…So here was a new kind of enemy: preternaturally innovative, daring, and disciplined, and not at all afraid to die. So it seemed to us, in September 2001.
GMT
It was 08.46 Eastern Standard Time (EST) when the first plane struck the North Tower. At that moment, over in London, it was 13.46 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – or, more grandly, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – and I was gazing admiringly and proudly and relatively innocently at the discoloured knuckle on my right hand. Yes, that wound of mine, received as I said in mid-July (through unemphatic contact with a brick wall), was doing wonderfully well: take a good look at the dime-sized scab (don’t stint yourself), with its resilient ridges; in a few weeks it would surely wither away or just drop off, putting me well on the road to perfect manual health. Yes, my wound was set to disappear more or less without trace by Christmas or even as early as Halloween…
Someone working in the yard at the rear of the house had his radio on, and the gaily babbling voice abruptly modulated into a tone of mature concern. I went to the window and listened. Reports were coming in that ‘a light plane’ had ‘collided’ with a building in Lower Manhattan. At that point the words were overwhelmed and scattered by two rival city noisemakers (chainsaw, car alarm), and after a while I went back to the desk and the exercise book. But my mood was wrong – meaning I couldn’t seem to get in touch with the novel I was trying to write.
So I went to the kitchen and activated the kettle, and the TV. It had just gone two. Now before me, on the screen, was a thing I’d never encountered before – an aircraft looking and behaving like an animal, like a cross between a carnivorous bull and an ink-black shark, seeming to rear up in greedy anticipation before putting its head down for the urgent rush of the charge…It was of course the second plane, and that jolt it gave (I later thought) was a reflex of the pilot, Marwan al-Shehhi, as he saw the achievement of his predecessor, Muhammad Atta. In the very last second before contact with the South Tower, with a quixotic flourish the second plane tipped its wings from the horizontal to the near-vertical – an angle of perhaps forty-five degrees.*3 And soon both buildings would wear lantern-jawed grins with oily black smoke frothing out of them.
Seconds later the telephone rang. It was Dan Franklin, my editor – publisher at Jonathan Cape, with some queries about the paperback of a collection of essays that had appeared earlier in the year. And why would anybody want to know anything about that? The collection – dismayingly it now seemed – was called The War Against Cliché. And who cared about cliché?
‘Are you happy with the quotes? I wanted the LRB on the front cover, but they –’
‘Dan,’ I said. ‘Two passenger jets have just crashed into the World Trade Center…Thousands dead. Nobody knows how many thousand.’
I called home as I watched the first Tower coming down. Elena was calling home too – the house of her childhood, her mother’s house in Lower Manhattan (and there was also Elena’s sister and brother, both nearby). We talked at length about organising the girls, and about shopping, and about having what used to be known as a quiet night in.
I called Washington DC, and got the machine – but Christopher, I remembered, was on the road somewhere in the west. Washington DC had also been attacked, by the third plane, which was flying so low, a witness said, that it seemed to be driving to the Pentagon (and driving at 500 mph). I had another look at New York. Manhattan was barely visible beneath the fouled sky. Manhattan had gone under.
I called a couple of friends in SoHo and got dead lines.
All off
It was Tuesday. And at four o’clock every Tuesday (and every Thursday) I attended an exercise class in Notting Hill Gate. So I thought I might as well act normally, and there seemed no point in not going…On my way out I had another brief session with my scab; whereas the carapace, the protective crust, gave no pain when I prodded it, the ambient area, I found, was still stringently tender to the touch.
Then I walked down the cobbled mews and under the arch and out into the street. Early autumn, and no weather to speak of, no weather one way or the other. As I passed the primary school on Elbury Avenue I slowed and slowly rocked to a halt. The children were being given a final flail in the playground, and I was abruptly riveted by the texture of the noise they made. This was the noise of ingenuous energy and excitation; but it now sounded like mass panic – a ragged crackle as loud as their lungs could make it…
At the crossroads again I paused, and stayed there for two or three cycles of the traffic lights. It seemed a curious arrangement – with the cars: how they stopped and patiently crouched in position when the lights went red, then crept meekly forward when the lights went green.*4 From where I stood on the kerb it felt waywardly literalistic, almost whimsically quaint, to heed the dictates of the lime, the gold, the rose. An anoraked youth on a bicycle was approaching with an arm trustfully out-thrust, dramatising his firm intention of turning left…
The users of the thoroughfare had not yet absorbed the other lesson of that particular day. That lesson was about the pitiful flimsiness of all prohibitions.
When I’d done my pilates, when I’d waved my arms about and flexed and wiggled my legs in the air and performed ‘the sock stretch’
