A gruesome North Finchley tale (this one owes a lot to Cusp)

Many years, almost two decades ago, there was a street person in North Finchley called Horace. He was a black guy, friendly, rotund, in his thirties, maybe, it's so hard to tell, as I've said before. I call Horace a street person, although I don't know whether he had a home he slept in or whether he spent his nights, too, somewhere in the nooks and alleyways and shop fronts of the high street. He certainly spent all his days there, usually parked in front of the shops - what were they, I find myself wondering now, trying to remember - Sainsbury's, probably, Woolie's, certainly, maybe a Boots - it is a long time ago. Horace spent his days outside the high street shops, greeting the people walking past, the people of the neighbourhood. He seemed to know just about all of them by name. Yes, said my boyfriend-of-sorts at the time - we'll call him Mr B------n, it may or may not be his real name - you tell Horace your name once and he'll remember it forever. He remembers everyone's name. Let me show you. Alright Horace, he called out - except because it was Nawf London, he said "awrigh". Awrigh Mr B------n, Horace replied. Horace was beaming but I didn't tell him my name.

Sometimes, you'd hear a great big shouty racket from the high street, really loud, it carried right the way inside the shops, down the street, I swear if the window was open you could hear it at our shared house down one of the side streets, although it was a good few houses down (and here I note I cannot remember the name of that street, it is gone, and this fills me with a nostalgia for the unhappy young adulthood year I had there. It was the room where I hand-reared the kittens named after the Beatles, and where we had the burgundy walls and, on one of the walls, a camouflage netting with weird things stuck to it - an inflatable duck, other similar items of interest, and the orange light bulb and the chest of drawers I painted alternating the drawer and knob colour between lime green and pale purple (I know, I know), only to discover as some of the white paint the thing was painted in chipped off that it had, at some point, been exactly the same hue of purple, before me, and the huge garden down the back, which just went on and on and where we had that Hallowe'en party where Dave Allen got so out of it he spent the evening walking around looking for an ashtray because he didn't want to stub out his fag on our carpet). Sometimes, you'd just suddenly hear this shouty racket, loud, upset, but not really threatening (and I am easily frightened by violence and detest confrontation). Ah, people would say, including the boyfriend-of-sorts whom I was about to swap for the man who was to father my children, ah, it's only Horace, someone's wound him up again. How? I asked. Oh, if you say "heads" to him, he really goes mad. Shall I show you? No, no, you're alright, don't wind him up, please, but why "heads"? Because

one night, some guys got the idea to wind Horace up a bit, they pushed him around, punched him a couple of times, frightened him, they stood in a circle around him and said, Right Horace, we're going to toss a coin. If it's tails, we'll let you go, but if it's heads, we'll kill you, and they tossed it and caught it and stood around him, in a circle, and chanted heads! heads! heads! heads! heads!...

and twenty years on, I hurt for Horace, and send this post out there to apologise to him for what was done to him, although it wasn't me, although I couldn't have stopped it, and thank Cusp for saying something in a comment thread that triggered his memory in my mind.