Silent Voices

a sweet right uppercut that he dragged right up from the floor.

Marty felt the bones in his hand compress as the blow made contact; it was a good one. The kid toppled to his right, his hands going down, the arms limp, and staggered backwards towards the ropes.

It was time to finish him. Most fights lasted only seconds, very few more than a couple of minutes. In the movies, they went on for a long time, but in real life they were scrappy affairs, consisting of brief bursts of energy and longueurs of heavy breathing and grappling. But there would be no close contact fighting tonight. That was not in the script.

Marty moved in for the kill.

Left, right, left, left, right… boxing all the way, not brawling, and using his training and experience to subdue the other man. The kid was flagging; he didn’t know what to do. His big weapon had failed him, and he had no craft to fall back on. Blood was smeared across his face; the light in his eyes went out.

And then it happened.

Just as the kid slumped back onto the ropes, a strange transformation occurred. It did not last long, just a flash, like an echo of a memory, but suddenly the Polish fighter was no longer in the ring. Leaning against the ropes was a huge, oval torso with stubby little legs that ended in hands instead of feet. The face was made up of large, heavy-lidded eyes, two holes for a nose, and a lipless mouth that was more like a thin crack in the flesh-coloured shell.

This was no longer the Polish street fighter.

It was Marty’s old friend Humpty Dumpty.

He threw one punch after another, laying into the image, trying to make it go away, to crack the shell. His vision blurred and then flickered, and the egg-shaped monstrosity changed back into a big loose-lipped Polish kid with blood on his face. But it was too late for Marty to do anything but continue his assault. He kept punching, his fists aching, his fingers crunching, and could do nothing but wait until his terrible rage was spent. Anger drove him on, fuelling his body and inuring it to the pain in his hands. He was once again the child whose father had beaten him for no other reason than to toughen him up, who grew into a teenager who burned and lacerated his own body so that nobody would ever cause him pain or beat him in a stand-up fight.

Just as Marty thought he might black out and enter the darkness where a bastardised kid’s rhyme lay in wait, sung through a crack in the world, he became aware of many hands upon him, an arm wrapping around his throat, and people pulling him off the other fighter. Realising what was happening, he went limp, his arms hanging loose at his sides, and allowed himself to be dragged away without further protest.

His opponent lay on the ground, his young face a mask of red. He was not moving. He did not even seem to be breathing.

What have I done? thought Marty. Who did I become?

At last, the audience had fallen silent. This was too much, too harsh for them to process. They came here expecting violence, and they had faced absolute savagery. Marty realised that he was screaming, but the sound was nothing that could be described as words. It was just a long, wailing lament, a cry of rage at the things that had pushed him to this point and driven him to fight with a demon from the pages of a children’s book.

“Get off me,” he cried, shutting off that other noise — the one that made him sound as if he’d lost his mind. “Get the fuck off!”

Who the hell was I trying to hurt? Not him — not the kid.

As the figures released him and backed away to give him room, he got to his knees and stared at them all. The ref was shaking his head, Erik Best was smiling, and a few of Best’s heavies were trying to stop the Polish corner crew from climbing into the ring. Marty held up his hands and stared at them. The white wrappings were coated with blood.

Nobody can hurt Marty, he thought, recalling the years of self-damage, of extreme body conditioning, and the insane physical tests he had put himself through before the age of thirty. Nobody hurts Marty… not even Marty.

Best stepped forward and bent down, trying to be heard above the clamour. “That was some fucking show, marra,” he said, grabbing Marty’s shoulder. “But I think we need to get you out of here before it all kicks off.” He squeezed Marty’s arm, earnestly.

Marty nodded. With Best’s help, he stood, feeling shaky and ill. The egg-shaped creature was no longer in the ring, and when he glanced beyond the ropes, at the people being herded away from ringside, he caught no sight of it anywhere in the vicinity.

“Quickly. This way.” Best guided him to the edge of the ring and lifted the top rope. Marty stumbled through, falling onto his knees as he hit the dirt on the other side. He looked up, staring at one of the ceiling lights. The bright spot held his gaze; it pierced his skull, burning into his brain, and once again he saw the terrible stunted image of a grinning Humpty Dumpty. He closed his eyes and twisted his head to the side, trying to rid himself of the horror.

Some kind of fracas was occurring off to his left. Marty could not hear clearly, just a dull roar, as if his ears had popped under pressure. He opened his eyes to see, and was just in time to catch the fat Polish man in the Kappa tracksuit forcing his way through the crowd. Marty blinked. His ears felt as if they were stuffed with cotton wool. He wasn’t sure what was happening, but he realised that things were not right. Then, just before someone grabbed him by the back of the neck and dragged him away, the Polish man hit Marty hard in the side. The impact was dull, yet it burned briefly. Marty moved in slow motion, glancing down at his left side. There was a shock of red there: a stain. The stain was moving, blooming like a flower. Spreading across his left side…

That was when he realised that he had not been punched. He’d been stabbed.

Sound rushed back into his ears and he pressed his bandaged hand to the wound. The tips of his first two fingers slipped easily between the edges of the cut, and they went in deep. The blood was warm. He felt no pain.

“Jesus,” he said. He looked back up, towards the hanging light fixture near the ceiling, but saw only the incandescence of the bulb. Then he looked back at his hand. His fingers were red and slick. There was a white halo around them, from staring too long at the light.

“Get him over here,” said someone he’d never seen before. “Now!”

Erik Best was charging around the Barn like a bull, clearing out the rest of the crowd and directing his men to grab hold of the Polish contingent. The fat man was lying unconscious on the ground at the foot of a broad timber post. Someone had wrestled one of the other corner men onto his back and was slipping in a couple of punches to his kidney area. Two other men in suits had pinned the last Polish man to the wall, where they were taking turns to hit him in the gut.

Marty was being walked quickly by three men towards the opposite corner of the Barn. Doc, an old guy in a shabby grey suit, was laying out medical equipment on a plastic bench beside a low wooden table. He was smoking a cigarette and his hands were shaking. Carefully, he placed a scalpel, syringes, scissors and various dressings onto the flat top of the bench.

Marty was forced to lie down on the table, strong hands pushing down on his chest. He still could feel no pain — the rush of adrenalin was probably masking it, but he knew the numbness wouldn’t last for long. Soon his left side would be in flames.

He opened his mouth. His lips were dry. “Is it deep?”

The doctor looked up from where he was inspecting the wound. “Yes, but it isn’t fatal.”

Erik Best appeared at the side of the table. “Can you fix him up, Doc?” His face was shiny with sweat.

Marty was drifting in and out of a dream. None of this was really happening; it was like a play or a movie. He’d fallen asleep in front of the television.

“Not a problem,” said Doc, peeling off a pair of rubber gloves stained with blood and putting on a clean pair fresh from the sterile packet. “The wound’s located far enough forward that it’s missed his kidneys. Luckily, because it’s on the left side where it might have happened, it doesn’t seem to have hit the liver. Higher up, though, and it would have got his spleen.” Doc grinned around his cigarette. “I should really make a larger incision to explore the wound, but I’m happy enough with my diagnosis that it won’t be necessary. This is basically your textbook loin wound. I’ll use lignocaine to anesthetise locally, clean it out, and then I’ll chuck in some ethilon sutures to stitch him back up.” He smiled again, a man happy with his work.

“Quit the shop talk,” said Best, glancing around to look over his shoulder. “Just fucking patch him up,