by Mel Parks
I keep meaning to walk alone during lockdown. Not to the shops or allotment, but really walk, lose myself to my thoughts, to the haze of the bluebells, songs of the blackbirds or the squelch of my shoes in the mud. But I know that buried deep down, far back, there is a fear that stops me.
When I first moved to this village, 12 years ago, I walked along the disused railway track to the childminder’s house to pick up my baby. There are fields on one side, back gardens of houses on the other. I wasn’t sure how far it was to the turning. There was no one around. I kept going and the fields and houses gave way to steep embankments on both sides and I wondered what would happen if something happened and I was down there with no one to see and no mobile phone. I started walking faster and my footsteps echoed under the bridge and I didn’t know if the turning was before or after the bridge and I kept walking faster and faster and looking behind me and looking behind me and walking faster and faster…
Eight years before that, I lived in Camberwell, south London. Our flat was on the first floor of a Georgian terrace in a quiet cul-de-sac. The street led to a small park, which was surrounded by large red brick houses. To get home or to get anywhere, you had to wind in and out of similar streets, then blocks of flats; one way led to Camberwell New Road, the other to Coldharbour Lane in Brixton.
I was on my way home at about 8.30pm in the winter dark after a journalism evening class when it happened. I got off the bus on Camberwell New Road and decided to walk under the railway bridge, the quickest way to the red brick streets. I was carrying a handbag. A 30th birthday present made from shiny brown fake patent leather. I’d chosen it myself from a wall of handbags. It was about time, I thought. It had plenty of room for books, my Filofax and a Palm Pilot that I’d been given in my new job at a dot com multimedia company. It was my first and last handbag.
There was this guy, sitting in a parked car in a row of parked cars under the railway bridge, where crisp packets and cigarette butts gathered in graffitied dark edges. I walked a little faster, but not too fast. I wrapped my handbag handles around my wrist after it was nearly whipped away by two teenagers rushing behind and past me a few days earlier. I told myself to keep going, to look straight ahead of me.
No sound.
Now, when I think of it, I imagine there must have been a sound, a train chundering along the bridge, or something. What I mean is, I didn’t hear his footsteps.
I felt what was happening first. A tugging on my arm, on my bag. A pulling in my shoulder. Rough. Urgent. I turned and looked him straight in his orange-flecked, bloodshot eyes. I took in his greasy dark blonde hair and pockmarked face. I tried to untangle my hand from my bag as urgently as he was pulling on it. We didn’t speak. Neither of us spoke. There was no one else to hear.