by Ned Beauman
‘My name’s Seth,’ Sinner had replied.
‘You got any brothers and sisters?’
‘Anna’s my little sister.’
‘I’d like to meet her. Well, see you again, Seth. Much obliged, Mr Roach,’ said Kölmel, patting him on the shoulder.
After Kölmel had gone, Sinner knew from his father’s expression not to ask who the man was or why he was taking money; but a few weeks later, when Alfeo turned up on a Sunday with plasters on both sides of his face, Sinner felt almost sure it had something to do with Kölmel. (Sinner didn’t know that, if you had asked Kölmel, he would cheerfully have assured you of his purposes: the money would help to prevent dirty new immigrants from setting up in the market to compete with the established stall-holders.) Either way, he couldn’t help seeing Kölmel as a benevolent figure, particularly since Alfeo loved to give Sinner a hard cuff over the head whenever he went near Alfeo’s cakes. And he didn’t mind seeing his father get humiliated. Intimidation was a kind of conquest, and Sinner liked conquest.
By the time Sinner was nine, he was working for Kölmel at the wet docks. Clutching a rinsed-out petrol can and a ‘rum pipe’ (a few inches of metal pipe glued to a foot of rubber tubing), he and another Whitechapel boy would creep down to the creaking wooden platforms where barrels of rum or port were being unloaded. There, with the other boy on lookout, he would ‘suck the monkey’: jam the metal end of the rum pipe under the barrel’s stopper, suck on the rubber end until liquid began to flow, fill the can, replace the lid, and wait while the other boy filled his own can; then they’d run off – snatching a lime or a banana or even a pineapple from a crate on the way, dockers spitting curses as they passed – slow down after a couple of minutes to walk panting and giggling through Limehouse, and swap their cans with one of Kölmel’s men for a few pence when they got home. That was how Sinner got his first taste of anything stronger than the froth on his father’s ale. It made you grimace, but if you drank enough it felt like discovering an entire hidden room in your own house that you’d never even known about. You wanted to do more than poke your head through the doorway. You wanted to take its dimensions.
When he needed someone beaten up, Kölmel didn’t use anyone younger than fifteen or sixteen because they weren’t strong enough and they got scared off too easily – and by the time Sinner was twelve, and everyone could see that he was already the strongest boy on his street and that he wasn’t scared of anything, Frink had made his claim on him. But Kölmel had won such a fortune betting on Sinner’s first few Premierland matches, back when no one but his cousin had guessed quite how good this midget newcomer was, that he still saw Sinner almost as an employee, and was officially ‘taking an interest’ in the boy’s career. That meant his men wouldn’t extort any more money from Sinner’s father, even though Sinner told them they were welcome to. Kölmel really only ran his old protection racket for sentimental reasons, anyway – from what Sinner had heard, a hundred times more money now came from whores and marijuana and forged cheques than could possibly be monkey-sucked with a razor threat from the stale loaves and squishy apples and gnarled pigs’ feet of the failing Spitalfields Market.
‘What’s next for you, then?’ said Kölmel in the dressing room. Here they were, today, with Sinner slumped in his green throne and Kölmel standing there like a supplicant; it didn’t reflect how things really were, but it still gave Sinner pleasure.
‘I want to go to America,’ Sinner said. ‘New York City.’
‘I mean your next fight.’
‘Don’t know. Ask Frink.’
‘What do you want to go to America for?’
‘Proper money over there. And you get treated like royalty, they say.’
‘Tossers, Americans. Except my half-brother.’
Sinner shrugged again. He thought of his father, whose journey from a village in eastern Poland had ended at the Jewish shelter on Leman Street only because he’d been thrown off the ship that was going to take him to the United States.
‘You’re talkative tonight, ain’t you?’ said Kölmel. ‘Got a girl waiting?’ He was ugly when he smiled. ‘Course you do. Give her a good hard one from me, son.’ Kölmel didn’t know what Frink knew.
After Kölmel left, Sinner drank a little more gin, got dressed, and then telephoned for a cab to take him from Bethnal Green to Covent Garden.
AFTER THE DAY’S ROUTINE SPEND YOUR EVENING AT
The Caravan
81 ENDELL ST.
(Corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, facing Princes Theatre)
Phone: Temple Bar 7665
London’s Greatest Bohemian Rendezvous
said to be the most unconventional spot in town
ALL NIGHT GAIETY Dancing to Charlie
PERIODICAL NIGHT TRIPS TO THE GREAT
OPEN SPACES, INCLUDING THE ACE OF SPADES, ETC.
The West End was littered now with these little cards, but Sinner had heard about the Caravan’s opening straight from its founder, Will Reynolds, a gambler, boxing enthusiast and well-known Soho rake who had been determined to make the worst possible use of a £300 inheritance from a Presbyterian great-aunt. The basement club was decorated in a nonspecific oriental style, with lacquered furniture, red hanging lanterns and painted silk drapes. Tonight, as every night, it was teeming. The band played ‘When I Take My Morning Promenade’. Later there would be a drag show.
Sinner liked coming here straight from a fight without bothering to wash. All the other men were so soaped, even perfumed, but he just stank, and in the crush at the bar they couldn’t ignore it. It was like walking around with his cock out. A few people greeted him, but he was already sick of talking tonight so he bought a double gin and stood at the end of the bar scanning faces. After a minute or two he noticed a good-looking boy of nineteen or twenty, with a French sort of bent nose, standing there with his thumbs in his pockets looking lost. Sinner shouldered through the crowd. He put a hand on the boy’s arm and bent towards his ear to be heard over the music, lightly brushing the boy’s crotch with the back of his other hand as he did so. ‘You waiting for anyone in particular?’
‘No.’
‘Come on, then.’ Sinner pulled him towards the door.
‘Who are you?’
‘It don’t matter.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Hotel de Paris on Villiers Street. I’ll pay. They know me. You been before?’
‘No, I don’t really … I mean. …’
Sinner never had any trouble. In a club like this, even the boys as beautiful as Sinner would usually join in the flirtation and gossip. That was why you came to the Caravan instead of just hunting in the dark at the Piccadilly News Theatre. But Sinner didn’t have to bother with that – there was something in the way he looked at you and the way he spoke to you. Or at least there was the first time – hardly anyone ever went with him a second time, not only because Sinner himself lost interest, but also because you were still too bruised and shaken, particularly if, like this French boy, you’d been unlucky enough to meet him on a night when he still had half a fight caged in him. Even if you’d been warned, though, you still didn’t turn him down. The best you could do was to pick up another pint of gin on the way so there was a chance that, after a last monochrome orgasm, he might pass out by daybreak.
They got to the door and started up the steps to street level just as a man in a black overcoat was making his way down. Sinner looked up. It was Philip Erskine. Sinner stopped.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?’ he said.
Erskine blanched and started to stutter something.
‘You followed me,’ said Sinner.
‘What?’ said Erskine.
‘You followed me here. Probably going to kidnap me. Posh cunt.’
Erskine swallowed. ‘That’s right. I followed you here. I’m sorry.’
Sinner knew that Will Reynolds wouldn’t like it if he heard that Sinner had punched a bloke out on his steps, so Sinner just cuffed Erskin
e hard with the back of his hand. Erskine let out a yelp, then turned, hurried back up the steps, and ran off down Endell Street.
3
AUGUST 1934
Erskine was back at school. In the dream, he woke up one morning in the dormitory, threw off his sheets, looked down at his body, and saw with horror that during the night he had somehow transformed from an insect into a man.
When he woke up a second time, he was sweaty and glue-mouthed and he had an erection. He had only intended a ten-minute afternoon nap but it was already three o’clock. He was in a small hot room in the United Universities Club on Suffolk Street, where he stayed whenever he was in London, on a mattress packed with knuckles and sinews. The club was old-fashioned and full of awful Cambridge hearties and so dusty he couldn’t stop sneezing, but his father had insisted that he join. Very soon, with a bit of diligence, Erskine felt he was certain to acquire lots of fascinating London friends with whom he would be able to dine and lodge as he wished, but so far, at twenty-four years old, the UUC was all he really had.
After changing his shirt he went downstairs to the L-shaped coffee room with its heavy maroon curtains half-closed to resist the siege of the summer day, and found Morton, Cripling and Nash sitting around cackling about something. He settled himself beside them in an armchair and tried to work out what was funny. No one greeted him, so he pretended to look over a copy of The Times. There was to be a plebiscite in Germany tomorrow to confirm the exciting succession of Herr Hitler.
‘I think Nash himself enjoys the occasional “night trip to the great open spaces”, don’t you, Nash?’ Morton was saying. ‘Ever the “Bohemian”.’
Nash raised his hands in mock-confession. ‘I shan’t deny it. “After the day’s routine”, I find it just the thing.’ They all brayed again.
Erskine saw that they were looking at some sort of chit or card. ‘What’s the joke?’ he asked.
‘Oh, hello, Erskine,’ said Morton cheerfully. ‘Cripling found this on the floor at his barber’s.’ Julius Morton had matriculated at Trinity with Erskine, and had once, quite sober, held Erskine down and forced him to gargle port until he threw up into his Ovid, then chuckled about it for days afterwards as if Erskine had been in on the joke all along. Every time Erskine allowed Morton to treat him as a chum the humiliation of that episode, and many others like it, was redoubled, but Erskine didn’t really have any choice – particularly since Morton had recently taken a romantic interest in his sister Evelyn, having met her by disastrous coincidence at one of Lady Molly’s dances. One of Erskine’s many objections to the orthodox eugenic theory of the day was that he knew of no proposed system which would put Morton down for compulsory sterilisation. Or at the very least a flogging.
Erskine’s only consolation, in fact, was what he knew of Morton’s beloved younger brother. At eight years old the brother had shoved a spade into the wheel of a moving car, which threw him on to his back so hard that he broke his leg and was blinded in one eye by a blow to the temporal lobe of the brain. The leg got better but he soon, unrelatedly, contracted polio. The Mortons’ family doctor, a former military man, was called, but, suspecting the boy of malingering, instructed that he should not be put to bed but instead kept active. As a result, Morton’s brother had lost the use of his right arm and both his legs, all of which had to be kept in heavy irons, and they itched so unbearably that he was driven almost insane: he would sometimes laugh for no particular reason in uncontrollable simian howls like a vaudeville comedian pretending to have gone mad. Nothing but acute pain could stop him, and his healthy leg ended up badly scarred because he used to burn himself deliberately with cigarettes. This episodic tragedy, which had darkened the lives of Morton’s entire family, gave Erskine ceaseless pleasure, like a really good radio serial.
‘What is it?’ he said, taking the card from Morton and reading it over.
Erskine didn’t understand – it seemed to be just an advertisement for a nightclub – but he forced a little laugh anyway, and gave it back. He sat for a few minutes as the three others began to joke about the temperaments of some of their university contemporaries. But as he tried to think of something witty to contribute, he slowly began to realise what they were really discussing, and at last, when Cripling used the expression ‘a bunch of brown hatters’, Erskine was sure. After that, he listened very closely.
But by then the theme was already almost exhausted, and the others soon started to talk about their plans for the evening. As much as he’d heard about the wonderful freedoms of a young bachelor in London, Erskine had found that one’s movements were even more public in a little club like this than they had been in a Cambridge college, so he already had an imaginary dinner with a cousin prepared as an excuse for going out to the fight tonight. And when the other three got up, leaving the card behind, he realised nervously that the excuse could do double-duty. Shaftesbury Avenue was only a few minutes from the United Universities Club. He could easily slip into this Caravan place on the way back from the fight.
In Trinity’s Great Hall he had once overheard part of a conversation along similar lines about a pub called the Marquis of Granby. Then, as now, he had carefully committed the exchange to memory, but it had contained no details of scientific usefulness apart from one crucial remark that ‘at a place like that, one can never be over-dressed’. Erskine consequently concluded that he would have to put on white tie if he was to visit the Caravan, but he could hardly wear that to the boxing match. Luckily, he had already resolved to wear his father’s overcoat on his trip into Spitalfields and keep it on at all times so that he wouldn’t have to come back to Suffolk Street with the ineradicable stench of blood and poverty and herring and Jew on his suit. The tails would not be visible under the overcoat.
He spent the early evening finishing a book by Lord Alfred Douglas called Plain English. Douglas, like Erskine, had been in the scholars’ house at Winchester, and Erskine had spent a term working at a desk on which the small carving of an erect penis was reportedly Douglas’ work. What Erskine had read of Wilde and his panderers he found repellent, but when he discovered that ‘Bosie’ had written a book about racial purity he ordered it from the London Library out of curiosity. As he’d expected, it was a crude work, with nothing to say, for instance, about Pitt-Rivers’ interesting but outlandish theory that, in sexual inversion, the great evolutionary consciousness of the species had found a way of hacking off its own least promising lines of inheritance before they could be propagated. Also, the book apparently lacked any of the coded allusions to immorality that Erskine sometimes found it abstractly amusing to identify in works by authors like Douglas, mentally netting and labelling each innuendo like a butterfly.
He ate steak and kidney pie at the club, changed into white tie, put on his gloves, buttoned his overcoat, and then, armoured, took a cab to Premierland. Commercial Road swarmed. The cab nearly ran over an organ-grinder’s monkey pulling at its chain. He’d heard that Thomas Cook took tourists on sightseeing tours of the exotic East End. To Erskine, the urban poor seemed not much different from the rural poor, and he understood neither. Why must they be so ugly and sore-ridden, he wondered? Why must they scream at their own children? Why must they urinate in the street? Plainly no one could desire these indignities for their own sake, so they made sense only as a sort of deliberate, spiteful impudence. On an intellectual level he understood that the condition of these specimens was the result of degenerative miscegenation and insufficient selection pressure, but still, somehow, as the son of Celia Erskine, a well-known charitable benefactor, he couldn’t help feeling personally insulted by their obvious lack of gratitude. Had Marx really spent all that time in London? Surely he must have realised that, if these withered grey creatures tried to rise up, the result would be unpleasant but barely perceptible, like a gust of smoke from a grate in the street.
The match was sold out, so he bought a ticket at four times the original price from a tout in a wheelchair, and found a seat. He looked around. The
lights above the ring were enclosed in a black square shade printed with advertisements for an evening paper, and around the ropes were hung red and blue posters with the programme for next week’s fight. Although the smelly man next to him kept jostling his shoulder, he felt secure in his overcoat. It wasn’t like the theatre – the audience came and went and talked and whistled and drank and even, somehow, slept as they pleased, and boys climbed from row to row shouting, ‘Nice apples, twopence’ – but then Erskine himself didn’t pay much attention to the first two fights. Instead, he looked around for anecdotal observations that he could one day include in a work on eugenics: a charming blonde Anglo-Saxon girl on the arm of some warty, toadlike Semite, for instance. Before Erskine had found anything of the sort, however, it was time for Roach vs Pock.
Erskine had first come across Seth ‘Sinner’ Roach in a copy of Boxing that was lying around in the coffee room of his club. Reading Sinner’s statistics and looking at his picture, Erskine had been struck by two powerful blows. The first was the very idea that such exquisite sporting prowess could have emerged from a physiological inheritance that was otherwise so wretched, like a peach tree growing from a plague pit – Jewish boxers were not uncommon these days, but what about an awkward, five-foot, nine-toed Jewish boxer who was good enough to be a world champion? The second blow was irritatingly obscure – like knowing you have forgotten something and not knowing what – but Erskine did not have time to pursue it because the case of Seth Roach had helped towards maturity one or two heretical ideas that he was nursing about practical eugenics, and soon he concluded that a close observation of Sinner would be the best way to put them to the test. He took out a subscription to Boxing, and when one of Sinner’s matches coincided with a visit to London he was determined to attend.