by Will Wiles
Involve Pierce. Get him on board. ‘If you go on the record,’ I said, ‘I’m prepared to craft the story with you, make sure you get your side across clearly and sympathetically. We can make your, ah, coming-out as gentle as possible.’
‘Well, thanks,’ said Pierce. He pinched the bridge of his nose, and shut his eyes hard, seemingly tired. ‘But let’s not delude ourselves. No way it’ll be gentle. It’ll be brutal. I’m going to get killed.’
I could not deny this, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I thought about the DVR in my shirt pocket. If I glanced downwards, I could just see the top of it. Pierce could probably see it too, if he knew to look, but that shape against my breast could be anything – phone, vape stick, pen drive. I became very conscious that my body language might betray me, might reveal that I was wearing a wire. I rolled my shoulders, pretending to rid them of stiffness, in fact trying to get the DVR to be less conspicuous, and peered into the neck of the beer bottle, inspecting its foaming dregs. To my surprise, the bottle was already almost empty, though I hardly remembered drinking from it at all.
But Pierce wasn’t even looking. He was preoccupied with telling his story. ‘Quin threatened to go public without me,’ he said. ‘He insisted that I confess and make amends. He said that it reflected badly on him.’ He barked a laugh, eyes wide. ‘On him! How fucking vain can you get? Such concern for his own reputation! He’s completely naive. He thinks that if I say I’m sorry then I’ll be OK. He’s wrong. I made up … I’d say “I made up a story” but that sounds so fucking innocent, so pre-school. I invented people. I invented events. I defrauded my agent, my publisher and the public. I told lie after lie after lie and said to people every time, “this is the sworn truth”. I was praised for my honesty. I’m a monster.’
I wanted, more than ever, to check the DVR in my pocket, to confirm that it was still running, recording these words. But I did not dare. I kept my eyes on Pierce, draining the last of my beer and letting him speak, but hardly listening, thinking only of the recording.
‘All those people who praised it, who praised my courage and candour,’ Pierce continued. ‘The people who wrote to me, the people who invited me to speak … All those people are going to feel like I made fools of them. And I did. Helen Mirren said that it made her cry. In a newspaper. Dame Helen Mirren. What are they going to do? How do I atone for something like that?’
‘Is that what you want?’ I asked. ‘To atone?’
It was Pierce’s turn to be silent. He scowled, giving the question deep, zealous thought.
‘If I’m being honest,’ he began – and I thought, Yes, please be honest – ‘I’d rather die before the truth comes out. But I’ll settle for atonement.’
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked. If I did decide to betray Pierce, the more information I could get out of him while he believed himself to be off the record, the better.
But he was no longer cooperating.
‘I envy you, you know. You’ve done it. You’ve been there – twice. I tried to think of the most primal urban experience possible: being mugged in the street, that was it.’
‘The way to avoid being mugged,’ my dad said, ‘is to look as if you’re going to mug someone.’ Memorable advice – well, I’ve remembered it, which is more than I can say about most of what he told me before I went to London. What made it stick was the thought it immediately prompted in me: that I could never, ever imagine my dad looking as if he were going to mug someone. This gem of street-smarts was dispensed by a diminutive, paunchy tax accountant wearing an incredibly aged blue blazer with loose brass buttons that dangled like charms on a bracelet. When my dad started losing his hair, it went at the temples first, as is quite common. But then it kept going back in two temple-width swaths, never expanding its path to take in anything from the sides or the top of the head. This left a mohican-like strip of hair in the middle of his scalp. He never did anything to adapt his hairstyle to the diminishing resources at its disposal, to try to disguise or balance the creeping baldness – a failure I saw then as a hopeless inability to face facts but in retrospect looked more like splendid unconcern. He simply did not mind.
Did he, my dad, base this advice on experience? Or was it just something he had heard and which sounded true enough to repeat without checking? So much ‘wisdom’ is like that, plausible but untested, repeated with confidence because it had been heard spoken with confidence. What did it even mean, in practice? A scowl on the face, a certain swagger, a certain swing, a certain strut to the walk. To appear at home in the street, as if you belong wherever it is that you are, which may be – if violence really is a possibility – what the newspapers call ‘the wrong place at the wrong time’. There’s data for you: if places and times can be ‘wrong’, then there are temporal and topological boundaries, this could all be mapped – indeed, apps like Tamesis could show you recent crime as a heat map. I knew because I hate-browsed homes for sale on those apps, seeking out the pockets where public-transport access was chilliest and crime was glowing magma red, hopeful of a miraculous, inaccessible few streets of nightly throat-slitting where a studio flat might dip towards a quarter of a mill.
You mustn’t look out of place, you mustn’t look like an impostor. That’s when the city turns on you. But it’s not quite right to say you must appear ‘at home’. Because when you’re drunk you often feel supremely at home on the street, altogether too comfortable, and you’re at your most vulnerable.
Whatever it was you were supposed to do, I can’t have been doing it. In 2005 I had just started working for Divider, the DVD magazine. Divider tried to compensate for its obvious anachronism by adopting a certain swagger in its editorial style, and I was exactly the kind of inexperienced but eager recruit it wanted, with a few energetic, pretentious university newspaper features to my name and not much else. This was little more than a decade ago, and remembering it now it occurs to me that today I would probably be expected to do an unpaid internship – an impossibility, with no resources and parents more than two hours from London (by the faster train). But in that forgotten golden age, 2005, they hired me right out of university. On a pittance, but in a real job.
Never mind that I had sauntered into the city across a collapsing bridge – I felt I belonged there, all right. Never have I felt less like an impostor. That first job was a resounding endorsement. No sense, yet, of the quiet doubts that had pursued me across that bridge, not an inkling of the trajectory that would take me to my humiliation on Pierce’s sofa. In the winter of 2006, I belonged. I was in.
That year Divider had its staff Christmas party in a restaurant in Soho. A back room filled with booze. I drank far too much, but so did everyone else. I know that I flirted with at least two co-workers, without consequence. I think I told the story about my uncle’s cockatoo, which isn’t true, but the timing is well rehearsed through repetition. There was a lot of smoke around that table – smoking in restaurants, a lost age for sure. It was my second Christmas party at that magazine. I had shed the novice nervousness that kept me near the corner the previous year. My co-workers were my friends and I was in my place.
The restaurant ejected us after eleven, and many of the others went to a club. Unsteady on my feet, I was gripped by an instinctive desire to grab the last Tube and go to bed before I made more of a fool of myself. I still lived in the Fulham flat-share, and opted to walk to Embankment Station, from where the District Line would take me straight home.
Soho dies hard between Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square. There’s a hinterland behind the National Gallery where the life goes from the streets, the lights recede and every building has its back to you. It was a cold night, and even with the pubs closing and the office parties winding down, few hurrying souls shared the pavements with me.
The choreography of what happened has stayed with me. A hand, a large hand, warm, was laid on my neck from behind – not violent, oddly intimate, almost genial, cupping itself to the curve where neck meets shoulder. I was startled, bu
t immediately assumed that a friend from the office had been following me from the restaurant and had caught up. No stranger would do that. I stopped and turned. It was a stranger. A tall, pale man whose lined face added twenty years to his age, which I guessed was only a few years ahead of mine, mid to late twenties. His hair, straight and dark, hung lank to one side, on a spectrum between Hitler and nineties indie dropout. That’s all the detail I can give. I have often tried to recall more, but even that basic outline is woozy as often as it is clear, and I wonder if any of it is invention, the imagination trying to help, supplying information not found in the memory. I’ll say this: he looked both unwell and in more formidable physical shape than me. His companion was even less clear.
Our dance continued. I had stopped in the middle of the pavement, by a street corner. He circled me, coming a little too deep into my personal space, which caused me to take a step back – which was not really a step back the way I had come because I had turned when I stopped. Instead I took a step backwards onto the narrower, quieter side street, a huge step really, across a threshold, not only from one street to another but from one situation to another, a step into a new world. And the old-young man was between me and the way I had come. It was impressive, really, the way that he sheepdogged me into the place he wanted me – a skill, a real talent. Absurdly, I was still trying to figure out if I knew him.
Behind me, movement. A shadow separated from the railings that ran along the side of the pavement.
‘Got a cigarette, pal?’
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘Smoke. I don’t smoke.’
‘Got a quid? I’ll buy my own.’
The air around me changed. My pleasant boozy buzz from the party shut off. The wider city disappeared – the millions living lives, happy and sad and indifferent, all gone, down to me, and him, and the third person, the one manoeuvring on my blind side. And the details around me: the paving slabs under my feet, wet and black, the black railings, the unlighted windows of the building behind those railings, the dirty glass skylight between railings and wall, the dark shapes of the parked cars, a dull shine on them from streetlights too far away. This whole scene, a radius of two or three metres, was my whole world, and it was empty of help.
But: I still did not know what was happening. This man did not want a cigarette, I knew that; if he did, it certainly wasn’t all he wanted. Was I being begged? Was I being robbed? Was I simply free to go, to say, ‘No, sorry,’ and push by, suffering nothing more than an epithet spat at my retreating back? If I gave this man a quid – it was there, and more, heavy in my pocket – was that all? Would we part on good terms, with some of that spurious cheer that accompanies a successful beg? No – I was sure, on a level of animal instinct, that starting to fetch money from my pockets was a mistake.
It was confusing. There was no clarity in the situation. It didn’t look promising, but it wasn’t a man with a knife saying, ‘Give me all your money.’ There was no obvious, sensible path to either escape or self-preservation. That was the most frightening part.
‘You got a quid then, mate?’ Old-Young said. He stepped towards me. Aware of his colleague to my rear, I inched back, but did not take a corresponding full step. He drew closer. The streetlamp hardly grazed him.
‘Sure, sure,’ I mumbled, and dipped a hand into my pocket. My keys jangled with the loose change there. As it happened, I had an unusually large amount of money on me: £30 in notes and perhaps another ten in change. At the time, on my starting salary in a parsimonious industry, that was a lot. I had expected to need it for carousing, but the magazine had paid for everything at the restaurant, leaving me flush. He heard it.
‘You got a lot there, yeah?’ he said. ‘How about you spare us a bit more?’
I froze, looking desperately towards the busier street, hoping against all likelihood that a policeman or patrol car might choose this moment to pass, or that a large group might turn the corner and give me the cover, the witnesses, to extricate myself. But I was alone.
My next move surprised me – it was, I suppose, brave, or bold, and thus I had not anticipated it.
‘You said a quid.’
Old-Young lifted his gaze from mine to look at his companion – the first time he had acknowledged him, although I had never doubted they were working together. I shuddered, expecting an assault from behind – an arm round the throat, a blow to the back of the head, a knife between the ribs. How would that feel, to be stabbed? I had only really been thinking in words: ‘mugged’, ‘robbed’, ‘assaulted’, these were very elastic concepts, which had made fixing them to the truth of the situation all the harder – until now, anyway, and now they felt inadequate against a much larger and less abstract consideration: Am I about to be hurt, and if so, how much?
Signalled by Old-Young, Railing had appeared at my side – but still a little to my rear, covering any reversal by me. He had on a hooded jacket; not the ‘hoodie’ of the stereotype but a windcheater, something you might wear home from the gym. And, unlike a ‘hoodie’, unlike the boys who had (not) attacked Pierce, like his companion, he was older than I was. Black hair and an offensive little line of goatee. Other characteristics muted or blurred by fear, drink and the natural working of memory.
My hand was in my pocket, with the coins and keys. I half-remembered something about holding keys in a fist, like a spiked knuckle-duster, and going for an assailant’s face, his eyes – not an act I could see myself doing, not even in an extreme situation. Although the nature of an extreme situation is that we don’t know what we’ll do until we get there. Even if I could bring myself to retaliate first, would that just provoke them into worse violence? The other advice my father had given – it was all coming back now, the blazer, the dark, pitted surface of the pub table, the small velvet-seated stool I had sat on while he took to the wooden bench against the wall, the summer light low in the windows and the optics – was that, if I was mugged, I should just give them what they wanted and scram. Don’t be brave, don’t resist, don’t be stupid. But what did they want? Where did it end? What was happening?
The two men closed in. Nothing good ever ‘closes in’: pursuers, predators, storms. Without being touched I was forced back onto the railings, my little hopeless pavement-universe cut back to its minimum extent. Only the boundary of the person remained. I checked their hands. Both men had a hand free and a hand in a jacket pocket. I never saw a weapon, a knife. That’s another saying, and it came back now: if they show you the blade they don’t mean to use the blade. Not my dad’s, that one, that came from an argument among my friends at university. Was it true? What kind of data had gone into that bit of street wisdom? Forget true: was it useful? We live our lives by these ungrounded, half-remembered bits of folklore, and when I needed help, when my mind urgently roamed its prison looking for tools, this nonsense buzzed uselessly at me: all trite and false, all of it. I knew nothing.
My hand came out of the pocket, fist clenched around as many coins as I could grasp.
‘Fuck off,’ Old-Young snarled when he saw this offering.
So we understood each other. I took my wallet from my back pocket. The demeanour of my robbers – I knew, now – had changed. We were into the delicate, unambiguous business of separating me from my possessions by threat of force, we all knew, and they had lost their stony composure and focus and become watchful and jumpy, eyes everywhere, lots of small movements. Railing took my wallet from me as soon as it appeared.
‘Phone,’ Old-Young said, beckoning impatiently. This was the least ambivalent instruction he gave me. I took my phone from my jacket pocket and Railing took it from me. This teamwork was notable: one doing the demanding, the other the taking. Did this offer some consoling moral effect, or imagined legal protection?
It didn’t matter, and my thoughts were cancelled when Railing hit me. I had no time to prepare. Even consumed by fear of imminent attack, I had not expected it. (So what was the fear for? What good was it?) There was a fraction of a second in which I realise
d ‘he’s going to hit me’ – his frame coiling back, eyes widening – then a flash of action and pain.
The punch wasn’t tidy. You only learn this after you’ve been hit a couple of times by people who mean it, but punches are messy, slippery affairs. Think ‘punch’ and, for me anyway, what came to mind was Raging Bull: slow-motion black and white arm-back bull’s-eye connection. Not a smeared moment of edges and glancing and sliding and mismatching body parts.
He hit me below the right eye, mostly on the cheekbone. It felt as if he were aiming elsewhere and missed, but that was mad, at that range surely he could hit wherever he wanted. I cried out and raised my arms to protect my face. Too late, of course, everything that happened had already happened, they were gone, off round the corner the quickest you can walk without running, all hands now in jacket pockets.
My first thought, once I had recovered my wits, was to call someone – the police, I suppose. And then I realised my phone was gone. I opened and closed my mouth, working the muscles of my face, establishing the level of damage. A wide zone of pain across the right side, a nasty headache from nowhere, but nothing broken. I was fundamentally intact. Hot, sour tears surged up and I fought with them, and the humiliation they brought and that brought them, all across the bright field of Trafalgar Square, and at last they retreated, without spilling, under the white lights of Embankment Station.
Neither of my housemates was home once I got back, which suited me as I had no wish to tell them what had happened and deal with their questions. As well as sore, my face was abnormally hot, and I knew some of that was shame.
The next morning – Saturday – I had recovered enough to explain the red patch under my eye and put a defiant, rational, angry spin on the whole business. I made some edits to the events, which helped. I felt it was my right, as victim and star witness.
