The Boxer's Dreams of Love Read online

  He stopped, sat up, looked around for something. Stood up. Eddie sat back a little, not scared exactly. Or not scared enough.

  ‘You want a drink?’ Frankie asked with a softness that came from an unknown place.

  ‘Sure,’ Eddie said, not really wanting one but what else could he do? He was handed the whiskey and sipped politely. Frankie drank a little and stayed standing, walking slowly around the room, thinking, regretting already what he had done, what he’d have to do.

  Eddie saw the sadness in the man’s face and was oddly touched that it was directed at him.

  ‘What were you thinking?’

  Eddie couldn’t, wouldn’t lie. But maybe Frankie really was talking about something other than the girl. How the hell would he have found out so quickly? Why him and not the police? He had heard nothing on the news, although when he thought about it, had he really listened to it? Don’t listen and you won’t hear.

  No, Frankie knew. He always knows.

  ‘How bad is she?’ said Eddie.

  ‘She’s bad, Eddie. Alive, which is both a good and a bad thing. She’s alive and talking, screaming, pointing fingers, looking for someone to blame. And we know who that someone is.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Eddie asked, not sure why.

  ‘She’s not in hospital, although she should be. If she was, you really would be in trouble, even though you still are. I won’t ask why, Eddie. I know why. It’s in a man’s nature to do certain things. It’s in your nature to do what you did last night. No matter how much you may hate it, fight it, fight against it, it’s in you. Probably in all of us at some point.’

  Frankie walked a little more, stood at the window, the light on his face.

  ‘I get a call, Eddie, six in the fucking morning, dragged out of my bed which I’d only just crawled into. I thought the days of getting such calls were over. I like my quiet, sensible life, Eddie. I get a call and venture out in the freezing fucking morning air and I have to watch a little movie, a movie of you acting like a fucking maniac. I bet you don’t remember it like that. You barely touched her, you hit her only once. That’s what you think, isn’t it? I should make you sit through it, strap you to a chair and replay it over and over. But the thing is. It’s in your nature and you’ll never change. Way you are. How do I know all this? I’m the same as you. Nature. You think I still don’t have it in me? Maybe I think that myself. Thing is, I get others to do it for me. I subcontract my nature. I can afford to do that. So I understand, Eddie. I do. I’m disappointed. I thought, maybe, this time, this guy is the exception. Because he’s a nice guy, everyone likes him. We all like you, Eddie. We’ve always liked you. We remember all those nights, you scrambling on the floor in the ring, Eddie. Jesus, we couldn’t fucking believe what we were seeing. Yeah, we laughed, I’ll admit that. But we soon stopped laughing at you when we saw you get up, again, again, kept coming. Fuck. There was no laughing then. There was respect, Eddie, admiration for a guy that could do that. Most of us couldn’t have done that. So we watch you get up time and time again. ‘How?’ we ask ourselves. You just keep coming back. Something stupid, something almost noble in that.’

  He’d lost the thread of his argument. The dagger he had wanted to point at Eddie had lost its edge.

  ‘Stop looking at me like that, will you?’

  ‘Like what?’ said Eddie.

  Frankie shook his head. Looked at his watch. ‘What are we doing here, Eddie? I really thought this time that you’d look after yourself. I thought you had a girlfriend? Someone told me you were living with her. Did I hear wrong?’

  ‘No,’ said Eddie. ‘I mean yes. Well, she’s away, working. She’s a singer. She’s in England. Has to work.’

  Frankie frowned. ‘So what the fuck were you doing last night?’ With someone, something like that?’

  Eddie shook his head. Couldn’t answer. Hadn’t worked that out in his own head yet.

  ‘You know who she is?’ asked Frankie. He was on the verge of saying but pulled back. ‘Nobody, that’s who. Less than nobody. A skunk that trawls the twilight hours, digging in the dirt, feeding on scraps, injecting anything she can find.’

  ‘She was—’ Eddie interjected but stopped. He shouldn’t have interrupted Frankie. And wasn’t quite sure what he was going to say next.

  ‘She was what?’ Eddie?’

  She was like me, Eddie thought of saying. That’s why I was with her. I didn’t see her across the street, I saw my reflection in the shop window.

  ‘She was giving him a blow-job. Some kid. She’d left me for five minutes, going to the toilet she said. I was worried so I went looking for her. Found her outside. On her knees in the rain, had him in her mouth and she had no idea I was there at all. Or didn’t care.’

  He looked up at Frankie Noon in the noon day light in the room from a different age. He looked like the old man he was, and Eddie felt sorry for him all of a sudden.

  ‘I don’t remember hitting her. Just – just raising my hand, that’s all. Then she’s lying there and there’s blood on the ground beside her. So I – I ran. Ran and hid.’

  Eddie needed to know everything now, listen to the one person who could, would help him.

  ‘Who called you?’

  ‘Gerry Rubin. He owns the club. You know him?’ Eddie shook his head.

  ‘He knew you, Eddie,’ Frankie continued. ‘Even on that CCTV, through the murk and the rain, he knew you. You should have seen what you did to her. Eddie? Are you listening? Really listening? What you did to her. No matter what she was. Anyway, Gerry knew you straight away. Made a call. Because he didn’t understand either, thought he was seeing things. Because he’d heard, thought he’d heard that you were living a simple, quiet life. Working for me. So he calls. Me. And here we are, Eddie. Here we fucking are.’

  Frankie sat down again, tired from talking so much.

  ‘So, what now?’ said Eddie.

  In the moment. Eddie saw the safety line cut. He was swirling in vicious seas and Frankie had been on dry land. Somehow Frankie had attached a line to Eddie and was slowly pulling him in. But the line was cut. The land was disappearing. Eddie was…

  ‘What now,’ Frankie sighed. ‘I can’t be your kindly uncle any more. Here.’ He reached down and took an envelope from the low table between them. Hurled it at Eddie.

  ‘That’s what now Eddie. Now, then and forever more. The price of friendship.’

  Eddie didn’t want to break the seal, see the wages of sin inside. Ticket to oblivion.

  ‘Go and find her, Eddie. Wherever she is. And don’t let her go. Why did you let her go in the first place?’

  Still Eddie couldn’t bring himself to look inside.

  ‘There’s a condition attached to what’s inside by the way. Eddie? Look at me.’

  Eddie looked at Frankie and saw his thoughts bounce back off the cold hard surface.

  ‘You can’t stay here, in Dublin. You understand? You have to go away for a while. As I said, why don’t you follow her? If you know where she’s gone.’

  Eddie opened it finally and started to count. But something wasn’t making sense.

  ‘Ten thousand. Save you counting. You understand now? How much trouble you’ve caused? That’s how much we’re willing to make it go away. Never seen so much, have you? Dreamt of it maybe. All those nights. Thinking it was going be the next one. Well this is it. Except we’re paying you to skip the next fight.’

  Eddie rose. Froze in the aftermath. Frankie still, silent, no more part to play in the Eddie story. A figure in a landscape, alien, dreamlike. In a museum of barren featureless rooms where the only signs of life existed in the pictures on the wall. Eddie walked these rooms alone.

  Ten thousand steps to another life. Hesitated in the hallway, light now dim. Had he been here that long? He waited. For what? For Frankie to come after him and ask him to come back inside.

  He put his hand on the door. Solid, real, not his. He’d never touch it again. No sound behind, no steps approaching, no friendl
y voice calling him back. The fragment of a song in his head. Edie in some other room, unaware, her voice rising for a few seconds. There was nothing in this house, except the dark rain of thoughts, hammering down, holding him back.

  He opened the door, to nothing but night.

  Down the steps, down the drive. Out on the road he looked back at the house. No lights, it looked empty. As if no one had ever lived there at all.

  Ten.

  Thousand.

  Steps he must have taken before he found his way home that night. Outside Sarah’s house he had stood. Wanted to see her, wanted not to see her at all. Wanted to take it back, peel back the hours and replace the lost time with something better. No sign of life. No lights. It looked deserted, as if no one had ever lived there.

  Paul stood soldier still at the top of the stairs and waited for the first customers of the night. Didn’t see Eddie across the street. ‘Edie?’

  Edie?

  His flat groaned with discontent. She wasn’t there. Of course she

  wasn’t. Couldn’t remember the last song, or the last piece of one. He didn’t turn on a light. Pissed in the darkness. Packed his bag. Took a yoghurt from the fridge and ate half of it. No messages on his phone. Wouldn’t send one, would he? No. That would be far too sensible. Her face was there in front of him. Shimmering, almost floating. He reached out to touch it and his hand passed right through. He remembered the money and put it on the table. He remembered the scar on the girl’s stomach, grinning and red, laughing at him. His hand smashing down, punishing her, hurting. All the money in the world. All the hurt, pain, broken teeth, swollen knuckles. All for the promise. Of money. Now resting on his table, in front of his eyes. Madness swelled up inside him. Madness, they said, who exactly he wasn’t sure, was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time.

  Sitting at a table in the dark, in the world between day and night, in a basement flat, out of work, blood money within reach, all the fucking money in the world, not knowing where she was at that moment, if she was thinking of him, he was past the age of thinking that it was all ahead of him, he was tired and he couldn’t sleep, he didn’t have that luxury, the audience gone home, the arena closed, all gone home, and he couldn’t stay here anymore, he had to leave now himself, no place to go but all the money he could want to do it with, at a table in the dark, alone, even the like of Sarah wouldn’t see him, even she, no, if he looked in that particular mirror it would shatter to a thousand pieces. Into ten… thousand… little pieces, what was that song, or piece that she had hummed on her last day, he almost had it, God he was so tired, so… get up, get up, Eddie and fight… fight… your nature.

  Get up.

  CHAPTER 7

  Edie collapses. Tommy Pearson makes an appearance. ‘Edie?’

  ‘Get up. Edie? Come on, get up.’

  The room had been cleared. They knelt in a circle, someone holding

  her hand, someone putting a hand under her head, all whispering, pleading with her to open her eyes, get up, make things go back to the way they were. Only fifteen, twenty minutes in and she had been in the middle of the song, eyes closed, that look on her face, unaware, alone in her head, the light on her and her alone, as if she’d drawn all the energy in the world to her. Then just stopped, turned to the band, confused, she raised a hand to her face and crumpled to the floor.

  There was a cursory knock on the dressing-room door but the manager didn’t wait for an invite. Slithered in between the band members like they were just blades of grass to be brushed aside. He put a hand on Edie’s shoulder as she wearily rubbed make-up from her face.

  ‘Alright? Edie?’ She looked at him in the mirror, at the toupe resting precariously on the top of his ice-rink head, his gold rings glittering like tattered stars and ricocheting in all directions. He twirled his cufflinks as he spoke, spoke in that angular, cutglass way that made you wince. There was a whistle underneath the words, his teeth not his own either, was there anything of his own left she wondered.

  ‘Edie, darling, I was worried, we all were, what happened out there? Eh? Fuckin’ ’ell, eh? You sickenin’ for something? Let me know and I’ll get it for you.’ They had this odd conversation where he didn’t want answers and they looked at each other constantly through the mirror even though they were only inches apart. Then he bent down close to her ear and her reflection merged with his. He smiled as if about to commit murder. Patted her on the shoulder and stood up. He surveyed the others in the room and rubbed his hands on his trousers as if their very presence made him feel unclean.

  ‘I assume you’ll be okay for tomorrow night. I mean, I don’t mind tonight, happen to anyone. You make sure and get some rest. Go straight home and sleep. Understand. Edie? Listenin’ to me? Want you well tomorrow night. Okay?’

  ‘Sure, Tommy. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Straight home, now. Don’t let these boys lead you astray.’ No show, no money, the threat of no more. They sat like funeral mourners around the café table.

  ‘I’m fine. I swear. Stop asking me will you?’

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  ‘If we don’t play tonight we don’t play for the rest of the week.’

  ‘He won’t do that.’

  ‘He what? This is Tommy Pearson we’re talking about. Rumour is he tried selling tickets to his own mother’s wake. Before she was even dead.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be able to get someone else that quickly.’

  ‘You really are sick if you think that. What do you think we are?’

  And so it went. Here, there. In every café, every town, always the morning after, the inquest, the job done, never quite as good as you wanted it to be, waiting for the next one, if there was one. And always that moment between them. Looked at each other and thought maybe it ain’t there anymore. If one didn’t believe then none did, is that the way it is? If one person on the plane doesn’t understand how the plane can fly then they plummet like a stone to the ground. That was the myth. And here today, every day was today, the myth was closer to the truth than ever before. Doubts were floating to the surface. They had all slept in a little later today, for good reason, but still. For one thing they didn’t have a performance to autopsy this morning. It had happened before, of course it had, things break down, people break down, then over the first black coffee the next day they revive the corpse, dust it off, dress it up, and the show goes on. But today none of them looked like they wanted to be there.

  It wasn’t Edie’s band and it would continue without her. Singers like her were fallen leaves on the forest floor. It didn’t matter that she was one of the best of them, perhaps. Or that she wanted it more than the rest.

  Scotty, Wilson, Andy, Rob, four men, drummer, bass, guitar, keyboards, and somehow they came together and made something happen. Made a noise that didn’t drive people out of the room. Like a million others, their vans passing each other on the electric highway. The circuit was a circle going inward, until it got clogged up. A diseased vein, in need of surgery, too many patients on the list though.

  Edie had been passing by. Passing by life, never looking in the shop window, never reading the notices, because she thought she didn’t have to. Her route was mapped already, it was coming to her, it would happen, she didn’t have to do anything. Just put out your hand and the bus will stop.

  Philip Boyle

  But the bus never stopped. Never came at all. So she slowed down, looked around, looked in the window, read the signs. Singer wanted. But she wasn’t a singer. Has to be something else, better. Easier.

  I’m not a singer. I sing but I’m not a singer. Big difference. But she went, turned up in that empty school gym with the four of them on plastic chairs while she stood on the tiny stage. What was it she sang? Jesus, how could she forget that? Must remember that. Think back. It had been Scotty she thought. The leader, or so it seemed. Good-looking but so serious. And he was only one who appeared to talk.

  She sang. She sang Send in the Clown
s… that was it. Thank God.

  Send in the Clowns. Finished two verses, they sat silent, stony faced, whispered to each other. She was furious, didn’t finish the song, almost fell leaving the stage and stormed out of the room. Not a singer.

  ‘Edie?’

  Here, today. Now. Even Scott was a little quiet. She knew they’d spoken amongst themselves before she arrived. What of it? They were friends, they were men after all.

  ‘Sorry about last night.’ What was she sorry for? She was sick. Nothing unusual. The heat of the room that’s all. The burning lights on her face, trying to hold the song, the note, too long. Losing herself in it, then she just lost focus, blurred faces, saw the open mouthed lady in the front row, the same one who’d been the night before, bag of sweets in her lap, fat rolling off her in waves, sucking sweets. Most nights you looked for a face, one face and you played to it. That was not the face you needed to see. The heat, lost in the song, the lights like flames, pushing sweat down her face. she held the microphone, trying to hold herself up. Then… nothing.

  ‘Are you okay, Edie?’ Scotty finally spoke. Concern in his voice? She searched in vain for it. ‘I mean, really okay?’

  ‘I just felt a little faint, that’s all. The room was like a furnace. Didn’t you feel it?’

  Scotty nodded in polite agreement.

  ‘So you’re okay for tonight?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Edie. Holding it back. Jesus, why didn’t the rest ever say anything?

  Their meeting ended, such as it was. She stayed after they left and wondered where they went. Talk about her no doubt, she wondered if any of them ever dreamt about her. They must have. No rings of marriage, they must have found it somewhere. She knew it would never happen, it couldn’t, although it had crossed her mind once or twice. In the wee small hours, in the after effects of a show, a good one, when a drink was never enough, when the mind and body just wouldn’t shut down. She looked and thought, maybe, maybe Scotty. If only Eddie was…