THE NIGHT OF GENERAL VENGEANCE

I think there was something in the water last night. Something that made us all go fucking mental.

Dom (the guy who crashed his scooter into a wall about a month ago, and who recently took off someone's wing mirror) started it all. I'm not sure that all the blame can be genuinely laid at his feet, but if we just accept that and move on it shifts most of the blame away from me, which I'm quite happy with.

So I'm just sitting in a queue at the lights, waiting for them to turn green so I can round the corner and park up. A moped pulls up on my right just as the lights begin to change. I go to shift into first, not paying any attention to the moped, when- OW! What the fuck? He just bloody slapped me!

Yeah, it was Dom on the moped, and yeah, he'd just reached through my car window and slapped me across the face. The lights then turned green, and he was off before I'd had a chance to process the fact that I was a victim of a drive-by slapping. It didn't hurt, what with the clumpy gloves the bike riders wear, but still... a drive-by slapping, right in the middle of my fair city. I wasn't going to stand for this. No way.

No.

Way.

I park up and head through the alley to the pizza place. Inside, I hand over the ticket and the cash to Becky and walk out back. There he is: Dom, the face slapper. Dom, whose back is turned to me. Dom, who is moments away from understanding the true meaning of vengeance. As I close the distance between us with what can only be described as righteous haste, it crosses my mind that I don't really know how best to exact my retribution. Do I just walk up and slap him in the face? Seems a bit harsh, seeing as I haven't got gloves on, and the novelty value of the drive-by slapping did serve to reduce the severity of his crime.

I know. I'll push him. That'll be fine. Just a friendly shove. Ha ha, Dom, good slapping, have an old-fashioned push in the back in return, and we're even. What could be more civil than that? This is how the noblemen of old solved their disputes: with prearranged violence. I am, in other words, a modern-day nobleman. And Dom has offended my honour.

My panther-like nimbleness deserts me as I draw close, and Dom hears the final steps of my approach. Too late for him to do anything about it, of course, but soon enough that he starts to turn as I begin the time-honoured ritual of the shove in the back. Unfortunately for him, and for my conscience, the result of this is that I catch him horribly off-balance, and he goes flying, face first, into the fridge door.

In retrospect, the sound it made was pretty funny. Kind of like THUDCRACK, which sort of looks like a band name from the genre of Retard Metal. Dom didn't look particularly amused, though; the look was more or less one of pain. Not agony, though, and that's important: I didn't want things to escalate out of control, after all.

"Oh, sorry," I mumble, and walk back to the front of the store with a satisfied smirk plastered across my ruggedly handsome face.

"Where's Dom?" asks Becky.

"Oh, I dunno. I think he's messing around in the back again," I say, with the slightest of weary shrugs, as if to say "you know Dom, I know Dom... what can you do?"

She grunts, and gives me Dom's order to deliver. Take THAT, Dom! Not only did I slam you into a fucking fridge, I went and stole your order afterwards! That's like fucking a man's wife and then stealing your post-coital cigarette from the cuckold's bedside deck of Marlboros.

Actually, put like that, it looks like my vengeance has gone too far. One slap in the face, balanced against a shove into a fridge AND stolen custom? That's no kind of balance at all. But whatever, he started it.

This revenge is a dish served HOT, baby.

On my way out to do Dom's delivery I nearly get run off the road. I'm just driving along, minding my own business, thinking about how hilarious it was when Dom's face hit the fridge, when all of a sudden some twat in a pink Fiesta roars up on my right and cuts right in front of me. Never mind that the right hand lane is FOR TURNING RIGHT, never mind that there was a gap barely big enough to swing his shitty gaymobile into, he's going for it, because he's a MAN OF ACTION.

I slam on the brakes and react in my usual style: vigorous clapping, combined with that thing where you thrust your tongue out under your bottom lip in a gross caricature that basically means "you fucking retard". I followed this up with the obligatory middle finger, and then carried on my way.

There's a set of lights only just up the road - at the edge of this giant bitch of a roundabout - and they're turning red as I approach. Guess who I pull up behind.

Yeah, pink Fiesta. And he doesn't seem to happy at my frantic gesturing. He returns one of his own over his shoulder... and then his door opens. What the fuck? Am I about to become a victim of (admittedly self-induced) road rage in the middle of the city's biggest fucking roundabout? What if he punches me square into the middle of the road? The repercussions for traffic would be catastrophic, although to be honest I'm a bit more worried about the repercussions for my ruggedly handsome face.

He steps out. Pretty big guy, bit of a gut on him, kind of middle-eastern looking, wearing a black t-shirt and a black cap. Hey, he's wearing the same bloody uniform as me! Come to that, he looks more than a little bit like Ali...

He gets a little closer. Yep. It's Ali. I move my hand away from the door lock - which I'd quite bravely been about to engage - and roll down my window fully.

"Hey! Ali!"

He stops, evidently surprised, and hesitates.

"Why so hostile?" he shouts back after a moment.

"Why so shit at driving?" I answer, then point to the lights behind him. "You'd better get back in your car, mate."

He hesitates again, and then smiles and does as I suggest. I don't really like that smile. It suggests that bad things are going to happen. I don't like it when bad things happen. He drives off, and I follow him.

We aren't going very fast. Nope, not so fast at all. In fact, we're going at a little below walking pace, from what I can tell. And I see what's happening: Ali's obviously already done his drop, and has decided to make me as late to mine as he can. As it turns out, he manages to do a pretty good job of it. The other cars behind us begin to overtake at a pretty manic pace, horns blaring, all that shit, and I don't really have much choice to stay behind Ali for the next five minutes. After that, he makes what can only be a lucky guess, and takes the turnoff I need.

Yeah, fuck that. I carry on around the roundabout and take the next turnoff. It takes a little longer than the first route, at least it would have if Ali hadn't been crawling along it, but I do manage to get the pizza delivered on time. More or less. Thanks to some shitty roadworks, though, I make it back to the store in over thirty minutes for the total trip, so Ali had achieved his own little slice of the vengeance pie.

To add to the joys of getting cautioned by the owner for taking over thirty minutes - I practice the ancient technique of staring into the middle distance until you're pretty sure the other person has stopped talking - I return to find that my staff meal has mysteriously disappeared. Seeing as Dom was in the store, where my meal was, when I left on the drop, and added to the twin facts that I shoved him into a fridge and stole his delivery, I reach the correct conclusion pretty quickly.

Dom ate my fucking meal.

"Hey, do you want to go home early?" It's Becky.

"Looking pretty dead?" I ask, casting an eye around the rest of the store. Ali's obviously been and gone, Dom's out somewhere - perhaps even eating my pizza RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT - so perhaps this is a good time to leave. The way things have been escalating, I'd probably have broken Ali's arm only to get stabbed in the thigh by Dom by the end of the evening.

"Yeah, dead. So do you want to go?"

"Yes," I say decisively. As Becky turns to check the computer (to see how many drops I did that shift) I look over at the oven. There's a pizza on top of it.

Well... I am leaving now. So, it's not like anyone's going to be able to exact vengeance on me tonight. And that's all that matters, right? I'll leave the long-term thinking to the scientists and the tacticians. Right now, I want a pizza, and Dom ate mine, so my course of action is pretty fucking self-explanatory.

"Whose is that?" I ask, gesturing at the pizza as Becky hands me my petrol money for the shift.

"Uh... Ali's, I think."

I smile serenely.

"Perfect."