retiring colleague, putting off their return to the office for as long as possible. I could see for myself exactly what was holding their attention.
Twenty metres down the alley, a man was lying on his back on the ground, shielding his bloodied face with his hands, while two men stood over him, relentlessly swinging narrow sticks of some kind. At first I thought the sticks were pool cues, but then I noticed the metal hooks on the ends. I’d only ever seen these obscure weapons before in one other place: my primary school, where an appointed window monitor would use them at the start and end of each day. They were meant for opening and closing an old-fashioned kind of hinged pane when it was too high to reach with your hands.
I turned to the other spectators. “Has anyone called the police?” A woman nodded without looking at me, and said, “Someone used their mobile, a couple of minutes ago.”
The assailants must have realized that the police were on their way, but it seemed they were too committed to their task to abandon it until that was absolutely necessary. They were facing away from the crowd, so perhaps they weren’t entirely reckless not to fear identification. The man on the ground was dressed like a kitchen hand. He was still moving, trying to protect himself, but he was making less noise than his attackers; the need, or the ability, to cry out in pain had been beaten right out of him.
As for calling for help, he could have saved his breath.
A chill passed through my body, a sick cold churning sensation that came a moment before the conscious realization: I’m going to watch someone murdered, and I’m going to do nothing. But this wasn’t a drunken brawl, where a few bystanders could step in and separate the combatants; the two assailants had to be serious criminals, settling a score. Keeping your distance from something like that was just common sense. I’d go to court, I’d be a witness, but no one could expect anything more of me. Not when 30 other people had behaved in exactly the same way.
The men in the alley did not have guns. If they’d had guns, they would have used them by now. They weren’t going to mow down anyone who got in their way. It was one thing not to make a martyr of yourself, but how many people could these two grunting slobs fend off with sticks?
I unstrapped my backpack and put it on the ground. Absurdly, that made me feel more vulnerable; I was always worried about losing my textbooks. Think about this. You don’t know what you’re doing. I hadn’t been in so much as a fist fight since I was 13. I glanced at the strangers around me, wondering if anyone would join in if I implored them to rush forward together. But that wasn’t going to happen. I was a willowy, unimposing 18-year-old, wearing a T-shirt adorned with Maxwell’s Equations. I had no presence, no authority. No one would follow me into the fray.
Alone, I’d be as helpless as the guy on the ground. These men would crack my skull open in an instant. There were half a dozen solid-looking office workers in their 20s in the crowd; if these weekend rugby players hadn’t felt competent to intervene, what chance did I have?
I reached down for my backpack. If I wasn’t going to help, there was no point being here at all. I’d find out what had happened on the evening news.
I started to retrace my steps, sick with self-loathing. This wasn’t kristallnacht. There’d be no embarrassing questions from my grandchildren. No one would ever reproach me.
As if that were the measure of everything.
“Fuck it.” I dropped my backpack and ran down the alley.
I was close enough to smell the three sweating bodies over the stench of rotting garbage before I was even noticed. The nearest of the attackers glanced over his shoulder, affronted, then amused. He didn’t bother redeploying his weapon in mid-stroke; as I hooked an arm around his neck in the hope of overbalancing him, he thrust his elbow into my chest, winding me. I clung on desperately, maintaining the hold even though I couldn’t tighten it. As he tried to prise himself loose, I managed to kick his feet out from under him. We both went down onto the asphalt; I ended up beneath him.
The man untangled himself and clambered to his feet. As I struggled to right myself, picturing a metal hook swinging into my face, someone whistled. I looked up to see the second man gesturing to his companion, and I followed his gaze. A dozen men and women were coming down the alley, advancing together at a brisk walk. It was not a particularly menacing sight-I’d seen angrier crowds with peace signs painted on their faces-but the sheer numbers were enough to guarantee some inconvenience. The first man hung back long enough to kick me in the ribs. Then the two of them fled.
I brought my knees up, then raised my head and got into a crouch. I was still winded, but for some reason it seemed vital not to remain flat on my back. One of the office workers grinned down at me, “You fuckwit. You could have got killed.”
The kitchen hand shuddered, and snorted bloody mucus. His eyes were swollen shut, and when he laid his hands down beside him, I could see the bones of his knuckles through the torn skin. My own skin turned icy, at this vision of the fate I’d courted for myself. But if it was a shock to realize how I might have ended up, it was just as sobering to think that I’d almost walked away and let them finish him off, when the intervention had actually cost me nothing.
I rose to my feet. People milled around the kitchen hand, asking each other about first aid. I remembered the basics from a course I’d done in high school, but the man was still breathing, and he wasn’t losing vast amounts of blood, so I couldn’t think of anything helpful that an amateur could do in the circumstances. I squeezed my way out of the gathering and walked back to the street. My backpack was exactly where I’d left it; no one had stolen my books. I heard sirens approaching; the police and the ambulance would be there soon.
My ribs were tender, but I wasn’t in agony. I’d cracked a rib falling off a trail bike on the farm when I was twelve, and I was fairly sure that this was just bruising. For a while I walked bent over, but by the time I reached the station I found I could adopt a normal gait. I had some grazed skin on my arms, but I couldn’t have appeared too battered, because no one on the train looked at me twice.
That night, I watched the news. The kitchen hand was described as being in a stable condition. I pictured him stepping out into the alley to empty a bucket offish-heads into the garbage, to find the two of them waiting for him. I’d probably never learn what the attack had been about unless the case went to trial, and as yet the police hadn’t even named any suspects. If the man had been in a fit state to talk in the alley, I might have asked him then, but any sense that I was entitled to an explanation was rapidly fading.
The reporter mentioned a student “leading the charge of angry citizens” who’d rescued the kitchen hand, and then she spoke to an eye witness, who described this young man as “a New Ager, wearing some kind of astrological symbols on his shirt.” I snorted, then looked around nervously in case one of my housemates had made the improbable connection, but no one else was even in earshot.
Then the story was over.
I felt flat for a moment, cheated of the minor rush that 15 seconds’ fame might have delivered; it was like reaching into a biscuit tin when you thought there was one more chocolate chip left, to find that there actually wasn’t. I considered phoning my parents in Orange, just to talk to them from within the strange afterglow, but I’d established a routine and it was not the right day. If I called unexpectedly, they’d think something was wrong.
So, that was it. In a week’s time, when the bruises had faded, I’d look back and doubt that the incident had ever happened.
I went upstairs to finish my assignment.
Francine said, “There’s a nicer way to think about this. If you do a change of variables, from x and y to z and z -conjugate, the Cauchy-Riemann equations correspond to the condition that the partial derivative of the function with respect to z -conjugate is equal to zero.”
We were sitting in the coffee shop, discussing the complex analysis lecture we’d had half an hour before. Half a dozen of us from the same course had got into the habit of meeting at this time every week, but today the others had failed to turn up. Maybe there was a movie being screened, or a speaker appearing on campus that I hadn’t heard about.
I worked through the transformation she’d described. “You’re right,” I said. “That’s really elegant!”
Francine nodded slightly in assent, while retaining her characteristic jaded look. She had an undisguisable passion for mathematics, but she was probably bored out of her skull in class, waiting for the lecturers to catch up and teach her something she didn’t already know.
I was nowhere near her level. In fact, I’d started the year poorly, distracted by my new surroundings: nothing so glamorous as the temptations of the night life, just the different sights and sounds and scale of the place, along
