Big Guy/Little Guy

The big guy is telling me to give him all my money; the small guy is laughing.

 

I think about saying, ‘over my dead body’, but the small guy is holding a knife. The knife looks sharp and the small guy’s laugh is mean; if a laugh can be mean.

 

I think about a comic strip I read many years ago. In the strip someone under threat and told to give all his money. I can’t remember who the someone is; it might have been a very large rabbit though I find it unlikely that violent street robbery was a suitable subject for Harold hare’s Own Paper which I did indeed read when young. More likely it was in a newspaper. 

 

The cartoon showed many images of the victim thinking; ‘there’s money at home in the coffee tin’; ‘there’s my money in the bank’; there’s the fifty quid Jack still owes me’ and ‘I’ve got three shillings in my pocket’. The newspaper would have been published a long time ago, back before metrification.

 

‘I can’t,’ the victim concludes, and the aggressor is confused and walks away; I consider it an option.

 

The big guy looks like someone who could, at a pinch, be confused; blessed with brawn rather than brains possibly. Possibly. The small guy is another kettle of fish.

 

I think that ‘another kettle of fish’ is a strange expression, then catch myself and realise that they are both waiting for me to hand over some cash; I have cash, but I need it. I’m hungry and I was on my way to the shops when they stopped me. The shops are still some way off, I can’t even see them; all I can see is waste bins, concrete and a knife.

 

When I was younger, still at school I knew what to do in situations like this. Not exactly like this of course, but situations of threat, they happened frequently at the school I went to.

 

I would run.

 

I knew that I was fast. Faster than anyone else in the school, we had sports days so it was clear. Faster than anyone in the local area, we had had sports events at the only primary school and it was clear even back then.

 

But I didn’t live in the local area any more, I didn’t go to the local sport events if indeed they existed, and I was older.

 

The Big guy didn’t look like a sprinter; the little guy was an altogether different pea in a different pod. It struck me that that too was a strange expression.

 

Still.

 

I started running.

 

‘Catch me if you can’, I found myself almost saying, but I considered it better not to tempt fate and bit my tongue. I thought about holding my breath instead, but I needed that to run.

 

And my legs, obviously.

 

And I would have preferred to have access to the knees of my youth.

 

Knees; bane of my life.

 

Tempting fate. I thought about that as I ran; it assumes that fate is out there, independently available to be tempted. I was certainly doing so now if the little guy was Stephen Hoare.

 

Stephen Hoare, the bane of my life at primary school, the only one who could challenge me on the sports field. Surely he would be taller now if he was still alive.

 

Did I have time to wonder if he was still alive?

 

Time will tell.