I meet James on my way out. He’s coming back from the shops with a few purchases in a carrier bag.
‘Good evening,’ he says blandly – whatever the truth about his memory, he recognises me perfectly well every time he sees me – and then he gives me that smile.
There is poor David, that smile seems to say. There is David with all his responsibilities and pressures and painful attachments. There is David the ever-anxious juggler, still trying desperately to keep those clubs in the air. And here, on the other hand, is lucky James, with his life-long sick note, giving him permission to let them fall.
12
Rage
On that particular morning I’d travelled down to London by train from Cambridge, where I’d been participating in a conference on problems of governance in emerging economies, and had stayed overnight with some friends. I arrived at King’s Cross at 8.15 or thereabouts. I stood in a queue at a food stall for a couple of minutes, meaning to buy myself a croissant and a cappuccino, then decided that I really didn’t need them. I’d already had one breakfast and I was, and still am, over two stone overweight. So I abandoned the queue and headed down to the southbound Piccadilly Line in order to travel to the Holborn offices of a certain NGO, small, but highly regarded in the field, which funds experimental agricultural projects in southern Africa. They’d commissioned me and an old colleague of mine called Emily to do an evaluation of one of their projects, and we were due to present our provisional findings at 9.30.
There was a train waiting at the platform. I climbed onto it near the front and, although of course it was pretty full at that time of the morning, I was lucky enough to find myself a seat. On the way up from Cambridge, I’d gone over our provisional report and jotted down some key points. Now, as the train moved off, I went back over the notes I’d written to make sure I’d got them clear in my mind. I was keen to make a good impression because I wanted to pick up more commissions from this particular outfit. They paid well and I needed the work. My wife and I had recently separated, so we had two houses to pay for instead of one, and my daughter Jasmine was about to start at university.
The doors closed. The train picked up speed and plunged into the southbound tunnel. I looked up for a moment at my travelling companions: Londoners – black, white, brown – reading, playing with their phones, listening to music, or just quietly sitting or standing in that little capsule of air and electric light and thinking their private thoughts as they hurtled through concrete and clay. People sometimes talk about the loneliness and alienation of big cities but I felt a surge of affection for these city folk, who every single day encounter many times more human beings than they could hope to get to know in an entire lifetime. How many other species would sit quietly and harmoniously in such a confined space with so many fellow creatures they’d never met?
I arrived at the office in time to get a cup of coffee before the meeting, and have a quick word with Emily, who’d travelled up from Brighton. Two more people arrived, Peter and Amina – we knew both of them pretty welclass="underline" the overseas development community is a small world – and the four of us went through into the meeting room to wait for the most important person, Sue, who as head of the NGO’s research section, had commissioned our work.
Sue arrived late, looking very agitated.
‘Haven’t you heard the news? There’s been a whole series of bomb attacks in the Underground. The whole tube system has shut down.’
We put off the start of the meeting. Amina set up her laptop on the table so we could watch the unfolding story, both to figure out its immediate implications for our day and to process it in a more general sense. There were suggestions at first that as many as six bombs had gone off, but the reports gradually settled on three: three different trains, one at Aldgate, one at Edgware Road and one at Russell Square. But then, just when that seemed to have been clarified, another bomb went off on a bus. How many more would there be?
I don’t remember the timing of it all, but at some point I figured out that the train bombed at Russell Square was on the southbound Piccadilly Line and must have followed directly after the one I travelled on. I looked back at my peaceful space capsule, hurtling through the earth, and imagined another one just like it, another collection of ordinary London people – white, black, brown – reading, listening to music, or just thinking their own thoughts, as they followed my train into that same dark tunnel. But, in their case, this familiar scene had been abruptly torn away like some flimsy canvas backdrop. Some of them would have been buried under corpses, or trapped by bits of train, or impaled by other people’s bones. Some would have been blown to pieces. Some would just be terrified. I imagined a second or two of silence and then screaming voices everywhere, from up and down the train, like the voices of the damned in hell.
‘My feeble attempt at dieting hasn’t succeeded in reducing my weight,’ I told the others, my voice wobbly, ‘but it may quite possibly have saved my life. If I’d bought that croissant, I’d have missed the train I came on, and caught the one after.’
I was pretty shaken for many days afterwards, but I didn’t suffer the survivor guilt that some people report after a close shave of that kind. I guess one day I may eat these words, but I’ve never really got that ‘Why me?’ stuff. The answer, it seems to me, is quite simple: I didn’t buy the croissant. What more do people expect? How exactly do they imagine this universe is arranged?
And as to the question of why anyone could feel justified in killing and maiming people who he or she didn’t even know, well, that wasn’t a mystery to me either.
Nowadays, when white British folk like me hear the word terrorist we think of some fanatical Islamist dreaming of martyrdom and paradise, his beliefs utterly alien to our own. My neighbour George, for instance, is a philosophy lecturer who is irritated to distraction by anything that isn’t logical, and he blames the whole phenomenon, firstly on the backwardness of the Islamic religion, and secondly, and more generally, on religion itself. If only these people could be weaned off their medieval belief in a superior being and persuaded to embrace secular, scientific, progressive modernity, then, in George’s view, this irrational and ugly behaviour would cease.
But George is very young, and I’ve reached the age when even philosophers look like kids. I remember the terrorists of the sixties and seventies: the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Basques and the IRA. None of them were motivated by religion, and most of them, including even the Arabs, were Marxists: which is to say that they subscribed to an ideology that saw itself precisely as secular, scientific and progressive. What’s more, the European terrorists often came from very similar backgrounds to my neighbour George and myself. Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, for instance, both came from middle class academic families, just like the family I grew up in, or George’s family now.
So, yes, in these present times, it is young Muslims who are being drawn to the possibilities of random murder as a way of making a political or moral point. But in my teenage years that particular pressure wave was passing through a different medium, and was much closer to my own world and my own experience. And, sequestered though I was in the bubble-like environment of a private boarding school, I myself felt its pull.