Chapter 6: Eleven Days
I was twenty-two. It was the second week of September and it was already dark by eight.
I had been out of the squad four months.
My shoulder had been operated on in March and had not taken, and I was carrying a plastic bag of shopping in my left hand because I could not carry it in my right.
Salter Row is a street of terraces with a pub at one end and a launderette at the other, and cars parked half on the kerb the whole way down.
There was a man and there was a woman and there was a car with the passenger door open.
The rest of it I have recited for twelve years, and a thing you recite that long stops being a memory and becomes a statement.
Here is the statement.
Raised voices. The woman's, then his. Something about a bag or a phone. Somebody said get in.
I put my shopping down on the pavement.
I remember the sound of the bag settling because there were tins in it.
I said something. I do not know what. Everybody in that street later agreed I said something.
He came at me.
He was about my height and heavier and he had a hand out towards my collar.
And my body did what my body had been doing since I was twelve years old.
I did not decide.
That is the part I could never make anybody understand, including myself, including two solicitors and a magistrate.
You do not decide. You have spent ten years making the decision unnecessary.
That is what the ten years are for.
I took the sleeve and the lapel and I turned in under him and I threw him.
O-goshi. A hip throw.
The first throw anybody is ever taught, the one a child learns in a village hall.
It is designed to put a person on their back.
He did not land on his back.
He came off the hip at the wrong angle because the pavement had a camber I had not accounted for, and there was a kerb, and he was not a person who knew how to fall.
He hit the back of his head on the edge of the kerbstone.
He was unconscious for eleven days.
He recovered.
I want that said early, because for years people would hear the eleven days and then not hear anything else.
He recovered. He went back to work.
He has, as far as I know, had a completely ordinary life since.
But I did not know that at eight o'clock that evening, and I did not know it at midnight either.
What I did at eight o'clock that evening was run.
I picked up my shopping, because it did not occur to me to leave it, which is the stupidest detail of my life, and I walked to the end of Salter Row and then ran.
They had me by Thursday.
The woman was gone by then. I never got her name.
She was not there when the ambulance came and she did not come forward, and I understood that, because I had not come forward either.
So the file said what the file could say. A man on the ground. A woman who ran. Eleven days.
And every single time it was described to me after that, in every room, in the same reasonable voice, it came out as this:
You were a trained athlete. He was a member of the public.
There was an argument in the street and you intervened physically.
And what I said, and went on saying, and eventually believed, was: yes.
Yes. I overreacted.
I had a coach from the age of twelve until the day I stopped.
His name is Tobias Lund and he is still teaching, and he came to the hearing and sat at the back in a coat he had owned since the eighties.
He wanted to give evidence about what a trained person can and cannot switch off.
I would not let him. I would not look at him either.
He wrote twice in the first year and once in the third, and then he stopped.
I have not spoken to him since.
That is not something that happened to me. It is something I did.
The thing that has never left is not the kerb, or the ambulance, or the eleven days.
It is that I was the best-trained person on that street and the outcome was the worst possible one.
I had spent ten years learning how to make a body land safely.
And the one time it counted, outside a gym, on a cambered pavement, in the dark, with a bag of tins at my feet, I got it wrong.
After that I decided, in the only clear decision I have ever made, that I would never touch anyone again.
I kept that for twelve years.
Eleven of those years were easy.