by Louise Kean
The three brothers grim descend on to the table next to me, landing themselves on metal chairs that scrape the pavement, squabbling. The red-haired horror shrieks as his older brother snatches away the piece of wood he has been playing with, and begins banging it on his legs and the table. And this is no musical child prodigy; I can’t even make out a rhythm, never mind a tune.
‘Charlie, give it back to Dougal,’ their tall and exhausted mother demands.
I smirk at the name Dougal, although I don’t know why. You hear much worse these days. I can’t think of a soap star called Dougal at least. Strangers sometimes smirk at my name when they hear it for the first time, but I am proud of it. I think that anybody who fails to see something positive in Sunny must have their own issues to deal with.
‘Sit there and be quiet. No, actually, come with me.’
All the children shriek in unison, and the youngest tugs at his mother’s hand to drag her into Starbucks. I pray she will usher them inside, but she accosts a stray waitress who has, in a moment of craziness, decided to come and clean tables. The mother asks for three fruit juices and a Skinny Mocha, and tries to settle the boys at the table again. I stare off into the distance until the oldest brother begins to run round and round my table, and little shrieking Dougal follows his lead. Short stumpy slightly unsure legs make a dash for a tree ten yards away. I glance over my shoulder to see what their mother is doing while they run amok – she is negotiating a straw into the youngest one’s mouth while furtively glancing towards her other two sons. I don’t know what I expect parents to do with their children, I just don’t think they should be allowed to shriek. If I ever have children of my own they will be impeccably behaved in public. They will have character, and be witty and charming, but they will not bang things, and they will not scream. They will only be allowed to do those things at home.
‘Dougal, come back here! Charlie, for God’s sake put it away!’ Their mother’s voice raises at her eldest son, who has decided to urinate up against the tree. Both children momentarily freeze, and Charlie pops his little penis back into his shorts. They start running round my table again – children burn off so many calories without even realising it. The older boy, Charlie, nudges my chair every time he passes, and I hastily put my coffee cup back down on the table rather than risk a stain on my white Lycra vest top with built-in cooling something or other. I check my watch – the gym will be open in twenty minutes. It is an 8 a.m. start on a Sunday, as if God won’t allow exercise before morning has truly broken on his day. Only ten more minutes of the shrieking before I can go.
Even this early, even for a Sunday, the road is peculiarly quiet. It’s getting late in the year for the tourists, despite the heat. Because of it nobody managed a good night’s sleep last night. Maybe now they are tossing and turning and kicking off sheets, trying to rescue another hour’s rest.
Charlie stops running, and stands in front of me, staring.
‘Yes?’ I ask him flatly, unimpressed.
‘Who is going to look after your dog when you die?’ He motions his little head towards an old sleeping Labrador chained to a railing five feet in front of me.
‘It’s not my dog,’ I say, and Charlie shakes his head at me and ‘tut’s.
I ‘tut’ back. Charlie raises his six-year-old eyes at me and starts running towards the tree again.
I guess the dog belongs to either an old man, practically knocking on heaven’s door at the Garden Café a little further down the street, or an elderly lady at one of the other Starbucks tables, resting from the heat. The weathermen have predicted that today will be one of the hottest days of the year, despite it being 27 September, and yet she wears a heavy charcoal-grey overcoat that looks as if it was standard issue in 1940, and a claret woolly hat with a fraying bobble. I look away quickly, gulping back tears. Her vulnerability is almost poetic. If she tried to sell me a poppy I’d be hysterical. Of course, now, as she wipes some lazy dribble from the side of her eighty-year-old collapsing mouth with a handkerchief, I am repulsed. It’s old people with all their facilities intact that I appreciate the most.
The kids are still running and screaming, and I thank merciful God that I have never had enough sex to get pregnant. Obesity was a great contraceptive at least.
A man walks past my table. He is average, forty-ish. I see his back, his jacket, his jogging bottoms, a balding head covered by thinning hair that is too long.
Before us all, an audience paying little attention, he walks calmly towards the tree ten yards in front of our tables, and with one jerky movement scoops up Dougal, and carries on walking south, away from us. I don’t see his face. Admittedly I am appreciative of the drop in noise levels, but I am also confused, and I straighten my back, turning to face his mother, to somehow check that this is OK, that he must be the child’s father, or uncle, or a family friend. Because things like this just don’t happen right in front of you. She isn’t looking up, but instead tries to wipe fruit juice from the edges of her youngest son’s mouth.
I say, ‘Excuse me,’ nervously but loudly, and she glances at me and then automatically in the direction of her elder sons. Her naturally concerned expression falls, as if all the muscles have just been sucked out of her face by a Dyson, and her eyes widen. She pushes herself to her feet as she sees Dougal’s red hair over the shoulder of the man quickly walking away. Her mouth opens and a scream leaps out as if it’s been waiting in her throat for the last ten years.
She darts forward two paces, but she hasn’t let go of her toddler’s arm and he screams. I jump up. She tries to move forwards, hoisting her youngest child in the air by his little arm as he cries out in pain, and Charlie, who has resumed urinating against the tree, turns around in confusion as he hears his mother’s cry.
‘He’s got my child! He’s got my child!’
I can’t quite believe this is happening, but I kick back my chair and start to run.
Ahead of me I can see the Stranger has his hand clamped over Dougal’s mouth, and as they turn the corner at the end of the street he breaks into a jog. They were always called Strangers when I was a child, and they were a constant threat. There were washed-out adverts tinted a dirty orange or a grubby yellow, warning us not to get into their brown Datsuns, or go and look at their puppies, or accept their sweets. Now they have longer medical-sounding names that I’m sure children don’t understand. The idea of a Stranger still scares me, and I am nearly thirty. These new words just can’t put the same fear of God into a child.
My trainers bounce off the pavement and the sudden rush of adrenalin through my muscles is sickening. My calves and thighs expand and contract as I round the corner and see the Stranger holding a struggling Dougal, but he is sprinting now towards the alleyway across the road. I have only been down that alleyway once and it scared the hell out of me: I kept expecting to see a corpse. It is full of gates to gardens and nooks and hiding places.
Feeling sick, I run faster. The man is by the road and he almost runs into a car, dodging it only at the last moment, but he isn’t as fast as I am. I push myself on, not aware of my breathing, not looking at anything but Dougal’s shock of ginger hair, which was so unfortunate five minutes ago, but is now vital. I can run five kilometres in twenty-seven minutes now. This time last year I couldn’t run to the bus stop without throwing up. Thankfully for me, for Dougal, I’ve streamlined since then. Far behind me, back by the Garden Café, I can hear his mother screaming his name, but I just run.
I hear the Stranger breathing now, wheezing and coughing hard, ten feet in front of me, making for the alleyway. My strides are long and elegant, I run on my toes, my arms pumping at my sides, my chest open, and I feel sick as my biceps and quadriceps push me on. There are no rolls of flab bouncing or ripping at my stomach now.
Three feet from the entrance to the alleyway I am almost within touching distance of the Stranger but he stops sharply and spins around to face me: he looks scared and sick as well. I see a bead of sweat streak down the cen
tre of his nose. I slam on my own brakes as he removes the hand that is covering Dougal’s mouth, and swings it, arm outstretched, clenched fist towards my face. Uncorked, Dougal starts to scream, his face as red as his hair, his eyes wide and watery and desperate. We are all scared. I try to lurch out of the way, but the man’s punch strikes the side of my head. I stumble like a speeding car hitting a boulder in the road. I have never been punched before. I am on the pavement and cry out at an awful evil feeling that shoots behind my eyes, and I am momentarily blinded. I blink back tears, but my calves and my thighs spring me up off the floor.
I turn into the alley twenty steps behind the Stranger, who has shifted Dougal and jammed his tiny head into his shoulder to muffle his screams.
Overgrown bushes swipe at my face as I run along the dirt track alley. All of our actions seem loud, louder than usual. Every twig that snaps, my breathing, the Stranger’s breathing, the pounding of our feet hitting the dirt track. He keeps running, but he’s slowing down and tripping, and I’m getting faster, but wincing at the aching knife of pain that has been forced through my temples where his dirty hand smashed at my forehead. I open my mouth to shout at him to stop, but a feeling of dread silences me, a need not to call attention to the fact that I am a woman, chasing a man down a lonely passage.
The alley is three hundred metres long and narrow like a bicycle lane. The bushes are overgrown and make it dark, but the morning sun is so hot and bright that I can see him ahead of me. He hasn’t ducked out of sight into any openings in the shrubs, and he can hear me closing in on him in my trainers and running trousers, as if I got up this morning and chose my best ‘chasing a child snatcher’ outfit. Sweat is pouring off us all and I focus on the damp patches spreading across the back of his dirty beige polyester jacket. He is wearing his best ‘child snatcher’ outfit himself. The air is filled with flies, and smells rotten, and even though it cannot possibly be this man who smells so bad, I can’t help but believe that it is.
I am almost at his side, and I throw a hopeful arm out for Dougal as I launch myself into the Stranger’s back, terrified.
We fall messily.
Dougal is on to all fours in front of us, scraping his little hands and knees on dirt and leaves. The Stranger slams face-first into the wall and I stumble down behind him, onto him, and the dirt. Instantly we are both scrambling to get up. I hear him mutter ‘shit’ as he crawls forward to get to his feet, and I am surprised that he speaks English. He looks English, but still I am shocked.
I can hear my heart and my head pounding, and another man’s voice maybe fifty feet behind us, shouting, but I can’t tell what. The Stranger lurches to his feet, as I am on all fours, and I scream, ‘Dougal, get behind me!’
The terrified mop of red hair and tears and bloody knees, and a bruised face with the Stranger’s fingerprints embedded in his cheeks, runs as fast as his ridiculous small legs will allow, behind me, before the Stranger is fully upright.
I can hear the cries of a man getting closer behind us, shouting, ‘You sick bastard, you sick bastard …’ and the pounding of his feet on the dirt. I look up and notice that the Stranger’s glasses have smashed, and his face, an average forty-five-year-old face, is red and stained with dirt and sweat. He looks down at me, with either confusion or fear or disgust, and then his eyes dart upwards and behind me at the menacing sound of larger feet than mine running towards us all, and I can clearly hear the chasing man’s voice now, shouting, ‘You sick fuck! You sick bastard!’
I raise myself onto my knees as the Stranger lunges forward. His dirty old badminton trainer makes sharp hard contact with my stomach, and seems to sink further in than it physically should. I scream in pain, folding forwards. He calls me a ‘bitch’, but in a tone that lacks conviction.
Dougal screams as I hear a blurred and breathless voice behind me yelling, ‘You sick fuck! I’ll fucking kill you!’
The Stranger turns and runs down the alley, towards the sunlight at the other end. I lie on my side and clutch my stomach, and moan at a pain I have never felt before. I have never been kicked in the stomach before. Dougal is behind me crying and pawing at my back. I push myself up onto knees that nearly buckle, and my stomach yells with pain, and my head thuds noisily with pumping blood and bruising. I turn and accept a screaming, crying red-faced child into my arms. He holds on to me tightly, then pushes me away, then holds on again.
The pounding of large feet slows, but passes us, and the chasing man shouts as he speeds up again, ‘Go back the other way,’ and then coughs so hard I am positive he won’t catch him.
I pull little Dougal’s head away from my chest, and hold it between my hands, and ask him if he is hurt. He nods his head, and continues to cry. I push myself to my feet, and holding Dougal in my arms, ignoring the thrashing pain in my stomach, and the thumping in my head, and the aching in my legs, and the tightening in my chest, I struggle back down the pathway, back the way we came.
Dougal quietens down slightly as we walk the long walk – we were two-thirds of the way down the alley. Where was the man planning to go? Did he even have a plan? Or was it just an impulse, a shocking unexplainable moment of opportunity?
Eventually I say into Dougal’s ear, ‘There’s your mummy,’ as we reach the sunlight. His face whips around to see his hysterical tall mousy mother clutching at her other two children. Dougal starts to kick and scream and struggle with me to be set free, and I lower him to the ground. He runs into his mother’s arms, and falls instantly silent, as she cries loudly for the both of them.
I lean against the wall, wiping stinging beads of sweat out of my eyes, clutching at my stomach, trying to control my breathing. It only takes a couple of seconds for me to start to cry as well.
I hear the wail of police sirens coming close, and see a small gathering of people across the street staring at this strange soap opera by the opening of the alley. A police car screeches up, and I shield my eyes from its electric-blue lights, which remind me of the flashing neon signs outside strip clubs in Soho.
The doors burst open as the wailing siren stops, and a radio full of static says, ‘We’ve got him this end.’
I wipe my eyes, and want my mum to hug me too. I want to tell her that a Stranger with broken glasses and a rotten smell hit me, and he kicked me, and I’m finding it all suddenly very personal. He wanted to hurt me. I cry because I am scared by what I did. I am scared at the thought of chasing a child snatcher, a Stranger, down that alley. I cover my eyes with my hands and feel sick, as a nauseous sliver of pride turns my stomach and a voice in my head whispers what I know before I can silence it. I ran fast.
I throw up a cup of black coffee and half a Skinny Blueberry Muffin on the street. That’s all there is.
Staring down at the pavement, I feel proud.
Cagney has the sick little fuck up against a wall, and the sick little fuck has the audacity to tremble. Cagney can’t punch him, but not because he doesn’t want to. Cagney wants to obliterate him, wants to bring the wall down upon him, wants to see his nose battered and black and pouring with blood, and to hear him moan as the life and the evil seeps out of him. But a policeman has a firm hold of Cagney’s arm at the elbow, and is forcefully prising him away. They should let him smash the sick little bastard apart with the fury of God; they can’t do it themselves, at least not in public, without being accused of police brutality, and sparking a peaceful protest of civil rights banners waved by bored housewives and fools. Cagney, on the other hand, has never been a policeman, so he can punch whomever he wants, if he is willing to take the consequences. And in this instance, the end very surely justifies the means. Still a constable pulls his arm away forcefully.
‘Let go of him. We’ll take it from here – let him go.’
‘You sick fucker, you want to mess with kids? They should let me kill you now!’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it,’ the man whispers as tears stream down his face.
The rage inside Cagney surges up like a twen
ty-foot Atlantic wave, but a second policeman grabs his other arm, and pulls him off, throwing him to one side. They spin the man around and slam the side of his face up against the wall, slapping a pair of handcuffs on him.
‘Whatever you do, it’ll be too good for him! There’s no justice any more.’ Cagney bends over with his hands on his hips, and coughs loudly. Speaking has pushed his body over the edge. His chest feels magnificently precarious; it may collapse at any moment. He feels bile rise in his throat, and throws up a little, at the end of the alley. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, stands up and leans back against the wall, clutching his sides.
He knows better than to run. A man in his condition shouldn’t run. There is no official medical term for his condition. He just knows it by the affectionate term ‘Jack Daniel’s’. He has a minor case of ‘Marlboro Reds’ as well, but he doesn’t think that one is terminal. Neither of his conditions need be life-threatening, as long as he remembers not to run.
One police car pulls off, carrying the man, and Cagney glares after it, trying to catch his breath. A policeman from a second squad car approaches him with his hands on his hips like a sheriff of a small town, about to quick-draw.
‘Are you ready to go, sir?’
Cagney looks up at Constable Cary Grant, and shakes his head, aware that nothing may come out when he tries to speak, that his trachea may have combusted from the heat and the fury in the back of his throat.
‘What?’ It is all Cagney can manage, with any clarity.