White Muslim

I’m looking down at the pavement, thinking about the permanence of the crap that gets left there. Persistent. A pile of vomit takes days to wash away, longer if it doesn’t rain much. On your way out to the villages, dead badgers on the side of the road. Moles. I saw a mole by the canal. It was there for several days. You think of the natural processes of decay. Ants carrying bits away, birds coming to pick up dead flesh. But then there’s a dummy in the gutter for weeks on end. No-one’s going to pick it up, I suppose. A tray of chips. Dog dirt. Piles of it by a lamp-post. That bit’s been there ages. It’s sort of sculpted by the rain, smooth, with run-offs and curves. It’ll be washed way eventually. Or maybe Ben from next door will come out. He’ll use a couple of plastic bags and move the thing. Pop it in his wheely bin one Friday morning. That’s that then.
I saw a blackbird get run over. It’s the sort of thing you almost never see. Just in front of the Spar near my house. Birds are always swooping out in front of cars. They’re so fast – it’s as if they fly under the car, into that dark space between the two front wheels. When you’re driving, you go quiet, angle your good ear down to make sure you didn’t kill it. No thud, quick check in the mirrors, no – it’s okay. This one didn’t make it. The car was one of those big things. The driver a long way up, away from the road. The thing played out in slo-mo for me as I walked up to get some chocolate. The wheel caught the bird’s wing. I saw a split-second of terror in the bird’s eyes. This time the he’d lost the game. When I was at school we called it chicken. Someone threw your school-bag into the dual carriage way and you had to run across and rescue it. Other people used to cut themselves. Now you’d call that self-harm, a cutting-club. The wheel drove along his wing, pulling him into the road. The twin black surfaces of tyre and tarmac looked like a deadly mangle, a black milling machine. For a moment it was cartoon-like. Your body is infinitely malleable; if you get squished, it’s like a balloon getting the air squeezed out and in fact you re-inflate automatically. So the bird gets pulled in to that impossibly narrow space. Watching it I can feel the role of friction in the accident. The grating feel of the black road-top. I think of the smell of driven-on tyres, the warm stickiness that helps them to adhere to the road. The bird has no chance. Air gets squeezed out, but also blood, bits of intestine. I hear the crack of tiny hollow bones. The bird does not make any vocalisations. No-one else has noticed. I go into the Spar and but my chocolate. On my way out I notice the flattened creature. It’s like a relief map of a “Blackbird Island” in a pirate story. I step over the oozing shape and go home. Watch what happens. Count the number of cars that run the thing over now it’s stuck to the road. The first few must wonder what’s happening as the irregularity in the surface is transmitted to their wrists through the judder of the steering wheel. In the night it rains, washing away part of the bird remains. The sun comes up and dries out what’s left. The tyres roll on, flattening the corpse out like a macabre ginger-bread bird in a hellish automated kitchen of death.
While shaving, I decide to go up for another look. Take the razor and shave the skin. Why do I associate hair with dirt? The hair that passes from inside the body, where everything is controlled – my processes in command – to outside. Vulnerable to all kinds of attack. The hair like a fire-fighter’s pole down which the swat teams of viruses and germs gleefully slide. Shave it off. This is a cleansing. I don’t normally come up to the shop in the morning, for some reason I decide that I need a paper this morning. When I walk up to the Spar, I look closely at the thing no-one else seems to notice. The beak is still clearly discernable: a yellow triangle amidst the silhouette of death. And it becomes my own meditation on death. A memento mori. Remember to die. As if we might forget to do that! The only action we are guaranteed to perform. A pet cat. A badger pulled to the side of the road by a concerned pedestrian (we are almost all both drivers and pedestrians, although we react in extremely partisan ways - when on foot we curse motorists who do not indicate, when driving we vilify walkers who don’t look both ways), who perhaps makes a mental note to call the council, but almost certainly doesn’t bother. A vole on a country lane.
I was staying with a friend once and we heard a sound behind her chimney. It was a trapped bird. Her mum told me this story: how they’d once had to have the fireplace ripped out when a bird got trapped there before. She wanted me to try to get the bird out. My friend was getting freaked out, thinking about the bird, stuck in the dark and in distress. There was a square hole round the back of the fireplace. I listened; I heard the scrabbling sound of a terrified bird. I imagined the sharp beak, the scratching claws. I didn’t want to put my hand in to that avian panic room. But two women were watching, depending on me: the man of the house was out. I reached in. I felt about. It was over in seconds. To the trapped creature my pink sausages must have been an ideal target, but she kept still. As I felt around gingerly, she was noting that a huge hand had come in and therefore there was room for a small bird to get out. I felt something. Feathers. I grabbed it; expecting the stab of a beak. I pulled out something strangely hard, and threw it onto the rug in front of the fire with the disgust of having to touch dead things. At the moment I extracted the mummified bird, the live one flew out past me, saw its way clear though open windows and was free. The dried up dead shell must have been blocking her in. Nice.

Dream #4
I am on the underground. I’m standing up. I can feel the clatter and sway of the carriage. I am holding a green plastic bulb attached to the ceiling with one of those thick, flexible things that look like oversize versions of the anti-vandal cables you find in phone-boxes. It fits neatly into my hand and for a moment my heart swells with a feeling of positivity for good design. I give myself to the rhythm. A wave is propagated down through the wire and into my arm. I enjoy the contrast between the intense sensation of my mass (must hold on tight or I’ll fall onto someone) and the relaxed way I give in to the sway of motion. I stay loose and the wave carries down through my body until it’s earthed by the carriage floor. I feel like that dancing when a row of people mime the progress of the music through their bodies like a bank of human oscilloscopes tracking a sine-curve.
Poem on the underground. Something by B. Brecht “Bad Time for Poetry”. I don’t read it. Newspapers. The backs of people’s heads, their bags. Wave motion. The underground can rock you to sleep. Now I am on a beach. Walk towards the surf. Look at that massive hole, it must be six-feet deep, the bottom is dark. When I was a child, my dad used to build a boat. A straight edge for the stern, a sweep round to the point of the bows. Within the outline of the vessel we built deep wells for our feet, left raised parts for the benches. We imagined we were rowing. As the sea came in and the water invaded the dinghy, we played at getting into difficulties, getting rescued. There’s something competitive about everything. My children’s sand boat is better than your stupid castle. Grown men bringing gardening-sized spades onto the beach: so many ways to prove you’re a man. At the sea’s edge, people have formed into rows, standing further and further into the waves. Ankle, calf, thigh, waist deep. Ahead of them, moving through the rows, are people on body-boards. They glide down, threatening to bash our ankles, then they’re off again, jumping over and through the waves. Sunlight scintillates off the sea’s bright surfaces. I bring my attention to my feet: the suck of the tide, excavating hollows around my feet, unsettling me. I give in to it a bit, sway in the surf, like a drunk man on an underground train. But I don’t want to fall so I pick my feet up and place them in a more stable place (which also will shortly be undermined). Wet-suits, sun-suits, bikinis, trunks, people with trousers rolled-up, fully clothed people. It’s as if they didn’t know they were coming here and have just had to get soaked, wearing t-shirts and tracky bottoms. Lots of men with big guts hanging – the sea makes us shameless. The aquatic ape theory. We are all looking out at something. Not the horizon, the shallow curve out of which the waves roll. Our focus is nearer, where the waves pitch up and break. The middle ground between deep sea and the edge where small children jump or flee the sliding sheets of foam-edged water that the tidal motor is driving across the sand. We watch for the rhythm. The inexorable movement of the tide, the thrill of the occasional big wave and the shock when we allow ourselves to be caught off guard. None of us have noticed, but we are moving inland quite fast, following the two steps forward, one step back creep of the waves up the shallow incline of shore. I hear a shout pitched a little more shrill than the usual cries of excitement. The beach-grave has been flooded. A few heads turn. One or two realise there are children trapped in there. A man is on the scene first – the dad? The sides are caving in and it’s hard to find somewhere to stand where you’re close enough to help without speeding up the collapse of the pit. If there was a helicopter here, perhaps they could drop a line down? But there’s no helicopter and the hole is already filling with water and sand. It’s so deep, such an impressive construction. The man lies down, keeping his weight as far from the quick-sand centre as possible. He reaches in, his elbow at a funny angle, muscles in his sun-burnt back bunched tight. He’s fishing, the hand circles and plunges deeper. He’s got one. He pulls out a girl, she looks about five years old. He flips her out and she lies on the beach like a suffocating fish. It’s the opposite, he’s plucked her up into a friendly environment. Now lifeguards are here, wrapping her up and moving her away. The man’s frantic now, digging like a dog, risking getting sucked into the maelstrom. “My son’s in there!” he shouts. At some cosmic distance there’s irony here; he digs and the sand flows back immediately. This precise mix of sea-water makes it unmanageable. It won’t stick, it flows and creates a thick, viscous sludge. The boy’s trapped in a wet cement, a deadly slurry. Wait. Look! One of the life-guards has got him. The man’s body twists with effort, the sun-block stripes on his nose and forehead thrown into sharp relief by the purple straining of his face. He’s lying at a weird angle, trying to pull his catch out of the pit. His colleague grabs his legs and he reaches in deeper with both hands now. Some of the onlookers comment that he must be trying to clear an airway. Like the father he finds that every attempt to clear out obstruction just seems to accelerate a new stream of suspended sand-grains which flow like water and stick like mud. It’s hopeless. We can send people into space, but get trapped in a six-foot pit on a beach against a rising tide and it’s over. The lifeguard’s face has to serve us all as a kind of medical instrument, a replacement for TV and comment. We watch him grimace and imagine the child’s hand clutching. We see panic and imagine the grasp slipping. We see despair and imagine the boy’s fingers limp in the hole. Some of us step back from the scene. We wanted to see a rescue. Somehow the body is pulled out. They try to resuscitate. No good. There’s a point in every scene like this at which the attempt to bring back to life stops being heroic and becomes pathetic. How do they do it in films? Is it the music? In films there’s always one doctor who can’t let go. His colleagues stop the procedure. They adopt a certain tone. They euphemise: “He’s gone.” The mum’s hugging her daughter. The dad’s bereft. He’s stuck, trapped by a thought that’s echoed in the minds of every person here who walked past that hole: he shouldn’t have let them dig so deep. That’s gonna be tough to deal with. Bet their marriage doesn’t last. Death of a child does that.
Back on the underground. That was a dream within a dream. We are in the tube. Piccadilly line. MP3 players and mobile phones texting. No eye-contact. Posters up about abandoned luggage. No different to how it was in the IRA days. Foreigners. They feel the cold in England. Even on a warm day they might be wearing a coat. I carry a rucksack. It contains some lunch, a book, a notebook. The doors open at Earl’s Court. There’s an alert. The police are fanning out across the platform. Uniform officers cradling their guns. Who comes up with those strange ways of holding a weapon? A smaller group of 4 plain-clothes guys. One makes a circle with his index finger, holds up four digits, makes a fist, pulls it down fast: this operation will be signed for the hard of hearing. In your nightmares, you see the suicide bomber open his coat, revealing the belts of explosive. In the films, it’s always a stand-off. The finger on the switch – it’s a dead man’s hand device – shoot me and the thing blows up anyway. No good shooting me in the head, even. People on the platform are uneasy. Some stand stock still. Don’t want to be on tonight’s news. Some are videoing on their phones – just in case it is about to kick off. Want to have some evidence to send into the TV news. Others carry on with their business. Get on to trains, read newspapers. This is ordinary. A man comes into our train. Coat, backpack. He’s white. White muslim? The next suicide bomber should be a white muslim. Imagine the faux-horror of the news media. Has a beard. He’s about 40. He’s okay. Simultaneously one of the plain-clothes guys gets something on his radio. He’s looking around now and spots another man coming into our train. This one’s younger. No rucksack although he looks pretty bulky under an XXXL hoody. He’s got a stereo in. The police yell at him to stop. He ignores it. Can’t hear them. They rush towards us, towards me. He hears something, perhaps “doors closing”. He picks up his pace to get on board though the closing doors. He’s in the train.
The four are in too. One officer circles his whole body without warning, pinning his arms to his sides. He brings his man down. Another plain-clothes guy has his weapon drawn and shoots the man twice in the head. One bullet enters the guy’s eye. A neat burnt circle that starts to well with blood as we look on in horror. More mobile phones are recording the moment. The obscene wound like a cigarette burn to the face. Look at this: the open wound of a killer culture. The panels advertise holidays. People are screaming. The man with the beard stares. Shock stuns the passengers into silence. Some are already sending the footage to sky news. Are terrorists somehow the “less-dead”? Is this man a terrorist. He’s very quiet. I expected a rant, some last words.
“It’s me, you idiots,” I’m shouting. “You shot the wrong man.” I detonate the bomb. I am not a white muslim. This is a private jihad. Hope you got some good shots on your camera phones. It doesn’t matter now who the police shot.