A pair of soft, curious blue eyes peeked over the parapet, 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 head 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 that his internal monologue was comprised entirely of Floyd Mayweather, pleading for his life in the third person. He threw a left hook. He threw a right hook. Uppercut! Uppercut! Jab! Jab! Jab! As he transferred his considerable weight from his back foot to his front with each punch, his entire body would halt jarringly, leaving nowhere for the energy to go but to ripple amusingly 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, emanating a mixture of excitement and fear, though he had yet to begin even contemplating stepping into the ring with him. 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 tilted upwards to where he imagined Mayweather’s bleeding and battered face might be, only to find himself looking straight into Derek’s unblinking eyes, just visible above the wall.
To Derek, everything that followed happened in slow motion. The other boy’s face slowly twisted into a contemptuous sneer, then continued to evolve, his eyebrows knitting together into a fearsome scowl as his cheeks sucked inwards and his lips pursed to mime a humiliating kiss.
Momentarily, Derek misread the gesture as sincere and his eyes widened, just before noticing that the boy had also unfurled his middle finger, obliterating any confusion there may have been about the kiss.
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. You’ve got about 10 minutes, yeah?”
No response other than a stream of incredibly vicious jabs and a slight vibration in the adipose tissue on his back.
“You sure you wanna do this, mate?”
Paul exploded indignantly: “COURSE I wanna, what do I look like? I’m gonna go MENTAL on him.”
This last bit of invective was delivered directly at Derek, who immediately 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, his tiny body folded into a full stop that lacked the certainty to end a sentence. For the first time he contemplated the prospect of fighting the other boy.
***
Coloured lights flashed around the darkened arena. Derek watched through the 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?”
“What an idiot,” thought Derek.
He felt himself swell with an uncharacteristic sense of 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 obstructed his breathing. There was a headlock which found Derek’s nose and face nuzzled forcefully into a sweaty, hairless armpit, and he made a sort of gasping noise. Derek was lifted off his feet and slammed to the floor, where he landed 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. Derek’s dad flinched as his son’s opponent flipped him over, straddled his buttocks and put him into a chokehold.
The bigger boy brought his lips close to Derek’s ear and whispered something indiscernible. Whatever that thing was flicked a switch in Derek that lit a fire behind his eyes and caused his elbow to jut backwards by a seemingly impossible distance to connect loudly with the other boy’s eye socket. CRACK. The other boy let go and stumbled backwards, dazed by the unexpected turn of events. Derek too seemed stunned and had also just stood there, loudly inhaling and exhaling. Derek’s dad waited patiently for about three seconds before screaming “GO ON THEN, GET HIM!”, and it wasn’t until then that Derek went thoroughly and involuntarily beserk. He closed his eyes and unleashed something.
There he was, standing relatively tall above the cheering crowd – in an octagonal ring that he would once have undoubtedly preferred to be a catwalk – heroically flailing his arms like a flamboyant garden hose in the grip of an epileptic fit. No headgear, no boxing gloves, no protection; just two little men. Derek’s fragile arms rained down panicked blows on the confused features of his opposite number with an intensity that could be mistaken for fury.
The sharp edge of the boy’s finger found purchase in the ample flesh of the overdog’s cheek and left a narrow scratch of indeterminate depth for blood to drip from. 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. The wiry man approached Derek’s father.
“Oi! Mate! What’s your boy playing at?”
“Tearing your lad a new one by the looks of things.” Derek keeps his eyes on his son, making a conscious effort not to suppress his smugness entirely.
“He looks like he’s doing a Lady Gaga dance or something.”
His smugness evaporated like an involuntary fart. If he’d listened a bit less selectively, Derek 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 bout, and 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 a 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 sweating boy, to the wiry man’s son, who by now was hiding his pudgy face behind his pudgy arms and trying frantically to recall any memory of what it means to do mixed martial arts. Derek junior continued to swing at the fat boy, his eyes tightly closed, scared of what he might see if he opened them.
Samantha had begged Derek to leave Derek alone, not to pressure him and make him feel obligated. “He doesn’t like it! He’s only doing it ‘cos of you! Why d’you want him to enter a thing like that?” Give over. After so many years, after such a humiliating history of simply letting young Derek be young Derek – after buying him that bald head and torso that grew Play-Doh hair out of its eyeless, plastic skull; after shelling out for front row tickets to Swan Lake for Derek’s birthday and then actually going to see it with him; after that awful year when everyone in the family finally acquiesced and agreed to refer to the boy only as “Dee-Dee”, until frankly it became ridiculous and the time came for everyone to put their collective foot down – after all that it seemed to Derek senior he had earned the satisfaction of seeing his son pulp another boy's head. Granted, 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! Look at our boy! He’s flying! She wasn’t there; Sam had refused to come; she couldn’t bring herself to watch. 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 camcorder.
Something was happening to the other boy. Having taken every floundering hit and slap with what had seemed like astonishing stoicism, it now seemed he had merely been absorbing punches 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 mum. He didn’t say “mum”, but he made a sound that only she should hear, and it stopped 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, quietly. The audience of 250 jeering men coalesced into an awkward silence as they jointly failed to pinpoint the appropriate reaction to seeing two young boys weep at each other in a cage-fighting ring.
Derek’s dad beamed.
***
Derek and Derek sat in their parked 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, his 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 rage-fuelled fugue state that had possessed him in the ring and he was yet to emerge from.
“How’d you like that then, boy?”
“Hm?” the boy’s voice was soft and distant.
“You have a good laugh up there? Everyone cheering you on?”
“Yeah...”
“Ain’t many 10 year olds can take a 12 year old apart like that, with everyone watching as well.”
“Yeah...”
The responses were distracted and non-committal. Derek could sense he was pushing the boy too hard and tried to maintain a respectful silence for as long as possible. This lasted approximately ten seconds.
“You know the bit I liked?”
No response from the boy, just a rhythmic focus on the glove compartment. Derek’s dad pressed on, an unpleasant edge to his voice.
“I liked the bit where you got a nail right into his cheek. That was good, right? When you made him cry in front of everyone and he looked like a right mug.”
Derek the boy stopped playing with the glove compartment and considered this for a moment.
“I didn’t like that bit, daddy,” whispered Derek. He may as well have quietly left a hand grenade in his father’s lap.
“Why not? What’s matter with you?”
“He was sad.”
“Yeah, sad 'cos 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 and slid the hand 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 made me feel nice.”
There was a long pause and then Derek started the car. Derek and Derek drove home in silence.