A pair of soft, curious blue eyes peeked over the partition, framed by luscious eyelashes. Derek, a ten year old boy, strained to see over the high wall that separated the two changing rooms but didn’t quite reach the ceiling. He had balanced a chair precariously on a wooden bench that ran along the dividing wall so he could see who was making all the heavy breathing noises. Now he stared with wonder at his competitor, transfixed; admiring his form. It was a strange form to admire.
The other boy was oblivious. He was shadow boxing topless in a bare, concrete room, but in his mind he was backstage at Earl’s Court, at Madison Square Gardens, at some mob-run Las Vegas boxing ring. The porky face under his unkempt brown hair was smeared with an expression so violently serious that it would be unsurprising to learn he was visualising a terrified Mike Tyson, bloodied and pleading for his life.
He threw a left hook. Right hook. Uppercut! Uppercut! Jab! Jab! Jab!
His considerable weight shifted from his back foot to his front with each blow, his body jarring to a halt, leaving nowhere for the energy to go but ripple across the abundant landscape of his flesh. His paunch quivered as if it had come to life.
It was comical, but Derek’s watchful eyes were just as serious as the other boy’s face; they emanated excitement and fear, though he had yet to begin even contemplating stepping into the ring. He just couldn’t stop looking. Nor could he stop looking when – in the midst of a particularly brutal uppercut – the other boy’s gaze jerked upwards to where he imagined Tyson’s battered face might be, only to find himself looking straight into Derek’s unblinking eyes, just visible above dividing the wall.
To Derek, everything that followed happened in slow motion. The other boy’s face twisted slowly into a contemptuous sneer, then continued mutating, his eyebrows knitting together into a fearsome scowl as his cheeks sucked inwards and his lips pursed to mime a humiliating kiss. For a brief second, Derek misread the gesture as sincere and his eyes widened, just before noticing that the boy had also unfurled his middle finger.
A knock at the other boy’s dressing room door.
‘Yeah? What?’ shouted the boy.
A wiry man entered, looking nervous.
‘You alright, Paul?’
‘Yeah dad, fuck off.’
‘Alright, alright. Got about ten minutes, yeah?’
No response other than a stream of incredibly vicious jabs and a slight vibration in the adipose tissue on his back.
‘Sure you wanna do this?’
‘Course I wanna!’ Paul was exploding. ‘What do I look like? I’m gonna go mental on him!’
This last bit of invective was delivered directly at Derek, who snapped out of his trance and ducked down behind the wall. He curled up into a sitting foetal position on top of his precariously balanced chair, folding his tiny body into a full stop that lacked the certainty to end a sentence. Finally, he contemplated the prospect of fighting the other boy.
* * *
Coloured lights flashed around the darkened arena. Derek watched through mesh fencing as his son punched that other boy in his fat, gormless face – a lot. What a gormless face. ‘How can you still be surprised by a punch to the face,’ Derek wondered, ‘when you have just been punched five times in the face?’
He felt himself swell with uncharacteristic pride in his son, and grinned smugly at the irony of the situation. Derek – Derek’s son – had the appearance of a small, flimsy girl as far as his body and eyes were concerned. It amused and satisfied Derek that his waif-like child was beating that fat, gormless boy, that boy whose masculine heft had seemed so likely to outweigh his obvious lack of gorm.
Earlier, things had not been going so well. The fight had begun largely as expected, the larger boy bending little Derek into various mixed martial arts stress positions, some of which had obstructed his breathing. There was a headlock which found Derek’s nose and face nuzzled forcefully into a sweaty, hairless armpit, and he'd made a sort of gasping noise. Derek was lifted off his feet and then slammed down, landing with his legs vulnerably splayed as the gruff boy held himself vigorously between them, pressing his whole body against the small boy’s torso while his forearm jammed Derek’s head into the canvas. Why wasn’t Derek fighting back? Instead the boys’ bodies were bucking against each other almost in synchronicity as they stared deeply into each other’s eyes.
But then, the bigger boy brought his lips close to Derek’s ear and whispered something imperceptible. And whatever he whispered lit a fire behind Derek's eyes. The fire caused his elbow to jut upwards at a seemingly impossible angle, connecting loudly with the other boy’s eye socket: CRACK. The big lad stumbled backwards, dazed by this unexpected turn of events. Derek, too, seemed stunned, now standing still on his feet, loudly inhaling and exhaling. Derek’s dad waited patiently for about three seconds before screaming ‘GO ON THEN, GET HIM!’ - and that’s when Derek went thoroughly and involuntarily berserk.
He closed his eyes and unleashed something.
There he was, standing relatively tall above the cheering crowd – in an octagonal ring that he would undoubtedly have preferred to be a catwalk – flailing his arms with the haphazard violence of a waterfall channeled through an unmanned garden hose. There was no headgear to soften his blows, nothing to obscure his catharsis other than a perfunctory mouthguard and the fingerless boxing gloves that gave weight to Derek’s fragile arms as they rained down panicked blows on the confused features of his opponent, with an intensity of feeling that could have been mistaken for fury.
The fingerlessness of the gloves allowed the sharp edge of one of Derek’s fingernails to to find purchase in the ample flesh of the overdog’s cheek and leave a narrow scratch of indeterminate depth.
Paul yelped.
Blood dripped.
Suddenly unsure, Derek’s eyes squinted through the spotlights to scan the crowd for his father’s face, which – had he been able to see it – would have been a picture of urgent encouragement: teeth gritted, lips stretched in a grim, anxious smile. Derek the elder pushed to the back of his mind thoughts of how the fight might have gone if Derek the younger had caved during their argument earlier and conceded to cut his nails.
The referee looked on, bewildered, as if seeing a corgi tear the flesh off a lion; as if something so unprecedented were happening that to stop it would be missing an opportunity to learn something anthropologically valuable. Paul’s wiry dad approached Derek’s father.
‘Oi! What’s your boy playing at?’
'Tearing your lad a new one by the looks of things.’ Derek kept his eyes on his son, making a conscious effort not to suppress his smugness entirely.
‘He looks like he’s doing a bloody Lady Gaga dance or something.’
Derek’s smugness twitched. If he’d listened a bit less selectively, he might have heard the 250-strong audience laughing at the fight. He didn’t. He heard them cheering.
‘Come on mate,’ said the wiry man, ’it’s not right. He’s making a mockery of it.’
For the first time, Derek turned away from the ring. He straightened to his full height, arranging his significant bulk into the shape that the wiry man would find most threatening.
'Of what?' asked Derek, in a way that suggested it wasn’t actually a question. A faded tattoo peeked out from under his t-shirt, and in that split second the wiry man imagined it being inked by a tattoo artist in a foreign land that Derek had visited in order to kill foreigners. The wiry man backed down.
Derek turned back to the fight, to his flailing boy, to the wiry man’s son, who by now was hiding his pudgy face behind his pudgy arms and trying desperately to remember how to participate in mixed martial arts. Derek junior continued to swing at the bigger boy, his eyes tightly closed, scared of what he might see if he opened them.
Samantha had begged Derek to leave the boy alone, not to pressure him and make him feel obligated. ‘He doesn’t like it. He’s only doing it for you. Why d’you want him to enter a thing like that?’ Give over. After so many humiliating years of letting his son be himself – after getting him that bald head that grew Play-Doh hair out of its eyeless, plastic skull; buying front row tickets to Swan Lake for Derek’s birthday and then actually going to see it with him; that awful year when everyone in the family had agreed to refer to the boy only as “Dee-Dee”, until finally it was too much and he had had to put his foot down – after all that it seemed to Derek senior he had earned the satisfaction of seeing his son pulp another boy’s head. Yes, Derek junior’s technique was unorthodox, but Derek senior nevertheless felt vindicated. There would be time to work on his style.
Look at him now, Sam! Our boy’s on fire! He’s flying!
She wasn’t there, of course; Sam had refused to come. Derek had mistaken this decision as evidence of a fear that their son would lose, rather than a general distaste for seeing children fight each other, so he had given her a peck on her cheek and assured her everything would probably be alright. Now he wished he’d brought a video camera.
Because something was happening to the other boy. Having taken every frantic hit and slap with what had seemed like astonishing stoicism, it now seemed he had merely been absorbing blows with the eventual goal of fashioning them into a noise. Almost without warning, Derek’s opponent unhinged his jaw like a python that had swallowed an air raid siren and unleashed the wail of every infant who has ever woken up in the middle of the night, forgotten where they are and screamed for their mother. He didn’t say “mum”, but he made a sound that only she should hear, and it stopped young Derek in his tracks. He stood still for the first time in what seemed like forever, examining Paul’s distress and panting.
He had not anticipated this.
He reached out and tenderly touched the arm of his heaving, weeping adversary.
‘GerOFFAme!’ screamed Paul, his words lost in a continuous wail.
Derek’s arm sprang back to his side and his face melted. He looked at Paul sobbing and gurgling, he looked out into the audience again in an attempt to see his dad, and then he too began to cry.
The audience of 250 jeering men coalesced into awkward silence as they jointly failed to pinpoint an appropriate reaction to seeing two young boys weep at each other in an octagon.
Derek’s dad beamed.
* * *
Derek and Derek sat in the car. Derek looked nervously over at young Derek, trying to gauge how he felt. Had some miraculous change taken place? Was there already some sense that his son’s wispy torso, still coursing with adrenaline, was beginning to fill out and prime itself with testosterone? Derek senior fancied there was.
To anyone else, young Derek might have seemed mildly catatonic; eyes drained of curiosity and wonder, mindlessly opening and closing the glove compartment. To Derek’s dad, this was encouraging. The opening and closing of the glove box seemed to suggest an affinity for repetitive action that would come in handy for body building, while he took the blank, dead eyes to be symptomatic of a fugue state he had entered in the ring and was yet to emerge from.
‘How’d you like that then, boy?’
‘Huh?’ The boy’s voice was soft and distant.
‘You have a good laugh up there? Everyone cheering you on, yeah?’
‘Yeah…'
‘Not many 10 year olds can take a 12 year old apart like that, with everyone watching as well.’
‘Yeah...'
The responses were distracted, non-committal. Derek could sense he was pushing his son too hard and tried to maintain a respectful silence for as long as possible. This lasted approximately ten seconds.
‘Know the bit I liked?’
No response from the boy, just a rhythmic focus on the glove box. Derek’s dad pressed on, an unpleasant edge to his voice.
‘I liked the bit where you got your nail right in his cheek. That was good, right? When you made him cry in front of everyone and he looked a right mug.’
Derek the boy stopped playing with the glove compartment and considered this for a moment.
'I didn’t like that bit,’ whispered Derek.
His words were a hand grenade, placed gently in his father’s lap.
‘Why not? What’s the matter with you?’
‘He was sad.’
‘Yeah, sad because he lost. Losers are supposed to be sad, yeah? You’re the winner, mate! You’re s’posed to be bouncing off the bloody walls!'
‘But I wanted him to like me.’
Derek the elder squashed his face between his thumb and fingers, sliding them down his cheeks and off his chin. 'Don’t ask. Don’t do it. Don’t ask,’ Derek thought. He ignored his own advice.
‘What for?’
‘I liked him,’ he was thinking deeply, speaking seriously. ‘He made me feel nice.‘
Ever so quietly, the grenade exploded.
Derek turned his key in the ignition.
Derek and Derek drove home in silence.