WHAT NOW?

We were walking through a red-brick suburban housing estate. It was night blue lamplight dark. Houses set back from straight roads with lawns manicured and neatly edged. There were no flowers or trees.
Two women came from the right crossed the road a little way in front of us and walked into a road to our left. They wore identical combat greens and had long hair.
‘Twins,’ I said to her, 'they’re twins.’
The next turning we passed on the left a group of twenty or so people, backs to us, milled around parked cars.
‘A gang,’ I said to her. Then more loudly, ‘look there’s a gang.’
She looked where I looked then gripped my left arm with both of hers and pressed her cheek against my shoulder.
We kept on walking, she wearing a long black belted coat collar turned up, me with my hands in the pockets of a brown leather jacket.
‘Oi, you,’ a man’s voice behind us.
We both looked round. Two men ran towards us.
‘Who are they?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
We started to run ourselves.
At the end of the road, still running, still being followed, we went down a long path, high walls either side, that led to a house had a front garden, a tree set in the middle of the lawn surrounded by flowers in flower beds and, along the right, a low stone wall, the far side of which was a short drop to a rough and rocky lane.
‘What now?’ she said.
‘Over the wall and along the lane. It’s only a short drop.’
By the time we got to where it'd seemed least, the drop had become a long one and injury, if we jumped, likely.
‘What now?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’