The Third Person

I moved as quietly and quickly as I dared, trying to recreate the pace I’d seen Charlie moving at. A quick walk, keeping my breathing in check so I could listen as carefully as possible. For a twig snapping, or a shoe scuffing the dirt up ahead. Worst case scenario: a scream. And all the time keeping an eye out on the woods to the left: looking for colour, for movement, for anything.

I’d been walking for about ten minutes when I heard the scream.

I started running immediately, twitched into motion by the sound. The woods around me seemed intensely real; I took in every shade of green, brown and yellow as I ran, hurdling over looping roots, tapping trees as I passed them, partly to propel and partly to steady myself. Too busy to notice the adrenalin. The path twisted around to the right. Too busy, until the last moment, to realise that the scream I’d just heard had come from a man. That fact occurred to me as I rounded the corner and saw them, a few metres ahead.

They were almost in a rugby scrum, forming a bridge, with Charlie holding on to the shoulders of a much bigger man and yelling in anger as she launched kicks into his flabby stomach. The man was panting uncontrollably: although he was much taller and heavier than she was, he seemed to have been bent double by the force of her attack and was now hanging on for dear life. As I started to move forwards, she stamped down hard on his shin, and he screamed and stepped back, letting go of her and covering his face just in time as she launched a series of punches at him. Quick, snappy left jab; hard right cross that smacked the back of his hand and must have broken something, and then a solid left hook that knocked him a step sideways. From nowhere, her foot was suddenly in his stomach again – she’d spun around on her heel and launched a blistering kick that seemed to go a full metre through him.

Kareem disappeared backwards into the wood. I watched him tumble down the embankment, with little punches of dust and cries of pain following him on his way.

‘Holy shit,’ I said.

‘Jason?’

Charlie was flushed.

I ran over. Kareem had come to a halt in an ungainly heap about thirty metres down from us. He seemed to be deciding whether to attempt to get to his feet or not.

‘What the hell just happened?’

Charlie said, ‘Son of a bitch jumped out at me.’

We both looked down at the son of a bitch in question: a mildly overweight man in blue jeans and a checked shirt. He was struggling upright, with the aid of the tree beside him, and seemed as stunned as I was. He looked up at us. He was shaking, and I saw an average face, filled with a kind of stupid, awful terror. Then, he turned around and began to flounder off in the direction of the Beck.

‘Wait here.’

I started down after him.

Leave this, my mind told me, even as I was running. Or stamping, anyway – the embankment was forty-five treacherous degrees of dry mud, spotted with a slalom of trees. You couldn’t run down something that steep; it was more like a semi-controlled, high-stepping fall that jarred your legs and hurt your stomach. As the ground evened out, the world juddered around impossibly quickly. I hit the woodland floor and was after him like a gunshot.

Leave this.

Kareem glanced back, saw that I was coming after him and found a higher gear. His shirt came untucked as he ran deeper into the woods. His arms were pistoning. In fact, he could move pretty quickly when he wasn’t having his ass kicked by a girl.

I was exhilarated, but also feeling like I was a worm that had been let off the hook and had then jumped right back on again.

Leave this. What the fuck are you going to do when you catch him?

Kill him? Now that Charlie’s seen him?

But I was still running in the wrong direction, regardless.

Straight after him, slapping past trees as I went. He veered right, heading deeper still. I could hear the stream and knew we must be getting close. He’d need to level out soon: just head straight right and hope he could outpace me to the ring road. But that was five minutes’ run, or more, and he must have known he wouldn’t make it.

I could hear his frantic breaths.

This feeling was the same feeling I’d had waiting at the station for the train to Schio on the day I’d gone to meet Claire. It was the shaking, stupid anxiety of a man who knew he was about to do the wrong thing; that he was going to disregard all the pleading, desperate advice that his mind was throwing at him, and go on and do the wrong thing regardless.

I put on a last jolt of speed as I reached him, punching into him from the side and driving him over towards the beck. Kareem went down; I heard a splash as my leg smashed into the water. Then grunting as I got my arm to the side of his head and pushed him.

He wasn’t a serious contender. I punched him again – hard – as we were getting to our feet. His nose shattered, and suddenly he was flat on his ass again, with blood spattered onto his shirt. He brought up his hands to hold his face together.

‘Shit,’ he said simply.