by Steve Liszka
As she walked home, Jo became aware of someone close enough to her, she could clearly hear their footsteps. She looked around and on the other side of the road saw a slight young man wearing a scruffy looking hoodie and tracksuit bottoms. He had been staring at her, but as soon as she caught his eye, he spun around and pretended to look in the window of the shop that sold scented candles and overpriced toiletries. Yeah, right, she thought, wondering when the greasy looking urchin had bathed last. She walked another fifty or so yards then turned and saw that he was still hanging around behind her. It didn’t bother her too much; it wasn’t even eleven o’clock, and there were plenty of people around. She also felt like she had two important things going for her. If for any reason the guy did give chase, she was one hundred percent certain she could outrun him. Secondly, she was pretty confident if he did get hold of her, she could beat the living shit out of him. She’d lived in London for nearly a decade; little shits like him didn’t bother her.
Half a mile later when she was nearly home, she turned again to see if her stalker was still there, but there was no sign of him. She’d been checking every couple of minutes, and while he had hung around for a while, his pace had gradually dropped. On her past two observations, the man had disappeared. Nevertheless, she still had felt it necessary to take this one last cursory glance. The muse that she lived in was part of a beautiful regency building set off the main road behind a row of newer flats. It was a quiet, peaceful area, but to get to it she had to walk down a dark unlit alley that led her from the new world to the old. If he had followed her, that was not the place that she wanted to meet him, regardless of how much she fancied her chances.
As she walked through the alleyway, she put her hand into the rear pocket of her ultra-breathable running tights and hooked out the keys to her flat. She felt the two keys on the fob, trying to differentiate between the square one for the front door and the round one for the rear, and as she rubbed her thumb against one, she dropped them on the floor. After picking them up and swearing at herself for being so clumsy, she looked up to see two men standing between her and the front door. One of them was only small, probably no bigger than the runt who had followed her earlier, but the other one, the one that sent a shiver down her spine, could have been Lenny’s bigger, meaner brother. She turned to face the way she had just come from, only to find her stalker blocking her exit; clearly, he hadn’t given up his pursuit.
She’d already decided that she was going to go through him rather than his two friends when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned so quickly that the smaller man’s hand moved away like it had received an electric shock.
‘You’re fast, ain’t you, girly?’ he said.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ she answered, trying her best to sound vicious, but she could already feel the fight leaving her. It wasn’t the one talking that bothered her, he was a podgy-looking fucker with bad skin and a pale complexion, but the other one, the lump, he just stood there with no readable expression, saying nothing. The man terrified her.
‘All we want,’ the smaller man said as he walked her backwards towards the wall, ‘is for you to be one hundred percent sure that you made the right decision yesterday. Ain’t that right, Frank?’
He looked at the monster standing next to him who gave him the tiniest of nods.
‘I mean, we all know that sometimes girls mean yes when they say no.’
The guy in the hoodie had now joined them.
‘Yeah, I bet this one’s a right cock tease.’ He put his hand between her legs and rubbed at her crotch.
Jo responded by grabbing his shoulders with both hands and driving her forehead into the fleshy part of the man’s nose. The sound of the bone cracking was sickening. Her knee came up into his groin a split second later, sending him crashing to the floor.
When the other small guy grabbed hold of her for a second time, she turned on him, stabbing the key at his eye socket. She had done Krav Maga classes when she was in London, and one of things they taught was that in real life you do whatever you need to do to keep safe, and if that meant gouging a man’s eyeball out then that’s what you did. She would have, too, if the big guy hadn’t stepped forward and grabbed her by the throat. She instantly let the other man go, all she could think about was where her next breath would come from. Before the answer came to her, he slammed her head against the wall, almost knocking her out.
When her eyes managed to focus again, the man loosened his grip just enough so the blood that filled her ears subsided for a second, allowing her to hear what he was saying.
‘See, that was silly,’ he said. ‘We were just here to put the frighteners on you. Give you a little scare an’ all. But now you’ve hurt my mates, I’ve got to do something about it. If I didn’t what sort of friend would that make me?’
The one clutching his face looked at his friend with his good eye and tried to smile. ‘This may ruin things, but I’m going to fuck this bitch up.’
He slapped her hard across the face. It stung, but had shocked her even more. Suddenly, she felt like crying.
‘Sorry, darling,’ the big man said, as a tear ran down her cheek, ‘but this is going to hurt.’
He started to draw his fist back like a piledriver waiting to strike the earth, but before he could deliver the blow, he dropped to his knees like someone had taken his legs out from behind him. Which, in fact, they had.
Facing Jo was Bodhi, who had stamped down on the back of the guy’s knee with all his might. The smaller man turned to see who was foolish enough to take on his giant friend and was met with a lightning-fast three punch combination that knocked him out before he had even hit the floor.
The big lump dragged himself to his feet, groaning as he did so; the stamp to the leg had served its purpose well.
‘You’re going to regret that, pal. I swear to God.’
‘Sure I am, bud,’ Bodhi said, brushing his hair from his eyes.
Both men ignored Jo as they circled each other. The big man was heavy on his feet, struggling to put any weight on his front foot while Bodhi was up on his toes, moving back and forth with the grace of a ballet dancer.
As they moved in on each other, the huge man threw a big right hand, but Bodhi had already seen it coming and dropped his right shoulder so the punch sailed past his head. He quickly rotated his upper body and drove a crisp left hook into his opponent’s ribcage. The impact made the bigger man take a sharp intake of air as he moved a half-step backwards.
When Bodhi smiled at him, the man frowned and launched himself forward to throw another punch. This time, Bodhi stepped to his left and, at the same instant, kicked him in the side of his injured knee, causing it to buckle again.
As he staggered forward, Bodhi spun around and threw his other leg up, catching him on the temple with a brutal roundhouse kick. It was the sort of thing that if you saw Jean-Claude Van Damme do it in a film, you’d say, “yeah right, that wouldn’t work in real life,” except it did. Bodhi was testament to it. Just like his friend, the man was out cold as soon as the kick made contact. He went down with his arms by his sides, unable to protect his face from the concrete.
After surveying the devastation he had caused, Bodhi turned to Jo and motioned his hand toward her hair like he was about to stroke it. Jo saw it coming and slapped it away.
‘Piss off,’ she said. ‘I’m not a baby. I don’t need you to look after me.’
Bodhi leant in, bringing his lips to hers. ‘You’re not a baby,’ he said, breaking away from the kiss. ‘You’re my girl.’
Panic at the Disco
With his hand resting on the boy’s back, Lenny guided the troublemaker out of the club. Now that he was on his own and away from his friends, the bravado the kid had initially displayed had vanished. Separated from the mob, all the fight had gone out of him. For Lenny, who had done this a million times before, it was like taking a well-trained dog for a walk. From his position just off the dance floor, he had watched as the boy had pu
t his hand up a girl’s skirt and got a good squeeze of her arse. Lenny had been on him in no time. He didn’t put up with shit like that; he had a daughter himself, for Christ’s sake. One day, she would have to deal with assholes like him. The thought of it made Lenny shudder, and he took it out on the boy as he pushed him out of the exit.
‘Try that again,’ he said to the lad who only just managed to stay on his feet, ‘and you’ll be seeing my not-so-nice side. Understand?’
The boy nodded and walked off down West Street, trying his best to look like he wasn’t bothered by what had happened.
Lenny shook his head and stepped back into the club. At the fire station, he may have been a loud-mouthed pain in the arse, doing his best to rub any form of authority up the wrong way, but in the club, he was a very different animal. He had worked on the doors almost as long as he had been a firefighter. It seemed a natural second job for a man his size and often available to work the unsocial evening shifts. He was good at it, too, very good, and that wasn’t just down to his natural attributes.
Lenny knew how to handle himself. He had never done martial arts, or any of that shit, but he could take a punch, and he knew how to put his weight into one, too, which meant something when you were pushing eighteen stone. Added to that, despite many trying, no man had ever got out of one of his infamous headlocks. But what set him apart from so many of the other meatheads who plied his trade was that Lenny understood violence or, to be more exact, the threat of violence. He had learnt early on in the game that it wasn’t what you did that made you effective at the job, it was what you didn’t do. It was what was implied in the threats that he issued to rogue punters that made him so effective.
He had learnt if you hit someone, it usually only made a bad situation worse. Let’s say, you had a bunch of skinny eighteen-year-olds looking for trouble; you hit one of them, and it all kicked off. One-on-one, they weren’t worth a second look, but you get seven or eight of them working together, and like a pack of hyenas, they could take anyone down, even Lenny the lion. The other thing was, when most people took a punch, they generally crumbled and did whatever they were told to do, but there were others who it awakened something primal in. Some people got hit, tasted their own blood and realised that, actually, it wasn’t as bad as they thought it would be, in fact, they kind of liked the feeling. Those were the people you didn’t want to be taking on. No, the trick was to do nothing and get them to do the job for you.
When people got into such situations, that’s when the adrenaline kicked in, stimulating the fight or flight urge. They did either of those things and that was fine, that was what millions of years of evolution had programmed them to do, but if you could get them to do neither, which was what Lenny was so good at, then the adrenaline dump the body experienced would leave the potential troublemaker in a bad, bad way. It left them feeling like their stomachs were about to fall out of them, and turn even the meanest opponents into quivering wrecks. Basically, he’d have them frozen with fear.
Lenny’s trick was to stay calm, say as little as possible and get the aggressors in a state where they were suddenly second guessing just how tough they actually were. By the time he was through, they were usually fit for nothing. In his time, he’d convinced black-belts, boxers and cage fighters into believing that should they mess with him, he would paint them over the nightclub walls.
It hadn’t always been that way. When he’d first started on the doors, he had been set up by the other bouncers as part of his initiation. Brighton Rugby Team were in the club where he was working, and after getting beaten earlier that day by their rivals Hove, they had gone out and got well and truly bladdered. The men were pissed, and pissed off at losing, and if anyone was unfortunate to get in their way, they were quick to feel the team’s wrath. When they started throwing punches at a couple of poor guys who had stood too close at the bar, the other bouncers thought it would be funny to test Lenny’s mettle and send him in alone. He’d only been working there for a few weeks and not wanting to disappoint, he had taken on the challenge, charging into the dance floor and launching himself at as many of them as possible.
The fight that developed from his moment of madness was legendary. Doormen still talked about it nearly twenty years later. It had ended with Lenny sitting in casualty surrounded by half-a-dozen rugby players he had sent there with him. They spent the next couple of hours trying to persuade him to play for their team, but he was having none of it; there were far too many rules for his liking, and he would take football over egg-chasing any day of the week. He was still friends with a couple of them.
Returning from the disposal of the troublemaker, he noticed a guy on his own, standing in front of the vending machine that was filled with multi-coloured lollipops. It was a strange thing to have in a nightclub, but the punters seemed to like it. The man had his back to him, but from the way he was slumped over the machine, Lenny could see that he was pissed up. The drunken guy put his hand into his pocket, and after fumbling around for a long time, came out with some coins that he fed into the machine. After trying to turn the handle, he smacked it with the palm of his hand as he yelled profanities at the inanimate object. Lenny rolled his eyes as he made his way towards the disturbance. It was only ten o’clock, and he’d already thrown out two people. It looked like town was full of arseholes, and he was in for a busy night.
He tapped the man on the shoulder with just enough pressure to show that he wasn’t kidding. ‘Come on, fella,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time to go.’
The man spun around with a speed that belied his drunken state and looked up at Lenny’s eyes that had suddenly grown wide. ‘You should have said yes,’ he said, just loud enough for Len to hear.
As Lenny’s arm fell away from his shoulder, the man pushed past him and headed rapidly towards the exit.
Lenny turned and watched him go. ‘That was weird,’ he said quietly to himself, then looked down to see a rapidly growing red stain on the front of his shirt. ‘Really fucking weird.’
As he fell to his knees, he noticed a fresh blob of bubble-gum stuck to the floor and wondered why anyone would think it was a good idea to put carpets in a nightclub.
Truth or Dare
Bodhi’s mobile phone going off woke him up the next morning. He reached across Jo’s naked body and grabbed it off the dresser.
Jo looked at the clock, closing her eyes in disbelief when she saw what it had to say for itself. Bodhi was used to getting up at this time, his body-clock was dictated by tides and wind speed, and if they were in his favour, he’d be up, regardless of the hour. Jo, on the other hand, loved her bed more than most of the men she’d had relationships with.
‘What prick is calling you at half-six in the morning? Tell them to fuck off.’
Bodhi looked at the phone then put his finger to his lips. ‘Shh, it’s Jimmy.’
The warning did its trick; Jo instantly stopped moaning.
‘All right, Jimbo, what can I do for you?’
There was a pause. ‘Shit, is he okay?’
Another pause, then he sighed. ‘That’s good, yeah. I’ll head up there for visiting time.’
He nodded, paused, then nodded again. ‘Okay, I’ll see you tonight. I think we need to talk.’
He put the phone back on the dresser and turned to Jo. ‘Lenny’s been stabbed.’
Jo sat up in the bed. ‘When? Where? Is he all right?’
‘At the club last night. Someone stabbed him in the stomach. Jimmy said he’s all right and that they missed all the important bits. That’s what happens when you’re a big bastard.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Jo said. ‘I keep telling him he needs to stop working in that fucking place. Too many dicks with something to prove.’
‘Jimmy thinks it was Mac’s boys who did it. It makes sense, considering what they did to you.’
Jo shook her head. ‘Fuckers.’
Bodhi smiled the way that someone did before they said something the other person wouldn’t like.
‘You know, we’re going to have to tell them what happened to you, and when we do, it’s going to come out about the two of us.’
Jo shrugged. ‘Tell them, if you like. They won’t believe you.’
And she was probably right too. If there were two people who the Watch would never have put together, then it was most definitely Jo and Bodhi. The two of them were polar opposites, at different ends of the scale. While Bodhi was so laid back, he was almost horizontal, Jo, who despite chilling out massively since she had joined the Watch, had a pole so far up her ass that the only position she could adopt was vertical. But then again, what was it that people liked to say? Opposites attract.
When they’d first met, there was an obvious chemistry there. Jo was attracted to the fit, healthy, suntanned guys, and Bodhi had always had an eye for slim girls who liked to stay in shape. The problem was that when they got to know each other, that initial attraction quickly wore off. Jo hated his “whatever” attitude to life; she didn’t think he was capable of taking anything seriously. The way he was happy to go with the flow, without considering the pros and cons of his actions, drove her nuts. To her, Bodhi was an empty vessel, the only thing that seemed to excite him in any way was his stupid obsession with the sea. It was like nothing else was of any relevance to him, and it pissed her off royally. She also hated the fact he was the messiest person she had ever met. Watching him set the table at work almost made her want to throw up.
Bodhi’s feelings were pretty much mutual. He was a disciple of the mañana attitude towards life. If you were too rigid, the water could snap you in half. The only thing to do that made any sense was to bend and go with the flow. Jo, on the other hand, was constantly trying to adapt and change things to her liking, and if she didn’t have anything to worry about, she would worry about that.
