One of Us Is Dead

92 Tuesday 18 October 2022

Rufus Rorke unhooked the headset above the co-pilot’s seat and donned it. ‘Always nice to know what’s going on, isn’t it, Taylor?’ He held the velvet bag to his side. It contained a heavy brass knuckle duster. Sometimes, Rufus thought, you could be just a bit too modern, a bit too hi-tech, a bit too digital where analogue might do the job better. Firing a gun in the pressurized cabin of an aircraft was just plain dumb. In some situations Uncle Johnny could be a far more effective weapon.

And he liked the double-entendre of the name.

When he had been a child, his mother’s brother, Uncle Johnny, had been his favourite relative. A tall, flash guy who had a dealer-ship selling used high-end cars, Uncle Johnny had in his youth been a county middleweight champion. He’d taught him how to box when he was just seven years old. Taught him painfully. Uncle Johnny had given him a cool pair of red, white and black gloves for his seventh birthday, and then had begun to coach him into becoming a boxer himself. Once a week he’d come over in a tracksuit. When it was fine they’d go out in the back garden, and when it was wet, into the garage, and Uncle Johnny would bash him to hell and back.

He taught him to duck, weave, parry, the jab, the cross, the hooks and the uppercut. He learned pretty fast that if he didn’t do it adroitly, his uncle would have no compunction about slamming a massive sucker punch into his face that would floor him.

During the school holidays, from the age of eleven until he was fifteen, Uncle Johnny would knock him flat on his back several times in each session. It angered him, not because it hurt — and it did hurt — but much more because it humiliated him. He never complained, he took it, he knew he was learning, and there was something else he was gaining from this, too, something that would serve him well in his career now. And that was how to bide his time.

It all changed a couple of weeks after his sixteenth birthday. He’d put on a sudden spurt of growth over the previous months and was now, at six foot tall, only a couple of inches shorter than his uncle — who still called him little guy, though. He’d decided it was finally time for action.

With surgical precision, using a razor blade, he cut out all the interior padding of his right-hand boxing glove, just leaving the thin outer skin. Then he carefully inserted a knuckle duster against the knuckle area of the glove.

He’d had the foresight to buy an identical pair of gloves, from money he’d saved, and kept them hidden beneath a bunch of clothes in a drawer in his bedroom.

The next Saturday, when his uncle turned up, it was pelting with rain, so they went into the double garage, and his uncle reversed out both of his parents’ cars. Then, as their ritual always went, his uncle would start his stopwatch, they would tap gloves, then step back two paces and, holding their hands up, protectively, would begin their cagey moves, darting forward, back, sideways, stabbing tentatively, feinting, looking for that opportunity to land a punch that counted.

Uncle Johnny wasn’t going to put him on the floor today, no way, José.

He dodged a massive punch that came out of nowhere, narrowly skimming his right ear, then walked into a stinging left uppercut. He saw the demon in his uncle’s eyes; the sparkle and glee of that old killer instinct; the smile on his face, the smile of a guy who knew he had the upper hand and was toying with his nephew.

And he saw the gap. Seized the moment, and slammed that heavily loaded right fist with all the force he could deliver, straight at his uncle’s face. For some reason, Uncle Johnny tilted his head down, and he struck between the bridge of his nose and the front of his temple. There was a loud crack and blood sprayed from his nose.

It was followed by a weird, giddy look in his uncle’s eyes, then he dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes and lay still.

Uncle Johnny spent three days in hospital suffering from concussion, during which he was diagnosed with a fractured skull. No one could figure out how this had happened from a blow from padded sparring gloves. The surgeon concluded there must have been an existing weakness that Uncle Johnny had sustained from a car crash a few years before. He was never quite himself again, after that blow, for the rest of his life.

Rufus Rorke went to a pub that night and got drunk for the first time in his life. But he wasn’t drowning his sorrows, he was celebrating.

It had just felt so good!