Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

George Elliot, Middlemarch

Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!

The terrifying words from Golding’s novel burst upon Rufus’s mind at the corner of his street. He has misjudged the timing by about three minutes. He has no choice now but to walk through the menacing cacophony to get to his house at the other end of the road. 

He sets his head slightly down, eyes straight ahead, strides forward. Only his peripheral vision glimpses the colourful tub-thumping figures gathered at garden gates, front doors and hanging out of windows. Unbelievably, two of his immediate neighbours (only one of whom he knows by name) are actually standing, clapping and chatting, right next to his own garden wall. With barely an acknowledgement, Rufus swings up the path and finds himself, breathless, behind the closed door before he registers that he has put his key in the lock and slipped, safe, inside.

‘Timed that badly,’ he grimaces, walking towards Rachel, cooking dinner in the kitchen at the back of the house, oblivious to the noise on the street and indifferent to its cause. ‘Can’t believe I didn’t make it back before eight o’clock.’

‘Eight o’clock?’ 

‘You know. Thursday. I’ve just had to run the gauntlet of the neighbours the length of the street.’

‘Oh, that,’ she shrugged, dismissively. ‘Of all the people,’ she added, amusement laced with genuine sympathy. 

Rufus envied Rachel’s self-confidence and uncompromising individuality, scorning teams, peer pressure and anything else that smacked of collective action or thinking. She knew that Rufus would sometimes like to belong, not to be always on the outside. But despite all the therapy and the drugs, she also knew he would never manage it, preferring to hide away within the quiet, almost anonymous, safety of two.

‘Where does that come from?’ she mused. ‘“Running the gauntlet”.’

What Rufus’s research discovers is grimly fascinating. A military form of corporal punishment in which a guilty soldier had to pass between two lines of his comrades bearing sticks and cudgels with which to beat him. Goes back centuries, apparently. The ancients used it as a form of execution, a communal clubbing of the victim to death. In later years, an officer walked with a sword in front of the guilty man to prevent him from actually running to avoid the blows. A public trial of physical torture against which the individual had to set his face and try to survive. Rufus shuddered.

The doorbell rings. His neighbour. The one whose name he knows. He can see him, unsmiling, beyond the shutters of the window. What does he want? Rufus shrinks back into the room. All at once, he thinks he can hear uproar and the beating of sticks. A crowd, on either side of him, baying for blood.

‘Rachel. The door. PLEASE!’