They Meet

If you happened to be standing in one of the fields between Wansbeck Road Metro station and the roundabout at the bottom of Broadway Avenue, looking south towards a set of six municipal benches, on a particular morning in the summer of 2016, this is what you would have seen.

You would have seen two women, one blonde, one brunette, enter the space between the six benches from opposite directions. The brunette would arrive first, and busy herself taking photographs: walking forward and back, probing the scene from different sides like a boxer trying to find an opening in her opponent’s guard. So busy does she become, walking and standing and kneeling, that she fails, at first, to notice the blonde, who very clearly does see the brunette, and shouts something at her. You can’t quite make out the words. They’re few, and sharp, and short: you can tell that much. You see the brunette’s lips move, watch her shift from a kneel to a kind of half-crouch. You can tell from the bounce of her knees, the size of her body, the way the hand which doesn’t hold the phone is fingers spread in contact with the ground, she won’t be able to hold this pose all that long.

Their lips are still moving: the blonde is snapping, curt, the brunette is talking steady, talking slow, trying to keep the scene calm. But the blonde is moving first to one side then the other. Circling, trying to find the exact point from which she can move in and close the space before the brunette can react. The situation is combustible: you know with certainty it will tip into violence. It does.

The blonde and the brunette both spring at about the same time. This means they almost miss each other, but not quite. The brunette’s shoulder hits the stomach of the blonde, whose right hand grabs the brunette’s ponytail as they fall skittering to the ground. It’s harder now to tell what’s happening at this remove, but neither one will see you stepping closer. The brunette is somewhere between kneeling down and on her back, grabbing at the blonde’s clothes for leverage, trying to reach for her hair. The blonde gets both hands on the ponytail and pushes backward with the muscles of her thighs, pulling the brunette forward, over the edge of her balance, ragdolling her head left and right, half-circles, putting pressure on the neck, wearing her out, making her dizzy. The brunette reaches up with one hand and half-claws, half-pushes the blonde’s face.

When something’s on your face it’s hard to fight the urge to pull it off. When the blonde removes her right arm from the brunette’s ponytail the move is reflex, but she masters herself in almost the same second. The first punch she throws into the brunette’s face is tentative, a faltering feint which chances on its mark. The second is more sure, and the third shocks the fight out of the brunette long enough for the blonde to get back to her feet and begin driving stomping, step-through kicks into the brunette’s side. The woman on the ground attempts to roll away instinctively, but the blonde follows with the speed of a fighter who knows what her opponent’s next move will be, and mounts the brunette before she can react.

At this point, you can tell that it’s all over, mismatched from the start. This is what happens when someone who sees violence so rarely they view it as play encounters one for whom it is a life. The question now is just how much of a beating she will take. Or, at least, that’s how it is until the blonde feels something which makes her suck in her stomach, a shock which has offended, unanticipated, unvoiced insult, and she shuffles back and, with her left hand holding the brunette’s t-shirt for control as she pads her hand back to a point just below the waist of the brunette’s sweatpants, until it comes to rest between her legs and the brunette’s increasingly useless attempts to fight back stop in mid-thrash as she, too, feels an unanticipated threat take hold.

There is a moment in a fight like this, a moment when something merely violent becomes something darker still, when what was quarrel shifts inexorably into enormity. This fight is paused, is poised on such a moment. One wrong move now results in death, results in murder, bodies hidden, absence noted, questions asked. The fights that end in death: the people watching say they didn’t see it happen. But they lie. There is a tipping point, beyond which nightmares lie. There is a point, in fights that end in death, when only willful blindness means the fatal outcome can’t be seen.

And it is only at this point that you decide to intervene.