My brother saved me once. Not from death exactly, but from a violent situation. I was in my early teens and had become fearful of almost everything. I was walking home from a friend’s house in the area. The streets were busy and dark; it wasn’t that late so it must have been in winter. I was walking down the Essex Road, and as I passed The Green Man pub, I noticed that I was being followed by three other lads. They were a little older than me, but not much. Pretty soon they caught up with me, after I crossed New North Road, when I was passing the row of shops set back from the Essex Road. Whilst trying to quicken my pace they stopped me. One of them pulled out a lock knife and held it to my stomach while the others rifled through my pockets and bag. I had nothing of any monetary value, or interest for that matter, on my person, so they began to indiscriminately kick me, laughing and shouting at me to keep walking. They continued to kick me, mostly in the shins and calves, trying to trip me up. I hopped and skipped, jumping out of the way. Then something hard and extremely painful hit me across both shins, which caused me to fall to the floor in immediate agony. I had been hit with an old wooden rounders bat. I was screaming in agony. I am, to this day, convinced that they were about to beat me into a pulp if it wasn’t for the near miraculous appearance and intervention of my brother. He had been passing by on a Number 38 bus and had seen the attack. He had jumped off the back of the bus and dashed over the road to me and my three assailants, where he pulled me up from the ground and, without having to use any force or violence, made the attackers disperse, simply by naming the school they attended. On hearing this they walked away, swearing, grumbling, shouting at us both, leaving my brother to carry me home.
Years later, when my brother was drunk at a family Christmas party at an uncle’s house, he — in the first and only time he had ever spoken about the attack — told me that it was a total fluke: he had guessed the school and had blurted out its name to them. Figuring that they were from the local area, and if he guessed their school correctly it might deter them. On the other hand, said my brother, in between gulps of the warm Guinness he was drinking, if he hadn’t of guessed the correct name of their school, he’d probably have been attacked along with me, too. When he said this he smiled at me in a way that made me feel that I was his brother.
seventeen
She waded over to me in the rain, the swan hanging limply from her arms. Her clothes were sopping wet through and I could see the outline of her skeletal frame. Her hair was stuck to her face, water dripping down her cheeks. I inched closer to the edge. Again I turned to look up at the bridge, to see if they were there, to see if the Pack Crew were there, but they had gone. But I knew all too well who had committed this abomination. I knew instinctively that it was them. I knew it was the redheaded one who pulled the fatal trigger. I knew it was him. I turned back to her and held out my hand, but she ignored my gesture, slipping a little, but still moving towards me. Then she began to struggle, losing her footing a number of times and nearly collapsing into the murky water. I moved over again and offered her my hand one more time. Now the bridge was directly above us once more and we were finally shielded from the rain. She looked at my outstretched arm. I followed the trajectory of my outstretched arm towards her and the dead swan. Beyond her and the dead swan, to my right, was the lower floor of the whitewashed office block and the company esplanade. At first I thought I saw somebody there, staring at us both, but it was a large seagull resting on a hand rail, looking into the canal for discarded food. It opened its wings at full span, stretching them as one would an arm or a leg, one after the other, before rising up into the air, up above the canal and over us and the rusting iron bridge, cutting through the sheets of rain as if they were nonexistent. When it had disappeared from my line of vision I returned to my outstretched arm, holding it out for her. She waded closer and then struggled to free her right arm from holding on to the dead swan, letting it rest on her stomach and right thigh, her left arm still wrapped tightly around it, whilst she struggled to maintain her balance on the slippery bed of the canal. Slowly, she began to reach for my outstretched hand. I inched even closer to the edge, as close as I possibly could before gravity could grip hold and pull me off balance, aware of how unsafe under foot the banks of the towpath had become since the rain had started to pour.
Our fingers touched, ever so slightly, but she must have lost her footing again and slipped, as her hand fell away from mine. She soon regained her balance, determined to lift the swan out of the canal to what she thought was safety, all the while managing to keep the swan out of the water. She seemed unaware that it was dead. Eventually, she made one last lunge towards me: I gripped onto her cold hand, near squeezing out what little warmth was left in it, and guided her up towards me and the towpath beyond the bank’s edge.
The more I think about what happened next the more absurd it all seems. It happened quickly, almost faster than time should allow for such things. In fact, it happened in almost no time at all. Yet each time I think about it, each time I run the events through my mind, knowing that in reality it happened so quickly, I purposely slow things down in order for her actions to reveal themselves to me. Bit by bit, slower and slower, frame by frame, until, finally, she is frozen there, in my mind, in time, unmoving, suspended. And then, just then, she is gone.
It is something I would never have predicted, yet she always knew that it would happen. She always knew, she had warned me about it, but I had never listened to her. I felt as if I had never truly listened to her. And if I truly think about it, really truly think about it, these events are a mere blip, a spot on a far horizon. Most people look back and think, where did all my time go? Why has my life passed me by so quickly? But not I. When I think back it feels like I had all the time in the world — whatever that means — and things have passed me by rather slowly. I have had a long life, and surely that’s the point: for things to pass us by slowly? For time to drag? So that we feel we have lived longer? It baffles me why people are so obsessed with trying to fill this time with holidays, cars, designer clothes, technology, energetic sports, et cetera. Why would they want time to pass by quickly? Why would anyone want that? Those who bemoan the speedy passing of time at the end of their life are surely those same people who tried to fill it up with things to quicken its passing anyway, aren’t they? Sometimes I don’t know why I think about this anymore, but there is still one more thing that rankles deep within me: if I have had all of this time, if my life has passed me by slowly, with each day lingering pointlessly into the next, if it has really passed me by so slowly, as slowly as it now feels, then how come I never saw this coming? This is the thought that rankles deep within me now: how come I didn’t see all this coming?
I don’t understand, but I suppose there are certain things in my life, things that have happened to me, that I will never understand. Not that my life has been in any way exciting or eventful, or even interesting for that matter. Yet still, even these normal instances, these humdrum, everyday happenings that have galvanised over the years into something I can call my life, even these I cannot fathom. It’s like I’ve never been born.