Free Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman Page B

claiming his piece of the city. A form of conquest, really. I remember when he put up that Wrigley’s sign on Broadway. Huge. Hundreds of feet long. I came back from my first semester at Yale and no one was talking about anything else. To make people excited about the fact that you’re selling them chewing gum – that’s a hell of a thing. If there was even one man in the mayor’s office with that kind of genius there’d be no slums left in New York.’
    As Pearl pontificated about lights, he still hadn’t switched on any more in the room itself. Losing interest, Sinner got down off the desk and wandered over to the open window of the study, outside which a black iron fire escape crawled like an insect up the rear wall of the house, dustbins clustered like eggs at its base. Beside Pearl’s desk he nearly stubbed his toe on a big cardboard box full of yellow printed forms. He bent down to look. They were all identical and blank. ‘What are these?’ he said.
    ‘A project of mine, from when I was working at the Civil Services Commission,’ said Pearl. ‘A failure. I offered them a true hierarchy of merit but of course no one wanted it. Do you understand that expression?’
    Sinner shrugged.
    ‘Those forms were to grade the men,’ Pearl went on. ‘I spent a year cataloguing the functions and responsibilities of every job in New York government. And then I gave each function and responsibility a mathematical weight according to its relative importance. And then I gave out those forms so that every man could be precisely assessed according to how well he performed those functions and responsibilities, and according to his personality and morals and potential and so on. And once we had all those numbers we could have said exactly who was needed and who wasn’t, who was being paid too little and who too much, with no need for any “human factor”. But it never passed the Board of Aldermen. They weren’t interested in change. Now they use those forms to pass around racing tips.’
    As Pearl continued to speak – and he clearly liked to hear himself speak – he reminded Sinner more and more of somebody he’d once met, and, after a minute of thinking, he remembered who it was: that posh cunt who’d followed him from Premierland to the Caravan, the one who wouldn’t shut up about how ‘unusual’ Sinner was. And at that moment of recollection Sinner was struck by an inexplicable rage, andhe began to gather up the yellow forms in his hands and fling them out of the open window. They fluttered away like dead leaves. ‘Cunts!’ he shouted. ‘You’re all cunts!’
    ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Pearl said, grabbing his shoulders. Sinner turned, cuffed Pearl’s face, bit his shoulder, bit his neck and bit his mouth. Pearl pulled Sinner away from the window and they both fell to their knees. Pearl, already panting, started to undo Sinner’s belt. Then someone was hammering at the door downstairs.
    ‘I know you’re there, Sinner!’ shouted Kölmel. ‘Come out! I know you’re fucking there! Or, er, otherwise, if you’re not, I’d like to offer you my sincerest apologies, Mr Pearl.’
    ‘Fuck!’ said Sinner. He got up, picked up his original bottle of bourbon, kicked the still-kneeling Pearl in the face and climbed out of the window on to the fire escape, which was now littered with the yellow forms. It was a warm night, and as he looked out over New York he felt like an ant crawling over a cinema screen. Running down the clanging iron steps, he nearly toppled off the edge – a week of abstinence and constant exercise had let him get drunk tonight even quicker than he’d intended. He jumped down to the pavement beside the dustbins and looked around. The street was empty but for a stray cat. He wanted to be submerged in glow again, but Times Square was a long way away, and on the corner opposite he saw a delicatessen, closed, and a little bar, still open. He ran across the street into the bar. And