Immediately the three of them moved closer.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, don’t be like that,darling,” the first one said. “I’m only trying to be friendly. Here.” He held out a can of lager toward her as some sort of offering.
She gently shook her head, her eyes shimmering slightly under the streetlights. If it were less traumatic times, Tom would wish he had his camera.
“Oooooh. Not even a no, thank you,” the stocky man said, stumbling slightly as the bus driver moved away to make another phone call. “Rude.”
Tom saw the woman stiffen at this as she took another step away.
“Do you know what?” he continued. “I think women are just getting too big for their boots.” He looked down. “Their shit trainers.”
The three men sniggered. Tom bit down on the skin around his thumb. Should he do something? Or was she doing the right thing by completely ignoring them?
“She thinks she’s too good to talk to us,” said the one with the shiniest bald head Tom had ever seen. It was like he’d put Vaseline on it.
“Oh she will,” said the stocky man. “It’s rude to ignore someone when they’re speaking directlytothem. Ain’t it, sweetheart?”
He moved forward again and Tom saw the woman look up with clear terror in her eyes. For some reason he thought immediately of Martha, and in seconds he’d stepped forward and was beside her, so close that he could smell her freshly washed hair. It dazzled him for a moment.
“Look, can you leave her alone,” Tom said, the words flying out of his mouth before he’d really thought through what he was doing. In fact, whatwashe doing? Now that he’d moved closer, he could see these guys were huge.
He faced the three of them. The stocky one had an eyebrow piercing he noticed now, which, aside from being about twenty years out of date, reminded Tom of one of the roughest guys at his school, and he wasn’t sure this man was going to take to him and his floppy light brown hair and posh-ish accent.
“And whothefuckare you?” the man replied, confirming Tom’s suspicions.
He coughed. “I’m Tom...”Oh my god, he’s not asking your name, idiot.“Look. It doesn’t matter who I am, it matters that you’re being aggressive toward this woman who—”
Eyebrow Piercing took a menacing step toward Tom. “If anyone’s being aggressive, it’s her.”
The woman flung her head up from where she had, Tom could see, sent messages about beingLATEandURGENT COVER. Her eyes were a sort of mossy green shade, and as she turned to look at Tom, he felt like she was trying to communicate with him by a glance alone, but he couldn’t quite read it.
Tom held his hand up, still clutchingOrlando. “Can we just... all... wait... separately? Act like the strangers we are?”
“What a dickhead,” Shiny Head muttered.
“Excuse me? What did you say?” Tom leaned forward, genuinely unsure whether he’d heard correctly.
“I said...” The man stepped closer. “What. A. Dick. Head.”
Tom felt the woman tense slightly beside him and he was sure, now, that she was frightened. As was he, for that matter. Frightened by these three strangers, pissed in the middle of the night, who’d chosen to climb ontotheirbus and ruin their journey. They’d been doing fine for months without these guys. Sitting separately, living their own lives, never once interacting. Not even a smile or a nod or any acknowledgment whatsoever of “Oh... it’s you again.” It was as though they’d both made a silent agreement that they were aware of each other, but it didn’t need mentioning. Until this moment Tom hadn’t realized how grateful he was for that. How easy she’d made it for him to keep getting on the bus. To sit there without judgment, and now these three had turned up and ruined everything, interrupting their carefully orchestrated anonymity.
“Why don’t you all just fuck off, actually?” Tom said, suddenly frustrated by the whole situation. Whowerethese men? Why were they even talking to him with their outdated eyebrow studs and their beer breath? Before he could process any of that further, Shiny Head came at him from his right, shoving him and then pulling his fist back, slamming it into the side of his face.
Jesus fuckingChristthat hurt. In all his thirty-two years Tom had never, not once, been punched. Until now. At 4:15 a.m. after getting off a bus he didn’t even need to be on in the fucking first place. What a shit show. What was he doing with his life? The woman beside him gasped and, as he spun, reaching up toward his cheek with one hand, she reached for his other, grabbing atOrlandoand taking it from him. And then, more aggressively than he had ever expected, she started hitting all three of the men with his book. She smacked them over the head and around the face so hard that pages started flying out of the paperback and littering the pavement around them.
“Hey!” The bus driver, finally alerted to the hostilities, came rushing over, but seemed unsure how to follow up on his initial exclamation and uncertain as to who the aggressors were in the situation if hewereto try and step in. Surely not this woman and her battered book.
Any escalation of the fistfight seemed to have been halted, largely down to pure confusion from everyone involved. These men didn’t seem to know how to react to an entirely sober woman aggressively wielding a paperback at four in the morning. They almost certainly, thank God, weren’t going to hit her, and Tom was glad to see that they drew the line somewhere.
She stood back, panting, and looked around her, scanning the ground as, like the plastic bag inAmerican Beauty, one of the pages ofOrlandogently lifted in the breeze and took off down the road.
“Look!” she shouted, pointing into the distance, and the three men and the bus driver all turned. Tom felt a tug on his hand and the woman was running, his book still in her other hand, fast in the opposite direction. Had he... Was he being mugged? Of his book? Except she was taking him with her while she ran?
“Fuckingmentalist,” one of the three men shouted from behind, followed by a loud belch as Tom fell into a jog beside her and they rounded the corner of Pentonville Road onto Euston Road, where the bus stop could no longer be seen. Or heard.
They slowed to a walk and Tom looked down, panting, to realize he was still holding this stranger’s hand. It didn’t feel like the hand of a stranger, he thought dazedly. He had no idea what his brain even meant by that, so he shook his head to erase the thought and let go.
“Sorry,” he said, his eyes landing on the very small but very sparkling diamond ring on her finger. Made sense. He reached up to touch his cheek as he opened and closed his mouth a few times. Jeez. Was his jaw broken? He moved his hand down to his chin, opening and closing it again. Sophie would think this was cool, he decided. If they were still together and he went home and told her that he’d stood up for a woman who was being harassedat the bus stop and got punched, she’d have run at him, wrapped her arms around his neck and called him a hero. But if they were still together, he wouldn’t have been on the bus in the first place.
