As I'm drifting off to sleep Monday night, Mr SDS joins me having
stayed up a little later, and tells me the breaking news he’s just read online. Details are still sketchy, but
it’s bad.
Oh no. Your heart
sinks, just sinks. The world is a
flawed, fractured place, full of twisted, tortured souls. You shield yourself from it as much as you
can, you try at least to be kind, caring, in everyday life. It’s
not hard to be those things, not really - is it? To just get on with your own life and let
others get on with theirs, peacefully? We're lucky here, imagine life elsewhere... but still. I
slip back into a restless slumber, these thoughts swirling around, wondering
what nightmare reality I’ll be reading about on Tuesday, things most of us
will never be able to understand.
I’m due to go into central London in the morning too. “Don’t go”, Mr SDS pleads. “Don’t go if you don’t have to”. But I
do have to. I’m very aware that I live
much of my life – out here in the quiet countryside - inside a cosy bubble. There’s the irony: probably the biggest danger I face on a daily
basis is that of an insidious, creeping paranoia about the world outside
it. I must defy that paranoia as much as anything
else, I must go because I want to go.
So I get on the train to London, and on the tube, mingle with
travellers in crowded carriages; there are extra police around, there
are serious faces, I don’t think that Manchester is far from anyone’s
mind this morning. But there are smiley faces too - cities are gutsy places and they remind you: most people
are alright, most people want the same basic, harmless things. In the city of strangers I’m one of them, not
going to give in to fear.
I have such a good day, meeting with lovely friends I haven’t
seen in years – catching up over tea and cake and paintings. I’d have missed all this had I let stupid paranoia win. It's over too soon, and I walk
back to catch my train through the metropolis, lapping up its sharp contrast to my usual habitat,
here where the sirens are my screaming swifts and starlings, and office blocks
and cranes pierce the sky instead of oak and poplar.
“This train does stop at Colchester, doesn’t it?” My solitary daze is broken as the woman with two huge
pieces of luggage, almost as big as her, asks me this. I've just boarded too. Yes, it’s the right train, so she sits across
the aisle from me and continues to talk.
“I’ve been travelling all day...,” she says, “...come down from Manchester…”
Weird how one particular word, on one particular day, can
carry so much weight and meaning and, right out of the blue, it unites us.
I’m drawn to her face, and in a split second of silence I’m
reading her expression. I need to talk, it says. I need to
talk about something. She has the air of someone who’s been awake all
night, with a body tired but brain still buzzing.
Her bright blue eyes are a little watery. Then she starts to tell me that she’s in the
army, and she’d been called on duty in connection with the Manchester Arena incident.
As other people start to board the train, filling up the
seats around me, I could just withdraw from the conversation with the
woman across the aisle. But instead I find myself moving seats, to be with
her. She needs to talk. She needs to talk about something.
And so I spend the next hour in unbroken conversation with a
complete stranger, who’s been awake for 37 hours and who, in spite of having
been stationed in Afghanistan and served as a medic, tells me
how intensely affected she feels by the night’s events. By what she’d seen and heard, what she knew so
far, what lies ahead too. I let her talk. My eyes are a little watery.
But we speak about other stuff too, and some stuff I never
knew, because I’ve never chatted to someone who’s in the army, it’s a world
away from mine - a world away from my cosy bubble. I’m so glad I stepped out of it today; I learned so
much more than I ever bargained for.
There’s no punchline to this, no big revelation… I just want
to express it. My train companion is
going to stay in my mind for a very long while.
She needed to talk, and I’m so glad I could listen.
Love and peace to Manchester.
