was of a perfect temperature and humidity. On a small table in front of me sat several bottles of water, wine and beer, and three packed meals, red self-heating lights all glowing. The lighting was at an optimum level, and although it seemed that the sun shone brightly outside, the windows filtered the glare. It was perfect.
Glancing down, I saw that I was firmly strapped into my seat.
I looked outside again and nothing was wrong. Kids played along the pavement, parents chatted over fences or washed cars or cut lawns, a family cycled along the street, passing so close to my window that I could see a shaving-cut on the father’s face. They seemed not to notice us. It was so silent inside the coach — if there were other passengers, their attention was concentrated on what was happening outside — that a sense of foreboding built rapidly, a feeling that nothing could be right with a scene that looked so perfect. Something bad was coming. It
My breathing quickened and I almost went to rap on the window, but then I remembered where I was and why. I’d come because I wanted to see things like this. I needed to know that my life wasn’t so bad after all.
And then the madman came.
It only took a couple of minutes from beginning to end. Our coach moved silently to one side to allow the high-powered car to roar past, scream into a skid and mount the pavement. A toddler disappeared beneath its front bumper and re-emerged as a red streak on the pavement, baseball cap fluttering in the car’s slipstream like a wounded butterfly. A bigger kid went flying, parting company with his bike and spinning through the air, blood spiraling as it caught the calm afternoon sun.
I saw a parent open their mouth and heard the scream, and I thought
The car struck a garden wall and the driver tumbled out… and then the true terror of what we were about to see became apparent.
He had guns. Slung around his neck, a belt dangled hand grenades like poisoned apples, full of death. A knife gleamed in his belt. His face was grim and spattered with blood, as if this was just another stop in a slew of mayhem, and I saw that he had a good haircut, manicured nails, a fake tan. I wondered what had driven him to this.
The madman stepped in a soft, red, wet mess next to his car. He wiped his foot slowly and carefully on a clump of grass. And then he opened fire.
I ducked, but the coach seemed to be beyond his sight. He swung the guns around, left, right, left again, then dropped one and plucked a grenade from the belt. People tumbled, sagged, screamed, shoved themselves under cars and behind doors with shattered legs, tried to catch their blood. Sounds and colours combined, the bloody red roar of rifle fire, the black explosions of grenades, the glinting screams of agony as windows burst out and glass lacerated, crumpled brick brained, fire rolled and added to itself.
Overhead, storm clouds had gathered from out of nowhere, and lightning forked down beyond the street. High up I saw a passenger plane struck and begin a slow, terrible roll towards earth.
Our coach pulled away quickly, leaving the scene of devastation behind. I should have been shocked, but there was only relief.
“Where are we?” I shouted. The woman frowned at me as if I was disturbing the climax of a particularly moving opera. “Where
“Shut up,” said a soft voice from the seat in front of me. I could not see the person speaking. The straps did not allow any intermingling.
“But is all that supposed to help?” I said. I turned to the woman, feeling the need for eye contact, but she had averted her gaze. It was dark outside now and there was a definite sense of movement, but the windows gave no reflection. Unless she chose to look at me I may as well have been talking to myself. “Seeing those people shot,” I continued, “murdered in cold blood, and that plane falling from the sky, who knows what the passengers were thinking? How can that help, all that pain — ”
“It helps because you’ve never felt it,” the man in front said. His voice was still low but it carried, bearing authority and experience and a weariness I had never encountered before. I wondered how long he had been here. The certainty that it was forever sent me cold. “Be glad.”
“Glad?” I said, but nobody answered. I already knew what he meant. I tried looking from the window instead, and right then I’d have given anything to be able to see my reflection. It was light inside the coach but the windows were a matt black, offering me no glimpse of how my eyes had changed over the past few minutes. First I had been in the waiting room and now I was here, and whatever had happened in between was lost time. Perhaps I’d been drugged.
“Were you drugged?” I asked the woman across the aisle.
She turned to me and I saw for the first time how striking and wretched she was. I had never thought to find beauty in sorrow, but her hooded eyes and down-turned mouth, the sallowness of her brown skin and her lank black hair… I found it all so alluring. Perhaps because I saw a reflection of myself at last.
“My son was drugged,” she said.
“He’s on here too?” I looked around, straining against my straps to see if there was someone else with this woman’s eyes. But however hard I tried I could see no one else, only the grey tuft of hair rising just above the seat before me. It wavered in an unseen breeze.
“No, he’s dead,” she said. I thought she smiled, but it was a grimace preceding an outpouring of tears. “They took him from school and gave him drugs, fed him them like they were candy, made him an addict and made him dependent. He couldn’t move without his fix, couldn’t wash or eat or shit. They turned him into their slave. His chains were drugs, his life was theirs, and there was nothing…
She wiped at her eyes but the tears had already ceased. Perhaps there weren’t that many left. “Then they sent him back to school with a pocketful of drugs and a flick-knife. He was expelled quickly, my Paul, expelled and arrested and beaten and arrested again and released and beaten, beaten by everyone. Helpless. I’d lost touch with him by then… long before then… but I wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway. I was helpless. When they found him… he was half the weight he’d been when I’d last seen him.”
“Sorry,” I said when she seemed to stop talking and fall into a trance, staring at my feet or somewhere far beyond. “I didn’t think — ”
“He always wanted to be an architect,” she said. “He was nine years old when he died.” She saw me properly for the first time then, her eyes seeing instead of looking, perhaps probing to discover whether I was someone she could really talk to. “So young, and yet he knew his future so well. How can they steal that from someone so young? How
I turned back to the window after offering her an awkward smile. I thought of Laura and how, at least, she was still alive. I assumed. I
“Hell is other people,” the grey-haired man murmured.
“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I didn’t raise my voice, but I was angry.
“I’m not offering an opinion,” he said, “merely quoting.”
There was nothing I could say to that, and I felt ridiculously admonished. I glanced across at the woman but she was staring down at her hands, twisting them in her lap. In this strange light it looked as if she was kneading shadows.
I wondered how this could be helping her, and in doing so I realised that it was already making me forget my own problems. Laura was still on my mind — she would