I hear high-pitched screams, a woman's screams. They're coming from nearby. From a house? A garden? They are loud. And they aren't stopping. I hear a man shouting. Now she's screaming again. They are nearby. Maybe just along the road? I speed to a half jog, trotting through the grid of houses separated and barricaded by 1.8m wooden fences over which lemonwood trees bulge; it's a typical Karori (Wellington) street. Who is screaming? Where is she?

I scan the next intersection in the dim evening light. On the other side of the intersection, damp tarmac glistens under a sodium streetlight and a man is pinning a woman to the ground. I slow to a deliberate walk across the empty street, yelling, "What do you think you're doing?" The man looks up and shifts back on his heels. The woman pulls free and runs down the street, a blur of a red dress.

Time crawls as I step from the tarmac up onto the grass verge where the man is waiting. The woman has run away. Why haven't I?

The man steps forward. He stops, his face twenty centimetres from mine. He's only a little taller than me, though square shouldered and solid. Grey eyes above a stubbly chin and a flattened nose bore into me. My heartbeat thrums in my ears. "Do you want to fight?" he asks.

"No," I say.

"Oh." He frowns and drops his gazes, then turns to look down the pavement where the woman had run.

A spell lifts. I feel rain wetting my collar. I take one step backward, two, three, then swing around to cross back to where Tim is standing on the opposite side of the road. He's staring at me, shoulders hunched against the evening air in his brown bomber jacket. "What did you do that for?" Tim asks.

"How could I not?" I say.

***

A man’s face blurred by a stretched stocking; an image seared into my amygdala.

However, the police found no stocking. Only a brick smeared with my blood and hair lying in a garden bed near a shed in which the Irish immigrant cowered.

The brick-wielding Irishman and I crossed paths in the early hours of the morning in Norbury, London, November 1988. I was returning to the house of my parent’s friends Wendy and Ernie – my home for a few nights after two months exploring Greece and Turkey. As I would learn, the Irishman was searching for a woman, any woman.

Did I ever see the brick? Certainly not when it hit the back of my head! Memory serves up an image of a brick blotched with blood, contained in a large, clear plastic bag, though partly obscured by my bloodied blue and white striped shirt and tan leather bomber jacket. However, this can't be right because the police didn't take my clothes. Could the police have brought a plastic bag of evidence, including the brick, to the Irishman's trial six months later? But what would have been in the bag other than a brick? His clothes?

I know that, after the police dropped me off at Wendy and Ernie's semi-detached, bungalow at six in the morning, I stuffed my telltale shirt and jacket down behind the sofa on which I was supposed to be sleeping. I changed into jeans and a white t-shirt, splashed water over my bloodshot eyes and quietly closed the white wood-panneled front door as I headed out to find a telephone box. Familiar chink of a twenty pence coin dropping into the slot; "Mike, I need to have coffee with you."

"Huh?"

Fair enough. Mike and I left the smoky central London bar around midnight.

"I need to meet you for coffee. I got hit on the head with a brick on my way home."

"What? Okay. My bar shift doesn't start till noon. Where do you want to meet?"

I walked the kilometre to Norbury Station, waited on the platform in damp air for a train to rush in with the sound of thunder, stepped on board and slumped into a seat for the twenty-five minute ride to Victoria Station. This was the train I hadn't caught last night, because it had stopped running by the time I'd left the central London bar at 12.30am.

Next episode next week...