Altercations with men in public, Part 2
London, 2001
Read Part 1 here
After the incident with the men in the van, I continued to dabble occasionally in hollering back at street harassers - sometimes telling them to fuck off, sometimes embarrassing them or behaving so oddly that they suddenly became desperate to get away from me. I also continued to ignore a fair few, because who has the time? Sometimes an eye roll or a blank stare was all I had the energy for, or all their unwanted attention warranted.
The next incident of note came, once again, from a motionless vehicle. This time from a lone man sitting in his car. It was winter and my friend, S, and I were on our way to the pub to meet friends, already warmed by the bottle of wine we’d shared with a bowl of stomach-lining pasta at her flat. Our wool coats were on but unbuttoned, cheeks red and arms linked as we chatted and laughed our way down a quiet residential road.
Initially, we couldn’t tell that there was anyone in the car as we approached it, until the glow of an inhaled cigarette half-lit the driver’s rugged face, a crystalline cloud of smoke and icy breath trailing from the half-open window. S’s eyes darted briefly in his direction, as did mine. Without saying a word I knew her radar had pinged too, antenna oscillating in search of a clearer signal. Uneasiness sat low in my stomach and then crept upward, an involuntary flutter of anxiety beating its wings in my chest.
The background beat of pop music on his radio abruptly stopped and S gripped my arm tighter, pulling us closer together. Instinct and experience predicted what would happen next.
‘Sexy ladies!’ he crooned as we began to pass. ‘Want to come warm yourselves up in my backseat?’
‘We’re good, thanks’ I replied, an edge of sarcasm in my voice.
‘Are you sure? Because I’ve got something here that will keep you nice and warm. Hot, even,’ he said, gesturing towards his crotch. He leaned out the window, grinning, and reached towards S as if to grab her. She sidestepped quickly out of his reach, fear flashing in her eyes.
The anxiety in my chest morphed into unbridled rage and, before I knew it, ‘Fuck off, asshole!’ was rushing past my lips, the hard F slicing through the cold night air.
The leer slid instantly from our harasser’s face, transforming into a rage of his own. He flicked his lit cigarette at us forcefully, narrowly missing S. Without pausing and, again, with no foresight to my actions, I found myself bending down to pluck it from the pavement, breaking free of S’s grip in the process. Striding over to his window, I tossed it straight back at him, so that it landed on his lap. It reminded me of an old Tom & Jerry cartoon, where one of them tosses a stick of dynamite back at the other. I couldn’t help but giggle internally as I watched him scuttle around, lifting his bum up off the seat shouting ‘Ooh! Ooh! Fuck!’ as he frantically patted at the embers.
S got hold of my arm and broke into a jog, dragging me along with her. Once we got a little ways down the road, approaching the safety and bustle of the high street, we turned to make sure he hadn’t followed us. Once we’d confirmed he hadn’t, S suddenly doubled over, clutching her stomach. At first I thought she was winded from the run, or was shaken from the adrenaline. But when I bent down to move the hair from her face, thinking I might find it wet with tears, I saw that she was, in fact, laughing.
It was a volcano of a laugh - beginning with complete silence and tremors, so intense is the building swell. And then, when the body can contain it no longer, the eruption.
‘You threw’ she wheezed, gasping for breath.
‘His cigarette.’
‘Back at him’.
The reality of what I’d done hit me only then, the stupidity and fearlessness of it. Things could have got very ugly indeed if he’d retaliated further, I knew that. But he hadn’t. We were okay. He was gone, hopefully with a hole burned into his trousers and shame burned onto his cheeks. I grinned, admittedly triumphant.
We fell into each others arms and then to the ground, laughing until mascara lined our faces and our sides seared with pain. It was a laughter born of survival, of relief, of a shared solidarity as we moved through a world that wasn’t fully ours. When we were spent, we picked ourselves up, dabbed at our faces with tissues, adjusted our coats, and completed our walk to the pub. We had many drinks bought for us that night, just rewards for our small act of heroism.
Later that night, in a taxi home, I told myself that I really should not do it again, that the next time could be much worse, that I could be punched or stabbed or killed. I told myself that I would hold my head high and ignore them from now on, that I would not give them the satisfaction of a response at all.
Even as I thought it, I knew it was a lie.