I was mugged last night. Well, kind of mugged as although he held a knife to my throat he never actually got anything. I’d had drinks with a few work mates from an old job and had just come off London Bridge on the way to meet another friend for the final pint of the night, when suddenly this bloke was in my face. It was so close to the South Bank and the Thames Path and safety and people as to be ridiculous, but suddenly there was this red-headed teenager pushing a knife into my throat. That’s all he was, this thin nothing of a boy, made man by the blade in his hand and the sneer on his face.
“Give me your fucking money!” he whispered in such a way as to be a yell.
I just stood there, discombobulated for a moment as it had all come so fast. It was as if he had burst out of the blackness, I hadn’t even seen him approach, and now he had a knife to my throat. A mix of dread and panic swept over me, but then – the strangest thing – a wave of calmness. It was as if this was the most natural thing in the world; like I had been expecting it to happen and now it was here I knew what it was and it wouldn’t bother me.
“No.” my voice was a whisper as well, but it carried an equal amount of force to his.
The knife touched in a few millimetres further to my throat. “I’ll cut you! I will so fucking cut you!”
I think I then closed my eyes, which must have surprised him – that my response to this life threatening scenario was to have a bit of a snooze.
“I don’t care,” I told him. “I don’t care if you slit my fucking throat or not. At this moment in time, I really don’t care if you cut my fucking head off. If it ends now, then it ends now – that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
When I opened my eyes, he was just staring at me – furious and uncomprehending. This wasn’t in the muggers’ script, he didn’t know how to respond to this. Clearly all he’d wanted to do was threaten, and now I was making that so hard for him by responding in a way that no threatened person actually should.
The two of us stared at each other, neither of us sure what would happen next. The fury didn’t abate in his expression nor did that knife retreat from my jugular, but neither did I bend. I showed him no fear, not a tremor of emotion. To him I was a man quite happy to die for my possessions, but he wasn’t yet a man ready to kill for him.
For a second I thought the two of us might stand like that until daylight – or at least until the first witness came past – but then suddenly he kicked me in the shin and dropped me to the ground.
“Fuck you, weirdo!” he cried. But he made no effort to rob my prone form of either my wallet or my mobile.
When I got to the pub I didn’t make any reference of it to my mate, just laughed and joked as if nothing untoward had happened. But at home I pulled the sheets over my head and cried. Despite my insane bravado, I don’t want to die yet.
I don’t want all this to end yet.
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