Hand in the Fire

There was a bit of blood on my shirt and they kept asking me what happened. I played it down and told them I had simply miscalculated the situation in the bar. I had no idea that Sharon had a six-month-old baby or that her father was her chaperon for the night, not to mention the other two bodyguards.

‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like that,’ Kevin said.

‘The lads at work brought me there,’ I said.

‘Trust me,’ he said.

They were no friends, he assured me. A true friend was somebody who would put his hand in the fire for you. He explained what was more likely to happen and what it meant when somebody got burst. Briefly, it meant losing teeth. It meant footprints on your face.

He handed me the money for the materials and bought a round of drinks. He got quite drunk and told great stories which made Helen laugh out loud. Me as well. I liked him. I liked them both together, because they gave me this great feeling of being at home.

5 (#ulink_99be1291-a3b7-5108-bd51-c3f69df8b1c8)

There we were, later that same night, Kevin and Helen and myself. The three of us walking together. Him in the middle with one arm around her and the other around me. Our feet shooting forward in unison. A strange animal with six feet and three laughing faces, two parts male and one part female. Once we reached the car and broke up, each of us stumbled away in a different direction. We lost the balance we had as a unit and had to regain our stability as individuals. He leaned into her, pushing her back against the side of the car to kiss her, but she shrugged him off, saying she was going to concentrate on getting home first. He fell away with his hands against the bonnet in a worshipping gesture. She laughed as she searched for the keys in her bag. She got into the car and turned on the engine while he sank down on to his knees, speaking to one of the headlights. His face lit up white. His eyes shut. Grinning. She shouted at him to get in, and then he cast an enormous shadow into the street as he stood up again.

‘Look, I can get a taxi,’ I said.

There were plenty of empty taxis heading back into the city centre.

‘Hang on, I’m bursting,’ he said.

His back was turned, hunched over as though he was counting out some money. Beyond him, the shutters of some shops, sprayed with graffiti. Then he spun around laughing and began to piss against the side of her car.

‘You bastard,’ she shouted.

I stood back on the pavement trying to pretend I was not part of this. I was embarrassed for her because he started pissing right across the bonnet. She was calling him a fucking animal, but I was not sure if she was really that angry and whether it might all be nothing more than a bit of fun in front of me. She must have known that he would pay to wash the car. He would even try and convince her later that it was an expression of affection. It was his trademark way of doing things in great waves of raging love and generosity. And maybe this was what she liked so much about him, his explosiveness, his talent for surprise. One day they would settle down and get married. Then all this madness would have to come to an end.

He began pissing right across the windscreen at her. She cursed again, but that only seemed to encourage him. She put on the windscreen wipers and sprayed two jets of soapy water in a counterattack, spreading the mixture of soap and piss across the glass.

Then I wondered if she was crying because she just backed down and remained silent, looking away into the street because this was not a very good sign for the future.

Was he consecrating her car or desecrating it? Quite possible that he would not be doing this without me present to witness this balancing act between them. They seemed to be appealing to me like a referee.

But who was I to judge?

Hard for me to know where the boundary lay between a joke and an insult. It was only a bit of a laugh, I kept telling myself. They have different rules here that I had not figured out yet. Or was it something else? Was he showcasing his power over her? Over me? Including me in this insane, intimate public act, but also letting me know that I had no right to take part?

A car sped past with all the windows open and three female occupants in the back seat singing along to the radio. They left a fraction of a familiar hit song on each part of the pavement, in doorways, in alleys, like cats hiding under parked cars.

And then the electrician turned up out of nowhere and pushed me against the shutters of the shops.

‘Where is she?’ he shouted.

It’s possible that he said other things. ‘You Polish bastard.’ You tend to add things in reconstruction, when it’s all so difficult to believe. The electrician seemed to think that I was alone in the street, because he began to swing punches at my head and claimed that I had abducted his daughter.

It didn’t take long for Kevin to react. He came rushing over and pulled the electrician away by the collar.

‘Get your hands off my friend.’

There was a struggle on the pavement. Not even a fight but more of a dance. Kevin kicked the electrician right in the groin and forced him to bend over, following it up with a strong punch in the face.

‘Kevin,’ I heard Helen screaming.

Maybe she thought she knew him better than that. She was tied to previous assumptions of his character, unable to understand where this violence had come from. To her it must have looked like something happening far away, beyond her control. Kevin swung the electrician around and sent him falling back against the shutters. The sound resembled the clap of a shotgun, followed by the scattering of pigeons.

I got the impression that the electrician was being lifted up off the ground. His feet were left hanging in the air. The first part of his body to land was the hip and I could hear it crack on the concrete, like a rare piece of porcelain shattering inside a velvet bag.

His head was the final part to descend, perhaps in self-preservation. There may have been another boot added at this moment, though I would still like to believe it’s not true. It was quite possible that the addition of this final kick to the head fractionally delayed it from reaching the ground. Perhaps it provided a vital alteration in the angle of fall, bringing it down to the pavement sideways, with the corner of his forehead as the last point of contact. A phase tester came clattering along the pavement.

There were several more urgent kicks to the head, but then it was over. The electrician didn’t stir after that. The whole thing lasted only a few seconds, as far as I recall. Kevin pushed me towards the car and roared at me to get in. Then he got in himself and slammed the door as if that was still part of the momentum.

‘Drive,’ he shouted.

But instead, Helen got out. She ran over to the man lying on the ground, quite peacefully. Blood had come creeping out of his nostrils. His right hand stretched out on the pavement in a begging gesture.

‘Come on,’ Kevin shouted through his teeth, getting out of the car again.

She kneeled down with some obligation to care for the man on the ground. But Kevin pulled her away, forcing her back into the car, this time into the passenger seat, while he ran around and took the wheel.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t drive.’

As if being over the limit had become the main problem now.

‘We can’t just leave him there.’

The car accelerated away. I looked behind me, not sure if he was dead or alive any more. Then I heard her shouting at him and telling him to stop.

‘You’re a fucking lawyer, for God sake!’

Kevin continued driving at great speed. After a while he stopped and parked the car in a place where we were looking out at the sea. The lighthouse in the distance, blinking lazily. Some stationary ships out there, waiting to go into port on Monday morning. The usual orange necklace of city lights and a thin drizzle making it look like the ships were drifting away. We sat there breathing, listening, not doing anything but trying to sober up and figure out what to do.

‘What’s come over you?’ she said. ‘You just beat the shit out of that man for nothing.’

‘I only tipped him and he fell over.’

‘And now you’re doing a runner.’

‘Racist bastard,’ he said. ‘He brought it on himself.’

‘We have to go back,’ she said.

‘No way.’

‘You’ve got to call the guards.’

‘It was a split-second thing,’ he said. ‘I had to protect Vid here.’

There’s a pause, but it didn’t seem right to express gratitude.