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KE: I saw her do it a few times, when I was watching or doing a video tutorial or whatever, and then I’d hear her at the door or in the kitchen talking to my dad. I think she only offered to feed next door’s cats so she could accidentally-on-purpose bump into my dad in the back garden. She was a bit sad, to be honest. She’s, like, one of those women who thinks they’re a teenager? Like, giggly and stuff. But Dad wasn’t interested in her. He’d never do something like that to my mum.
HS: And what about your mother’s friend Lisa?
KE: What d’you mean, what about her?
HS: Were her and your dad close?
KE: Well, yeah, but Auntie Lisa’s sound. She’s not my real auntie but, like, she wouldn’t do anything. Her and my dad are solid.
28
Rachel
My clip file expanded; I could barely close the rings. I would soon need a new one.
Mass stabbing in Croydon, gang-related, police suspect.
Double knife death in Manchester club.
Nottingham reels after girl-gang knife death.
A fuzzy CCTV capture of a violent crowd; a picture of the Manchester club during the daytime; a photograph of a boy, no more than seven, at his mother’s grave. Girls were carrying knives now; that wasn’t the first I’d seen, and if it didn’t strengthen my case, I didn’t know what would. How much longer would the government turn a blind eye? Couldn’t they see that it wasn’t just hoodlums now? These were normal kids, kids who thought they were arming themselves for protection when all they were doing was making sure an argument had every chance of turning into a tragedy.
I printed them out, these victims, slid them under cellophane and took a moment for every single one. I said a few words and closed the file for another day.
You’d think all that crime on the streets alongside Jo’s death and the attempted strangling of that Henry Parker chap would have put me off walking out altogether, but, like a cigarette that leaves you feeling sick, no sooner had the nausea cleared than I craved another drag.
I was frightened, very frightened, of myself as much as anyone, but a passing greeting just wasn’t enough anymore. I was talking to strangers more than I knew I should. But I didn’t take anyone anywhere secluded, I swear – strictly public places only, Mark’s knife safe in the cutlery drawer. I didn’t trust my jinxed timing, my bad luck, myself. All I did was listen to problems, share recipes and housekeeping tips, commiserate about the daily news, how full of anger and hate the world seemed. I stopped to talk to a chap sleeping rough in the doorway of the Co-op, gave him twenty quid, which I couldn’t really afford but which I hoped would buy him something hot or get him halfway to oblivion. Whatever helped him make it through the night; it wasn’t my place to judge. But there were no grimy encounters in graveyards, no near-suicides in town-hall ponds, nothing to report.
Days became weeks. Joanna Weatherall faded like a memory. The man in the cemetery? Well, in the eyes of the public, he’d been little more than nothing to begin with. He was like me: invisible.
I scanned theWeekly Newseach day as usual.
Knife attack in Warrington nightspot, two teen boys in critical condition.
Armed robbery in Toxteth bank.
Fatal shooting in Manchester – three dead.
A spate of house burglaries. The knife attack in Warrington turned out to be gang-related, no surprise there. I wondered if any of them would be able to say why, where it had all started, the hate.
Tragedy of scholarship boy in drugs-row death.
I pored over that one: two Liverpool schoolboys, high as kites, a drugged-up altercation in a kebab shop that proved final. Why? Because earlier that evening they’d thought it a great idea to arm themselves with knives like proper gangsters. Not even for protection; just for the thrill. Fifteen years old, both from good homes, starring in their own bad-lad fantasy – one dead, one facing murder charges. The waste. Very few kids carry knives with the intention of using them, I genuinely believe that. But when you throw drugs and alcohol into the mix, the extreme passions of the young, their rage and their hormones, their insecurities and their prejudices, their violent films, violent computer games, the prejudices of the parents, the news, those who are in power who should know better spouting the rhetoric of hate willy-nilly, you name it – you throw all that into the mix and what should only ever have been kids having a scrap leaves the ground flooded with too much blood to ever clean up, no going back, families left with nothing to do but wring their hands over holiday snaps, Facebook pages become memorials, bedrooms become shrines.
I checked the nationals too, of course, every day. Some days it seemed to me that we’d become a country, a world hooked on hate, the origins of which had been lost in a fog of pre-World War Two-style propaganda, anger-mongering that was OK or not OK depending on what colour you were, which school you went to: the enemy is anything other than yourself, beware the other, hate the other, kill the other. Anger is a leak in the bathroom. Hate is its outlet in the kitchen wall. Anger. Hate. Rage. Ramped up, misdirected, always misdirected.
Liverpool boy charged with manslaughter. An outrage, victim’s parents say.
Those two Liverpool lads. The follow-up report. The deceased’s family baying for blood. Blood and more blood. Anger and more anger. Hate on a loop, round and round. Eye for an eye. You did this to me, so I’ll do that to you or someone else, anyone else, who looks at me wrong, who wears clothes I don’t like, worships a god I don’t know about, has sex with people I don’t think they should, whatever, repeat ad infinitum. Terrorists, gangs, religious maniacs, racists, ageists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, anyphobes… people just wanted somewhere to put the fury they were carrying inside themselves. They just wanted someone, anyone to pay the price to help them make sense of it. Ramped up, misdirected: a leak in the kitchen wall that has nothing to do with the kitchen.
The sadness and rage of the world took up lodging in my chest. It camped on my back. It lived in my heart.
And so I carried on with my walkabouts – waged my one-woman campaign, as I saw it, against hate. Love and understanding, that was what I thought I was promoting, honestly I did – you have to believe me on that. One chap’s stress over the J62 bus making him late for his hospital appointment? A warm smile from me, a friendly ear and suddenly his day isn’t so bad. Some other dog-walker’s daughter a dreadful worry with her recent withdrawn behaviour? Feels better for having got it off her chest, if only to a stranger with a stolen bag of sweets to share and a little black dog called Archie. An old man fretting about the state of the world –Where are we all headed? Hell in a handcart!Laughing because I say I’ll be driving it, shake my head and tell him:You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?
I walked out and I walked out and I walked out.
I listened and I listened and I listened.
