Read The Scrapper for Free Online Page A

would just need to take a walk through the locker rooms in St Thomas’s Club. There the elderly, retired boxers and trainers would gather every day for games of cards or games of chess or just to sit and talk, all of them suffering from the ‘I could have been a contender’ syndrome.
    There had been one constant in St Thomas’s Boxing Club over the past fifteen years. That constant was ‘Froggy’ Campbell. Every day Froggy would open the club first thing in the morning and would be the last one to leave when he locked it last thing at night. For this Froggy received no payment. Nor did he seek any. For the world of St Thomas’s Boxing Club was Froggy’s world. Froggy was thirty years of age, and it was believed that lack of oxygen at birth had caused Froggy’s brain damage. At first everyone thought he was just deaf, but as he got older and special school followedspecial school, it was discovered that Froggy was trainable but not teachable. A difficult situation to explain, but best described by his mother when she would say, ‘Froggy can be trained how to dress himself but he will never learn why he has to.’
    A big man and perfectly healthy in every way, if a bit overweight, Froggy had the mind of a six-year-old child. He mopped out the showers, swept the gym, washed the windows, and spent his entire day shuffling from one task to another, always with a smile on his face. Froggy had two passions in his life. One was boxing, obviously. The other was his polaroid camera. The latter interest began when Froggy was sixteen years of age and he got his first camera. He’d been given it as a present from Madrid by Sparrow McCabe, the man whose portrait was bigger than any other on the club wall.
    Froggy never understood what had happened to Sparrow in Spain, but he did remember that Sparrow was very sad when he returned. Still, he had taken the camera out of its box and loaded the film, showing Froggy how to work it. Froggy immediately took his very first photograph, a black-and-white head-and-shoulder shot of a very sad Sparrow McCabe.
    It was Sparrow who had taken Froggy to the gym for the very first time. Sparrow had often met the retarded boy, then only fifteen years of age, as he walked to the gym. Every day the boy would smile and say, ‘Hello.’ And one day Sparrow stopped to talk to him. It had been a strange conversation, for at that time Froggy’s vocabulary revolved around four words: Yes, Thank you, Mammy, and of course, Hello.
    Sparrow was in training every day then, and he wouldcall to Froggy’s house at the same time each day, and with Froggy’s mother’s permission take him by the hand down to the gym. Sparrow would be the last to leave, so he would lock up, take Froggy by the hand and walk him back home. After six months of this, Froggy began to make his own way to the gym. And because the pattern had been set, he would insist on being the last to leave the building.
    Nowadays Sparrow trained only two or three times a week – and one couldn’t really call it training, it was more of a work-out. But this didn’t break Froggy’s routine; it was easier for his mother to let him go to the gym every day than to try to un-train him.
    Today was one of Sparrow’s work-out days. Froggy was sweeping around the ring, for the tenth time, and all the while his eyes never left Sparrow McCabe, who was working-out on a punch-bag. Froggy was dressed in ill-fitting boxer shorts and vest, ordinary street shoes and socks, and had his latest polaroid camera hanging around his neck. His camera had been updated four times. This latest one even spoke to him. Just as he pressed the button a little voice would say, ‘Watch the birdie!’ Where the other three had been bought over the years by Sparrow, this latest one was a Christmas present from all the boxers who used the gym.
    Froggy laid his brush against the edge of the ring and shuffled over to where Sparrow was now furiously working the bag. He lifted his