LITMIR.BIZ

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course, now, as she wipes some lazy dribble from the side of her eighty-year-old collapsing mouth with a handkerchief, I am repulsed. It’s old people with all their facilities intact that I appreciate the most.

      The kids are still running and screaming, and I thank merciful God that I have never had enough sex to get pregnant. Obesity was a great contraceptive at least.

      A man walks past my table. He is average, forty-ish. I see his back, his jacket, his jogging bottoms, a balding head covered by thinning hair that is too long.

      Before us all, an audience paying little attention, he walks calmly towards the tree ten yards in front of our tables, and with one jerky movement scoops up Dougal, and carries on walking south, away from us. I don’t see his face. Admittedly I am appreciative of the drop in noise levels, but I am also confused, and I straighten my back, turning to face his mother, to somehow check that this is OK, that he must be the child’s father, or uncle, or a family friend. Because things like this just don’t happen right in front of you. She isn’t looking up, but instead tries to wipe fruit juice from the edges of her youngest son’s mouth.

      I say, ‘Excuse me,’ nervously but loudly, and she glances at me and then automatically in the direction of her elder sons. Her naturally concerned expression falls, as if all the muscles have just been sucked out of her face by a Dyson, and her eyes widen. She pushes herself to her feet as she sees Dougal’s red hair over the shoulder of the man quickly walking away. Her mouth opens and a scream leaps out as if it’s been waiting in her throat for the last ten years.

      She darts forward two paces, but she hasn’t let go of her toddler’s arm and he screams. I jump up. She tries to move forwards, hoisting her youngest child in the air by his little arm as he cries out in pain, and Charlie, who has resumed urinating against the tree, turns around in confusion as he hears his mother’s cry.

      ‘He’s got my child! He’s got my child!’

      I can’t quite believe this is happening, but I kick back my chair and start to run.

      Ahead of me I can see the Stranger has his hand clamped over Dougal’s mouth, and as they turn the corner at the end of the street he breaks into a jog. They were always called Strangers when I was a child, and they were a constant threat. There were washed-out adverts tinted a dirty orange or a grubby yellow, warning us not to get into their brown Datsuns, or go and look at their puppies, or accept their sweets. Now they have longer medical-sounding names that I’m sure children don’t understand. The idea of a Stranger still scares me, and I am nearly thirty. These new words just can’t put the same fear of God into a child.

      My trainers bounce off the pavement and the sudden rush of adrenalin through my muscles is sickening. My calves and thighs expand and contract as I round the corner and see the Stranger holding a struggling Dougal, but he is sprinting now towards the alleyway across the road. I have only been down that alleyway once and it scared the hell out of me: I kept expecting to see a corpse. It is full of gates to gardens and nooks and hiding places.

      Feeling sick, I run faster. The man is by the road and he almost runs into a car, dodging it only at the last moment, but he isn’t as fast as I am. I push myself on, not aware of my breathing, not looking at anything but Dougal’s shock of ginger hair, which was so unfortunate five minutes ago, but is now vital. I can run five kilometres in twenty-seven minutes now. This time last year I couldn’t run to the bus stop without throwing up. Thankfully for me, for Dougal, I’ve streamlined since then. Far behind me, back by the Garden Café, I can hear his mother screaming his name, but I just run.

      I hear the Stranger breathing now, wheezing and coughing hard, ten feet in front of me, making for the alleyway. My strides are long and elegant, I run on my toes, my arms pumping at my sides, my chest open, and I feel sick as my biceps and quadriceps push me on. There are no rolls of flab bouncing or ripping at my stomach now.

      Three feet from the entrance to the alleyway I am almost within touching distance of the Stranger but he stops sharply and spins around to face me: he looks scared and sick as well. I see a bead of sweat streak down the centre of his nose. I slam on my own brakes as he removes the hand that is covering Dougal’s mouth, and swings it, arm outstretched, clenched fist towards my face. Uncorked, Dougal starts to scream, his face as red as his hair, his eyes wide and watery and desperate. We are all scared. I try to lurch out of the way, but the man’s punch strikes the side of my head. I stumble like a speeding car hitting a boulder in the road. I have never been punched before. I am on the pavement and cry out at an awful evil feeling that shoots behind my eyes, and I am momentarily blinded. I blink back tears, but my calves and my thighs spring me up off the floor.

      I turn into the alley twenty steps behind the Stranger, who has shifted Dougal and jammed his tiny head into his shoulder to muffle his screams.

      Overgrown bushes swipe at my face as I run along the dirt track alley. All of our actions seem loud, louder than usual. Every twig that snaps, my breathing, the Stranger’s breathing, the pounding of our feet hitting the dirt track. He keeps running, but he’s slowing down and tripping, and I’m getting faster, but wincing at the aching knife of pain that has been forced through my temples where his dirty hand smashed at my forehead. I open my mouth to shout at him to stop, but a feeling of dread silences me, a need not to call attention to the fact that I am a woman, chasing a man down a lonely passage.

      The alley is three hundred metres long and narrow like a bicycle lane. The bushes are overgrown and make it dark, but the morning sun is so hot and bright that I can see him ahead of me. He hasn’t ducked out of sight into any openings in the shrubs, and he can hear me closing in on him in my trainers and running trousers, as if I got up this morning and chose my best ‘chasing a child snatcher’ outfit. Sweat is pouring off us all and I focus on the damp patches spreading across the back of his dirty beige polyester jacket. He is wearing his best ‘child snatcher’ outfit himself. The air is filled with flies, and smells rotten, and even though it cannot possibly be this man who smells so bad, I can’t help but believe that it is.

      I am almost at his side, and I throw a hopeful arm out for Dougal as I launch myself into the Stranger’s back, terrified.

      We fall messily.

      Dougal is on to all fours in front of us, scraping his little hands and knees on dirt and leaves. The Stranger slams face-first into the wall and I stumble down behind him, onto him, and the dirt. Instantly we are both scrambling to get up. I hear him mutter ‘shit’ as he crawls forward to get to his feet, and I am surprised that he speaks English. He looks English, but still I am shocked.

      I can hear my heart and my head pounding, and another man’s voice maybe fifty feet behind us, shouting, but I can’t tell what. The Stranger lurches to his feet, as I am on all fours, and I scream, ‘Dougal, get behind me!’

      The terrified mop of red hair and tears and bloody knees, and a bruised face with the Stranger’s fingerprints embedded in his cheeks, runs as fast as his ridiculous small legs will allow, behind me, before the Stranger is fully upright.

      I can hear the cries of a man getting closer behind us, shouting, ‘You sick bastard, you sick bastard …’ and the pounding of his feet on the dirt. I look up and notice that the Stranger’s glasses have smashed, and his face, an average forty-five-year-old face, is red and stained with dirt and sweat. He looks down at me, with either confusion or fear or disgust, and then his eyes dart upwards and behind me at the menacing sound of larger feet than mine running towards us all, and I can clearly hear the chasing man’s voice now, shouting, ‘You sick fuck! You sick bastard!’

      I raise myself onto my knees as the Stranger lunges forward. His dirty old badminton trainer makes sharp hard contact with my stomach, and seems to sink further in than it physically should. I scream in pain, folding forwards. He calls me a ‘bitch’, but in a tone that lacks conviction.

      Dougal screams as I hear a blurred and breathless voice behind me yelling, ‘You sick fuck! I’ll fucking kill you!’

      The Stranger turns and runs down the alley, towards the sunlight at the other end. I lie on my side and clutch my stomach, and moan at a pain I have never felt before. I have never been kicked in the stomach before.

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