The smell of Chinese food that wafted from the carrier bag was making the man’s mouth water; he hadn’t eaten anything since that morning and had waited for his girlfriend to finish work before ordering the takeaway. He was still in her bad books. She had left him a list of chores the length of his arm while she’d been away with a couple of friends during the week, and had come home the day before to find none of them had been done. He wasn’t intentionally lazy; he just found it difficult to be organised. He was hoping that a house special chow mein and the bottle of red he had waiting back at the flat would win her round. She couldn’t stay mad at him forever, although some days it felt as though she was determined to give it her best effort.

The man cut down a path that divided a row of terraces and turned left towards the park. It was dark behind the houses, without the glow of street lights to soften the blackness of the evening, and every footstep he took seemed to echo around him, bouncing from the doors of the garages. He wondered whether they might watch a film later, depending on his girlfriend’s mood when she got home.

There was a hiss and a screech and the man looked up to see a lone firework scream upwards to the sky before it exploded in an umbrella of colour. Reaching the end of the lane, he turned towards the path that ran alongside the park and quickened his step, wanting to get home before the food needed reheating in the microwave. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows thrown across the footpath by the overhanging trees that lined the park, he saw a figure ahead. It staggered in the middle of the path as though drunk, but as he got closer he realised it wasn’t one person, but two.

He stopped and narrowed his eyes to gain better vision in the darkness. As the outlines of the figures sharpened, it became clear that they were fighting.

‘Oi!’

The man hurried forward, oblivious to the potential threat ahead. The figures came into focus: one dressed in Hallowe’en costume, the black and white of the skeleton making him harder to distinguish in the darkness; the other just a boy. It was the boy the man had seen staggering, falling back as a flurry of punches had rained down upon him.

‘Leave him alone!’ the man shouted.

Then he heard something else: the splash of liquid as it was slopped from a can and thrown across the cowering boy, who tripped on something and fell with an echoing thud to the ground.

Dropping the takeaway bag, the man charged at the skeleton, throwing himself at the figure whose face was hidden behind a mask of bones and darkened eyes. The skeleton stumbled before regaining his balance. With a shove, he sent the man staggering before fleeing into the darkness of the path. The man might have chased him, but the pitiful whimpering that sounded from the ground near his feet kept him fixed where he was.

‘Come on,’ he said, offering the boy a hand. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, he thought. Just a kid. The boy stayed cowering on the ground, reluctant to accept help from a stranger, clearly terrified by what had happened, and what might have happened had the attacker not been intercepted.

Then the smell hit the man, stronger now than the waft of chow mein that drifted from the fallen takeaway splattered across the concrete path feet behind them. He reached down and put a hand to the boy’s arm, touching the wet sleeve of his jacket.

The boy had been doused in petrol.