Boxer, Beetle (13 page)

‘I got the cab to take me in a circle,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I wanted to know if you were really Philip’s valet. You’re not, are you?’ She had a mannish way of jutting her chin forward when she was daring someone to contradict her.

‘I don’t know. An hour ago I was a stableboy.’

‘I knew it. If one of his servants really ever looked as deathly as you he wouldn’t go within a mile of them, let alone put them up in his flat. What do you really do?’

‘I was a boxer.’

‘You’re rather short for a boxer.’

‘I punch pretty hard for a short bloke. What are you?’

‘I intend to be a composer. Do you like avant-garde music?’

Sinner shrugged.

‘I’m quite sure you would,’ said Evelyn. ‘I can almost invariably tell.’ Evelyn was aware that she didn’t completely convince when she made knowing remarks like this, especially to someone like Sinner with that gaze of his, but she didn’t see how her repartee was supposed to gain any poise when she had absolutely nobody to practise on at home. If she tried to deliver a satirical barb at dinner her father would just stare at her until she wanted to cry. And Caroline Garlick’s family were lovely but the trouble was they laughed rather too easily, rather than not at all – it wasn’t quite the Algonquin Round Table. She was convinced that if she had been allowed to go to Paris she would have had lots of practice, and of course met lots of people like this boy, but as it was, if she ever met any genuine intellectuals – or any beyond their neighbour Alistair Thurlow – they would probably think she was hopelessly childish. For about a week she’d tried to take up heavy drinking, since heavy drinkers were so often reputed to be terrific conversationalists, but most of the time she just fell asleep.

Evelyn recovered herself and smiled. ‘You know, my brother is an extraordinary character in many ways. I never would have known he had the courage. He gets through twenty-six years with such olympic diffidence and then suddenly it’s an ordinary Thursday and one discovers a concubine in his bed. I don’t expect you mind if I call you that?’

‘What does it mean?’

‘You don’t, then.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘What it means is that I have never had any illusions about my brother’s real—’

‘You don’t call me names, you stuck-up bitch,’ said Sinner, and turned away from her. Immediately he heard a swish and
felt a hard blow to the back of his head. He turned back. Evelyn had clonked him with the umbrella.

‘And you don’t speak like that to a woman,’ she said, slightly flushed. She went out.

Sinner sat down in an armchair, rubbing the back of his head, surprised at how deeply he’d allowed Evelyn to irritate him, and knowing, really, that it was because of how deeply Erskine’s sister reminded him of his own. The sister he’d once had. Anna.

The last time he’d seen Anna, he was fifteen and she was only twelve, eyes still too big for her head. One Friday night the whole family was at home in the flat on Romford Street, in the big all-purpose room which they called the kitchen. Sinner’s mother was at the hob cooking chicken soup, Anna was determinedly trying to teach Sinner to knit, and Sinner’s father was sitting with three or four of his old friends from his home village, grumbling about business over a Polish card game called Ocka on which they were gambling with shillings. After losing nine hands in a row, Sinner’s father had stamped his foot and said to one of his friends, ‘You took three cards instead of two.’

‘I took two cards.’

‘You took three. You thought I wouldn’t notice?’

‘I took two.’

‘Cheating,’ said Sinner’s father. ‘Cheating again,’ he roared. Then he rose from his stool, picked up the rickety little fold-up table on which they were playing and hurled it out of the open window. There was a crash outside followed by a couple of startled oaths. Sinner jumped up, ran down three flights of stairs almost before the first ace had hit the cobbles below, and started snatching up the coins that had scattered across the street. He’d picked up nearly £2 in shillings before he turned and saw that his sister had followed him down.

‘Go back upstairs, Anna,’ he said.

‘Are you going to buy sweets?’ she said. She was wearing one of his old shirts.

His father appeared at the door of the tenement block. ‘Come back here with our money, you little shits.’

Sinner ran.

When he got back that night, drunk, he found his mother in the room that he shared with Anna. (He’d slept in the same bed with her for most of his life. In the world he knew, it wasn’t unusual for brothers to end up fucking their sisters, or at least to come close, and he was proud that he’d never touched her like that.) His mother was holding a cold wet cloth to a green bruise on Anna’s head. Anna was half-awake and mumbling. Sinner went into his parents’ room, woke up his father, and beat him until his face was all blood and he was cowering in the corner beside his mother’s sewing machine. Then he went back into the other bedroom and took over with the cloth from his mother, who went out. The next morning he said goodbye to Anna and went to the gym to train with Frink. In the evening he had a match at Premierland, at the bottom of the bill, and a man in the crowd came up to congratulate him afterwards, and he lived for about a week in that man’s flat; he tried cocaine there for the first time, but he didn’t like the blank and cubic tone it gave his orgasms. When he finally went home again, Anna wasn’t in the flat.

‘Where is she?’ he said to his mother.

‘She’s gone. Your father’s out looking.’ She’d been crying.

‘What the fuck do you mean she’s gone?’

‘I went out and I came back and she wasn’t here.’

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘If you stayed with us, Seth,’ said his mother. ‘If you stayed with us this wouldn’t happen.’

‘Stay with you? Every day and night until he dies or fucks off somewhere else?’ said Sinner.

‘Just until she finds a husband to take her away.’

‘Every day and night?’

‘Why not? Why can’t you? Because of prizefighting and girls? Stay with us, or just go. He hits her because he can’t hit
you. God above! If you weren’t here at all, he wouldn’t want to hit so much. If you were here all the time, he would want to hit, but he couldn’t. But you come and go. You stay just long enough to make him angry and then you disappear. Do you think it helps when you come back here once a week to punish him? That just makes it worse for her. And for me.’

Sinner went out to look for Anna himself. He never found her. And when he lost Anna, whom he loved, he lost more than just a sister. Because he was certain that Anna – just like, it now seemed to him, Erskine’s sister Evelyn – had known something important about her brother long before her brother had really known it himself. She used to smile one way when she heard their mother blather to him about local girls and another way when she saw him stare at a handsome man in the street, neither smile her usual smile, which rose slowly in her face like a glass filling with orange juice until it overflowed into laughter. She was only twelve but she knew him in a way that no one else had ever known him. So what else was there to find out about himself that she had never told him, and could never tell him, now that she was gone? What other secrets of Sinner’s had been washed away with her in the rain?

At twenty-two, just down from Cambridge and not very happy, Erskine had begun a three-month period of rigorous self-experimentation in imitation of his hero Francis Galton. Of the experiments he had performed in that time, four were particularly memorable.

The first was very brief. For most of his life, Erskine had wondered if the unconscious processes of the body could be subjugated more fully to the conscious mind. So one day, as a preliminary study, he sat down on his bed at home in Claramore and, for half an hour, concentrated only on inhaling and exhaling. Then he turned his attention to an essay he was planning about the genus
Ceratophaga
(the moth that eats nothing but dead horses’ hooves and dead tortoises’ shells) and commanded his body to go back to breathing without supervision as it normally did, rather as one might impatiently send a child off to play.

But his body ignored him, and he continued to feel as if he’d suffocate and die unless he specifically willed each breath. After several minutes of panic in which he wondered if he had permanently shut off some gasket in his brain and would never be able to concentrate on anything else again for the rest of his life, he realised he was breathing without thinking – but as soon as he realised, he stopped again – panicked, started, realised, stopped – again and again – and it wasn’t until his mother knocked on his door to tell him about his sister’s early return from holiday that the torture was interrupted. Three far more ambitious related projects had been planned – to fall asleep at will, to stop his nasal mucosa from
producing unwanted mucus, and to pace his digestive system so that he could eat a huge breakfast every day and then skip lunch without feeling hungry – but he decided to postpone them all in case he did himself some sort of lasting damage.

After that, he wanted to know if the mind could ever be quite as unruly as the body. So for two weeks he carried a notebook, and every time he made a decision to do something, however unimportant, he made some rapid notes about the circumstances, then before bed he would expand on those notes in detail. And in all that time he couldn’t find a single action that was, in Galton’s words, ‘uncaused and creative’: everything he did, every so-called whim or fancy or inspiration, was a consequence of utterly predictable and conventional desires or obligations, and those in turn could probably be traced back to some banal combination of heredity and environment. This depressed him. Then, on the fifteenth day, he was passing his sister’s bedroom when he saw on her dressing table a picture, torn from a newspaper, of the young French bank robber Alexandre Stavisky, known as
le beau Sasha
. He went into the room and stared at the photo for some time, then went back to his own room and took out his notebook, but he wasn’t sure what to write down: he had no particular interest in crime and punishment so there was no earthly reason why he should have looked at the photograph. He abandoned the experiment.

The following month, he learnt that one of the cooks in his boarding house at Winchester had been committed to an asylum after trying to attack a boy with a skillet, and he became interested in insanity. So the next time he was in London he went on a walk from Rutland Gate in Kensington to the cabstand at the east end of Green Park, and on the way he pretended that everything he saw, human or animal, animate or inanimate, was a spy sent by a foreign power. By the time he got to the cabstand, he could divide the horses into those with pricked-up ears who were openly watching
him and those with floppy ears who were pretending not to. Terrified, he ran back to the United Universities Club. He didn’t feel better until the next day, when he began his fourth experiment, which was to investigate idolatry. He put a calabash pipe on his desk and stared at it, insisting to himself that it had the power to reward or punish the behaviour of all men. Very gradually, as the hours passed, he felt a sort of reverence developing for the pipe, but he had to go to dinner before he could really bring himself to get on his knees before the thing.

In the end, these experiments frightened him. He didn’t like to think about how easy it was to demean and diminish the human intellect. More and more often, as he fell asleep after a difficult day, a particular image appeared before him. It was of a great noble building on top of a hill, a marvel of pillars and turrets, somewhere between a castle and a monastery and a stately home. But through every room and hall and corridor and staircase in the building ran a bloody, translucent, glistening tube as thick as his torso, with no beginning or end, that shuddered in a constant squelching peristalsis, staining the carpets and smearing the windows. And every so often, for no apparent reason, one knot of this intestinal beast would contract, tighter and tighter, until an entire tower or wing of the building cracked and crumbled and then toppled down the hill. The place could be rebuilt each time, but you never knew which section you would lose next, and if you tried to hack the viscid worm in half with an axe or a hammer it would just regrow, and the following day you would find it blocking the door to the pantry or twisting beneath your bedsheets. Even when he deliberately tried to picture the tube withered away to dust and the building unbesmirched, he couldn’t hold the thought for more than an instant before he saw its red flesh again.

By the time Sinner was living in his flat, however, this image didn’t come to him nearly so often, but only because now, if
he was specifically trying not to think about something, it tended to be the angel child.

After that trip to Poland in November, and the terrible incident in bed with Gittins, he had for a short time returned to self-experimentation, determined that it should be possible never to ejaculate in his sleep or wake up with an erection again. Eating half a pound of liquorice a day had failed to muffle his libido, but he had discovered that if he masturbated about once every ten days he could achieve a sort of homeostasis.

Masturbation, however, was troublesome – though not, to Erskine, for the traditional moral reasons. He found the Bible unpersuasive, and the only reference his housemaster at Winchester had ever made to the male sexual urge was one short, uneasy interview in his study: Dr Paisey had asked Erskine, ‘Do you understand the difference between a bull and a bullock?’, and when Erskine had said, ‘Yes’, he had sent him away, apparently satisfied that he had done his duty. Still, Erskine had read a lot about masturbation since then, because it often came up in older books about race improvement. Joseph Howe, for instance, claimed that masturbation caused acne, pallor, dull eyes, a furry tongue, constipation, tuberculosis, epilepsy, hypochondria, insanity and, worst of all, ‘debilitated sperm’, which would in turn produce nothing but runts, weaklings and females. It was largely because of the influence of Howe and his faction that even the richest boarding schools in England refused to give up their open dormitories, coarse linens, doorless lavatories, cold showers and exhausting timetables of physical exercise, although of course these measures were generally now attributed to the toughening of the manly character rather than to the prevention of self-abuse. Rationally, Erskine knew there was scant medical evidence for Howe’s claims, but he still couldn’t help feeling that as a pioneer of eugenics he shouldn’t be so careless with his procreative serum (although he often reminded
himself that Galton’s own marriage was childless). So sometimes he masturbated and sometimes he didn’t, and when he did, it took great discipline to prevent either the bloody worm in the castle or the angel child from coming into his head uninvited, to the point where he would begin each reluctant session with the self-defeating declaration, ‘I must not think of. …’