by Glen Duncan
Kate didn’t know what to say. These things weren’t part of her thinking.
‘He’ll work on the railways like his father,’ she said.
‘There won’t be any work on the railways by the time he’s a man, not for Anglos. Nor in the police, nor in Post and Telegraphs. You think Nehru cares about a handful of bleddy cheechees? India for the Indians. Hector’s right.’ It was a revelation to him as he said it. For years the facts had been impinging, the old disturbance on the periphery of his vision. Gandhi’s Untouchables who were now Children of God. They wanted, and the government said they would be given, jobs. Our jobs, Ross framed it, knowing even as he did that they were only his and Eugene’s and Hector’s and Chick’s because people like Hoggarth had made it so. He thought of all the orders he’d given to Indians, servants, subordinates, coolies, box boys. We’re taking these donkeys. His whole life had been a casual exercise of entitlement. We pull out, you buggers are going to be up shit creek wi’out a paddle. A whole life of imperfectly ignoring the future. Now the future had arrived. ‘If we stay here,’ he said, ‘we’re doomed.’
‘All right,’ Kate said, ‘then we’ll go. They can’t stop you getting a passport for ever. And if we can’t go to England via Helsinki, we’ll just have to save up until we’ve got enough to go there on our own steam.’
‘They can stop me getting a passport as long as they like,’ Ross said, still with the unsettling calm quiet voice. ‘But even if I get one, do you have any idea how long it’s going to take to save that kind of money? Read the letter: “denied any promotion for a period of three years”. We could be here for another ten years. By that time they won’t even be letting us in to England. There’s no point in me going to the finals. It’s a waste of time.’
‘You’ll win,’ Kate said. ‘That’s not a waste of time. We’ll find a way round this.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know.’
That evening Ross, not drunk but sour and saturated with booze, went with Eugene over to Chick’s. Skinner was already there. Rum and ginger beer, choora, lamb samosas, half a dozen sambals. Chick had been laying on hospitality ever since the job had gone wrong, and would go on doing so, Ross and Eugene rather shamefully knew, until they made a big effort to let him know they didn’t hold him to blame. I can’t keep coming here, Ross thought. It’s just wound-licking. Does no good to anyone. With a struggle he’d managed to say nothing about Hoggarth’s quid pro quo offer. It was a jewel-like pleasure to have done what he’d done for the Englishman, but the temptation to cash it in had been almost overwhelming. He’d flirted with the idea of telling Eugene, in confidence, knowing Eugene wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut. He’d blab to Skinner and the great act of manly selflessness would shine. Ross was ashamed of how much he wanted this credit. Ashamed enough, thus far, to rise above it.
He showed them the letters from Hoggarth.
‘Madhar choth,’ Eugene said.
Chick shook his head. ‘Bleddy hell, men. See the bastards, no?’
‘Christ knows what I’m going to do,’ Ross said. ‘There’s no point in going to the finals. The whole bleddy thing’s…Cheh.’
In the heads-down silence that followed, each of them realized they were all waiting for Skinner’s reaction. Impossible quite to shake the old conviction that an Englishman could do something.
Skinner lit a cigarette, inhaled, exhaled with a shake of his head. ‘I can help you,’ he said. ‘But it’s not going to be easy.’
It would cost, he estimated, somewhere in the region of two and a half thousand rupees. ‘Now, first,’ he told Ross as they walked back from Chick’s, ‘you can knock off five hundred. I don’t want any argument. I’m putting that in. You gave me the slip with it the other night but destiny is destiny. The whole thing’s my fault anyway so I’m not taking no for an answer. Now, do we understand each other?’
‘What difference does it make?’ Ross said. ‘That still leaves two thousand. Where the hell am I going to get two thousand rupees from?’
The sun had gone down (‘Gets dark here like someone falling off a bloody cliff,’ Skinner had observed. ‘Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in this country, you never get used to it’); constellations were in the first phase of their frozen ferocity. They were passing the deserted market where beggars–among them a few of Dondi’s brothers-in-meths–huddled over a fire. Somewhere in the darkness a dog was barking, repeatedly, like a stuck record. Men were out on the streets, idling, smoking, paan-spitting, gossiping or staring into the night. ‘Chick’s in for five hundred, too,’ Skinner said. ‘I’ve spoken to him about it. He feels bad about the whole thing, you must know that.’
‘I’m not taking money from Chick. It’s not his fault. It’s not anyone’s fault.’
‘Which leaves,’ Skinner said, ignoring him, ‘fifteen hundred. And I don’t know how you’re going to get it, but you’re going to have to get it and get it fast because these things move bloody slowly. I want to go down to Bombay within the next couple of days.’
‘A couple of days?’
‘Look the finals are on the tenth, right? You need to tell the selectors you’ve already got a passport. They’re not going to ask questions, because they want the medals. Fuck Hoggarth. He’s been after me for years. I know he probably tried to get you to give him my name and I know you didn’t give it to him.’
Ross felt the jewel melt into something more precious, which filled and enlarged him.
‘If I had the money I’d foot the whole bill myself. I owe you more than I can ever repay as it is. But the fact is the five hundred’s pretty much the last five hundred until I can…Look, the point is: for Christ’s sake take this chance, because another one’s not going to come.’
Ross, still suffused with the pleasure of knowing that Skinner knew what he’d done (the ancient nobility of honour among thieves), said nothing, walked with his head down, relishing.
‘You come to the Ambassador two days from now. Get the money from the baniyas if you have to. I mean, why not? What are they going to do? Come looking for you in England? I don’t think so. You’ll be long gone. Although if I were you I’d still haggle hard over the interest for the sake of appearances; these chaps aren’t stupid.’
‘They’ll think I’ll need it because of the investigation,’ Ross said, surrendering himself to the plan’s flow. ‘Word will have got around, and if it hasn’t I’ll get Dondi to spread it.’
‘Better and better,’ Skinner said. ‘Monroe sahib in big trouble, one month no pay, etc. It’s right up their street. Christ, man, we should’ve gone into partnership years ago.’
‘But I mean…’ Ross hesitated.
‘What?’
‘The passport. What about my wife, the kids?’
Skinner stopped to toe-crush his cigarette butt. Cogitated. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’ The barking dog had stopped. Up ahead of them the Ambassador’s doors were wide open. The lit lobby revealed a different, sprucely awake desk clerk sharpening a pencil with martial concentration. ‘This is hard,’ Skinner said, looking not at Ross but into the hotel doorway. ‘You might have to go on ahead of her. She follows later with the kids. I mean, her passport application could go through legitimately, right?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose it could.’
‘Alternatively, you get another thousand together and I’ll try’n get a deal for two. It’s usually cheaper that way but these bastards are whimsical.’
They stopped and shook hands at the edge of the Ambassador’s radius of light. A pariah dog nosed something in a blocked drain nearby.
‘It still seems…’ Ross said. There had been flurries of hope as they’d talked, but his feeling of stagnant fate had endured.
‘What?’ Skinner said.
‘I don’t know. Impossible.’
Skinner grinned. ‘One thing my years here have taught me,’ he said. ‘In this country, nothing’s impossible.’
Considering what was at stake it wasn
’t a big crowd. The hall at the Calcutta YMCA in any case only held three hundred. The space inside was filled with pliable heat against which you could lean. Cigarette smoke, fried snacks, sweat; the odour of the canvas drew you, said here you can forget everything else and settle your fate. Ross’s heart lifted and hovered in its cavern, netted in nervous currents.
‘Well,’ Eugene said. ‘You made it. Now don’t bugger it up at the last hurdle. I’ve got bleddy money on you, men.’
‘Cheh,’ Chick Perkins said, face contracting with irritation, ‘you don’t talk to a man like that just before he goes into the ring. What’s the matter with you?’
Ross had come out, hands taped but not gloved, to get a final look at the ring from the outside. The last two weeks’ training had been a hard, lovely poetry; he’d fashioned an ultimate version of his physical self, seen people noticing it. Even now Eugene was registering the deltoids like smooth oval stones and finding it hard not to laugh. Perfection was funny, the great human improbability of it. If you laughed it was from delight that someone, even if not you, was doing the job of achieving it. Ross had felt it himself, watching gymnasts; once a sax-player from Madras at the Institute.
‘How are you feeling?’ Chick said. ‘Nice and loose?’
‘I’m okay,’ Ross said. An agreement had evolved between the men not to talk about Skinner. There had been three letters from him since he’d left for Bombay, euphemistically reporting on ‘the business plan’ (‘our partners’, ‘our intitial outlay’, ‘the necessary paperwork’), all of which was going ahead, but slowly and unpredictably. Skinner’s tone was one of weary determination in the face of ceaseless setbacks. ‘Please, for God’s sake, don’t worry. This is still our best option. Things have changed since the last time I had to do anything like this, and more than a few of my contacts have left twitchy successors. They still speak the same language (money talks!) but I’ve had to start with some of them from scratch. I know you’re worried but you have to concentrate on the job in hand. I’m moving things forward as fast as is humanly possible. I’m promised completion in two weeks. At the very latest I’ll be at the finals in Calcutta. Keep training!’ That had been more than three weeks ago. Since then nothing.
With a blank superhuman effort Ross had pushed the question of what was going on aside and sunk himself into training. His inner voice had said, once, early in Skinner’s absence: He’s not coming back. Ross had allowed it this single utterance, a heart’s entitlement in exchange for which he would have the right not to hear it again until the fight was over. Through all the sit-ups and pull-ups and push-ups, the roadwork, the skipping, the hours with the heavy bag, the shadow-boxing, the sparring, he kept everything out except the growing awareness that he was taking himself to a level of fitness and strength he’d never known before. When he wasn’t training he sat on the veranda staring into the bleached dust of the compound, or studying the sky. Evenings he went down to the Taptee and floated on his back. He made love to Kate in silence, as if his mind had been freed of consciousness altogether, as if the boundary separating him from his experience had burned away. Contemplating either the past or the future led to Skinner, the inner voice, the annihilating doubt. Therefore he lived, as the Buddhists claimed one could, entirely in the now, sipping water from a tin cup; walking from bedroom to veranda; hitting the heavy bag; floating in the river face up to the starred sky.
He’d borrowed from his father, Hector, Agnes and the baniyas.
‘Better not to have the wife and kids this time,’ Chick said.
Ross shrugged. ‘Little fellow’s not well.’ This was true; Carl was teething, miserably, but it had been a relief to have the question of whether Ross should go without family settled extraneously. Kate knew the ferocity with which he wanted this. It was better he went to it alone, not just for the idea of himself solitarily facing combat (this business of destiny, he’d made it) but also so there would be no one else to blame if he failed. The desperateness of his need would tempt him to look for explanations outside himself if he lost. That was what they’d conceded back in Bhusawal, without words, in looks and the lucid telepathy of post-coital darkness. He was ashamed that she’d sensed it. But when he kissed her goodbye she’d said, ‘I love you,’ and so that he knew she meant it had held his face and made him look at her. Grinned, to contain his weaknesses. I love you, including that.
‘No, no, of course,’ Chick said. He had to shout. The crowd’s murmur had swelled. Eugene’s fixed smile was nerves, a look of inane mild bliss. ‘You can feel it, men,’ he said. ‘The bleddy thisthing. Atmosphere.’
Old Clem the trainer appeared, a towel draped over his shoulder, in the doorway to the dressing rooms. ‘Monroe!’ he barked. ‘Get in here, will you, for Christ’s sake?’
Much of the crowd was on its feet now, milling about around the ring and in the aisles. Some pitch of expectation had been passed and not fulfilled. The collective mind had been counting down to action; the countdown had zeroed and no action had begun. Now they were irritated, absurd. The right man could seize them with a shout and make a mob.
‘Monroe!’ Clem screamed over the din. ‘Now!’ Ross smiled at him. The man’s little face was tomato red with the heat and the terror of losing and the anger at his fighter gone off for a fucking stroll. The red face and the snow-white brush of moustache. You look like Father Christmas, Clem, he’d say to him, walking up.
‘Right then,’ Eugene said. ‘No half-larks now. Get in there and hammer that sonofa—’
‘There he is,’ Chick said, face suddenly unpinching into the genie smile. He was looking past them into a ringside knot of people. Ross and Eugene turned.
‘What?’
‘He’s…I just saw the bugger,’ Chick said.
Clem, with thickened forehead veins, had come up. ‘Are you fighting today or not?’ he said.
‘Which bugger?’ Eugene said.
‘Skinner. I’m sure it was him.’
‘Monroe,’ Clem said, trying to shove Ross away. ‘I swear on my mother’s grave if you don’t—’
‘Where?’
‘I just saw him there in the crowd.’
‘Are you sure?’ Ross said, over his shoulder, as Clem used all his weight to get him moving.
Ross’s opponent on 10 April 1952 was the East Bengal ABA bantamweight champion, Ahmed Ibrahim, a stocky, aggressive fighter with a murderous left hook but whose right shoulder was prone to dislocation. ‘Make him miss with a big shot,’ Clem had said, half seriously, ‘and you won’t need to knock him out.’
One round in Ross knew he was going to knock him out. He’d already found the gap. At five foot seven, Ibrahim was a difficult man to hit on the chin. Taller opponents (and even most bantamweights were taller than five seven) found themselves punching out of their natural plane. Instinctively or from smart training Ibrahim ducked low, pulling the strike zone further south still. It took the sting out of a punch to have to throw it downwards like that, betrayed your shoulder, made you feel you were flailing. It needed only one small obstacle to your fight geometry for the suspicion of futility to creep in. It was a terrible thing to know the full force of a blow wasn’t landing, was getting burned up in the weird line of its flight. Exacerbated by this bobbing bastard whumping you in the guts and when you’d got used to him working you downstairs suddenly popping up and hitting you with that hook the size of a football. Ibrahim had won a lot of his fights with knockouts precisely because the big upward-climbing left hook was always such a surprise.
But Ross had found the gap. An idiot could have found it. Coming in low, head down, Ibrahim was wide open to an uppercut. The right body shots were thrown from wide and the left guard was angled high, forearm across forehead, as if there was an invisible desk he was resting on. It left an empty lift-shaft straight up the middle. The problem was that the uppercut wasn’t, typically, a knockout punch. You couldn’t see the man’s chin, for one thing, and for another it was tough to get the power of a cross or a hook coming
up from below like that. To turn an uppercut into a knockout punch you had to roundhouse, make a cartoon-like golf swing out of it, momentum as much as muscle. Hit a man on the point with that, and he’d go down, no argument.
Therefore, halfway through the second, that’s exactly what Ross did. ‘You looked like bleddy Popeye, men,’ Eugene said afterwards. ‘Nearly lifted the bugger off his feet.’
It was a lovely connection. Ross felt the truth of it. There was time to note the expression on Ibrahim’s face (he had taurine good looks under the short fringe of close-cropped curls) of mild complaint, as if some negligible but disappointing injustice had been done to him, before he, Ibrahim, with two hesitant backward steps in slow motion sat down on the canvas.
As the sound rolled back in, Ross in the neutral corner looked down into the crowd and saw Eugene jumping up and down. You’ve got him! You’ve bleddy got him! Ross smiled, looked up at the ceiling lights high above like a ring of angels, then with a smile again back at Eugene. Time was trying to push its way through the knockdown’s blockage. The referee screamed ‘Four!’ as Ibrahim got to his knees. Ross could feel his lungs labouring, his body’s blood-crowd packed tight. Skinner, he saw, was seven or eight rows deep, with his back to the ring. He was talking to someone behind him, but the slicked-back blond hair and slim shoulders were unmistakable. He’d gone back to the pale linen suit (the jacket was slung over his shoulder), which almost as much as the repaid trust gave Ross a feeling of poetic satisfaction.
‘Five!’
Ross’s lungs would have to be ready. The fight demanded things, specifics of the legs and shoulders and chest, told you that they must be so, therefore you made them so. Ibrahim had got one foot flat and was wobblingly pushing himself into a stand. Whatever Skinner was talking about to whomever he was talking to he was animated, emphatically pointing a finger. Any moment he would turn. Ross’s mind moved like a girl dreamily following a riverside path. Wouldn’t have come if the plan had failed. You’re different. Destiny is destiny…
