The Swimming-Pool Library (23 page)

The Club building must formerly have been a Nonconformist chapel. The bulk of it was built of a rebarbative grey stone, with mean pointed windows; tacked on in front and at the side were modern extensions in red brick, with metal-framed windows (the frosted glass spoke of changing-rooms) and peeling white trim. It was, as Charles had said, a big night, and the lino-tiled hallway was full of family people—rather got up, I suspected: mothers with arms crossed anxiously under their bosoms, and fathers showing the suppressed pride of parents at a speech-day. Many youngsters were rushing about, and the sense of private occasion made me feel more than ever out of place. I went over to the glass-fronted NoBos and communed for a second with my reflection before scanning the lists of activities, notices about excursions, and team photographs, routinely seeking out the faces of pretty boys (of which there were several) and those inevitable glimpses of underwear up the rucked short-legs of seated footballers. Then, in the next frame, there was a larger notice, printed in an old-fashioned and distinguished way, announcing that on this very day, in contests of three rounds each, the London and Home Counties Boys’ Club Boxing Championship would be decided, and the winning team presented with ‘the Nantwich Cup’.

I felt how slow and incurious I had been now that I saw this
evidence of Charles’s further influence and philanthropy. Of course he hadn’t sent me all this way merely to speak to the mysterious Shillibeer; I was amused and impressed that there was more to it, as well as getting the uneasy feeling that Charles was orchestrating his revelations with some expertise. I became convinced that when the line had gone dead two nights before it was a deliberate foreclosure on his part, and that back in the City he would now be nodding expectantly. Coming hard upon the grotesque and momentary episode in the churchyard it made me feel just a little out of control. I heard applause and a voice raised beyond the swinging green doors into the hall. I went in, trying to look as if I knew what to expect.

The ring was raised in the middle of the room, which still had its galleries on three sides, supported on thick wooden pillars. Seating rose in scaffolded tiers around the ring, leaving a kind of ambulatory under the galleries, through which I could walk almost unnoticed. Up above, too, the place was packed, and I hoped I would be allowed to drift around rather than getting penned in a seat for the evening. I loitered in one of the aisles, leaning against the stepped edge of the temporary arena. The man whose feet were by my elbow leant over and said, ‘You want a seat?’—making accommodating gestures and showing how he and his party could squeeze up. But I declined. The dinner-jacketed M C completed his announcement and stepped down, a balloon-bellied referee in white shirt and trousers that lacked any visible means of support squeezed between the ropes, and a few moments later the first couple of lads sprang into the ring.

There’s something about boxing which always moves me, although I know it is the lowest of sports, degrading the spectator as much as the fighter. For all its brutality, and the danger of those blows to the head, those upward twisting punches that are so tellingly called cuts and which tear the fronds of the brain known as the
substantia nigra
, an inner damage more terrible than that of pouchy, sewn-up eyes, mangled ears and flattened noses, it has about it a quality that I would not be the first to call noble.

Boys’ boxing, of course, is not nearly so awful. The bouts are short, the refereeing paternal and attentive. Any moderately heavy punch is followed by a standing count, and fights are swiftly
brought to an end if there are signs of stunning or bleeding. It maintains too, in some ideal, Greek way, an ethos of sport rather than violence. In the hall tonight the Limehouse supporters far outnumbered the St Albans visitors—and the place was small enough for individual voices shouting their encouragement to be heard, just as they might have been decades before in hymns or prayers in the same building. But when the fights were over, and the referee held the boys’ huge gloved hands in his smaller fingers, jerking aloft the winner’s arm as the result was announced, there was a touching mood of friendship, the boys embracing, patting each other clumsily with their upholstered fists, clasping the hands of the cutmen and the trainers in their gentle paws.

In the first fight, between two fourteen-year-olds, the Limehouse youngster had started well, but it was a sloppy affair, the St Albans boy always retreating to the ropes and clinching with his opponent rather than putting up a fight. In the second break I strolled off round the back and came in again on the side where the judges’ table was, just below the ringside. A lean sixty-year-old man, with no forehead and grey pointed sideburns that curved across his cheeks like a Roman helmet, was standing talking with some parents in the audience. When he turned round I saw the words ‘Limehouse Boys’ Club’ on the back of his sweatshirt. Just as the bell rang I said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find Mr Shillibeer?’ He looked at me stonily, not out of aggression but out of slowness.

‘Bill? Yeah, he’s out the back somewhere, I should say. Try over there, through the blue door.
Come on, Sean, let ’im ’ave it
,’ switching without notice to the really important matter and showing in his wild singlemindedness that he had already forgotten me.

It seemed a foregone conclusion, anyway, and as the sporadic engagements of the final round began I slipped away and made for the blue door. It was a fire door, and had a window of wired glass in it, through which I saw, as I pushed it open, two figures approaching down a corridor: a boy in pumps, singlet, shorts and gloves, and the massive, stocky figure of Bill Shillibeer—Bill, that is to say, who had befriended me years before at the Corry, and whose courteous adoration of Phil I had been privy to over the last few months.

‘Hallo, Will,’ he said as usual.

‘Hi, Bill …’

‘His Lordship said you’d be coming down. This is Alastair, by the way.’ He rested his hand on the boy’s head.

‘Hello,’ I nodded. Alastair blinked, shuffled and pummelled the air in front of him, breathing in and out like a steam train. I laughed with relief that Phil had not come with me.

‘It’s a big night for us,’ said Bill, ‘hosting the Nantwich and being in the finals. We’re placing a lot of hope in this young man.’ Looking at Alastair, I was not surprised. Unlike the scrawny little bruisers of the first bout, here was a boy, older, certainly, broad-shouldered, with some unconscious charismatic glow to him. Bill’s hopes, too, cannot all have been sporting. His protégé had a handsome, square-jawed head, pink and gold colouring like my own, and instead of the bog-brush haircuts of his team-mates a trendy coiffure, cropped short and close at the sides, with sprouting golden curls on top: he looked like the inmate of a penitentiary as imagined by Genet. Along his erotically plump upper lip ran the licked blond wisps of his first baby moustache. I felt a churning of lust for him, and the mood of the churchyard, which had abated a bit among the mums and dads, crazed me again. ‘Come and see him do his stuff,’ said Bill—and we went back into the hall as the bell for the end of the first fight rang out.

I didn’t know if Bill was being very cool and ironic, or if he assumed I would know that he was Shillibeer and that he played a part in the Nantwich feudal system. For the moment he was too engaged with the boxing, running across to speak to Alastair’s father (who was biting his cheek with anxiety in the second row) and showing how he belonged by making fluent, familiar remarks—‘All right, Sean? That’s the stuff!’ ‘You gotta watch that left, Simon’—all with a slightly forced or stagey air, brought on by the tension of the occasion (for Bill was a shy, sober man) and perhaps by my presence there.

We had seats right at the front, by the Limehouse corner, and the floor-level view of the ring, the scuffling of feet on the canvas, the alarming lurch of the ropes towards us when one of the boys fell against them, made it a disturbingly immediate spectacle. When Alastair’s name and age and weight were called out, Bill subsided to the seat beside me and seemed exhausted by his anticipation
on the child’s behalf. ‘He’s darned good, he’s
darned
good,’ he said to me. Then the bell rang.

He was paired with a black boy, heavier than him but less agile. Alastair, who had hyped himself into a state of dancing aggression by the time that the two of them touched their white-knuckled gloves together, moved about with wonderful deftness, rather keeping himself to himself at first, but darting in for arhythmic, chancy jabs. Like many boxers I’d seen, people like Maurice at the Club, Alastair was not physically large; his shoulderblades and scruff, uncovered by his royal blue singlet, were not packed with muscle, and his upper arms, though long and powerful, lacked the volatile, easy massing that many ordinary working boys could muster. He ambled in for a swift succession of blows, left, right, left, that sent his opponent onto the ropes, half tripping as he fell backwards. As the referee sprang between them, conjuring an eight-second standing count with the deaf-and-dumb gestures of the ring, the voices rose for Alastair—his father loud and abrupt, and the juvenile babble of his team supporters and mates. One trio of teenage stylists bawled their encouragement while grinning and chewing, selfconscious, acting manly, caring and not caring. After a little more capering about the round ended.

Bill was on his feet in a second, propelled by sheer anxiety and commitment. The helmet-whiskered man was planning to do the mopping and pepping up, but Bill snatched the stool and bounded up between the ropes, pushing his boy into the corner with an awkward, forceful accolade. I looked up at them and half caught Bill’s remarks, a mixture of love and surprising complaints. ‘You’re letting him off, you’re letting him off,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget your fists’—useful advice that was followed by dogmatic, nodding one-worders, as he sponged Alastair’s flushed, upturned face, wiping brusquely at the unspoilt features, and running his sopping embrace around the boy’s shoulders and up the shorn, gold fuzz of his neck. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Great. Smashing.’ Alastair just nodded back, saying nothing, staring entranced at Bill, breathing in keenly through his nostrils. When the bell rang, Bill popped the gumshield back into his mouth, swelling and spreading the pink lips into a fierce sneer. Then, as the referee bobbed backwards to the ropes, they were off again.

The second round was unspectacular at first; the St Albans boy was by no means unattractive, I decided, if of a rather slow-witted, suspicious expression—and he managed to place a couple of good body-shots under Alastair’s guard, shots that were rare in this kind of fight. Then Alastair sent through a vicious jab to the black boy’s face, where we heard not only the muffled smack of the glove but beneath it a strange, squinching little sound, as of the yielding of soft, adolescent bone and gristle. As the boy fell back Alastair followed up, before anyone could stop him, with a second blow of punitive accuracy. Cutting the air between them with his arm, the referee held Alastair off, gestured him away, and as he did so caught up his left glove in his hand. Across its blancoed surface, smeared by the impact of the second blow, was the bright trace of blood.

Bill turned to me with a look of relief. ‘He’s done it,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to stop it now. Yes, he’s done it.’ The shouts in the hall were modified with a sympathy easily accorded to the loser, and Alastair, himself looking rather stunned, cheated somehow by his own victory, jogged about in the ring, punching the air, which was all that was left for him, and showing he had hardly noticed, he needed a fight. After brief deliberations between the ref and the officious, serious judges (this was their life, after all) the unanimous decision was announced. Then Alastair relaxed, hugged and patted his opponent with a careless fondness, and did his lively round of thanks and handshakes. I was moved by the propriety of this.

Bill of course went off with his champion, and after I’d watched the opening of the next fight, which didn’t promise to go so well for Limehouse, I wondered what the hell I was doing and sloped off too through the audience and out by the swinging blue doors. Through another door on the right I heard the familiar fizz of showers and felt the familiar need to see what was going on in them.

There was such an innocence to the place that they saw nothing suspicious in my presence there—nothing either in Bill’s, who, freed from adult prerogatives, absorbed himself with earnest complicity in this little manly world. The mood here also was one of pure sportsmanship, of candid bustle, like a chorus dressing room. Both teams shared the facilities, and Alastair and his
opponent sat side by side on a bench, Alastair undoing, with patient, soldierly tenderness, the bandages that bound the black boy’s hands, and then offering his own hands to be undone, his wrists lying intimately on the other’s hairless thigh. The black boy wore a plaster woefully along his already puffing cheekbone.

‘I’d have a shower, lads,’ said Bill professionally. Watching the lads undress I felt, as perhaps Bill always felt too, not only randy curiosity but a real pang of exclusion, in every way outside their world. The shower was a perfunctory business and soon Alastair was back by us, towelling himself with surprising unselfconsciousness for a sixteen-year-old. I realised why it was, when, after tucking his long-skinned dick into cheap red knickers, and pulling on a grey jersey and those baggy, splotch-bleached jeans which look as though a circle of kids have jacked off all over them, he said to Bill: ‘I got to go and see my girlfriend.’

Bill grinned at him wretchedly. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he said.

At my prep school the prefects (for some errant Wykehamical reason) were called Librarians. The appellation seemed to imply that in the care of books lay the roots of leadership—though, by and large, there was nothing bookish about the Librarians themselves. They were chosen on grounds of aptitude for particular tasks, and were known officially by the name of their responsibility. So there were the Chapel Librarian, the Hall Librarian, the Garden Librarian and even, more charmingly, the Running and the Cricket Librarians. My aptitude, from the tropically early onslaught of puberty forwards, had been so narrowly, though abundantly, for playing with myself and others, that it was only in my last term, as a shooting, tumid thirteen-year-old, that I achieved official status, and was appointed Swimming-Pool Librarian. My parents were evidently relieved that I was not entirely lost (urged absurdly to read Trollope I had stuck fast on Rider Haggard) and my father, in a letter to me, made one of his rare witticisms: ‘Delighted to hear that you’re to be Swimming-Pool Librarian. You must tell me what sort of books they have in the Swimming-Pool Library.’