Holdup As clearly as if it was happening right now, I remember the last day I ever went in second-hand bookshop. That day was #life-defining. I used to spend a lot of time in that bookshop. I liked to lose myself in its dark recesses among the dusty tomes which teamed with tales of drama and courage. I'd put my headphones on and disappear. With my world filled by blaring guitars and roaring death-metal vocals so I couldn't even hear my own footsteps or breathing, I felt as if I was not quite part of the reality around me. It was like playing a video game of my own #life. Just the way I liked it. That day, I'd been kneeling down for some forgotten period of time, exploring the covers of two books, eagerly soaking up the clues they offered me about their content whilst a dark musical maelstrom thundered in my ears. I would never open a book before I'd bought it. That would just feel wrong. This wasn't a library. I didn't come here to read, I came here to choose, and to buy. A little drop of my meagre wage earned from heroically rescuing abandoned trolleys from the Tescos car park, would find its way into the coffers of this place. It was like I was feeding it. And I loved the choosing almost as much as I loved reading the books. But my God, something changed that day. Some sixth sense caused me to glance over my shoulder. Just a quick twitch of the head; I hardly knew I was doing it. And I was gazing back down at the books before I even began to process what I'd seen. A couple of figures standing at the counter which was a fair distance away. But there was something wrong. The image chrystalised in my mind and I turned my head really slowly this time, my heart pounding so powerfully I could almost hear it over my music. A shotgun... pointed right at the girl behind the counter. Animated gesticulations from the hooded figures. Slow mo. The thick quagmire of music muddied the world — I was detached. One of the men grabbed the girl and dragged her by the arm out from behind the counter, the shotgun trained on her the whole time. I didn't know this girl, she was new. I'd nodded her a greeting when I came in but I'd noticed very little about her, except that she was older than me, plain verging on ugly, and she was pregnant. It didn't cross my mind to wonder why these men had chosen a bookshop to rob. It was clear they had not seen me. I was in a dark corner, dressed in my long black coat, black hair, black jeans. I was a patch of shadow, and this place was full of those. But I need to tell you why I had this fascination for books. I need you to know, so you can fully understand what I was going through. I am a coward. I don't mean 'a bit timid'. I don't mean 'scared of men with shotguns' just like everyone else, I mean my #life is governed by fear. Ok, I can go out of the house, do my shopping, live a normal #life without anyone guessing, but I'm what you might call a functioning totalphobic. I'm afraid of little things like what people think of me, right through to big things like plane crashes. But what terrifies me most is coming face to face with someone who wants to do me harm. I fear pain, and I fear people who don't. I know that if I met someone who really wanted to hurt me, I'd be too weak with fear to be able to stop them. My mind would flood with images of what might be about to happen, and I'd live the horrors before they'd even begun. That's why I love reading real #life stories, biographies and autobiographies of people who have faced up to horrendous dangers, endured unendurable suffering, kept their heads, and survived. The books I read are about real heroes, real men and women who have put themselves in danger of torture, injury, death, to save others. How can anyone do that? I'd be a pathetic, gibbering mess, my head filled with powerfully imagined experiences of horror as I cowered, waiting for my fate. I have no strength in my arms and shoulders. If you wanted to, you could cut my throat, or twist my arms until the shoulders dislocated. You could break my neck while I tried to elbow you off with increasingly feeble blows. You could slice me open and pull out my innards, I wouldn't be able to stop you. And these are the things that have happened to so many real people in the past, and probably are happening to people in the present, right now, right this second, so why shouldn't they happen to me? So, when I realised what was happening behind me, I went ice cold, and vomit rose in my throat driven by my pathetic terror. All I could think was 'Please don't see me.' The world spun to the sounds of satanic vocals and insanely fast drums. Nothing felt real. They dragged the girl and shouted at her. I had no idea what they were saying. I had no idea what they wanted. I was just glad it was her they had and not me. I was paralysed. I was looking in on another world. My mind was a block of ice, all my thoughts frozen solid. The only thing that kept going was the music, pounding and roaring and reminding me I wasn't dead. A brave person would have realised they had the advantage here. A brave person would have sneaked up behind the man with the gun and smashed something over his head. Or even, tried to to slip away to get help. But all I could think of was the damage a shotgun can do to a person. I imagined that dense cloud of tiny lead balls smashing into my gut, ripping me open, forcing my bowel out of my back in bits. Or what if he aimed higher? My jaw could be sheered off, my eyes peppered with shot, bursting them. Or lower? My penis, my testicles... I saw it all happening to me even as I crouched, books still in hand. All this had probably taken just a few seconds. And suddenly something changed. The sharp, bright sting of reality was all over me as if I'd become fully awake. I could hear the men now, they were yelling, “Where's the safe? Where's the fucking safe?” One of the men went round the back of the counter and disappeared through a door leaving the gunman alone with his terrified hostage. My whole being tingled, my ears rang, and it was several long, slow seconds before I realised my music had stopped. I think my phone battery had run out, but I didn't process that at the time. I just found myself removing my headphones and, for some reason, standing up. And that's when he saw me. “Who the fuck are you?” he said. Even from here, even through the stocking which smoothed his face into a blur of orange tan, I could see he was as nasty as cancer. He didn't care who he hurt; he'd come here to rob the place and I was in his way. If this was a film, it would be a film about him, and I'd be just some background character getting blown away before you'd even noticed me. I knew I was about to die in a red fog of my own exploding flesh. But he still had the gun on the girl, as if he could tell I was no threat. And I suddenly imagined, in vivid technicolour, what would happen to mother and foetus if that gun went off now. Christ, I did not have the mettle to survive this. I was not Oscar Schindler. I was not Grace Darling or Mary Seacole or the people who hid Ann Frank, or the man who broke into Auschwitz. I wasn't even one of the equally brave many who tried to help and failed, who risked their lives and lost. I was one of the unremarkable, unremembered, unheroic dead. I was crippled by over-thinking. Fear was shutting me down. Fear was killing me. I was floating. And, oddly, I was so numb that I was free of it, as if I'd come out the other side of some immense cavern, and I could think again. I blinked. I breathed. I spoke. “She's pregnant,” I said. It seemed like someone else's voice. “What?” the gunman said. I knew that one of those horrible things was going to happen to me now, but I wasn't thinking about them, I was just thinking about getting that gun away from the pregnant woman. “Look, I'm not going to try anything,” I said, eager to assure him he didn't need to fear me. I raised my hands to show him I was only holding books. “You've got the gun, I'm trying not to shit myself so I'm not going to try anything, but please don't point the gun at her, she's pregnant.” He spun the gun towards me and yelled, “Get down on the floor. Get on the fucking floor!” That was the end of my moment of bravery. Terror came flooding upon me once again. As I hurriedly knelt, dropping the books and clasping my hands over my head, I heard the roar of the shotgun, I felt the crowd of hot leaden beads surging into my flesh, ripping my face and neck apart and severing my spine... But that was just my imaginings. What really happened was this: the woman smashed a champaign bottle / candle stick over the gunman's skull and he collapsed. Anticipating the gun firing as he fell, I lurched to one side with a resounding whimper, but the gun did not fire. Then, the girl went back round the counter and slammed and locked the door to the back rooms where the other man had gone. I was on the floor not far from where the gunman lay. I knew I had to get the gun away from him, but my mind reeled with tales of what would happen if he awoke before I got to it, or even, if he awoke when I'd already got it. What would I do? I wouldn't shoot him! But he might shoot me. It seems such an easy, obvious decision when you read this sort of thing in a book, but fear had me paralysed again, like a huge, invisible being pinning me down. I couldn't move. But I knew I had to move. And, against my expectations, I found I could. I dived for the gun. The gunman's eyes flickered open and he groaned. I dragged it away from him by the barrel. Terrified it would go off in my hands, I turned it towards him, shaking. I felt as if I was crawling with spiders. I couldn't pretend I was some hard man. I wouldn't be able to frighten this man, so I levelled with him. I said, “I won't kill you but if you move I'll shoot your feet.” Where that came from I don't know. He could see I was shaking but that probably made him realise there was all the more chance of the gun going off whether I meant it to or not. I had it pointed at his scruffy trainers, and I slid my index finger over the two triggers. I didn't know if I really would do it, and I hoped I wouldn't find out. I felt ridiculous, standing there with a shotgun trained on a criminal like some sort of hero. My hands were shaking uncontrollably now, and cold reality made me want to vomit. This wasn't over yet. I knew I was going into shock, and I knew the criminal could decide to get up any moment. Would I shoot his feet if he did? I really didn't know. But those real-#life heroes I'd read about must all have found themselves in a situation like this, not knowing how it was going to end, not knowing if they were going to live or die, if the biography would be about them or about the man or woman beside them. In the end, bravery doesn't save you. Fate does. And fate is utterly random. I wouldn't survive this just because I was the goodie and the man on the floor was the baddie. It was still anybody's game. But fate was on my side today. The criminal's eyes closed and his bleeding head dipped reluctantly onto the floorboards. The blow had been a mighty one, and had put him slowly and gently to sleep. The police arrived. I hadn't even noticed the girl phoning them. There were no sirens, none that I noticed anyway, just a sudden influx of uniformed officers. The girl. She was the hero. She had knocked the gunman unconscious and locked the other man in the back rooms. A pregnant girl. I felt a warm flood of admiration for her. Beyond the wall of policemen around me, I noticed she was lifting her skirt unceremoniously and wiping her legs with some tissue a WPC kept handing her. “What?” the girl snapped belligerently when she saw me watching. “Weed myself, didn't I. Oh, and I'm not pregnant neither, cheeky bastard. Just fat.” Not pregnant? I almost laughed. But what would I have done if I'd realised that at the time? It was the thought of her unborn child which had driven me to speak to the gunman, which had given her chance to knock him out. If it wasn't for that misunderstanding, that might not have happened. Things might have been very different. A policeman relieved me of the shotgun and someone wrapped one of those silver blankets round me. I was going into shock. The gunman was stretchered away by an ambulance crew. The other man in the back rooms had found his way out and was gone, but apparently he hadn't got the valuable first edition he'd come here for. I later found out there was quite a back-story: the owner of the shop had bought a batch of old books for a few pounds, knowing they contained one worth several thousand. What he didn't realise was that the family he'd bought them from had gangster connections. I was just an extra in the final scene of this Saturday Night Drama; this was my brush with another world, a deeply dangerous one which exists within our own, on the streets, in the pubs and, apparently, in the bookshops too. I never went in the bookshop again after that. Not because I was afraid of the same thing happening again. And not because I was embarrassed to see the fat woman I'd thought was pregnant. I never went in there again because a couple of days later the gunman's accomplice came back and torched the place. At least, I assume that's who it was. So the drama continued as I went back to my #life of peaceful trolley-collecting with its death-metal soundtrack. But I had been in a #life and death situation now. I'd faced something I'd always thought I'd be hiding from forever, and I'd acted. It wasn't that I'd become brave, far from it. I'd always be afraid of physical harm, but I knew now that I'd always been more afraid of something else. Without knowing it, I'd been afraid of myself. I wasn't any more. _________ Thank you for reading this Opuss! If you enjoyed it, I'd be really grateful if you'd consider re-posting it.