And then Mark decided to make some comment about the place being ‘overrun with pikeys’.
Admittedly we were in a deserted bit of the stadium, drinking our alcopops – most people were down at the racetrack, cheering on their horses. But there were still a few people around. A group of youths, as the Daily Mail might label them. And Mark hadn’t made any effort to be quiet. He’s like that. Sometimes I think that if Emma weren’t so unobjectionable, so ready to muck in, people would tolerate him a lot less.
Two of the booze-fuelled teenagers heard him. Suddenly they were squaring up to him. But you could see that they didn’t really mean it. It was just something they felt they should do, to protect their slighted honour, like in a nature documentary when the smaller males of the pack can’t afford to show any fear, or risk being eaten. Quite understandable, really.
The foremost one was a short, thin guy, with the faintest whisper of teenagerish stubble about his chin, a particularly garish pinstripe number. ‘Say that again, mate.’ His voice had an unmistakable adolescent reediness to it; he couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
I waited for Mark to apologise, defuse the situation – make light of it somehow. Because that would have been the only sensible, adult thing to do. We were the grown-ups, after all. Mark stood a couple of heads taller than his pinstripe-suited aggressor.
But Mark punched him. Took two steps forwards, and punched him full in the face, with one of those meaty hands. So hard that the boy’s head snapped back. So hard that he fell like a toppled statue. There was a noise, a crack, a simulacrum of the racecourse starting gun; the way I had thought only really happened in films.
We all just stood there, stunned, including his little gaggle of mates. You might have thought his friends would fight back, try to avenge him. Not so. That was the quality of the violence. It was too sudden, too brutal. You could see: they were terrified.
They bent down to him, and, as he came round, asked if he was all right. He moaned like an animal in pain. There was a trail of bright red blood coming from his nose, and another – more worryingly, somehow – coming from his mouth. I’d never seen anyone bleed from their mouth before, either, apart from in films. It turned out that he had bitten off the tip of his tongue when his head hit the ground. I read that in an article online, in the local rag, a couple of weeks’ later. I read, too, that the police were looking for the perpetrator. But there was also some mention of the fact that the guy was a bit of a troublemaker – so perhaps it wasn’t a very serious hunt.
What was so odd, I thought, was that Emma didn’t even seem particularly shocked. I remember thinking that she must have seen this side of Mark before. She had a clear, immediate idea of what to do – as though she had been waiting for something like this to happen. All practicality. ‘We need to leave,’ she said, ‘now. Before anyone gets wind of this.’
‘But what if he’s not OK?’ I asked.
‘They’re just a load of drunk chavs,’ Emma said. ‘And they started it.’ She turned around to face us all. ‘Didn’t they? Didn’t they start it? He was just defending himself.’
She was so earnestly convincing – so convinced – that I think we all rather started to believe it. And no one mentioned it again, not for the whole duration of the three-day break. On New Year’s Eve, when Mark danced on the table wearing a silly wig and a big, goofy grin, it was even easier to believe that it had never happened. It’s almost impossible to imagine it now, looking at him pulling Emma onto his lap, ruffling her hair tenderly as he smiles down at her – the image of the caring boyfriend. Almost, but not quite. Because the truth is I have never quite been able to forget what I saw, and sometimes when I look at Mark I am jolted back to the memory of it, with a little shock of horror.
DOUG
Two a.m. When he lifts the curtain he can see light blazing from the Lodge, which seems brighter now, almost, a defiance against the darkness surrounding it. He has been lying awake for hours now, like an animal whose territory has been encroached upon, who cannot rest until the threat is gone. He can hear the guests even from here, the music thumping out, the occasional staccato of their laughter. He can even hear the low vibration of their voices. Or is he imagining that part? Difficult to be certain. For someone who was once told at school that he had ‘an unfortunate lack of imagination’ his brain seems to conjure a fair amount from thin air these days.
He chose this cottage specifically because it was the furthest from all the other buildings. The windows predominantly face the bleak greyish flank of the Munro; the loch can only be glimpsed through the window of the toilet, which is almost entirely overgrown with ivy. He can almost imagine himself completely alone here, most of the time. It would be best if he were completely alone. For his own sake, for that of others.
He vaguely recalls a man who was sociable, who enjoyed the company of others – who had (whisper it) friends. Who could hold court over pints, who had a bit of a rep as a comic, a raconteur. That man had a life before: a home, a girlfriend – who had waited for him through three long tours in Afghanistan. She stuck by him even when he came back from the last tour, broken. But then the thing happened – or rather he did the thing. And after that she left him.
‘I don’t know you any more,’ she had said, as she piled her things haphazardly into bin liners, like someone fleeing from a natural disaster. Her sister was waiting in the car, she said, as though he might try to do something unspeakable to stop her. ‘The man I loved—’ and there had been tears in her eyes as though she was grieving someone who had died, ‘wouldn’t do something like that.’
More than that, she was frightened of him. He could see it as he moved towards her, to try to comfort her – because he hated to see her cry. She had backed away, thrust the bag she was holding in front of her like a shield. She moved away; changed her number. His family, too, retreated. The idea that the man he remembers was, in fact, himself, seems too absurd to be real. Better to imagine him as some distant relative.
He saw how they looked at him, the guests, as though he were a curiosity, a freak show. When he has – rarely – caught a glimpse of his appearance in a mirror he has some idea of why. He looks like a wild man, someone on the very margins of society. This is probably the only profession in which looking the way he does, the unbrushed hair and battered old clothes, might actually be considered a kind of prerequisite. Sometimes he wonders whether he should drop this pretence of living like an almost-normal person, and live fully wild. He could do it, he thinks. He’s definitely tough enough: those first few months of training with the Marines quickly sloughed off any softness, and the years since have only toughened him further, like the tempering of steel. The only weak thing about him, the thing he seems unable to control, is his mind.
He has a particular set of skills, knowledge of how to survive in the wild indefinitely. He could take a gun, a rod: shoot and catch his own food. Everything else he could steal, if he needed. He has no qualms about taking a little back. He has given everything, hasn’t he? And most people don’t realise how much more they have than they need. They are lazy, and greedy, and blind to how easy their lives are. Perhaps it isn’t their fault. Perhaps they merely haven’t had the opportunity to see how fragile their grip on happiness is. But sometimes he thinks he hates them all.