The Bomb that will bring us together

Margaret Callaghan

The exodus took place in silence; roads empty of traffic, shuttered shops, closed restaurants. Streams of people walked north, south, east and west as though some invisible force was repelling them outwards. Occasionally a noisy bar punctured the calm. Its noise obscene at first growing muted as we walked on.

People cradled mobile phones like babies and carried gym bags on their backs like small children. The lucky ones had swapped their heels for trainers and dangled their shoes in their hands, others limped along beside them, some barefoot. We didn't know how long we'd be walking for.

Most people were alone. Some spoke quietly into their phones but rarely did they speak to each other. This was still London. Years of being shoved into people underground in melting, fainting heat, of being jostled and pushed in shopping streets, of living packed on top of each other; years of long queues to get into clubs, to buy train tickets, to go to the toilet, even sometimes to cross the road, had built up an emotional distance to compensate for the lack of a physical one. Occasionally on my way to work I'd see a person on the tube, presumably a newcomer, lean forward and attempt to engage someone in conversation. The recipient would jump startled, as though one of the adverts that they had been gazing at blankly had come to life. That morning, on my way to a meeting at the Houses of Parliament, the tube journey had been even more unpleasant than usual; delays on the Victoria line, the Piccadilly line cancelled, restrictions on the Northern line. Rumours reached us of electrical failures as one line after another closed and jams of people swarmed up and down stairs in the packed tunnel seeking an alternative route. I'd pushed a little, terrified as ever of being late, more especially that morning when I knew I had to get into the House of Parliament on time and knew that the queues would already have started. I regretted delaying myself by returning a DVD.

Finally we reached Victoria Station where I jumped a bus to Westminster, pushing it along with the insides of my stomach, drumming my fingers to get some sense of movement, poised to jump off and wondering if I would be faster running than sitting in this crawling line of buses. When finally we reached my stop I disembarked and ran across the road to Westminster weaving in and out of the traffic to arrive gasping at the top of the queue. As I tried to persuade an impassive policeman to let me skip the security queue I heard a crackle from his radio and the words 'bombers.' . It seemed as though we all knew at the same time. The only reaction was the increased volume in the queues' chattering. Little in peaceful prosperous Britain had prepared us for this. We were waiting to be shown how to feel.

Finally I got to the top of the queue. Bags searched, bodies scanned, apologies about the slowness because of 'the situation' and I was in.

Inside the Houses of Parliament, the establishment was going on quite as usual. The speaker of the house, my member of parliament in Glasgow, went past in his robes and silk stockings and I smiled as I wondered if he ever considered wearing them at surgeries in the East End of Glasgow, or at home in private. The debate on badger illness and how it affected cattle went ahead. Committees on human rights met and were told sternly by the chair that this was not time to make political capital. No one cancelled meetings. No one raised their voice. No one showed any emotions. In between meetings we crowded around television sets in the visitors area, which showed pictures of the outside of the building and told of decisions being made in offices next door to where we met. I had a strange sense of pressing my nose against glass to see inside to where I was.

Finally I left the Houses of Parliament and joined the long walk home. I walked up an empty Westminster, past the doorway where the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated had died, past the balcony where Churchill had declared the end of the Second World War, past Downing street, empty of photographing tourists, past the closed tubes, past the National Gallery, past the empty restaurants and cancelled theatre shows of Soho. Without my phone I felt alone and unreal, despite being surrounded by people. There were no comments, no jokes, no feeling that we were in this together.

After a mile or so the occasional bus appeared. I caught one going in the general direction of my house and, as it made its way north, it began to fill up, although the top decks remained empty. Rare taxis picked up individuals. I thought about late night drunken taxi queues in Glasgow, where people would shout the area to which they were going to try to find others going the same way. When we reached Kings Cross we were evicted from the bus and had to walk through alleyways and around housing estates to get past the large area which had been cordoned off, as police and bomb disposal experts searched for evidence.

The next day journalists wrote hand wringing articles debating whether they should have stopped to offer people a lift, and it amazed me that this was something which they had to think about and scared me that their decision was generally 'no.' That weekend I lay in bed reading the newspapers and realised that on the missing list was someone who had said goodbye to her boyfriend at the same time from the same station I had left that morning.

By then I had begun to understand. Every year you live in London you add on another layer: of fear, of separateness, of distance, of exhaustion, and as the years go on the layers become you. You close the door to your mind and retreat to the space behind it.

But that day I got home and turned on my mobile. An explosion of texts and answer machine messages. 'Are you ok?' 'Where are you?' 'Tell me that you are ok.' I turned on my computer, another thirty e-mails from people from Glasgow: old work colleagues, friends from university, people I could hardly remember. I composed the same text and e-mail. 'I'm fine.'