Hands up

January came and went quickly this year like I had fallen asleep on Christmas Eve and woken up this last weekend. I went back to work the first day after the break, realising that one of my classes was starting a week earlier than I thought it would and like everything else when you are still starting a new academic job, each season brings something new that you don’t know. What did I agree to teach. When are the assignment briefs due. What assessment was decided last year before I started. You sort one thing and another comes, and then there is a manuscript that’s been accepted that needs finalising in a day, and the one thing I’ve meant to be doing, writing a bid, continues to slip a day and another day and another day. Every day fills up with things that need doing and the feeling that I’ve not done the work on the funding bid that I set out to do at the beginning of the day. I’ve run. I’ve made dinner. The rest of the day disappeared.

In service of the research funding bid, I rode my bike out to Small Heath for a meeting that went very well, but my used bike, which I had committed another year to last September, was starting to fail again in familiar ways, the ways that make you think it needed a serious overhaul, a rebuilding of the hub, probably, new shifters and new brakes, even though I’d never managed to get them to work for the years I’ve had the bike. The gears are always skipping, always something going wrong, and at the end of a very long day, having cycled home and then back the other way towards Newman to the school I am the governor at, I stood on the side of the road with the bike turned over, trying to get the chain back on in the cold, covered in grease.

I had planned to get a bike through the Cycle to Work Scheme, scheme being a Britishism that I’ve struggled to translate into American English because it continues to hold on to its negative valence for me. This government scheme allows you to buy a bike pre-tax, and through some convoluted series of actions, gets you a new bike for something like 35% less than you would normally pay, at least in my case. I have wanted a Brompton folding bike for a long time but never could justify the cost, particularly when it made little sense going to Newman. Now, an urban university employee, the Brompton is exactly what I needed to achieve true British Middle Classness. I hired one a few months ago and found it to be everything I wanted, I could keep it in the front room of the house and not have to worry about pulling it out of the shed. It was far easier to manoeuvre in the city around pedestrians. And now, facing a £200 bill to rebuild my other bike, I finally got around to identifying the bike I wanted and putting the paperwork in to get the bike.

This all went smoothly until I realised that the bike I was trying to buy was probably on a January sale and the approval for the payment wasn’t going to go through immediately — it could take, they said up to thirty days, and I had in the meanwhile found on a Facebook group a beautiful, lightly used Brompton just outside of Birmingham in Eccelstone and on Saturday, after going back and forth, decided to buy it instead for £600 with a range of accessories, deciding tempting fate was worth the three hundred pounds I would save over the other bike, even after all the tax savings and given the giant faff it was becoming.

I dropped Yoko and Mia off at the Cathedral for a choral evensong and set out for the country on Sunday afternoon, the M5 clear enough going up, and a plan to be back at choral evensong at 3:30. I followed the smartphone directions past town, on to a one-track road, stopping once to double-check the map and the address, and finally coming to the end of the road, when I looked up and saw two people standing in the car park of a house waving at me, an immediate red flag that I was buying a stolen bike, I thought: they’ve given me a fake address. I said hello and made a bit of small talk before getting on the bike and going for a short ride, noting that it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it was in very good shape and very well maintained. I rode back to them and we chatted some more and it became very clear that it wasn’t in fact stolen and that for whatever the worst-case scenario would be for fixing it, it would still be cheaper than my other options, so I transferred the money, thanked them, put the bike in the back of the car and headed back to the Cathedral.

On Monday morning, I had a light recovery run before dawn, having exhausted myself on Sunday with a run that was probably too hard for this early in the season, and as I came down our road, noticed that the bin men were coming through to the recycling, making a terrible mess as they went. I passed them, and pulled our first bin that had already been cleared to the back of the house and came back for the next one, which they had just cleared and were stopped a few doors down from us. I noticed some paper in the road, cars were stopped on both sides of the bin men so I walked into the street, in front of a car that was stopped, to pick it up, but just as I bent over, he sped up and I jumped out of the way, pounding on the side of that car as it passed, shouting, Hey, you almost hit me, asshole.

The car stopped suddenly and the driver’s door immediately opened and a kid who couldn’t have been more than twenty jumped out in a sweatsuit and was shouting at me, Don’t touch my car, don’t fucking touch my car. He was stopped in the middle of the road, blocking it and I could see a woman in another car who couldn’t get past look at us, and he got in my face, Don’t touch my car, don’t ever touch my car, you fucking asshole, and I put both of my hands up, saying, hey man, calm down, man, calm down, you almost hit me. He was lit up, screaming, don’t ever touch my car, I’ll rip you by the fucking ears, and made like he was going to lunge at me, but didn’t, and I said, You almost hit me, man, calm down, I’m sorry I touched your car, you almost hit me. He shouted some more and then lunged again, this time with his arm out, hitting me in the neck like he would strangle me, and then stopping immediately and going back to the driver’s side. Don’t fucking touch my car, and I was stunned, and said, Fuck off, and he lunged again like he would come back at me, but kept getting into the car and sped away. The traffic cleared and no one stopped and I went inside, trying to remember the number plate.

I thought later, as I was changing, that you need to take your ring off when you fight and I wondered, as I do in my male fantasy of fighting, if I could have intimidated him, and I thought of the thousand things to say, accessing my American accent register in ways I don’t normally, and in this pantomime, I pulled a bit at the ring and realised it was not easy to take off: it stalled at my knuckle and I thought that actually I was happy I hadn’t done anything. It was in front of our house, I don’t really know how to fight, and it was 7:30 in the morning — he was almost certainly high. I told this story to a colleague, gesturing and realising suddenly that my ring was gone. My pantomime must have gone further I thought, and I went down to the bathroom where I’d changed after riding to work and it was not there. I went to Tesco where I had bought lunch and it wasn’t turned in there and to Security at the University and I felt suddenly the pressure of the kid’s hand on my neck again, the way that when you’re hit in the neck, the feeling remains.

I have taken my ring off before, for months at a time. Last year, I had worn it around my neck after I went to the solicitor and then through the autumn when I had given up, but sometime in November had put it back on, feeling like a coward for my inability to make a choice, to be neither good nor bad, to be petulant and passive and quietly disobedient. Here though, it was gone in a way that I hadn’t controlled. I gave up looking, sent emails, and went home feeling helpless like it was one thing to not wear a ring by choice, to make some silly statement to yourself, it’s quite another to just lose it like a child loses their coat. At home, I changed and went to the bathroom to take out my contacts, and there it was on the bathroom cabinet shelf, a ring that I didn’t recognise at first, but then it became clear to me what had happened: I was daydreaming at home, not at work, the time between had somehow evaporated in my mind, and I’d forgotten where I was and I had, in my dream of hitting this boy so hard that he couldn’t stand up, lost myself completely and floated into a world that never could exist, where I’m a strong man, a man who can hit younger men, and who doesn’t put his hands up and beg for the other person to calm down.

I made it back to the Cathedral on time and sat down proud of my blue Brompton bike, this British me that I’ve always wanted to emerge as I get older. The kind of guy who knows he likes Navy blue and who has the job he’s always wanted, in the village in the city, with three kids and a partner with whom he eats every night. Yoko and Mia were already seated in the choir and I had the sense that I do in Anglican services, in Evensong in particular, that there is nothing I need to do. I can sing or not sing, recite what I want to recite or not. Mother Charlotte said the other day, God is a metaphor, and I said, Metaphors are my area. I’ve written about them. I’ve written about religious ones in particular. We sat and stood and I recited the creed with everyone as a one-off, to see how it would feel, to see what it would be like if it were all just a metaphor, not that it matters what I do or say, really.

You realise occasionally that it could all just end. You could find yourself lying on the street after a boy, a tweaker with a knife, has panicked and stabbed you, you with your hands up, or you swinging wildly, living some fantasy that ends poorly. Every fantasy in my life ends poorly except the one where Yoko and I retire in the village and take long walks with two golden labs, recovered and in love the way you can be when you’re in your sixties. I want to stop the whole encounter and say, I am a coward: I hit your car to get your attention, but I regret it now that I’m faced with actual violence. I have my hands up. If we could just stop, and think about this, we’d realise we’re both having the same dilemma, we’re both hostages to the fantasies that keep going, and I think both of us don’t want this fantasy to play out. Because let’s be honest, you’re a coward too, you’re threatening a random person with violence at 7:30 on a Monday morning, your life must not be going that great either. Look, if I take off my ring and try to punch you, then what happens. I have so much more to lose than you. I’m a coward, but I have so much to risk, you have no idea. I have book proofs to look at today, I can’t waste any time going to jail. There’s nothing you can do to hurt me, only I can hurt me. I have kids. I have a pension. So many people depend on me. I’m a coward: fuck you, push me, I’ll walk away, it doesn’t matter.