"You heard."
"Say it again. Say it to my face."
The crowd, which had been dispersing, rapidly un-dispersed. They sensed what was brewing.
Thor very slowly and very deliberately repeated the word.
"Coward."
Oh dear.
Ten
This was what always used to get me into trouble, back during the bad days, post-discharge, post-divorce. Someone only had to say the wrong thing, look at me in the wrong way… Hell, they didn't even have to do that. All it needed was me thinking they were saying the wrong thing or looking the wrong way, and I'd bristle.
Alcohol played a part, but by no means every time. I didn't have to be drunk to lose my rag, although, let's face it, drunkenness made a flare-up a lot likelier. Mostly, though, I was just looking for any excuse to start a scrap, and finding it. I was like a balloon in a roomful of porcupines. Only had to float a few inches in any direction and pop!
Coward was the one word that could be absolutely guaranteed to set me off. It, of all insults, really rankled. I had a short fuse as it was, but coward nipped it to the quick. No idea why, unless it was simply that I'd been a soldier, I'd fought for queen and country, I'd faced enemy fire, heard bullets whizzing past my ears, seen mortar rounds turn men to mince, and I'd never once flinched — so what the fuck would you know?
I'd believed it was all behind me now, that period of easy aggravation and overenthusiastic readiness to ruck. I'd believed I had that hair-trigger temper of mine under control.
Apparently not.
I flicked a glance at Odin. He gave the slightest of shrugs: Please yourself. I'm not going to stop you. On your own head be it.
"You shouldn't have said that, you big fat twat," I said to Thor. "Now I'm going to have to kick your arse."
"Come on then, dog's dinner," he replied. "Give it a try."
He beckoned to me.
I limped over to him. The crowd clustered around us.
It was insane. I was in no shape for this. I'd only just risen from my sickbed. An anorexic dwarf could have mopped the floor with me.
But that didn't matter. Consequences were irrelevant. Just as in the old days, the bad days, this was about me hurting someone else in order to make myself feel better. And if the other person managed to hurt me back, that was almost a plus.
I made a show of leaning heavily on the walking stick, looking like I was in dire need of it. The hope was that Thor would underestimate me, and the crowd would sympathise. A couple of them did give me a grin and a thumbs-up, but cash was already changing hands again and I could make a pretty good guess which way the odds were going.
"I shall be gentle," Thor said.
"Don't patronise me, you great nonce," I said. "You're the one who's started this. If you're not going to follow through in any meaningful way, why bother?"
"Very well. Then this won't take long."
"Ooh, you've really got me cacking in my Calvin Kleins," I said, and then I hit him.
Or rather, before I'd even completed the sentence, while he was under the impression we were still in the trash-talking phase of the fight, I hit him. Hoicked the walking stick up between his legs, and the thwack! it made brought a collective sharp intake of breath from the men all around.
Thor's eyes bulged, his cheeks too, and as his hands flew to his tender parts I followed up with a heel stamp to the inside of his ankle bone, then clouted him round the head with the stick.
He reeled, and from the crowd's reaction — oohs of surprise — I knew that it was the first time anything like this had happened. Someone had actually staggered Thor.
I myself was a mite disappointed. I'd been counting on him falling, but he stayed upright. Worse, once he'd got over the initial shock and the pain had started to fade, he looked across at me with eyes ablaze, and I realised all I'd managed to do was piss him off.
"This is supposed," he said, "to be hand-to-hand."
I shrugged. "Nobody told me. Not my fault if you didn't lay down the rules at the beginning."
"Were I to draw Mjolnir now, that would be the end of you." He patted his hammer. "But I, at least, will play fair. Besides, that stick is no real weapon at all."
"Oh yeah? It's done pretty well so far. You're just jealous because mine's longer than yours."
The audience liked that one, although Thor didn't. He growled and lumbered at me.
He wasn't a fast mover, but it was something to see so huge a man come barrelling towards you like a fucking freight train, hands outstretched, teeth bared, bent on pulverisation. I did have a nanosecond of Now you've gone and done it, Gid, but then adrenaline and combat training kicked in. I sidestepped, and at the same time flipped the walking stick over so that I was holding the end with the rubber ferrule. The crook then became a handy tripping device. I snared Thor's shin and down he went, sprawling full length and sliding along in the snow like a bobsledder without a luge. His momentum was such that people in the crowd had to skip smartly aside to avoid being bowling pins.
I shot the briefest of glances at Odin, to see what Thor's dad was making of my treatment of his son. The old man's expression gave nothing away — except was that a twinkle of amusement in his eye?
I pressed on with my attack. Thor was pushing himself up off the ground, but while he remained on all fours I still had the advantage. I darted in from behind, aiming the stick at his side, hoping to give him a healthy smack in the kidneys.
Somehow, with an unexpected turn of speed, he got a hand up and caught the stick. He yanked it from my grasp distressingly easily.
I knew then that I was buggered. The stick had been my only real edge. Without it, with a bum ankle and a bad wrist, I stood the proverbial cat's chance in Hell.
To make that absolutely clear to me, Thor got to his feet and casually, as though it were made of balsa wood, snapped the stick in his hands. He chucked the broken halves aside and ran at me again.
There were two ways I could play this. Stand my ground and meet him head on, or evade and try to find a new angle of attack, and maybe a new weapon. The risky option or the sensible one.
I went for the risky. It meant a greater chance of being clobbered, but also more opportunity for locating a vulnerable spot, some chink in Thor's armour.
I'd braced myself, but Christ, it was like getting slammed into by a rhino. I managed to grab his wrists, but the force of his charge, with all that bulk behind it, was tremendous, and I found myself being driven backwards. My feet scrabbled for traction on the snow but couldn't gain any. He shoved me along, I slithered helplessly, and his face was right in my face, his reddened features filling my vision like an irate moon, his breath gusting hot on my skin.
We must have travelled twenty yards like this, me a kind of human snow plough, him the engine pushing. I kept my body rigid so as not to crumple and fall, and that was murder on my traumatised ribs, not to mention my poor old shoulder, ankle and wrist.
What eventually stopped us was one of the trestle tables. We crashed into it, and it did what trestle tables did best; namely, collapse. We fell, Thor on top, amid a scatter of gun parts. Springs, screws, feed port plugs, barrels, trigger shoes, sight assemblies, all flew everywhere.
As we hit the ground I felt one of the ribs that had been trying so hard to mend break again. I might have cried out — I wasn't really paying attention to the sounds coming out of my mouth just then. Thor, straddling me, pinned me down. He lodged one forearm under my chin, putting pressure on my throat. With his free hand he started cuffing my head.
It wasn't pleasant. He was holding back, a little. The blows were loose-handed. But they rocked me nonetheless, reverberating like seismic waves through my skull. With each thump I could feel myself becoming more remote from the world, gradually tuning out, getting stupefied. Being choked didn't help matters.