Signalled by Old-Young, Railing had appeared at my side – but still a little to my rear, covering any reversal by me. He had on a hooded jacket; not the ‘hoodie’ of the stereotype but a windcheater, something you might wear home from the gym. And, unlike a ‘hoodie’, unlike the boys who had (not) attacked Pierce, like his companion, he was older than I was. Black hair and an offensive little line of goatee. Other characteristics muted or blurred by fear, drink and the natural working of memory.

My hand was in my pocket, with the coins and keys. I half-remembered something about holding keys in a fist, like a spiked knuckle-duster, and going for an assailant’s face, his eyes – not an act I could see myself doing, not even in an extreme situation. Although the nature of an extreme situation is that we don’t know what we’ll do until we get there. Even if I could bring myself to retaliate first, would that just provoke them into worse violence? The other advice my father had given – it was all coming back now, the blazer, the dark, pitted surface of the pub table, the small velvet-seated stool I had sat on while he took to the wooden bench against the wall, the summer light low in the windows and the optics – was that, if I was mugged, I should just give them what they wanted and scram. Don’t be brave, don’t resist, don’t be stupid. But what did they want? Where did it end? What was happening?

The two men closed in. Nothing good ever ‘closes in’: pursuers, predators, storms. Without being touched I was forced back onto the railings, my little hopeless pavement-universe cut back to its minimum extent. Only the boundary of the person remained. I checked their hands. Both men had a hand free and a hand in a jacket pocket. I never saw a weapon, a knife. That’s another saying, and it came back now: if they show you the blade they don’t mean to use the blade. Not my dad’s, that one, that came from an argument among my friends at university. Was it true? What kind of data had gone into that bit of street wisdom? Forget true: was it useful? We live our lives by these ungrounded, half-remembered bits of folklore, and when I needed help, when my mind urgently roamed its prison looking for tools, this nonsense buzzed uselessly at me: all trite and false, all of it. I knew nothing.

My hand came out of the pocket, fist clenched around as many coins as I could grasp.

‘Fuck off,’ Old-Young snarled when he saw this offering.