The Duel
The End
2.
The oldest of them stepped forward and struck me on the chest with an open palm. Confident and aggressive.
‘We saw you walking up the beach,’ he said, smiling.
‘Oh yeah,’ I replied, ‘And I saw you.’
The others stood relaxed, their hands empty.
‘Are you travelling alone? Or are you with other people?’
Suddenly, every phantom dissipated as irrelevant.
‘I’m travelling with my brothers,’ I replied. ‘They’re just up here. Do you want to come and meet them?’
**
There’s a fabulous line in The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz that describes the violence of a lion hunt:
Boaz-Jachin let the being-with-the-lion come to him… He felt the lion-life, the weight and power and the surge of it like a river of violence, calm and huge… and he was at a moving point of balance in between.’
This is the moment of truth where your fear swells like gas in a chamber; the tipping point between the intention and the action, the desire and the spasm. You become ‘the moving point of balance in between.’
On one side is the fear. Trying to decide which one to hit first, and how to structure the flow of action to prevent them from getting behind you; timing your strikes so as to incapacitate each one to eliminate them from the brawl.
On the other side is resolution. Adrenalin flows in like an amphetamine, and you know that these men had better be armed – for their sake.
**
In The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah prefigures the apocalyptic confrontation at the film’s climax with the scene of the dirt colosseum at the beginning where the children torture the scorpions and ants.
Pike Bishop may not recognise the symbol but he feels it resonate, and William Holden portrays this in the close up of his face as he watches. In the colosseum, he recognises a presentiment of his future.
Maybe part of the definition of tragedy is something that is circular. It isn’t simply that the protagonist is caught on a wheel, but at some level he is aware of it. The Bunch, Bishop particularly, are trying to escape from one way of life so they can live another.
Writing, as a form of ‘art’, is partly concerned with trying to become conscious of the wheel and its turning. Sometimes, that process can be transferred to a reader as a beautiful, vicarious experience.
This blog has been running for over fifteen years now, and I often find myself sifting through it for quotations like the above, taken from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. These details might be like that dirt colosseum. Somewhere, my future has been prefigured; I am aware of the wheel and its turning and am trying to escape to a higher order.
I am reminded of all these circular metaphors for tragedy. Firstly, there is King Lear bound upon the wheel of fire. Then, I remember the circle in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
I was totally floored by that book when I read it, and part of its sophistication is the circular nature of the narrative. I spent some time rereading it, trying to figure out its true start and finish.
I bring it up now because I am a writer by vocation and now that I’ve been paid for it, by profession, also. But here’s the irony; I thought I was writing a letter to close one circle, but suddenly discovered myself at the top of the big one, the one to close all the others. I found myself looking down, poised at the top of the wheel, seeing those figures standing in a ring around me on the beach.
Ironically, the reader always sees things with perfect clarity, and that’s why I have put this episode at the end of what was intended to be a reasonably entertaining saga about age and the lasting impacts of bullying. All that time, I was traversing a circle which is perfectly clear to you, dear reader, and probably always was.
I have made you as omniscient as a God.
**
The old man did the arithmetic and decided that three guys my size were probably not worth the effort.
‘Have a good trip,’ he said, and the men walked back up the sand to their fishing boat.
It wasn’t until I was a few meters from the entrance to my hotel that the adrenalin came crashing down and the fear flooded my bowels like cold, liquid lead. I’d been in similar positions in Morocco, but not quite so close to flashpoint. You know they don’t actually want to fight you, and what will most likely happen is one of them will stab you from behind.
I imagined myself lying on my back, looking at the stars as my life went seeping into the sand, the warm waves lapping at my feet.
It was a good death.
Theme Park at its Darkest 
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