. In the absence of conversation he reluctantly turned on the radio. Music pierced the strange atmosphere and brought its own baroque baggage. Tom Waits was on a downtown train, making the dark even darker.

  He was in no hurry and she clearly had no idea where she was. The Grand was clear and luminescent on this pitch night, it was visible at the end of the road and he waited for her to see it but nothing came. She had rolled down the window a little and her eyes closed partially while she lifted her nose to the outside. The long day previous had finally faded from his mind, the blood clean washed off, he had had to involve himself in a tiny little dispute in order to bring it to a close. Back at the house afterwards and even the second tumbler of whiskey had failed to quell the insurgent agitations inside. His aides, his worriers, had argued against him going out again, alone, especially with the clear spots of alcohol on his breath. What was he, he screamed, a prisoner in his own house? Was he now no different than that little girl they had finally offloaded on some insolent beach somewhere? Finally, alone, no whimpering poodles nipping at his ankles, he had escaped to his car and was doing laps around this desperate place which he vowed to escape. Just not yet.

  And now her, this loaded woman, who had no idea where she was going. He could drop her at the hotel and what would she do then? She wouldn’t go in, he was certain of that. He realized he could do what he liked with her.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ asked Maggie, dreamy, sleep-like face that suggested she wanted always to be nearly there and never arrive. As long as she was moving, as long as she was warm, being driven, she was safe. It was only when the engine stopped, when the door opened, when she had to wake up, that the problems began. She had made a mistake, she wanted to go back, the Grand hotel was a piece of memory, something gleamed form the news, some political party conference. And the sea, the sea didn’t taste the same at night. the lights, the noise and dirt of the streets, party people, kids patrolling the streets with their dogs of apathy straining at the leash. Suddenly she wanted the comfort of the home, the ex-nurse wanted to be nursed again, wanted her chair near the TV, wanted to experience the world at a safe distance, not like this. This was too real. And this man beside her, too polite, clean shaven, tidy hair, that odd tint to his accent, he was too quiet, and that trace of a smile buried under. When he looked at her, she could swear she saw nothing but black in his eyes, no reflection off the surface.

  She noticed they were turning off the main streets, she shivered in the heat of the car, felt a bead of sweat on her brow.

  ‘You have no bag,’ he said out of nowhere.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have no bag. Do you have money?’

  ‘Y-yes. Of course I have. We must be there by now. I’m sure I saw it earlier.’

  ‘You’ve never been here before, have you? To Brighton I mean?’

  ‘Of course I have. Can y
ou please just let me out? I can make it from here.’

  ‘I couldn’t let you out here. It’s not safe around here. Only minutes from the seafront and yet you wouldn’t believe the people you’d run into round here.’

  ‘Please. I’m late.’

  ‘Late for what?’

  His heartbeat had slowed to its normal pattern. He was back on the ground, in his realm, in control, enjoying himself. No doubts or uncertainties here, he was driving the train, directing the play, whatever you wanted to call it. Why do this, she would ask in a few minutes. They always asked that question. If you had to ask that question you were in the wrong business entirely, you had no business being there at all. What the fuck was this woman doing walking on an empty road with no place to go? What else did she expect?

  ‘Late for what?’ he repeated.

  ‘I’m – meeting someone.’

  ‘In the hotel? Why don’t you phone them? No phone, no bag. Do you even have money?’

  She just nodded this time, now too afraid to speak.

  In the end that’s all he had. When all else failed, and all else had failed, he had this, this latent, frightening talent. And if you can do something better than other people, if it sets you apart, lifts you above the rest, keeps you ahead of the chasing pack, well then. He didn’t think of himself as bad in any elemental way. Everything was relative and in a relative world his crimes paled in the shadows of many others. Somehow, somewhere recently, he had taken a wrong turn. No way ahead, only option was to turn back and that was no option at all. The shark dies if it stops swimming. Move ahead or die.

  He was turning onto a road of empty, boarded houses, falling for-sale signs, signs of re-possession from those who didn’t possess any more. Everything had been turning in of late, he didn’t understand any of it, Frankie, the two dead policemen, that kid shot in the doorway, all to do with him and he had nothing to do with any of it. Except… Except what? No orders from him, he would never be that stupid, why draw attention to yourself like that. It was coincidence and yet it couldn’t be. He knew they would come eventually. Knew his name was on a list somewhere. Turn and turn, down roads too narrow to turn back on, keep going, to where they took you. She was breathing hard beside him.

  ‘You have nowhere else to go, do you?’ He hardly understood his own words. ‘Where are you really going?’ An interminable pause before she answers.

  ‘Brighton.’

  ‘But we’re already there.’

  ‘I won’t go back.’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Are we near the sea? I want to smell the ocean. That’s all.’

  ‘Where have you come from? I don’t know your name by the way? Have to call you something.’

  ‘Maggie. Maggie Brogan,’ she proudly announced. Brogan? Why did the name register with him? Something there he couldn’t quite see. ‘The house on the hill,’ she continued. She seemed to have lost all of her fear. He looked ahead and wasn’t sure where he was. He watches her finger drum tiny beats on her leg. There is still a trace of a smile on her face. He wonders if he stops will she start to shriek with horror, implore him to keep going? They were passing through the other side of the city, out into the countryside again, on pagan roads, distant farmhouses, and curious lights out at sea, oil flames from ancient pirate ships, waiting for the signals to come ashore. The road curved and snaked, pitch black now. He turned and saw not a middle-aged, disturbed woman but his teenage self. Sitting on a torn high seat in a rattling jeep that barely held the fractured dirt road over which it hurtled in the sunken African night. Beside him sat two tall skinny coal black men, high on Russian vodka and speed of their own making. They cackled like the hyenas that ran in laughing excitement alongside the endlessly bouncing vehicle. They barely paid the whimpering white teenage boy any attention for which he would be grateful later on. The boy was no longer the mature man of the streets that he had imagined himself to be. He had left his house, his town, his territory and was lost now in a bewildering nightmare. Be careful what you wish for because it just might happen. Hitchhike down the coast a little, sleep rough for a couple of nights and find some way of getting to his feet. He had money, he had the safe sanitized dreams that he was stronger than he really was, better than the others, the so-called friends left behind in their middle-class mediocrity. Get up, get out. He had made it to the road, beyond the lights, beyond the concrete and the suits and any semblance of structure. He had put out his scrawny hand and felt his heart hammer in his chest as the battered jeep jolted to a stop twenty yards up the road. Huge shiny smiling teeth lit up the shut-down darkness and a hand waved Stephen forward. He moved, against his will, drawn in by that smile, too late to stop now. He was only getting what he wanted, wasn’t he?

  He knew before he climbed up into the vehicle that smelled of rotting fish and a myriad of other dark perfumes. Knew he was in trouble. They didn’t ask him questions, they simply speared off into the night. They spoke in a dialect he didn’t understand, they laughed, he was sure about him, and only at the last did the boy see the rifles poised recklessly between their rocking legs. An hour and a half and they never said a word to him. They finally pulled into a ragbag car park of deserted cars with frayed metal skins. A shack nearby shone with fluorescent light and frenetic music spilled out like infectious inescapable rain. They jumped from the car and almost forgot him. His door was pulled screaming open and skeletal hands dragged him out.

  ‘And you? Your name I mean?’ Quivering voice, Maggie continued on with this bizarre conversation. Both assuming the façade of normality for no apparent reason.

  ‘Stephen.’ No harm in telling her, not his first name. Not now, what did it matter? She had pulled him from his teenage nightmare at least. He had survived, the drugs and drink imbuing his captors with a frenzied high that made them forget him completely. He drifted out of the shack, shaking, not believing his luck, vomiting in the nearby grass, the smells and fumes and fear clogging up his sense. Something made him go back momentarily to the entrance, made him stare at the hellish scene unfolding like a Dante-esque vision before his young eyes. In that staggered, staggering moment, Stephen Zinny was infused with an arrogance, a feeling of immortality that remained with him for ever after. Nothing would ever frighten him the same again, and that was both his salvation and his downfall. The downfall of all such men. Maybe it would have been better if those men had abused and tortured him, and then dropped him back home a whimpering, cowering little boy. Because the arrogance fuelled contempt, contempt fuelled the extravagant desire that could never be satisfied. That led him to cross to the other side of the world when his own vast country was no longer enough. That led him through countless clubs, bars, warehouses of the weak and corruptible, through rivers of drugs and alcohol, vacant cheap women. That led him here. To this nothing road on the outskirts of everything, with a woman who had no idea where she was, where she wanted to go. He hated her because she had lived a dull fucking dull plastic life and yet here she was in the same car on the same road on the self same night. Where was the fairness in that? He abandons one lost woman only to find another. Was that his punishment? The singer, what had been her name again? And Tommy fucking Pearson. Never do favours for little men like that. Never accept gifts from little men like that. Yet here he was, hiding from the world in Tommy’s house, the king held in checkmate by the pawn. And the world was looking for him alright, under every rock, in the bargain basement clubs that he would shudder from ever visiting himself. What was going on with the world? It had ended, simple as that. In a hospital bed, with tubes and wires, machines that caught the slow laboured breaths of a young woman who had done no wrong in his eyes. No, the end had begun in that dismal alley, in the dismal rain, under that hammer blow from a man too pathetic to inflict his long dead skills on anything that might resemble an equal. No, he had to choose a slip of a girl, his daughter, he had to cut her down, and then run. He might have left it at that, he might have followed through in his promise to Frankie. He
might have, he might have… if she had hung on. If.

  ‘Please,’ Maggie was saying as he came back. Her voice, eyes, aging face pleaded for escape. Maybe she had glimpsed the horror pictures in his mind and realized the enormity of her plight.

  ‘You want to see the sea?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she almost cried.

  ‘I’ll take you there.’ He thought of something else, something that clearly amused him. ‘Maggie may,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 37

  Eddie tries to get to Brighton The rain like bullets on the window. The unnatural cry of the wind that ghosted down the street outside. He checked to make sure the window was closed properly. He could feel a draught from somewhere. Maybe it was inside him. His hair rested on the edge of the bed that squeaked and groaned under the tiniest movement. And as for the couple next door, it probably wouldn’t be long until they were back from their little trip. Tommy hoped it would have tired them out so that they could all have a good night’s sleep.

  That wasn’t the reason and he knew it. Why his mind couldn’t rest, why it spluttered off in all directions at once. This was not the retirement he had planned, not the golden beach under a thousand suns. He checked his phone. He wasn’t going to try again, not tonight. What the fuck was he calling him for anyway? What was he going to say? How’s the house, are you looking after the garden, oh, and by the way, Stephen, I have done terrible, terrible things. And all because… why? Two steps from the bed and you were in the bathroom, that’s how small this hovel of a hotel was.