‘Hello Susi, got the night off?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Come and join us for a drink.’
‘No thanks. Not just now. I’m with my sister.’
‘Better still. Bring Chai over too.’
‘Maybe later.’ And with that she disappeared into the toilets.
We continued drinking, but the sight of Susi had made me restless. Not one to be put off easily, I decided to see if I could persuade Susi and Chai to be more sociable. I wandered over to where they were sitting in a semi-private booth. The two sisters were sitting with a group of Portuguese men. They were obviously engrossed in something more than social pleasantries, so I decided to leave them alone for a little while longer. Ten minutes later, I thought I would try again. I went right up to where they were sitting and gestured. Susi glanced up and nervously gestured for me to go away. The nervous look did not register with me and I simply thought she was playing hard to get. One more drink and then I would go right up to their table. I turned and headed back for the empty stool at the bar next to Clint.
As I had my back to the booth area, I didn’t see the three characters behind me whisper something urgent, get up, move their chairs swiftly to one side and head for the steps by the jukebox. The first I knew of anything being wrong was when the unmistakable sound of breaking glass cut through the bar and jolted the place into high tension. Instinctively I spun round, and saw the lead character of the three, tense-armed, gripping a broken bottle held menacingly low and pointing directly towards me.
Clint swivelled round, saw the bottle, leapt off his stool, jutted out the index finger of his right hand and shouted, ‘Police! Put the bottle down!’
The three paid no attention whatsoever and continued to advance. At this point Clint went for the guy with the bottle. He evaded the first threatening swing of the vicious, jagged weapon, grasped the man’s wrist in a vice-lock, forced the bottle to the floor and threw him against the jukebox. As he crashed spreadeagled into the machine and slumped to the floor, a wild screech and scratch followed by a rumbling sound emanated from the loudspeaker and then, incongruously amid the mayhem, the soft romantic ballad began to play again a few bars further on. Out of the corner of my eye I could just see Clint putting the boot in to finish off the job, when the man’s companions both grabbed bottles from the nearest empty table, broke off the bases with a practised flick of the wrist and advanced to within striking distance of Buffalo and me.
As they had paid no heed to Clint’s warnings, I decide to throw the system out of the window and go solo. I reached into my back pocket for the insurance policy I always carried with me in case of trouble – a First World War trench-fighting knuckleduster issued to British troops for hand-to-hand combat. A lovely piece, worn smooth by age, I’d obtained it from my brother-in-law who runs a military museum. Years before, while serving with the Royal Engineers in Germany, a mate of mine had been jumped by a gang of Italian Gastarbeiter thugs. They put their knives into him and he never walked again. I was determined that no one was going to turn me into a vegetable at any cost, and I carried the knuckleduster with me everywhere I went. Now it was about to come into its own.
I felt for the reassuring hard touch of the metal and drew the weapon out into the open. I jammed it into my hand, pointed it directly at my would-be assailants, flexed my fingers conspicuously and snorted in a cold, rock-steady voice, ‘Right! Let’s have you, lads.’
As they came forward I struck the nearer one full in the face. He went down. I swung my arm back and caught the other on the side of the temple. He dropped his broken bottle and went down. A fourth person, later identified as Didier Peres, a well-known drug-pusher, then came from the booths area and lunged at me with a crude form of rugby tackle. He was very quick. Before I could strike him with the knuckleduster, he grabbed me around the throat and pushed me into the bar, sending two or three stools clattering to the floor. At the same time his considerable strength enabled him to turn me around so that I was facing towards and was bent over the bar. He then thrust his hand up to my throat and held me in a windpipe pinch. The pain was excruciating, as if I were being gripped by a rabid Dobermann. The precise positioning of the thumb and index finger had all the hallmarks of a professional street fighter. It was the throat equivalent of getting your hand jammed in a bank’s time-locked safe door when all the staff have gone home for the weekend.
My position was now serious. By shaking forcefully from side to side, I managed to free my knuckleduster arm and swing it around. Peres was bent low into my shoulder, so the duster cracked him on the top of the head. To my dismay, the blow had no effect except to make him tighten his grip on my throat. By now my eyes were beginning to blur; the bottles behind the bar were swimming. There was a heavy thumping in my head and a high-pitched whistling in my ears. I was desperate. I had to do something quick. By now I was having trouble breathing. I could feel my temples beating to bursting point. I was virtually paralysed. I frantically scoured my brain for a solution, going on fast-forward through all my years of training. A flash of inspiration! I had to try it! It could be my last chance. I worked up my left hand, grabbed hold of Peres’s thumb, snatched it away from my throat and put it straight into my mouth. I bit down as hard as I could until I felt the solid resistance of the bone. Peres, taken by surprise, squealed like a stuck pig, released his stranglehold and ran out of the bar.
I looked around. Clint was still over by the jukebox slugging it out with someone who later turned out to be a Portuguese-American sailor on forty-eight-hour shore leave. Clint swung his arm, the man crashed backwards, smashing the glass cover on the jukebox, and the music was silenced for good. Buffalo was arguing with the barman about using the phone to call for help. The barman refused, saying, suspiciously, that it was out of order. So Buffalo dashed out to phone from the restaurant across the street. At this point I decided to get out of the bar as quickly as I could. I was on a sensitive job and didn’t want complications.
I pushed past another character who tried to stop me. He dropped like a ton of muck as I cracked him with the duster. I was staring freedom in the face when suddenly I was jumped from behind at the door. We rolled around, the momentum carrying us straight through the door and into the street. As we continued to roll around on the pavement, a crowd gathered to watch the spectacle. Suddenly someone ran out of the gathering, kicked me straight in the face as I wrestled with my assailant, then mingled back into the crowd.
Undeterred, I continued the struggle. I heaved the man over and managed to get on top of him. Just when I thought I had the situation under control, he put his hand up, gripped my testicles and twisted them violently beneath the thin material of my lightweight tropical trousers. It blew my mind. The anger exploded in my brain. There was only one answer to this. I grabbed his hair with my left hand and rapped him across the forehead with the knuckleduster, splitting the skin from eye to eye. Like a heavyweight boxer in a title fight who goes on punching beyond the bell, I just did not hear the high-pitched wailing of the police siren. As the character slumped unconscious to the ground and I began to think I might have overdone it, I suddenly felt a heavy hand on my shoulder.
‘Police! You’re under arrest.’
There is something strange and frightening when in the course of a single moment you realize that your life has irrevocably altered. It is the moment when a young wife, joyfully looking forward to her husband’s return so she can reveal the news of her first pregnancy, is told by the grave-faced policeman at the door that she is now a widow; when the champion jockey, who only a moment ago was soaring high over the jumps, wakes up in hospital to be told that his vertebrae are so badly smashed that he will never ride again. The moment is strange because it is so sudden and disorientating, and it is frightening because you are cast headlong into a situation where a completely new order reigns and a new set of rules prevails. Your unsuspecting emotions are cruelly whiplashed into a vicious reversal of direction. No matter how loud you scream inside, ‘This can’t be happening, this can’t be true,’ no one will ever hear you. Events are propelled forward with an absolute and remorseless energy.