Boxer, Beetle

by Ned Beauman

  The fight was thrilling. Both fighters glowed like medieval saints. Unlike many sportsmen Erskine had seen, Sinner seemed to take no satisfaction in his own speed and grace and power – they were too much a part of him – he was like a fox or a deer, any creature that is more beautiful because it cannot know it is beautiful, any creature with the courage to contend that the world does not carry on while it is asleep. Hitler had said that ‘the German boy of the future must be lithe and slender, swift as a greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel’. Sinner was all that. Hitler hadn’t said anything about tall.

  And there was something so intimate about these near-naked men fighting their very hardest – Erskine almost wanted to turn away in embarrassment, but he was too rapt. Soon the cheers of the crowd seemed to fall away, and he could hear nothing but the butcher’s-counter slap of fist on face.

  Then it ended. Erskine was as disappointed as anyone by the sheer cowardice of Pock, who by that point was wet and blinking like someone who hadn’t quite saved his dog from drowning in a river. During the ensuing dispute over the foul, Erskine remembered that a match like this was played by Marquess of Queensberry rules, and wasn’t that Lord Alfred Douglas’ father, sued by Wilde for calling him, illiterately, a ‘somdomite’? Except he wasn’t sure if it was the same Marquess of Queensberry. When Sinner knocked Pock out of the ring, he found himself screaming with joy. He’d wanted Sinner to win so much.

  Afterwards he made his way to the dressing room, and stood outside the door for a minute or two before he had the courage to knock. The interview with Sinner was not a success. ‘I’ve had enough of beetles now,’ he told the boy. ‘I want to study human beings.’ This wasn’t quite true. Whether or not Sinner complied with his request, Erskine knew that he would probably have to carry on herding insects as long as he lived. For one thing, his father, who funded his studies, would be unhappy at the abrupt switch from entomology to anthropobiology. But, more importantly, some of his planned eugenic experiments would require hundreds of bloodlines to be followed for hundreds of generations. That was ambitious enough with insects, but probably impossible with humans, unless you had a whole dynasty of scientists working under a whole dynasty of despots. In a truly enlightened society, of course, the two clans would soon fuse: scientists would be despots and despots would be scientists. At least with beetles it was easy enough to be both. Not long ago he’d read a book called If I Were a Dictator, by Julian Huxley, whom he’d once met at a cocktail party. Huxley argued that busy shopping streets should have their pavements replaced with moving pneumatic platforms and that sex should be taught in schools, but other parts of his argument were more creditable. ‘The true-born Briton is rather proud of his reluctance to become a governmental “guinea-pig”,’ he wrote. ‘In reality this attitude is the product of an irrational and suspicious stupidity on his part, and of unscientific unplanned action on the part of the State; an atmosphere should and could be created in which to be selected as an experimental object and to serve in the application of science to social progress would be regarded as an honour.’

  But this atmosphere was missing from Sinner’s dressing room, and Erskine left Premierland almost in tears. He had to trudge a long way down Commercial Road, jostled by passers-by, before he could find a cab. He didn’t want to ask the driver to take him to the Caravan, so he got out at the north end of Endell Street and walked up and down it for nearly twenty minutes before he realised that the club was tucked below street level. He stood at the top of the steps gathering his resolve, as he had outside the dressing room, and then started down. And that was when, as in a dream, Sinner came out through the door.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?’ said the boxer. ‘You followed me.’

  Actually, for a delirious instant Erskine had assumed the reverse – that Sinner had followed Erskine to Covent Garden to tell him that he’d changed his mind. But that didn’t make sense. ‘What?’ he said, noticing that there was another boy with Sinner. A fellow boxer?

  ‘You followed me here. Probably going to kidnap me. Posh cunt.’

  How else could Erskine explain himself? He could be fairly confident that Sinner wouldn’t have heard of Pitt-Rivers’ Evolutionary Consciousness, or understand that the Caravan was the perfect place to test that theory. Also, it looked as though he might get hit if he tried to argue. So he said, ‘That’s right. I followed you here. I’m sorry.’ And got hit anyway. He had found it strangely challenging to lie to the boy: there was something in his gaze that flayed you bare. He recalled that boxers had to be keen empiricists of human behaviour, so that they could always predict their opponent’s next move. Erskine liked to think of himself as a keen empiricist of human behaviour, but the truth was he found it a rather confounding subject, like algebra.

  One or two people laughed at him as he hurried down Endell Street. He was suddenly unbearably hot in the carapace of his father’s overcoat. Crossing Long Acre, he slowed down, and went into a pub on Bow Street near the Royal Opera House to buy a brandy. He didn’t want to go back to his club yet. From the bar he could see out through the window, and a minute later, to his surprise, he caught sight of Sinner and the other boy going past. Even to watch Sinner walk was fascinating: he had a sort of swaggering bounce as if he were still in the ring. Erskine gulped down his drink.

  Outside, he pursued the two of them from a distance. They went a long way down the Strand, then turned left into the little mess of short streets beside Charing Cross Station, where he knew he couldn’t help being seen if they happened to turn their heads. But neither did, and he was able to watch as Sinner led the boy into the Hotel de Paris. The narrow building was a scuffed, brown-toothed interloper in a relatively smart street. Erskine stood on the corner for ten minutes smoking a cigarette and mentally reviewing all that he knew about perverts in case he should be obliged to pass for one, then went inside, where a fat man in braces sat behind a counter reading a paperback detective novel and breathing heavily. He asked for a single room for the night and was given a key in return for ten shillings.

  ‘Expecting any callers later?’ the man said.

  ‘Definitely not.’

  Erskine did not even look at the room number on the key. Instead, he walked the shabby corridors of the Hotel de Paris, wondering which room was Sinner’s, hearing nothing but the creak of his own footsteps and the intestinal groans of the hot water pipes. (Why was he here?) When he’d paced all three floors he chose a room at random, 39, knelt down, and held his ear to the door. Inside he could hear grunting and panting. Could this be Sinner and the other boy, he wondered, his stomach hollow? But when he tried 38, he heard the same; from 37, silence; and from 36, grunting again.

  ‘What on earth are you up to?’

  Erskine looked up. A man who wore eyeshadow, rouge and no shirt was coming out of the communal lavatory. He had his hands on his hips and he spoke in a high-pitched theatrical voice that Erskine found physically nauseating.

  ‘Nothing,’ Erskine replied, and got to his feet.

  ‘I’ll be free in about an hour if you’re looking for a bit of—’

  ‘No!’ Erskine shouted, and, once again, fled. That night, noosed in his sheets at the United Universities Club, he dreamed of two rabbits, one white and one black, strapped together on a surgical table and cut open so that each one’s carotid artery gushed into the other one’s heart. When he awoke, choking on blood that wasn’t there, he wondered about the symbolism – he’d read Freud as well as Marx – until he remembered that this image was not a product of his unconscious, but rather a real experiment performed in 1870 by the great Francis Galton, inventor of the word ‘eugenics’, to disprove his cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of pangenesis. ‘It was astonishing to see how quickly the rabbits recovered after the effects of the anaesthetic had passed away,’ Galton had written. ‘It often happened that their spirits and sexual aptitude were in no way dashed by an operation which, only a few minutes before, had changed nearly
one half of the blood that was in their bodies.’ Erskine got up and took a very long bath.

  4

  Only six or seven hundred people in the world have trimethylaminuria. Because of a misprint in our genes our bodies are unable to break down trimethylamine, the chemical that gives the stink to both rotting fish and bacterial infections of the vagina. (Hence all those tiresome old jokes about a blind man wandering into a fish-market and taking it for a brothel, or vice versa, which could just as well be made about a blind man wandering into a convention of trimethylaminuria sufferers, although in truth if such a convention were ever to take place then it would no doubt be identified as a terrorist biological weapon and fighter planes would be scrambled at once.) Trimethylamine leaks out in our sweat and our urine and our saliva, curdling the air around us. There is no cure. Most of us will never have consensual sex, and many of us commit suicide by the time we are thirty. I used to spend time on trimethylaminuria support group messageboards, the closest thing we have to the aforementioned convention, but I found the tone too depressing, in contrast to Nazi memorabilia collecting messageboards, which are brisk with shared endeavour and friendly competition.

  Along with trimethylaminuria I also have asthma, eczema, cystic acne, mild irritable bowel syndrome and half a dozen other absurd non-terminal diseases. I have come to see my body as a sort of Faulknerian idiot man-child which I must drag along groaning behind me wherever I go. Stuart is convinced that within the next fifty years it will be possible to upload one’s brain into a computer and live on as nothing more than sparkles on a hard disk, and I long for that day of rapture. (Funnily enough, though, Stuart himself suffers from a sort of electronic trimethylaminuria, the sheer obnoxiousness of his emails and messageboard posts ensuring that I am the only person left in the internet Nazi memorabilia collecting community who will talk to him. He once tricked several of his enemies into watching a nine-minute video clip, loosely of the pornographic genre, called ‘Three Girls, Two Cups’; at least one victim has reportedly not approached a computer since.) But until that day, I will just have to go on smelling like unwashed cunt.

  Consequently, you might expect that I would take excellent care of my flat in Holloway, since I so rarely feel motivated to leave it. But several months have passed since Maria quit, and things have got to the stage now where I worry that, without all the dirty socks, takeaway cartons and semen-stiffened tissues like crude artificial roses, the place might actually feel a bit empty and weird. I’m not someone who minds a bit of mess. Also, even if it were spotless, the trimethylamine smell would still be intolerable to anyone but me. Sometimes I like to think of it as a mutant power but the truth is I don’t think I’d fit in with the X-Men.

  When I got home from Zroszak’s flat at about one in the morning, I woke my computer and wrote a post on the largest of the collectors’ forums.

  Subject: Philip Erskine?

  From: kevin (Posts: 1,267)

  Time: 1:11 GMT

  does anyone know anything about a scientist and possible acquaintance of Hitler called Philip Erskine?

  I opened my chat program. Stuart, as usual, was still online. He doesn’t sleep much.

  KEVIN: i saw a dead body today

  STUART: dig her up yourself? lol.

  KEVIN: i’m serious

  STUART: where, then?

  KEVIN: i can’t tell you

  STUART: well aren’t you mysterious

  hey, what’s this about ‘Philip Erskine’?

  Stuart has a browser extension that immediately alerts him to every new post on every relevant forum so that he doesn’t have to click ‘reload’ every ten seconds.

  KEVIN: just something i came across

  STUART: to do with the dead body?

  KEVIN: no

  STUART: come on

  KEVIN: no nothing to do with it

  STUART: oh for fuck’s sake, don’t hold out on me like this

  KEVIN: i’m not

  STUART: so two unrelated exciting things happened to you in one night? right.

  Guiltily I clicked away to another window and ran a search for ‘Philip Erskine’. A motivational speaker, a history teacher, a town planner, a few others, but no scientists. I went back to the forum. To my surprise, someone had already replied to my post.

  Subject: Philip Erskine?

  From: nbeauman (Posts: 17)

  Time: 1:14 GMT

  > does anyone know anything about a scientist and possible

  > acquaintance of Hitler called Philip Erskine?

  anything to do with Seth Roach, the boxer?

  Remembering that Grublock had mentioned that name, I wrote:

  Subject: Philip Erskine?

  From: kevin (posts: 1,268)

  Time: 1:15 GMT

  > anything to do with Seth Roach, the boxer?

  yes. what else do you know?

  and waited, fidgeting, for five minutes, but there was no further response. I went to nbeauman’s profile to see his sixteen prior posts: just short, routine contributions to a few forum arguments, some of which I’d actually read at the time without noting his name.

  I spent the next half-hour running more searches on ‘Philip Erskine’ and ‘Seth Roach’, from which I didn’t learn much, while debating with Stuart whether Unity Mitford could really have had Hitler’s baby and whether the new two-disc special edition DVD of Capricorn One was worth the money. At about two in the morning, I went to bed. At about five, something woke me. I opened my eyes. There was a man in my room.

  He sat, because there was nowhere else to sit, on the low chest of drawers by the door. He was lean and muscular, dressed in black, and held a black semiautomatic pistol with a long silencer.

  ‘Get up and stand beside the bed, please,’ he said. ‘Don’t move unless I ask you to, and you won’t be hurt.’ He had a faint Welsh accent. I did as I was told. ‘Hands at your sides. Thank you.’ He did not lower the gun. ‘I need you to tell me what you found at the detective’s flat.’

  ‘A letter from Adolf Hitler to Philip Erskine, dated 1936, in condition “Fine” to “Very Fine”,’ I said quickly. I wanted to lie but I was too scared.

  ‘That is of no use to me, I’m afraid. I’d hoped it might be something more substantial. What else do you know about Philip Erskine?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘The truth, please.’

  ‘You killed Zroszak.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you work for the Japanese? A consortium?’

  ‘You were on the subject of Philip Erskine.’

  ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ I said, my voice cracking.

  ‘Wait, please.’

  ‘You can’t imagine the smell if I piss myself,’ I said. In truth, it could hardly get any worse than it already was: I sweat so much when I panic that I turn into a minor airborne toxic event.

  He looked at me for a second and then said, ‘Where’s the toilet?’

  ‘Off the living room.’

  ‘Go.’

  He followed me out of the bedroom into the living room. He flipped on the light, and I glanced back to get a better look at him. I knew I should probably study his calm face, but all I could look at was the gun in his hand, its shape familiar from dozens of computer games, and that was when I noticed the tattoo on his wrist: a hunting dagger atop a rounded swastika.

  ‘You’re from the Thule Society,’ I whispered.

  ‘Hurry up, please,’ he said. As I went into the bathroom he added, ‘Don’t close the door.’

  I didn’t. But his view of the sink was blocked by my body. With one hand I tugged my penis out of my pyjama bottoms, and with the other I picked up my toothbrush mug. I pissed into the mug until it was almost full. Coming back out of the bathroom, I held the mug behind my back and with my free hand pointed at the letter from Hitler on my computer desk. ‘There it is,’ I said. ‘What I took.’ The Welsh Ariosophist reached to pick it up, and I threw the mug of hot piss in his face.

  Trimethylamine in hig
h concentrations starts to smell more like ammonia than fish, and is vilely corrosive to the mucuous membranes. Like a bethylid wasp who squirts venom at her enemy as she flees from a fight, it was only a distraction; but as the Ariosophist coughed and retched and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, I had time to grab my car keys from my desk and get out of the flat.

  I slammed the door behind me, and heard two gunshots no louder than the punch of a big stapler. I ran down the stairs, dodged a few post-nightclub drunks who stood smoking outside Happy Fried Chicken, and got into my car. It had rained through the night, and the street lamps glistened off the tarmac, grainy golden light spreading under my wheels like daffodil blood oozing up through the earth. A helicopter buzzed in the distance.

  Zroszak might just as well have been murdered by the Whig Party, I thought, as I careened down Camden Road on the way to Grublock’s penthouse near Battersea Bridge. As far as I knew, the Thule Society hadn’t operated for at least eighty years.

  It had been founded in 1914 by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, an occultist and adventurer. He took the name from Thule, the capital of Hyperborea, a lost utopia near the North Pole identified by the American congressman Ignatius L. Donnelly as the real location of Atlantis and the birthplace of the Aryan race. Sebottendorff held meetings in a hotel in Munich and even purchased a local newspaper. In 1919 two Thule Society members, Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer, were asked to establish a political front for the organisation, which they called the German Workers’ Party. Then in 1920 Adolf Hitler joined, and they changed the name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.