Before

Rebekah had chosen the pub because she knew Johnny – as a big fan of the movies – would love it. It was on Holloway Road, less than a mile from her halls, and built into the side of a beautiful, grade-two-listed art-deco cinema called the Regal. The pub was housed inside the cinema’s original foyer, and it gave the décor a wonderful bygone elegance, with its hardwood stairs, marble floors, and geometric and sunburst patterns. On the wall behind the bar, there were huge posters for Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, which was another reason Rebekah had chosen the place: Johnny had loved both movies, watching them on repeat growing up.

‘Wow,’ he said, as they entered. ‘This is so cool.’

‘I thought you’d like it,’ Rebekah replied. Because they’d arrived at the pub early it was relatively quiet and they got to pick the best spot: a curved booth with a metal table built from the bones of an old film projector.

‘This is amazing,’ Johnny said, as they slid into the seat. ‘Thanks so much for bringing me here, Bek. I love it.’

Rebekah’s friends started to arrive just after five, and although Johnny was never great in crowds, particularly with people he didn’t know, he put on his best show for her. He was sweet, funny, let Rebekah tell stories of when they were young, listened politely as the conversation moved to school, to the teachers there, to gossip about other students. At one stage, maybe four drinks in, Rebekah leaned in and asked if he was all right, and he told her he was enjoying himself. That wasn’t entirely true, she knew: a few of her friends would bring him back into the discussion sometimes, but most of them – like Rebekah herself – were seventeen, armed only with fake ID, bravado and a youthful belief that their story was the funniest, and most important, and the only one that deserved to be heard.

As the night went on, the pub became busier, eventually filling with Arsenal and Spurs fans. A north London derby was kicking off at Highbury at 8 p.m., and although uniformed officers were stationed all the way along Holloway Road, principally in an effort to keep the two sets of fans apart, some had scurried into the Regal unseen and were shoulder to shoulder at the bar.

Forty-five minutes before kick-off, Rebekah offered to get another round of drinks, because the Regal always stopped asking for ID once the crowds were two deep at the bar.

As she was waiting, a guy in his late forties, his gut straining against a Spurs shirt, backed into her, spilling his pint on his boots. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he muttered, turning, angry, his expression fierce. But when he saw Rebekah, his ire instantly dissolved. He looked from her breasts to her face. ‘You all right, love?’

She just nodded.

‘You going to apologize, then?’

‘For what?’

‘What do you think?’ He gestured with the pint glass, lager sloshing around inside. ‘I spilled half my beer on my shoes because you backed into me.’

‘You backed into me.’

Behind him, a friend peered over his shoulder. ‘What we got here then?’ the friend said.

‘A stuck-up bitch by the look of things,’ the man said, and winked at Rebekah, as if she should lighten up. ‘Just messing. You out with mates?’

‘What’s that got to do with you?’

The man looked beyond her, his eyes scanning the pub, trying to find the table where Rebekah was sitting. And then he spotted it: it wasn’t hard because, aside from Johnny, it was filled with seventeen-year-old girls.

‘Bloody hell,’ the man said, catching his friend’s attention and pointing at the table. ‘Get rid of the queer boy and we’d do a bit of damage there, Woody.’

Rebekah shook her head. ‘Piss off, will you?’

‘What was that?’ the man said, leaning in to her.

‘I said,’ she responded, facing him down even though he was almost twice her size, ‘why don’t you two just piss off to the football?’

The man grinned again.

‘You got a filthy mouth,’ Woody – the friend – said, but the man shushed him. He and Rebekah were still staring at each other, his smile still there.

‘Just leave me alone,’ she said.

‘Women with mouths like yours are only good when you give them something to fill it with,’ the man said, sinking his beer. As he drank, he didn’t take his eyes off her. ‘You good on your back, love?’

This time, Rebekah chose not to reply, hoping her silence would defuse the situation. She glanced over her shoulder and could see everyone on the table deep in conversation, unaware of what was going on. But then Johnny looked out across the pub, searching the crowd for her, and they found each other.

‘I could teach you if you like,’ the man said.

‘Drop dead,’ she muttered.

‘Oooh, yeah,’ he fired back, looking at his friend, deliberately creasing his face into an expression of faux-ecstasy. ‘Oooh, dirty talk. I love it, darlin’.’ The two of them burst out laughing. ‘I bet you take it up the arse.’

The men wailed like hyenas.

Rebekah tried to get the barman’s attention.

Please come and serve me.

‘Seriously, though, do you take it up the arse, love?’

Please.

The men erupted into laughter again.

‘You all right, Bek?’

Rebekah turned to find Johnny standing at her right shoulder. He looked at the men, then at her. Johnny was no fighter, but in that moment she would rather have him at her side than not. He shuffled into the space between Rebekah and the men.

‘Cover your arse, Woody,’ the man said.

They laughed again but the mood had changed.

‘Looks like it’s queer o’clock,’ Woody chipped in.

‘Why don’t you guys just give it a rest?’ Johnny said.

‘Hello, it’s GI Joe.’

He tried again: ‘Just give it a rest, guys, okay?’

The man leaned all the way into Johnny, stopping so close to him that their noses were almost touching. ‘I’ll give it a rest whenever I fucking want to.’ He pushed Johnny in the shoulder. Johnny stumbled back, into Rebekah, who stumbled into the people next to her. Straight away, she could tell that Johnny hated this, that it scared him, that he was so far out of his depth he could barely see dry land – but he did what he had to do as her big brother.

He stepped forward again, into their space.

‘I think you need to calm down.’

‘Or what?’ the man growled.

‘Just …’ Johnny glanced at Rebekah.

‘Or what? You gonna fight me?’

Saliva speckled Johnny’s face.

‘You gonna fight me?’

‘Just leave her alone,’ Johnny repeated meekly, wiping the saliva away from his cheek. ‘Just go enjoy your soccer match and leave her alone.’

‘It’s football, you fucking bender.’

‘Whatever. Just leave her alone.’

‘Or what?’

‘That’s enough.’

‘Enough? I’ll tell you when it’s enou–’

Johnny grabbed the man by the neck, clamping his fingers around his throat. It happened so fast, the movement so quick and unexpected, that for a second Rebekah barely processed what was happening. She didn’t remember the last time Johnny had even so much as raised his voice – in twenty years, she was pretty certain he’d never raised his fists. When he was picked on at school, pushed around, he never fought back. Mike would tell him he needed to, but he wouldn’t. Except now he had: he was shoving the man to the floor, sending him crashing into a nearby table, stools toppling over, glasses smashing, the background music drowned in gasps and shouts from the bar staff.

Rebekah looked down at the man, splayed on the floor, his face a mix of shock and anger, and even as Johnny saw the bouncers rushing over, he wasn’t done: he went for the friend, Woody, grabbing him by the hair, by the excess skin at his neck, and throwing his head against the bar. Woody folded, like a piece of paper, his pelvis hitting the hardwood, his face smashing against the counter top, nose breaking instantly, blood spattering.

Johnny leaned over the man on the floor. ‘I’ll fucking kill you.’

He spat the words – violent, destructive – and of all the things that stayed with Rebekah about that night, two faces remained most vivid, even years on. First Johnny’s: there was corrosiveness behind his eyes, a rage that she’d not only never seen before but had believed he simply wasn’t capable of. It so shocked her that, in the hours afterwards, she convinced herself she must have been mistaken, that the emotion of the moment had skewed her memory.

And then there was the second, that of the man on the floor: Rebekah saw the fury in him, the violence he was capable of – but the moment he went to get up, the moment his eyes found Johnny, it vanished.

Johnny had made him cower.

As soon as the bouncers arrived, one grabbing Johnny’s arm, the other hauling the man up off the floor, everything altered, a fracture repairing itself: Johnny glanced at Rebekah and said, ‘I’m sorry, Bek.’ He was her brother again, panicked, worried, his voice small. He repeated himself as he was marched away, one of the bouncers already on the phone to the police.

But Rebekah never forgot that night.

Or the stranger who had been her brother.