Julius grins, takes off his gloves for a moment, reaches into his pocket, and withdraws a cigarette and matches.

“Some say they are bad for your health. But I find they help me focus.”

He lights it with a flourish. The smell is unmistakable. Charlie waits for some sign of the cigarette’s effect but Julius’s face remains a picture of calm, his skin clean. It seems impossible.

There must be some sort of trick.

The motion of his jaw gives it away, the way he turns his tongue inside his cheek. A sweet. No, many sweets, tucked away at the side of his gums. Charlie wants to warn Thomas but it’s obvious from Thomas’s face that his friend has already seen it. More than that. It confirms a theory long adopted.

“It binds the cigarette Smoke the very moment it is produced,” Thomas says, quietly, but not so quietly Julius cannot hear. “He likes it there, on the knife edge of control. Vicious, but not quite barking mad. And, of course, clean as a whistle.”

Julius smiles at that, steps to the centre, raising his fists and bouncing on his toes.

“Ready whenever you are, Mr. Argyle. When you are done talking, that is.”

In his mouth his tongue is turning, redistributing sweets.

ф

Julius boxes with cool viciousness. He hits Thomas almost at will, largely with jabs, at distance. When his opponent swings at him, he slips the punch and counters, all with the same aloof air of control. Thomas, by contrast, is distracted by his own rage. He charges widely, stands flat-footed, off-balance, always a beat behind the dance. Already his breath is showing dark in front of his mouth and an inch-long line has formed between his shoulder blades like the swollen body of a leech.

At the end of the round Julius bends over the ropes that frame the ring and spits out a black rotten sweet. For a split second Charlie is transported back to school, to that initial fight between Thomas and the head boy. There, too, a blackened lump was spat across a floor. It bounced on bathroom tiles.

Back then they took it for a tooth.

They start the second round. Thomas does not stand a chance. Julius continues to box scientifically, inflicting maximum punishment. He works Thomas’s body as much as the face, the side of the ribs, and the soft of the belly, Thomas looking as though he is drowning. He smokes from pain and helplessness, staggers, rolls, slumps. It does not even occur to Charlie that he is baiting his opponent, making him careless. But when Julius shoves his reeling figure, pushing him into the ropes, Thomas suddenly straightens and out of nowhere lands a hook with such force it sends four or five sweets flying from Julius’s mouth, some dark, some still clear as crystal. They are followed by a gob of blood.