Chapter 3 of "The Knock 'em Down Boys" a coming of age novel with a twist - the boys meet Robin.

Rat and Sparky save a girl called Robin from a pretty unpleasant situation. If you want to read Chapter 4, let me know your thoughts below where you can like, comment, share or subscribe!

Chapter 3

Leyton Orient – Home – Tuesday, September 3rd

The night we met Robin was a Tuesday.

Robin had been wandering around the Manchester Road area of town.  

To understand what was happening to Robin, you need to know about Manchester Road. Everyone in our town knows about this place. It’s rough, it’s dodgy and some nasty stuff happens here.

Me and Sparky often used the route as a shortcut through to the Ground if we had been in town before a match – but even we kept our wits about us when we moved through the Manchester Road backstreets.

Robin wasn’t dressed out of the ordinary: skinny jeans, pink hoodie, and trainers.

The way Robin tells it, she was walking along minding her own business and going at a good pace when she realised that she was being followed by a bunch of lads.

The next thing Robin knows, one of the lads has slapped her backside, a second has asked her for sex, and two others have moved around in front of her to cut off any escape.

In her mind, she had two options. First option, reason with the lads and say that they’ve made some kind of mistake. Second option, try to front them out.

She chose option two and pushed at the two in front of her, challenging them for chatting shit about how she was a dirty little skank. Then she ran at them to try and get past.

They grabbed her easily. One of the lads behind her pinned her arms and then twisted them behind her back.

She told us that she struggled, turning to spit in the face of the lad who had grabbed her arms, and if she could have, she would have tried to claw his face off.

She couldn’t say which one, but one of the lads twisted her head around to face the two at the front, grabbing a large clump of her hair in the process. She could feel knuckles against her scalp and managed to struggle one arm free, grabbing at the wrist of the bloke who had a bunch of her hair in his fist.

She pushed her fingernails into the soft underside of his wrist imagining if she pushed hard enough she might just get through to his veins.

Seeing what Robin was trying to do, one of his mates punched her around the head, near the temple. She felt the pain quickly and the sensation that she was being moved.

She panicked then, and just started screaming.

The lads tried to cover her mouth, but when they did, she bit them as hard as she could.

She ended up with a few more smacks in the mouth for her trouble. That was when she realised that she wasn’t going to get out of what was coming so easily and that maybe struggling was just making a shit situation worse.

She stopped fighting then, and they eased her into the middle of an alleyway not far from where we were taking our short cut.

For whatever reason, they couldn’t quite manage to do what they had intended now that they had their chance, and maybe that was good for her, because it took me and Sparky a little bit longer to notice what was going on.

They were probably expecting Robin to cry her eyes out and beg them not to hurt her. That was probably what was throwing them off their stride. They weren’t exactly getting what they wanted from Robin. She wasn’t playing the victim the way that they had imagined it in their script.

I remember that we heard a commotion somewhere up in front of us. We definitely heard a girl’s voice and she wasn’t happy.

Robin says she must have wound them right up, because the four of them launched themselves at her at the same time, twisting her around, slamming her face into a damp wall and dragging her cheek down the rough surface until she was bent over.

Three of them were keeping her in position while the other one, the loudest one, was struggling to get her jeans over her hips and having a job of it on account of how tight they were.

Robin first realised that me and Sparky were there when there was no one holding her against the wall and the pretend hard man voices of the lads who were trying to do her over had changed to the terrified cries of little kids.

Being shit scared does that to some people.

Robin told me afterwards that she was ready to run then, and leave us outnumbered. While she was grateful that she wasn’t going to be raped by four sad pricks, she had no idea who we were and what we would want in return for the favour of pulling them off her.

Two of the brave lads turned tail and showed us a clean pair of heels as soon as we dragged them off Robin. They got to the alleyway’s exit and didn’t even look behind to see what had happened to their mates.

The other two weren’t so lucky.

Within seconds, one of them was slumped against the opposite wall from me; blood was seeping from one of his eyes, his nose and mouth. I had hit him three times with speed, accuracy and power, opening cuts in several places on his face. I slapped his face a few times and shouted a few insults, but he didn’t respond with anything like a fight.

Sparky was kneeling on the face of the other one who had tried to get Robin’s jeans down. His weight was grinding the lad’s face into some broken glass and dirt on the floor of the alleyway. The lad was curling up like a baby as Sparky spoke.

“Is that all you have got?”

Neither of them said anything.

The one in front of me, slumped against the wall, shook his head slightly as if to say no more please.

Sparky lifted himself up and slammed his knee down with its full crunching force into the face of the lad he had pinned down.

Leaving the lad on the floor, Sparky got up and nodded to me, brushing the dust from his clothes. We were both good dressers, and whatever was happening, we wanted to try to get to the match without looking like tramps.

I checked my jacket, jeans and trainers. I couldn’t see any damage.

Sparky did the same. We could both put up with our clothes getting ripped or stained in action, but not by these pricks.

The lad who Sparky had dealt with was crawling away through the dirty puddles and crap on the alleyway’s floor – and he wasn’t looking back.

Robin told us later that she watched him and hoped that his face was worse off than hers, which wasn’t at its prettiest after being smashed into the wall.

Seeing the coward crawl away, I turned my back on the lad slumped against the wall thinking he was finished. I’m not one to dish out more than another lad can take. I let my fists fall to my sides and moved towards Robin to see if she was alright.

It was then that Robin shouted to me to watch out – and just in time.

I side stepped and the tosser who had been slumped against the wall came past with a bit of a brick.

Me and Sparky were on him in less than a second, before he even had a chance to turn around and see what was coming.

He had stopped screaming by the time we had finished with him. He had stopped moving too, though I think he was breathing when we left.

I spoke to Robin first, “You’d better come with us. You don’t look so great. We need to get you sorted out, and when these arseholes find their mates, they’ll miraculously find some bottle too.”

I suppose she would have been as scared of us as she was of them. But what choice did she have?

When we had walked back onto Manchester Road proper, away from the alleyways and hidden attacks, Sparky spoke to her.

“Are you alright? Your face looks sore.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I’m fine, and thanks. You didn’t have to do that. They might come looking for you now.”

“They might,” I said, “but if they know what’s good for them, they’d better not. That was just a taster session. If they come back, we’ll meet our mates and do them properly.”

I looked at Sparky, “Did you let them know who we were?”

“When I had my knee in his face. They wanna make something of it, then they know exactly who to look for.”

Robin couldn’t have helped registering the quiet menace in Sparky’s voice.

 “My name’s Rat and this is Sparky,” I said, realising we hadn’t even told her our names.

“Funny names,” she said smiling and then rubbing the side of her face.

I was still looking around us, just checking in case the lads who had attacked Robin found their bottle more quickly than we anticipated.

Sparky was looking ahead, his fists still clenched.

“What were you doing in that backstreet?” Robin asked as we turned a sharp right at the top of Manchester Road and walked at a pace towards The County Ground.

“Taking a short cut,” said Sparky.

“A shortcut?”

“Yeah.”

“Where to?” She asked.

“We’re going to meet a few mates,” I said, “and then we’re going to the football.”

While I spoke, Sparky flagged a taxi down.

“And what about you? What were you doing?” I asked her.

Robin looked at me closely then, like she was trying to work me out or something, before looking away.

“Taking a shortcut too.”

“Look,” I said knowing we didn’t have much time left to get to the ground, “here’s a taxi. It’ll take you home, or to the hospital if you prefer. Are you sure you’re ok?”

“Yeah,” Robin said, “I’m fine. Just a few bruises and scratches, thanks to you two.”

While we were talking Sparky paid the taxi driver cash and told him quietly to take Robin wherever she wanted to go and keep the change.

We both nodded as Robin settled down in the car. Sparky shut the cab’s door. Robin said a few words to the driver and the taxi moved off.

We started walking along the road to the ground when we saw the Taxi stop at the end of the road and start reversing towards us.

Robin was hanging out of the window waving a piece of paper she must have got from the driver. The taxi stopped next to us, and she passed the piece of paper to me with a smile. Then the taxi drove off.

Written on the paper, was her name and mobile number. I looked at it for a moment, and then passed it to Sparky.

He looked at it, folded it neatly and put it in his pocket.

It was near kick-off so I texted the other lads to let them know we were on our way.

Then we hurried towards The Ground, hoping that our little bit of exercise wouldn’t make us late for the meeting with Ghandi and Scratch.

If you are enjoying this story, and you want to read more about Rat, Sparky and Robin - or Ghandi and Scratch - then let me know below where you can like, comment, share and subscribe!