‘Did you hear me?’ Greg asks, but I ignore him.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask Amy. ‘Are things okay?’
‘I think you should go,’ she says. ‘We can talk later.’
‘We’re talking now,’ I say.
‘Did you hear me?’ Greg says again, this time loudly in my ear.
‘Not very well. Because my ears are not tuned to the language of dickhead,’ I say, turning around to see four guys, all of whom I know from school, each one of them, a dickhead.
‘Maybe your ears should be tuned to the language of dickhead,’ Greg says, and Amy and I laugh, which makes him even angrier than he was a second ago.
He tells his friends to get us, and there isn’t much time to get away. There’s just enough to lunge at the guy who’s taken hold of Martin. ‘Run!’ I yell after the guy let’s go, but Martin stays where he is. It’s a brave move. Stupid, sure. But brave.
They haul him towards the car first, throwing him in the back and slamming the door. They grab me second, and shove me in the boot. Before they close it over, the last thing I see is Amy standing on the footpath, staring in my direction.
The car starts and I feel the rhythm of the road. It’s an understatement to say that the night is not turning out how I’d imagined. I wish I were the kind of guy who didn’t panic but I am not that guy. As it turns out, I’m the guy who panics quite a bit. They won’t kill us but they’ll do something bad, and at this point I think it’s best not to imagine what that bad might be.
All the while I’m lying here, I’m trying to work out what Amy sees in this guy. I’m trying to interpret her expression before they closed me in the boot. Anger at Greg? Fear? Pity for me?
Surely she can’t be even a little bit in love with Greg now. What is there to be a little bit in love with? Part of me is happy he’s done this because there’s no way she’ll be able to stay with him after tonight. Love’s insane but it’s not fucking insane.
I try to work out which way we might be going based on the speed of the car. First they move slowly, I’m guessing because High Street’s full of traffic on Friday night. The car picks up to about sixty for a while, so I think they might be going down Melton Street, which means they’re taking us through the city. Slow, fast, slow. I map it out but I’ve got no real idea. My instinct is they’re taking us across the other side to the harbour.
It’s about fifteen minutes before they stop. One of them opens the boot but Martin’s putting up a good fight in the back seat, so he pushes it back down to help his friends contain him. I stop the boot clicking shut at the last minute. I’m free but I can’t run. I’m not leaving Martin and anyway, there’s nowhere to run. I was right. We’re at the stretch of road that runs along the docks.
Packing crates are behind us, a double lane freeway in front. There are a few warehouses spread out along the road on the other side, but that’s about it. Apart from that it’s deserted.
There’s enough time to send a dropped pin to Rachel and a help! text while I’m waiting for them to come back. Out of respect, I close my eyes when they start to strip Martin of his clothes. I can hear him put up a good fight, though. It takes a while for them to get everything off him. I open my eyes when they’re winding the tape around and around his body, securing him to the pole. They’ve got a couple of rolls of the stuff so they’re not stingy with the amount. He’s wrapped up tight when they stop.
And then it’s my turn.
All of them haul me out of the boot and throw me on the ground. They tell me to strip and they kick me when I don’t. I’ll admit I give up pretty quickly. ‘If you want to see me naked so badly, Greg, who am I to ruin your night?’
The comment earns me another few kicks and then a siren sounds in the distance and they let me get on with the stripping. I’ve always been fairly sure I don’t look good naked but I solve the problem by not looking in the mirror when I don’t have my clothes on. I don’t have to look in a mirror today, but I do have to put up with my ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend filming me for YouTube.
‘You fucker,’ I say, as he takes the gaffer tape and winds it around and around me and the telegraph pole again and again and it crosses my mind that there are some parts of my body that will never be the same after I rip that tape off.
Once Greg’s satisfied that I’m taped sufficiently, he films me some more, and says I can find myself on YouTube under ‘dickhead’. I suggest to him that surely the ‘dickhead’ is the guy who strips another guy naked and tapes him to the pole. I am clearly the dickhead-ee.
‘Fuck, I hate you,’ Greg says.
‘Believe me, the feeling is mutual.’
He’s about to make off with our wallets, our mobile phones, the bookshop keys, when I call out that taking those makes this a robbery, not just a joke. ‘Can you practise law with a criminal record?’
He comes up very close and does some more filming before he throws our valuables on the ground and gets in the car. I’m fairly certain Greg is the kind of guy with a great internet plan, so we’ll be up for all to see before they’re pulled out from the curb.
‘What kind of guy does this to another guy?’ I ask Martin when we’re alone.
‘The kind of guy who’s taking revenge for a ruined suit?’
‘Is it really the same thing? This seems so much worse.’ I look down at myself. ‘So much worse.’
Martin takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.
‘You’re mad,’ I say.
‘I’m naked and gaffer-taped to a pole. That’s what I am. It’s not your fault. I’m not angry with you. I helped you squirt him with the hose. I want to concentrate on how we get free, that’s all.’
‘I sent a dropped pin to Rachel,’ I tell him. ‘We just have to wait.’
People drive past us but don’t stop. I don’t hear car horns so I don’t think they even notice us. ‘At least it’s warm,’ I say.
‘You’re an optimist,’ Martin says after a while.
‘It seems important to be, considering the reasonably regular shitness of life.’
‘But I mean, why isn’t George an optimist? There’s this guy who’s been writing to her in the Letter Library for three years now and she’s pretty sure she knows who he is, and she’s sure she likes him, so why hasn’t she done anything about it?’
‘What guy?’ I ask, and he reminds me it’s the guy he told me about at the party, someone who’s been writing to her in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. ‘He’s been writing to her for three years and she’s almost certain she knows who it is, so why hasn’t she done anything about it?’
Three years is a long time to write to someone. That’s commitment. That’s romantic. I think about George sitting in the window of the shop, acting cynical about love, when all the while she’s falling for a secret admirer.
‘He might not even be the guy she thinks he is,’ Martin says. ‘He might be a psychopath.’
‘All the psychopaths are on the internet now,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘More potential for victims, I guess.’