Nicola Griffith - Always

She picked an orange-and-red ray gun and held it in two hands, like a TV cop.

“What kind of gun is it?”

“A big one,” she said with relish.

“Anyone, give me the name of a handgun.”

“SIG-Sauer P210,” Therese said. “Or a Smith and Wesson 627, if you prefer revolvers.”

Everyone looked surprised, or perhaps impressed. I certainly was.

“That’s a heavy gun,” I said.

“Nearly three pounds, unloaded. But it takes eight rounds.”

“How many’s the other one got?” Suze asked her.

“The Sig? Eight in the magazine, one in the chamber.”

“Then that’s what this is.”

“All right,” I said, and stood about ten feet away. “Shoot me.” I sounded like something from a bad porn film.

Suze took a wide-legged stance, aimed, and I waved the T-shirted hand very slowly to one side just as she began to squeeze.

“Shit.” She squirted again. I made the wave a lazy, three-dimensional figure eight. She began to swear and pump furiously with her index finger and I simply walked up to her, still waving one hand, though a little more randomly, and took the gun away.

“Of course,” I said to the class, “I doubt I’d be as calm if that were a real gun. Then again, with the noise and the weight and only nine bullets, she probably wouldn’t have been as accurate.”

“She missed!” Pauletta said.

“Yes. Most people do, most of the time.”

“Handguns are more accurate than water pistols,” Therese said.

“In the hands of an expert, and on the range, wearing ear protection and aiming at a stationary target, yes. In real life, no. A shooter will hit a running target only four times out of a hundred—and even then the bullet is extremely unlikely to find a vital organ. You can improve even those overwhelmingly favorable odds by not running in a straight line.”

“But…” Nina said, and couldn’t think of anything to add.

“If someone pulls a weapon on you, keep breathing and start thinking.”

“Start running.”

“Yes, if you can. If you can’t, start asking yourself questions. What weapon is it? What kind of person is holding the weapon?” They all looked monumentally blank. “Ask yourself what they want. If you know what they want, you can make some good guesses about what happens next, where your advantage might lie. So, what do they want?”

“To hurt you.”

“Sometimes.”

No one else had anything to offer. I decided to approach from another direction.

“Remember that they can’t hurt you with a stick or a knife unless they can touch you with it. They can’t hurt you with a gun unless they can hit you. That means stay out of reach, and start moving.”

“What if he’s already behind you in the car?”

“He won’t be, because you will have parked in a well-lit spot, and before you get in the car, you have looked through the window.”

“I will?”

“Yes. As you approach the car, you have your keys ready. You are not overburdened by bags. You examine the car by eye as you get closer, noting whether there are any extra shadows under or inside the vehicle.” Why didn’t they know this?

“Underneath?”

“Attackers have been known to hide there.”

“Jeez, I never thought of that.”

If they spent time worrying about being attacked in the first place, why didn’t they spend time considering realistic possibilities and responses?

“So what do we do if there’s someone under the car?” Jennifer said.

I looked around with raised eyebrows and waited. “Leave?” said Christie.

I nodded. “If he can’t touch you, he can’t hurt you.”

“Unless he has a gun.”

Either they were unable to listen or they couldn’t connect the dots. “The hit rate of four times in a hundred only applies under usual circumstances. If the assailant is squeezed under a car I imagine the number is even smaller. Also, as we’ve learnt before, you can use almost anything as a weapon. You could throw your groceries at him before you run. A can of tomatoes makes a formidable weapon.” Or a cup of hot coffee. Or a good yell. Or a spray of oven cleaner.

Nina made a rock, paper, scissors hand. “My tomato beats your gun.” They all laughed.

I wasn’t in the mood for it today. “I’ve given you statistics,” I said. “Now you tell me what it is about guns and knives, even toy ones, that makes you all so nervous.”

No one offered an answer. Katherine shifted from foot to foot. Kim started flicking her nails.

I sat down. “You may as well make yourselves comfortable. This may take a while.”

They sat one by one.

“This is a serious question. Why do knives and guns scare you so much?” Flick, flick, flick. Tonya’s faint wheeze.

After a long thirty seconds, Therese said, “We’re afraid of getting hurt.” “Let me tell you something about the times you’ve been hurt, all of you, every single one: it didn’t kill you.”

“But getting hurt… it hurts.” Pauletta.

“Certainly. So does having routine blood tests. Or dental work. Having children, spraining your ankle, menstrual cramps. A hundred and one things you’ve all been through before and survived.”

“But a knife. Being cut.”

“None of you has been cut while chopping vegetables?”

“Do you really not understand?” Therese said. “It’s the malice. It’s the fear. It’s the idea of some masked man with a knife threatening to torture you, and you being so scared that you do anything he says. Anything. You humiliate yourself just so he won’t… damage you.”

“So he won’t cut your nipples off and rape you with the knife!” Jennifer said.

There was a gelid silence and they all looked away.

The bogeyman with a knife. Afraid of the bogeyman, because they didn’t know that 76 percent of women who are raped and/or physically assaulted are attacked by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, or date; that for women ages fifteen to forty-four, domestic violence was the leading cause of injury. They have met the bogeyman and they are married to him, at least according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

I had encountered ignorance before in my brief stint as a community liaison officer. They didn’t understand, they didn’t know. They hadn’t been twelve when their mother had visited a London domestic violence center in her ambassador’s clothes, chatted politely to the executive director, and been given a green-covered, amateurishly designed book titled The Women Against Rape Study. Their mother hadn’t given that mysterious-looking book to her assistant. They hadn’t taken the book from the assistant’s desk the next day and leafed through it, trying to understand who their mother was and what it was that other people thought interested her.

I had gradually become fascinated by that book, with its columns and tables of statistics, its quotes from women who had been attacked by husbands and brothers and boyfriends, by bosses and transport workers and babysitter’s fathers.

I had read that green-bound book over and over, in between novels like The Lord of the Rings and Narnia and Dune, and had gradually come to believe it was my job to be the wise and powerful one, the wizard, the warrior, the seer; my job to lead my people and protect them from harm. I was the one with the noble brow and the secret book of runes, I was the one who knew. And so I became that person. I taught myself. I read that book, and others. I watched people. I studied their faces, their hands, their words. I learnt karate, and later wing chun, and boxing, and aikido, and tai chi. Killed a man who pointed a gun at me when I was eighteen. Joined the police force. And gradually forgot that I had ever had to learn, that I hadn’t been born this way, that nobody is.