“No, it’s not,” I said.
“What do you mean?” He was looking down at me, with concern, I expect. I may have been pale. I was staring through the wall.
“It’s a warning from hell,” I said.
Finally, I looked at him and focused. I could tell he wanted to ask the same question again. Instead, he just said, “I wouldn’t do that.”
“I know,” I said.
9
When the bombs went off on the London Underground in July 2005, I was in a stockbroker’s office, talking about funding mission in the City, and Sky News was running on screens suspended from the ceiling, a silent pantomime of a major “power failure” on the transport system. Do us a favour, I thought. The dark truth we suspected surfaced when we saw the lid blown off the bus and the faces of survivors, white, black and red. I can remember wondering what I should do, whether I should be somewhere, visiting the injured, comforting the dying, that sort of thing. These were promises I made when I was ordained, but my instincts had been nurtured in Africa.
As it turned out, the decision was made for me. Hugh called my mobile and told me I’d been allocated Aldgate tube station, under the London Diocesan Crisis Plan. I didn’t know we had a plan. I walked quickly up Fenchurch Street, the sound of sirens the only augur that this wasn’t a normal City day.
My dog collar was all that was needed to penetrate the police cordon and, as ever, I’d entered a brutish new world, devoid of anyone without a fighting role to play, like a war zone. In a small, hastily erected marquee, I was given an identity card to fill out, simply name, function and employer. In the final category, I wrote “God”. When I ran an errand later and had to show it to an officer at the tapes, he laughed. It is a laugh, really.
At the church, St Botolph without Aldgate, a light and airy seventeenth-century rebuild next to the Underground station, the incumbent staff and clergy were doing the best they could to become a field station for the emergency services, mostly an elite crew of fire and rescue firemen trained for bomb carnage.
I smiled. The atmosphere of suppressed desperation was very much like Africa, but we were fulfilling our caricature of old England. We were making tea.
“We must get them something to eat – to keep up their strength,” I said to a tall police officer in a hi-vis jacket. He took me across the road, traffic lights signalling dutifully to a road blocked by parked ambulances. Opposite, there was a City sandwich mini-mart, evacuated of its staff. They’d left in a hurry. It was unlocked; the swing door gave listlessly to my shoulder. Tight little gondolas freshly filled with tempting gourmet sandwiches and salads for a lunch hour that the local money men and international currency dealers would now be spending in the bars to the west.
“Help yourself,” said the policeman. “It’s OK.”
He held a cardboard box, while I randomly reached for salmon, couscous, all-day breakfasts, yoghurts and crisps.
“Better not take too much ham,” he said. “There may be Muslims.”
I filled plastic carrier bags too and we crossed with our booty back to St Botolph’s. The church was filling now with a shift just up from the dark underworld beneath. Big men in almost paramilitary gear, they stood about with mugs of tea and coffee or sat uncomfortably in small groups in the pews. I started to do what I do. I fed the hungry.
I’ve often found violence surprisingly easy. People don’t realise that. You just need to get started. Once you’ve hurt someone, really injured someone or just hurt them emotionally, you wonder, frankly, what all the fuss was about. And then it suddenly makes sense of all those assaults you hear about, the ones that make you wonder: why didn’t they stop to think for a second just before pushing the knife or pulling the trigger, like most of us would?
But you don’t think, you see, because it’s easy, because you’ve done it before and it’s over before you realise you’ve started. That’s why it makes no sense to people reading newspaper reports in their conservatory extensions. They see someone on death row or facing decades in prison and think, how stupid, all for a moment in which they could have weighed the consequences and made a different decision. Never mind thinking about the victim – why didn’t they think of themselves? Then they wouldn’t have ruined their lives too. But it’s not like that. You’re resentful, you’re angry, you even hate and then you do what you do, the opportunity arises so you just do it. Oops.
The first time it happened to me, it was all over before I knew I’d taken any kind of decision. I suppose I was a little surprised I’d done it, but I knew in the instant of seeing what I’d done that I could do it again. I can’t say that I wanted to do it again, but I’d lost my violence virginity and, rather than remorse, all I felt was relief, like a rite of passage. Any mystery was gone and I could do it again and again if I wanted. I’d hugely injured another person, but I didn’t care about that of course. As for me, it was no big deal, really.
This is how it happened. My dad struggled not so much with the functions of bringing me up – that is, feeding and educating me, and I suppose being there for me, bless him – but with the logistics. He was a single parent, having lost Mum to cancer just as I was starting secondary school, and he had to get around his job and get me around mine, or so he thought. He’d take me to the cinema most Saturdays in term time and take care about what he took me to
