Incendiary (7 page)

I don’t know how long I dragged myself through the smoke and the crackle of the police radios with the firemen’s boots stamping down all around me. It was very hot and the blood hurt when it dried on my face. Someone stood on my hand. I heard it break. I heard the bones crunch past each other and I saw my thumb sticking out all funny but I couldn’t feel it. I was thinking nothing much. I was thinking of those 3 kids turning slow circles on their bikes. Of me lying next to my husband and listening to him breathe.

I went up steps and down steps with dead bodies and bits of bodies lying all over them. The bodies were like islands in a river with the blood all piled up in sticky clots on their uphill sides. After a long time I felt grass under my hands and I knew I was on the pitch.

The floodlights were on. I could see them shimmering in the sky through the smoke. I crawled until I found the halfway line and then I followed that until I got to the centre circle. I suppose I had the idea I’d be able to see more from there. But in the centre circle there were just 2 men fighting. One of them was wearing a Chelsea shirt the other one was Arsenal. I crawled closer to them. I wanted to ask if they’d seen my boy.

The 2 men fighting weren’t players they were supporters. They were both big lads with bellies. I suppose they were the
YOBS THAT GIVE FOOTBALL A BAD NAME
. The one in the Arsenal shirt was burned very bad you could see the bone showing through his arm. The one in the Chelsea shirt had mostly lost an ear it was hanging off the side of his head upside down. The Arsenal man hit the Chelsea man in the face with his fist and he grabbed a big lump of something the Chelsea one had been carrying. The Chelsea one fell but he stood up again and he kicked the Arsenal man in the privates. Kicked him so hard he dropped the lump again and the Chelsea man grabbed it. Can’t you see he’s Arsenal you wanker? the Arsenal man shouted. He’s one of ours. No shouted the Chelsea man I know who this is we paid 4 million for him last year. Bollocks you did the Arsenal man shouted and he hit the Chelsea man in the stomach and grabbed for the lump but he missed and it rolled across the turf towards me.

When I saw what they’d been fighting over I fell unconscious and I stayed that way for 3 days.

*                  *                  *

Well Osama I sometimes think we deserve whatever you do to us. Maybe you are right maybe we are infidels. Even when you blow us into chunks we don’t stop fighting each other. I suppose you heard the details on the radio did you? It must of been strange for you sitting there in your cave with your Kalashnikov. I suppose you were sitting out on the rocks before dawn listening to the goat bells when one of your men came over to you. Did he say Hey boss turn on the radio we did it we blew up Arsenal’s shiny new stadium? Did you smile? Did you hear the news breaking while you watched the sun rise over the mountains?

They stopped the Premiership but it was weeks before the score stopped rising. At first they said 700 dead but it went up and up. The survivors wouldn’t stop dying you see. They had so many bits blown off them they couldn’t really help themselves.

Did you wake up early each morning with the air very crisp and cold in your cave high up above the valley? Did you step outside and stretch and piss against a rock? Did you watch the shepherds driving the goats up the hillside? Did you sit in a high place where you could look down on the whole valley? Did you clean your Kalashnikov while you waited for the sun to come round the shoulder of the mountain and warm you up? Did you turn on the radio and listen to the death toll rise to 750 to 800 to 912?

912 was what it was at when I woke up in hospital. The sheets were very stiff and white. The radio was on in the ward. 912 dead it said. A nurse came in. She saw I was awake and she came over to me.

—Are you alright dear? she said.

—Do you have any news? Do you know if my husband and my boy are alright?

—Steady on dear. We don’t even know who you are yet. In a while someone will be along to ask you some questions but for the moment you just try to get some rest.

—But I’ve got to know now. I’ve got to know where they are.

—Just get some rest dear, said the nurse. I’ll send someone along.

I started screaming then. The nurse brought a doctor over and he gave me an injection. It was very nice I went straight back to sleep.

When I woke up again it was the next morning and the sun was blazing through the windows. They could of done with a clean. There was a
BRAVE 82 YR OLD GRAN
in the bed across from me. She’d lost both eyes at the stadium and she was singing 1 NIL TO THE ARSENAL again and again and again with her voice very high and crazy. The radio was still on in the ward. 966 dead it said. They kept calling it The Catastrophe. The BBC never did work out what to call the thing you’d blown up. After days of calling it the Emirates Stadium or Ashburton Grove or Gunners Park they gave up and started calling the whole thing May Day. Everyone did. Like you hadn’t just blown up a football ground you’d blown a hole straight through our calendar.

I felt like I’d fallen through the hole. Day and night didn’t mean anything it was all just buzzing neon. I was right at the back of the ward farthest from the windows with only fluorescent strips and green lino and the stink of disinfectant. I couldn’t count the days all I could count was the bodies. THE NUMBER OF CONFIRMED DEAD FROM THE MAY DAY ATTACK HAS RISEN TO 966 they said on the radio. WITH DOZENS MORE STILL MISSING OR IN CRITICAL CONDITION. The ward sister brought me a nice mug of tea.

Did one of your men bring you tea that morning Osama? In one of those little glasses? Did you look him in the eye and wonder if you could trust him? I suppose you must wonder that all the time. 966 is a lot of Gunners fans to blow up if you don’t want it to come back to you one day. Did you drink your tea while you looked your man in the eye? Then did you walk out in the hot sun and breathe in the smell of dry goat shit and wild thyme? Did you turn on the radio and hear them say 966 dead? Did you turn to the east? Did you put your mat down over the rocks and kneel down to pray? Well I prayed that morning Osama. Maybe we were praying for the same thing. I was praying for the death toll to go up to 967. God forgive me but I was praying for the
BRAVE 82 YR OLD GRAN
across the ward from me to die and leave me in peace.

I marked the days off by scratching little lines in the guardrail of my bed like they do in the films. Each time the nurse came to give me my sedatives I reckoned it was a new day and I made a new mark although now I come to think of it the nurse might of come round twice a day. So maybe it was 16 days after May Day or maybe it was only 8 when the death toll finally reached 1,000. I think the whole country had been secretly hoping it would get there. It was like a relief when it happened. It felt like we’d got somewhere we’d all been headed for a long time.

I must of wished very hard because it was the singing granny who made it a clean 1,000 god bless her. I woke up very early one morning and it was all nice and quiet so I pushed myself up on the pillows and I looked across at her. It was obvious she was dead. The bandage had slipped off her eyes. There were just 2 holes there. The holes were packed with bloody gauze. The poor dear looked like a dirty old doll losing her stuffing. I was thinking YOU’RE NOT SINGING ANY MORE. I started laughing I never knew I was so funny. The doctor came running. He shone a light into my eyes and suddenly I was back on the pitch with the floodlights shining down on me through the smoke. I started screaming again and the doctor gave me another injection.

When I woke up again the radio said 1,003 dead and they were playing a song Sir Elton John had just written called ENGLAND’S HEART IS BLEEDING that was going to be number 1 probably forever or at least until the sun and the stars burned out like cheap lightbulbs and the universe ended for good and it couldn’t come soon enough if you asked me but nobody did.

The death toll didn’t go up any more from 1,003. They started to work out what had happened. I listened to the BBC every morning. They reckon you sent 11 suicide bombers. I don’t know if that was on purpose but you fielded a whole team. Nobody knew why you made them be Arsenal fans. Does Allah hate the Gunners even more than he hates the West in general or was it just a coincidence? Maybe you decided it on the toss of a coin the same way the 2 captains decide which team’s going to kick off.

They reckoned what happened was that 11 of your men got into the ground with bombs under their Arsenal shirts. They had season tickets for seats in the East Stand. When van Persie took his shot on the volley everyone in the East Stand jumped up. The real Arsenal fans were shouting YES! but your men were shouting ALLAH AKBAR! The police played the TV pictures back frame by frame so they could read their lips.

Your men pulled the triggers on their bombs. 6 of them were wearing fragmentation bombs and the other 5 were wearing incendiaries. It had never been done before the experts said they were the most terrible suicide bombs ever used in the history of the world. They must of looked huge under those Arsenal shirts but nobody would of said anything except maybe oi you fatty guess who ate all the pies. There’s a lot of beer bellies in the Gunners fan club you see. Well I suppose there’s a lot less now.

They reckon maybe 200 people died straight away blown to bits by the fragmentation bombs. I hope my husband and my boy were part of that 200. That’s a funny thing to say isn’t it Osama? When I was growing up in the East End me and the other girls used to push our dolls around the streets in tiny little prams and pretend they were our real babies. I don’t recall us ever wishing they would get blown to bits by fragmentation bombs. I don’t think that was how the game ended ever. But that is what I hope. I hope my chaps died straight away. One second thinking YES! and the next second thinking nothing much. Because the 200 people who died straight away didn’t have to suffer. 803 other poor sods didn’t have it so easy.

After the first blast anyone who could still run did run. There was a stampede. People were legging it in all directions. Even the ones who had small bits blown off them like noses and hands and whatnot. There was phosphorus raining down all around. It set fire to the seats. To the stands. To the clothes and skin and fat of the fallen bodies. There was an inferno. They reckon maybe 500 people were crushed and burned to death while fire rained down on the East Stand. And that left 303 people still to die.

The hospital porters said that after the first ambulances started to arrive they had to borrow rubber boots from the operating block. They would swing open the ambulance doors and the blood would be an inch deep on the floor. They said some of the things that arrived on the ambulance stretchers didn’t really look like anything.

Only 2 people died not at the ground or walking away from it or in the ambulances or in the hospitals. Quite near the stadium they found a couple of Chelsea fans hanging from a big old Victorian lamppost. They were strung up very high with electrical cord around their necks. You must of seen them Osama. They were in all the papers swinging very slow and peaceful in their blue shirts against the blue sky once the smoke had cleared. They stayed up there for the whole of that long sunny May evening. The authorities had to clear away all the abandoned motors before they could bring in the cherry-picker crane to take them down. While they were waiting for the crane to come the police sent a marksman to shoot the seagulls that wanted to eat the dead men’s eyes. Nobody ever found out who strung those men up there.

*                  *                  *

It took a few weeks before it wasn’t just May Day on the radio. Then some of the normal programmes came back but even the normal programmes weren’t normal any more. Every day they put
The Archers
on in the ward but even
The Archers
kept banging on about May Day. It’s funny Osama but the first time I realised May Day was actually real was when I heard Eddie Grundy sitting on his tractor and moaning about it.

By that time anyone who was going to die had died and now it was time for us that were left to get better. I had a broken knee and a broken hand but the doctors said it was my internal injuries meant I wasn’t going anywhere for a while. So I lay there day after day watching the relatives coming on to the ward to visit their loved ones. Some of the relatives looked happy when they visited but some of them were heavy with sadness and you could tell their next visit was a grave. Then there was a third kind of visitor and they were the unhappiest of all because they weren’t visiting anyone in particular. They were looking for a relative that was listed missing. They came like ghosts outside normal visiting hours and their eyes stared very hard at each of us ladies on the ward. You could see them patiently trying to turn our faces into the ones they were missing. Even through all the painkillers it made me cry Osama I would of given anything to look like their missing relative just for 1 second just to give us all a moment’s hope.

The day they told me my husband and my boy were definitely dead was the day Prince William came to visit. The nurses were excited. They ran up and down the ward changing our sheets. Men in suits came with mirrors on sticks. They went along the whole ward looking under our beds for bombs. A photographer came and he put a gadget up to my face.

—What’s that?

—It’s a light meter madam, he said. You’re too pale.

—My husband and my boy are missing. You’d be pale too.

The photographer ignored me.

—Please can you get this one some makeup? he said.

A leggy girl came over. She had a long plastic case like the box my husband used to keep his fishing tackle in. She put it down on my bed and opened it up. There was a whole makeup studio in there. She gave me some foundation and then she did my eyes and my lips.

—There, she said. You look lovely. Fit for a prince.

Now 2 men on ropes came down the outside of the building. They washed the windows so clean you couldn’t tell they were there. A doctor wheeled in some big shiny medical contraptions with lots of flashing lights. He put one next to each of the beds on the ward. When he plugged in the machine next to my bed I propped myself up on my elbow to look at it. The doctor blinked at me.