As I walked through the gathering dusk, with each beat of my heels on the pavement the neighbourhood came more alive around me. Here was where I had been terrified by a dog that had bared its teeth until driven away by a delivery boy. And the strange old woman here had owned a pet monkey, letting it out in a big cage on the porch where it flung itself about and screamed curses at passers-by. And next to her, the man with the parrots, two of them that competed with the monkey in screams, so that my mother thanked heaven that we did not live any nearer. And behind those lighted curtains, a child had died of the polio; there, a woman had been rushed to hospital when she had fallen down the stairs (and the whispers that followed, saying she was pushed—my first experience with criminality); at the now-boisterous house next door had lived a boy with pale green eyes who talked to himself and . . .

And then without warning the slow unfurling flower of my past was hacked away, with a sudden fast scuttle of feet behind me and an urgent shout that I should Get down, get down!

I whirled, prepared for battle, but he was too close, and ploughed straight into my diaphragm with a sharp banging noise, driving all breath from my lungs and sending me flying backward. I struggled to do battle, in spite of a desperate lack of oxygen and the dizziness throbbing out from the back of my skull, but before I could so much as get my hands raised, my attacker was up and away. Completely confused, I fought to sit upright against the dizziness of the impact and the panic of no breath. After far too long, my compressed lungs finally remembered their function and, with a great whooping noise, sucked in several gallons of glorious cold night air.

Seated, my hands holding a head that threatened to fly off, I heard footsteps approach again. They seemed too slow to be threatening, so I simply sat and took pleasure in the act of breathing. A hand came into my vision, holding a pair of glasses; my glasses. I took them, straightened them on my nose, and squinted up.

Not very far up. The man was short. And Chinese.

“You're the bookseller.” My head hurt, raised like that, so I allowed it to fall back into my supporting hands.

“I am. Are you all right?”

“I will be. What the hell did you do that for?”

“A man across the street was aiming a pistol at you. I feared that if I merely yelled, you would turn to see and he would hit you.”