When I could take it no longer, I said I wanted to go home. It was a pleasant evening, still light in the sky. Elise was reluctant to leave but prepared to if that was what I wanted, but I suggested that she stay and enjoy a real drink. We had not been there long, and they were more her friends than mine. I was being a drag. I would appreciate a quiet walk home, to clear my head. I expected her to suspect me, because everything I said felt like a lie, even though it was the truth. But she was ready to trust me. And she was right to. I wasn’t going to drink, I just wanted silence and solitude.

I had to traverse the Victoria vortex. Many of the streets there are blind, with no homes or shops, only empty offices or high walls blocking off railway lines. Misjudging my bearings, I made a wrong turn, and found myself having to take a longer route. I was not lost; I gave it little thought.

They might have seen me leave the pub, or they had simply guessed that was my origin, spying a leisure-wearing, unladen young man making his directionless way. My head was down, and I was walking without spirit. Perhaps I looked miserable and vulnerable. Perhaps I looked drunk.

There were three of them. I had been dimly aware of them behind me, laughing and larking, but I had not paid much heed, too tied up in the ligatures of miserable thought, the choice between abstaining and suffering or relapsing and suffering. Then, on a walled-in bridge crossing the railways, they rushed past me, as if in a hurry to be elsewhere, to be off that eyeless street. But they did not rush on, and fell into step around and ahead of me, choking off my pace. One of them asked me the time, which was odd, because even as he asked me he was holding his phone, but perhaps he had no battery, perhaps none of them did. For some acute fears, we are slow to believe they are coming true, because we do not want to believe. I took out my phone and told them the time, but that wasn’t what they wanted of course, as I was late to realise. There was that moment of dislocation, of confusion, as the interaction changed shape, the threshold was crossed and I entered the other city. I was being mugged a second time.

This time, however, it was different. The whole business is supposed to be a fairly straightforward emotional transaction: threat, fear, valuables changing hands. We fear violence against us, but we also fear being held in a prolonged state of fear, being terrorised, as Pierce was. That usually makes mugging a brisk business, which suits everyone – it’s a reliable formula, until it breaks down.