BOMBS

On this date four years ago, bombs were detonated on London’s mass transit systems. Three underground trains and a bus. Fifty-two people were killed. I give no particular credence to conspiracy theories, so let’s run with the assumption that they were indeed terrorist, suicide affairs.

I live and work  in London and always have, barring those four years spent studying in another place. On the day in question I was at home, woken by worried phone calls from family. Of course I’d neglected to tell anyone if I was working or not, so they may have been justified in their concern. As it happens, no conceivable route to my place of employ could have placed me in any particular danger, and the same is true for the majority of the people I knew at the time. But it’s quite natural to worry for one’s immediate contacts, and it’s understandable to imagine the worst. Is it, however, acceptable to behave like this bitch?

Shocked and tearful, she related the details of how she’d lost someone at work. It was terrible. Horrendous. They’d been killed in the bus blast. Everyone was shattered. Oh, the grief. The grief. She basked in our concern until further questioning revealed that the victim had been a cleaner at the building in which she worked, and they’d never met. Fucking vulture, hovering around, tearing off satisfyingly fleshy strips of grief. Yes, it’s quite natural to feel involved. It was so close. It could’ve been anyone. It still could be anyone because such plots are ongoing, or so I’m led to believe.

But you can feel appalled and saddened without attempting to stake your claim on someone else’s life and death. You don’t have to link yourself via a tenuous series of connections in order to care. You can be scared, sickened and furious without a physical fastening to an atrocity. And you can remember the victims without trying to somehow own them.