Chapter 93: Open Hands
He came forward and I went sideways.
Not back. Never straight back, because straight back is a line and a line runs out.
I gave the ground on an angle, along the wall, weight even, feet under me.
The distance between us stayed at about six feet, and he did not notice that I was choosing it.
That is the whole skill. It is not glamorous.
You learn it at fourteen, by being made to do it for forty minutes without touching anybody.
“You're very quiet,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You were quiet at Christmas too, until you weren't.”
Six feet. Then five, because he moved and I did not have room.
“Your friend,” he said. “Priya Raman. She works for the county, doesn't she. Housing benefit.”
There is a version of me that reacted to that. She is about ten years younger and she is not in this story.
“Damon,” I said. “There is a camera above your head.”
He did not look up. He had known it was there. That was the point of the room.
“It's been on you since you opened that door,” I said. “It has both of us on it. It has you between me and the exit.”
“It has a woman with a conviction in a stairwell,” he said.
“Yes. And a man who followed her into one.”
He took another step and put his hand out towards my shoulder, as though there were something on my coat.
I was not there.
I had gone thirty degrees left on the ball of the back foot. One step.
His hand closed on air at the height where my collarbone had been half a second before.
He said something under his breath. It was not a word I will write down.
And I understood then that it was going to be all right, in the small way that things are all right when you are only frightened and not yet hurt.
Because a man who wants to hit you moves differently from a man who wants you to hit him.
He wanted contact. Any contact. Two ounces of it.
A hand on his chest. A wrist taken. A shove backwards through a door.
Four seconds of a video would have finished me.
“I know what this is,” I said.
“You don't know anything.”
“You want me to put a hand on you.”
He stopped.
I kept my palms out and my fingers spread, and I did not lift them above my waist.
I have never in my life worked so hard at doing nothing.
“So here is what happens,” I said. “I am not going to. Not this afternoon, not in October, not ever again as long as I live. That is not a promise to you. It's just true.”
“Is it.”
“And in about four minutes my friend comes down from level five, and sees you in this stairwell. She writes everything down. It is her job.”
Something in his face moved.
“So you can be a man who was in a car park,” I said, “or you can be a man who was in a car park with a witness. That is the entire choice available. It is not a threat, Damon, it is just the order the questions come in.”
The wind came through the gap in the door.
“You think anybody is going to listen to you,” he said. “About a drug trolley. You.”
“No,” I said. “I don't.”
That answer was not tactics. It was true, and it landed on him wrong, because true things do.
“I'm nobody,” I said. “That's why it isn't me doing it.”
He stood there for what the footage says is nine seconds.
Then he pulled the door open with the flat of his hand, and stepped back through onto level three, and let it swing.
At the last moment he stopped it with his foot.
“Twenty-seven,” he said.
Not a question. Just the number, in his mouth, in a concrete stairwell, from a man who had never once in three years asked me what I did on a Wednesday.
Then he went.
I stayed exactly where I was, with my back to the wall and the white number three beside my head, and I did not move until I heard a car start two levels up.
Then my legs went and I sat down on the top step.
I rang my solicitor from there.
She said four sentences. The first was, are you injured. The fourth was, do not leave that stairwell until Priya is with you.
Priya found me eleven minutes later and did not ask a single question until we were in the car.
I have watched that footage since.
All of it, twice, in a room full of other people, which was its own kind of afternoon.
It runs four minutes and eleven seconds.
In every frame of it, my hands are open.