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.
Nobody moved. Each one of us trying to roll back what happened. But you might as well try and turn history into reverse. Soldiers taking crimes out from underneath their pillows and carrying them off to secret locations. Bullets popping out of people’s heads. Dead people jumping back to life and walking away backwards.
We were parked right on the verge of the quay. Any further forward and we would have ended up in the water. They would be lifting us out with a crane in the morning, out from among the floating condoms and beer cans.
‘You’ve got to be able to walk away,’ he said. ‘Big mistake to retrace your steps.’
‘Did your mother tell you that?’
She stared at him, extracting a forecast from his words, as though he had become a stranger to her.
We sat there, looking out at the black water of the port, the dark eyes of deep water staring back at us. We heard the sound of small waves going up and down the granite steps. We waited for the future to come, wondering if he was going to drive over the edge. We might as well have gone underwater as it was, driving away along the floor of the sea, through fields of brown seaweed, with mullet and luminous prawns swimming across the windscreen before us. Speeding through a silent landscape of rocks and barnacles and anchors and suspended lobster pots. I had the feeling that we were only waiting for the electrician to come and join us, limping or crawling up to the car, getting in beside me and putting his seat belt on. Dark worms of blood going in and out of his nostrils. Breathing clogging up in his chest. We would never get rid of him now, I thought. I imagined him speaking calmly, with moisture in his voice, getting ready for this long underwater journey that we were about to embark on together. ‘I was only having the craic,’ he would say, because he really wanted to be friends and keep the conversation going.
The engine started up again. I can remember thinking that he was going in the wrong direction, reversing instead of going forward. He drove in a rage once more, this time parking outside her place, rushing us away inside, into her basement apartment.
‘Stay there and don’t move,’ he said.
Then he disappeared again. We heard him walking away. Where to, we had no idea. We stood looking at each other. After a moment, her hospitality returned and she asked me to sit down.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
I
