by Takis Würger
Hans
Most of the boxers jogged together. “Attacking the road,” my coach called it. Billy didn’t jog because he had knee problems, or so he said. Everyone suspected that he was just too lazy. I liked to run in the evenings before I went to bed, through the meadows behind the city. I ran alone. Every time I ran past the paddock with Charlotte’s horse I brought it an apple and enjoyed feeling close to it.
That night in November I was running across the meadows, thinking about the next fight, or about nothing at all. I didn’t care whether or not my sweatshirt was clean, or if I looked ridiculous in my bobble hat; what mattered was that I was running as fast as I could. I’d thought a lot about what boxing training actually was. Training gave you the chance to accustom your body to pain. As a child I tried to avoid pain, punching less hard when the trainer wasn’t looking. As a student, I went looking for pain. I think a boxer has to love the fight, not the victory. When I watched footballers training they would laugh and mess around. Nobody laughed in the gym of the Cambridge University Amateur Boxing Club.
I saw two people standing by the paddock fence, but I couldn’t make out their faces in the dark, so I ran closer.
The two people by the paddock were Charlotte and a man. They were holding hands. It looked wrong somehow. I wanted to turn and run the other way.
“Hans.”
Charlotte called to me. I was out of breath. She introduced the man, smiling as if she had understood nothing. “This is Magnus, my boyfriend,” she said.
He was blond and looked as if he was probably good at golf. I wondered why he didn’t have any stubble.
“Are you visiting?” I asked.
The blond man laughed. His teeth were white and even. He slapped me on the shoulder. My left hand twitched briefly; for a moment I saw panic in Charlotte’s eyes, and I knew that she understood everything.
The blond man didn’t notice. He laughed with his mouth wide open, as if I’d told a good joke.
“I’m doing my PhD in Economics, but I’m actually a consultant at BCG.”
I didn’t know what BCG was, nor did I care. Charlotte and the blond man made a couple of bland remarks. I thought of how her little finger had brushed my neck as she tied my bow tie.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Excuse me—I’m training— got to go—good luck.”
I turned and ran off into the night. Why had I said good luck? I ran faster, and forgot the blond man’s face.
Peter
Alarm: 7 a.m.
Sport: 50 press-ups, dips, 2 planks 30 seconds each
Masturbation: during breakfast
Breakfast: instant noodles with jiaozi
Motto of the day: One can know how to win without being able to do it.
Aim of the day: Write to the African prince; be the best.
Dear Prince Makonnen Workq,
My name is Peter Wong and I am a student at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. You don’t know me, but you and I have something in common. We both came to Cambridge as foreigners. You came shortly after the coup in your African homeland. I came because what I seek does not exist in my homeland, China. I came for the Pitt Club, because it is an institution that brings forth greatness. I would like to ask you, as an alumnus, to support my admittance to the Club. You were the first dark-skinned member; I would like to be the first member from China. I know that you are a member because I found an old photo of the Committee in the library in which you appear.
I am the son of Wong Bao Wen, the CEO of the Northern China Technology Corporation. I passed the Chinese national higher education entrance examination, the gaokao, as the best student in Beijing, and I run a marathon in 3 hours 17 minutes. I speak Mandarin, English, French, and a little Hakka. At Cambridge I gained a First in my Part One examinations. I am a member of the Union Society, the Athletic Club, the Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society, and the Croquet Society. I have many friends at the Pitt Club, but I think it would be helpful if you were to write my name in the book in the entrance hall.
I would like to express my gratitude by supporting your fight for justice in your homeland and would appreciate it if you could let me know how I might support your foundation, idealistically or financially. I would be happy to come to London to introduce myself in person.
I look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Wong
Hans
Shortly before the end of term I was lying on the parquet floor of my room. I had strained my back that morning and couldn’t sit or lie down without pain. It was more bearable if I lay on a hard surface and propped my feet up on the edge of the bed. I was reading a book about a book by Foucault.
I was naked; I always slept naked, even when it was cold.
There was a knock at the door. I pulled on a pair of jeans and went to open it. Angus Farewell was standing outside in a dinner jacket. He laughed in my face and tossed his long silver hair.
“Get dressed,” he said. “We have an appointment.”
I went back into my room, surprised by how pleased I was to see him. I splashed my face with cold water, put on a shirt and started to tie my new bow tie. I’d found it in my pigeonhole a few weeks ago, after the night by the paddock; it was in a brown paper envelope with no note, but I knew it had come from Charlotte. I’d practiced tying it for two weeks, a few minutes each day.
I was still tucking in my shirt when I stepped back into the corridor. Farewell was leaning against the wall, fine fabric on whitewashed plaster.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
He was walking downstairs ahead of me, and I couldn’t see his face.
“To the Pitt Club. The Committee has decided to admit you,” he said.
I followed him, speechless. Every stair brought me a step closer to my goal, but with every step I was betraying the man who had lent me his support.
I stopped at the bottom and held out my hand. Everything about this felt wrong.
“Thank you, Mr. Farewell,” I said.
“Please—call me Angus.”
We walked to the Pitt Club in silence. A clammy chill had risen from the river and descended on the town. Neither of us was wearing a coat, but I was too nervous to feel the cold. We entered the Club and went upstairs. Before me stood at least thirty men in a row, all in evening wear. Around their necks they wore the Pitt Club bow tie: silver, blue, and black stripes. Farewell and I walked towards the bar, and each of the men shook my hand. I wished I had a handshake like Farewell’s, firm and dry; my palms were damp.
Two metal goblets stood on the counter, filled with champagne. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Farewell down his in one, and I emptied my goblet, too. He tugged at the end of my bow tie, loosened it, put it in my suit pocket, and tied a Pitt Club tie around my neck.
“To Hans Stichler,” Farewell declared to the room. Then he leaned towards me and said, “You’re one of us now.” The men raised silver goblets and called out my false name, which they pronounced “Stickler.” Nevertheless, I was proud.
The evening passed to the rhythm of popping corks. The lilies in the vase by the wall exuded a scent that gave me a headache. I wondered who was paying for the drinks. I saw the faces of men I knew from university; some of the boxers were there, too.
From time to time one of the older men came up to me and made small talk or asked me which college I was at.
“What’s the totty like this year?” asked one.
“What does your father do?” asked another.
“Do you hunt?” asked the next, before launching into a long speech about the merits of the German dachshund.
Josh hugged me. I found the physical contact unpleasant. He apologized for forgetting to put chervil in the vinaigrette and said we had to thrash Oxford this year. He kept on gently slapping my face.
“Boom, boom, boom,” he said.
I ran my hand along the wooden counter of the bar and placed my palm over a spot where the varnish had chipped off.
&nbs
p; A hand grabbed me and pulled me to the door, down the stairs and outside, where cold air streamed into my lungs. It was Farewell.
“A little walk,” he said.
I thought of my father’s laughter lines. We walked to St. John’s College; the porter let us through the gate without asking any questions, as if he knew Farewell. We sat on the wall of the bridge over the Cam.
I wanted to tell him about Alex but I didn’t know how to start. She’d never been there for me, not until she needed me. I was lying for her, I hated it, and I didn’t know how long I could keep it up.
“Hans?”
Farewell was looking at me. I’d been daydreaming.
“Are you looking after Charlotte?” he asked again.
“I thought the Swede was doing that?” I said. I was rather drunk.
“The Swede isn’t one of us.”
Farewell spat into the water.
“Never take her to the Club,” he said.
I was silent.
“And you must come to London next week. My tailor is over from Vienna. You need a new dinner jacket.”
I’d bought my dinner jacket for eighty-nine euros and ninety-nine cents before moving to England, from an online shop called Alibaba. The trousers sagged like a burst balloon. I’d thought no one would notice.
“I’d love to come, but I’m afraid I can’t afford it.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
He put an arm around me; as a father might embrace his son, I thought, but perhaps I was wrong.
I wasn’t religious, but that night, as I entered my room and fell into bed fully clothed, I made an attempt at a prayer: “Dear God, thank you for letting me meet a man like Angus Farewell.”
All my life I’d dreamed of having friends and belonging somewhere, and now the dream had come true because I was a fraud. Alex had told me I had to solve a crime in the Pitt Club. Some of the men at the Club had a strange way of talking about women; it sounded as if they despised them. Far stranger to me than these men were the women who knew what they were like yet still came to the parties. I couldn’t imagine Farewell being part of anything where people were actually doing something wrong.
I had the sense that I hadn’t told God enough.
“And … please show me the right thing to do.”
I lay on the mattress and thought about the evening, which had been a good one, and about all the other evenings to come. I put one foot on the ground beside the bed to stop the world spinning quite so violently. My back pain was completely gone.
Josh
There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to living a long way out of town. The big disadvantage is that it’s a fucking long walk home.
I fell over a couple of times. I threw up in a bush in someone’s front garden. Absolutely first-class puke; I’d hardly eaten anything because I had to keep my weight down, so the stream flowed smoothly from my throat.
I saw a terracotta garden gnome beside the bush and took it with me, singing a nursery rhyme I’d learned from my first nanny.
Rond, rond, rond
La queue d’un cochon.
Ri, ri, ri
La queue d’une souris.
I felt sick, but happy. I was pleased for Stichler; we would become friends now, I could feel the connection between us. I’d become really obsessed with the friendship thing. If I hadn’t known better I’d have thought I was a faggot. I just wanted to spend time with him, chatting about this and that. I wanted him to be my mate.
I sat on a bench for a few minutes, singing. When I started to feel cold I walked on, thinking about gin and the next Varsity match. Just before I reached my flat I went into another front garden and undid my fly. I didn’t see the bitch standing in the shadow of the doorway, smoking. My stream hit a rosebush; my dick was in my hand and I was thinking about how other men were good at math, playing the violin, or French. I’m good at shagging, I thought, and felt smug. When the bitch behind me started talking I was so startled that I lost my balance and fell into the rosebush.
“I hope that rose doesn’t take after you or it’ll always be tiny,” she said.
Her voice was calm. I walked up to her; she looked me dead in the eye, which I thought was pretty rude. She had hair like a man’s, close-cropped, a number two.
“Get the fuck off my property,” she said.
She tried to turn away, but even after four bottles of champagne I was too quick for her. I got her with a left hook, with the palm of my hand. You don’t hit women with a fist.
Boom.
The force of the blow knocked her over. I didn’t say a word; I spat in her direction and walked off without looking back.
Ra, ra, ra
La queue d’un gros rat.
The terracotta gnome was cool in my hand. From now on he would sit on my windowsill beside the pots of basil and rosemary.
Peter
Alarm: 7 a.m.
Sport: 52 press-ups, 30 dips
Masturbation: after reading post, three times, to calm down Breakfast: instant noodles with jiaozi
Motto of the day: If you’re planning to do something, act as if you’re not.
Aim of the day: Climb the spruce opposite the Pitt Club and keep watch; be the best.
Dear Mr. Wong,
Many thanks for your letter. Unfortunately I cannot see any way in which I might help you with your endeavours. I do not maintain contact with any clubs connected to the University of Cambridge.
Sincerely yours,
Amha Makonnen Workq
Alex
I bought the expandable baton on Amazon for fourteen pounds through a friend’s account and had it sent to her post office box in London. It was sixty-three centimeters long, with a rubberized handle and a steel ball on the tip. One of the customers had left a review: It is made of attractive, shiny metal and is very robust. When tested on a metal table the baton did not sustain any damage. Very nice! I had never used such an implement, but the customer review convinced me.
I found out where he lived the night he hit me, then went home and washed my face. He didn’t see me follow him.
From then on, every evening, I put on black clothes, slipped the baton up my sleeve and waited in a hedge outside his house. I’d been waiting every night for two weeks. It was cold, and the hedge was crawling with spiders. I knew he would come, and I wanted to meet him at night, when the road was dark and everyone was asleep. I had learned in the past to be patient.
Standing there in the hedge I thought about Hans. Charlotte had told me how well he got on with her father. The boy was so lonely.
One night, a few weeks earlier, I’d seen him walking down Castle Street. It sounds crazy, but when I’d realized he wasn’t going back to his room in College I followed him. He stepped softly, as if checking with each step that there was nothing in his path that he might crush by mistake. His mother used to walk the same way. I missed her. Back then, sitting at table with her and Hans in the house in the forest, I realized what it meant to be a family. We all held hands before dinner, and I felt safe.
When I saw Hans that evening in Cambridge, standing and staring at the white pillars outside the Pitt Club and looking lost, I had an overwhelming urge to go and hug him. I imagine being a mother must feel a bit like that. I stayed in the shadows.
Being a mother—how absurd that sounds. As if it were a profession. I’d never have thought I’d imagine I could understand what it was like. But then neither would I have thought that I would one day be almost sixty years old and spending my nights in a hedge waiting for a man.
When he came I pulled the balaclava over my face, took the baton from my sleeve, stepped silently out of the hedge and booted the backs of his knees. When he was on the ground I let the steel ball rain down. Twenty, maybe thirty blows to the torso. I was careful to aim well. A blow to the head could have split his skull, and things would have got too complicated. When I got tired I spat in his face. He had closed his eyes. How easy it was to get a man to close
his eyes and stop moving.
At home I slid the baton under my mattress, took a hot shower, and moisturized my skin. Now it was just up to Hans to play his part. What a good thing it was that he had come. For the first time in years I slept without fully lowering the blind.
Hans
“You look terrible.”
Alex was sitting bolt upright in her chair. I knew she was right. It was late February; the match against Oxford was in five weeks. I was eating nothing but steamed chicken breast and salad without dressing, as I still had to lose another four kilos to reach my weight category. I ate just once a day. My skin had taken on a sickly grayish sheen.
It was February; it was raining that day and had got dark early. A fire was burning in the grate. I had read in the rules that open fires were banned everywhere in College. I could see little holes in the ceiling of Alex’s room where the smoke alarms must have been.
Alex wanted to discuss my progress, as she’d put it in her e-mail. I’d been at the university for five months and had realized it was a place that had a lot to offer. There were indeed some geniuses among the students, but the majority just worked really hard. Some of them would fall asleep over their books in the library; lots of students took Ritalin to cope with the pressure. There was a girl in my college who had a soundproof room because she practiced the violin for eight hours every day. There was a supposedly nymphomaniac Philosophy student from Russia who knew more about Hegel than the lecturers, and a young man writing a PhD on mouse brains who snapped the necks of four mice a day, on average, so he could look inside their skulls. Most students knew that the Pitt Club existed, but they also knew that they weren’t member material, so they didn’t pay much attention to it, apart from talking occasionally at parties about the latest rumours concerning the Club and secretly hoping they would be invited there one day.
