Late For The Bus! Not My Choice!

So my apologies to Karen, whose prompt for the Bus this week was, in essence, about choices we have made. Many fine poets have written, and you can find their words here.
http://keepingsecrets-karen.blogspot.com/2010/11/on-road-again.html

Me? I'm recovering from a somewhat hectic six days, so I've only got a story. And truthfully, being by nature an intuitionist bulldozer, choice is not something I often struggle with.

You're going to need a little bit of street geography for this one.
Here's The Hatchet in Frogmore Street, Bristol.

Here's the new Bristol Centre that sits behind it.

And this is The Hatchet side on. See the two No Entry signs in the picture below? That's just about where the tackle took place.

So, the story.

The Hatchet

The pub itself stands isolated, an island,
wine cellar cavern streets before and below.
Black and white half-timbered, Admiral Benbow,
Tudor relic, mocked by the brutalist,
pugilist, cinema, ice-rink and nightclub
New Bristol Centre that rises, squat, behind.
Come eleven on a Saturday night
and you can imagine.
Leave pub for club, film finished,
ice rink ready to freeze over for the night,
blurred bodies meeting, mixing, reeling,
in sodium light and slight drizzle,
ice-skates lace-slung round necks of some,
skirts high on hips, shirts undone,
shouts, screams, shrieks and minor scuffles,
then someone sees a man with a machete
and when you’re the fast response car
you really wish they hadn’t.
I was learning, just four weeks on the streets,
and Adora was driver, and technically tutor.
You should know that she drove slow.
We arrived, found the keen-eyed,
saw said machete man, long leather coat
in a swirling crowd of mixed agendas.
The street layout is such that though
a huge area, there are just four ways out,
so being city-rich with back-up we called it,
and blocked all egress with blue bodies.
We chose one way out ourselves, me and Adora,
the only girls there. We were policewomen:
they called us girls.
Task Force was Golf 7, Taunton, tall men,
sent four over to make the approach
of the man with the alleged machete.
He saw them coming.
I think there was a height requirement
for Task Force back then, and helmets didn’t help.
So, and I’m in his head now, he looks about,
sees officers at each escape route, and makes
a pretty informed decision. We look like his best option.
He gets the machete out from under his coat
and runs straight at us.
We girls stood stock still, I don’t recall any terror,
never played rugby, but my reptile brain
suggested go for the legs. I did.
And he’s on the ground and we have him,
men arrive and relieve him of his weapon.
Fast response car stays out: you make arrests
as rarely as possible, so it is Clive,
fat, speccy Clive who says the words,
stands him up. Machete man decides to fight,
and I watch slow-motion unveiling
machete man’s flailing arms, and Clive,
panting, throws a punch and connects,
and in doing so his glasses fly off
and in the subsequent struggle get broken.
Machete man is restrained and taken to the station.
Now, an hour later, we, the fast response car,
are called back to the nick: Clive wants a statement.
Clive want us to say how machete man
threw a punch at him,
knocked off his glasses,
broke them.
Clive wants the man charged with police assault,
Clive being the police in question.
Clive is long-serving. Clive is fat. Clive pants.
Clive fills the report-writing room. Clive insists.
Adora walks out. Adora is black.
Sometimes she feels our group
does not entirely accept her.
Clive is telling me what to write.
I am a probationary constable,
I need to be told what to write.
Then I draw the red velvet curtain,
step back from the room, make his voice distance.
And I know the Hur was good and the Cid was good,
and Michael Caine in Zulu was good
and my father, although bad, was good,
and broke that buying ring at Maidstone market,
and wouldn’t join the Masons,
and saved his law-breaking for mainly tax evasion
and, well, assaulting police officers
who subsequently stitched him up,
and I thought, at some distance,
still, quiet, of what is good.
I sided with machete man,
did not write a word save what I witnessed,
for good law is truth, and I always want to be
Charlton Heston in my own epic.