Plume - Will Wiles

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I’d go a little quiet and break my pace, and I’d say, ‘I was here that day, when it happened,’ in a voice that really stressed how I didn’t talk about it often but it had stayed with me, picturing a great dignified weight, the memory of those x souls, my gratitude at having escaped in time, tempered with noble guilt at being a survivor, my respect for the emergency services. Perhaps poor oblivious Alan would be among the x, intimately involving me, bringing the whole sad story closer, making it far more authentic.

      Or nothing. The same steady procession out of the station. No sirens, no evacuation, no space-suited firefighters, no strengthening fountain of smoke from the depths. I wanted there to be an emergency not for ghoulish reasons, but because the alternative was an internal emergency. The smoke, the suffocating need to escape – for me that was real, but it never happened to anyone else.

      There was real smoke out here, though: the darkness in the east, over the roofs of Bishopsgate, behind the spires of finance, where I was supposed to be. Perhaps that was the source of my fascination with the Barking fire – that, at least, was real, really happening; other people around me could see it too, it was in the papers. For the first time in months, the city was in sync with me.

      Eleven a.m. – the time Alan and I were supposed to arrive at Pierce’s house. I was cold and my joints were stiff from sitting on the step. Adjacent to the station entrance was a pub.

      I had been caught up in station evacuations before, as I suppose every regular Tube user has – or any regular passenger on any subway network anywhere in the world. A couple of times I had seen fire engines arrive. But I had never smelled smoke, not so much as a match’s worth, let alone the thick clouds that had almost suffocated me on the platform with Alan.

      When the bombs went off on 7 July 2005, I was living in a shared house in Fulham, and working my first job. My commute, District Line to South Kensington, took me nowhere near the bombs, and I had only just left the house when it all happened. The station was already closed when I arrived, and the pavement outside was filled with a restive and palpably upset crowd. No one knew what was going on, exactly, although the look on the faces of the staff made it obvious it was no signal failure. At that moment, an early report about a gas explosion was being shown to be tragically wrong. We were told to go home, and I did, to find one of my housemates already there and full of rolling news and internet rumour. We watched together. After about half an hour, when it was completely clear that services would not be resumed, I called the office, and the phone rang unanswered. I tried my boss’s mobile – he was at home as well.

      Thinking about it now, that was the first time I took an unscheduled day off work. After a couple of hours watching the news, mostly unspeaking but for occasional expletives and blasphemies, I went to the fridge, intending to make us both a cup of tea, and saw that there were four cans of Grolsch in there, left over from the weekend. (The very thought that beer could be lying untouched, forgotten, in the fridge from Sunday until Tuesday dates this memory for me.) I took two of these cans through to the living room and was hailed as a stalwart foe of extremism and a doctor of the human spirit. The kettle boiled, and cooled, without further attention. We finished those cans, and the other two, and went out for more. When our other housemate came back, he found us both convincingly drunk.

      The mood took an uncomfortable turn not long after that when my day-long drinking partner made some broad statements about Muslims, and collective responsibility; he alluded to retaliation, without specifics; and he spoke as if confident that we all shared his urge to punish, to strike back. This seemed pathetic and futile to me, the bombers having obliterated themselves, and I disagreed strenuously, impressed with my own tolerance and ardent forgiveness – rather full of it, really. The other housemate sided with me and the day ended on an ugly note of disharmony.

      I was at home during the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the bombing. I don’t recall if this was a scheduled or unscheduled absence. Next door had not yet started its renovation; I woke mid-morning and switched on the TV after opening my first can, expecting Homes Under the Hammer. But instead there was a live broadcast of the ceremonies at St Paul’s Cathedral. I watched, disturbed at the mismatch between the ancient ritual and anachronistic dress happening now, and the memories of the very modern catastrophe then. And disturbed at the unsimple range of emotions brought up by the day, the date. Shock, anger, grief, yes, yes, yes. All those, of course. But also that strange sense of liberation when the day’s pattern is broken, and the comfortable comradeship of the beers at noon, on a workday; and the unpleasant way the day had ended; because to call that ‘unpleasant’, could it be inferred that I found something pleasant before then? Which meant awful guilt. I hated the way my housemate had held the bombers’ co-religionists to blame, the way he easily swung his anger around to face a whole community, our neighbours as well as our fellow Londoners and Britons. But I wished my own reaction was that simple and stupid. In the following days I heard the sirens in the streets, felt the tension.

      For a year or two after the bombs, I occasionally had nightmares of being caught in an attack or other disaster on the Tube; trying to flee down lightless tunnels, being trapped in carriages filled with smoke, bodies everywhere. In the hellish summer of 2012, those nightmares returned to my waking mind, one of several choice scenarios served up to me as I lay shaking and sweating in bed, completely awake.

      We want beginnings. Start late, finish early. Get stuck in. ‘X is running late, and here I talk about how rude their PRs are’, ‘X was born in blah and spent their early years blah-de-blah’, ‘I meet X in this or that restaurant or hotel and here are three paragraphs describing that setting in not-very-amusing detail’ – these are called ‘long drop’ intros and are frowned upon.

      But what if a situation can only be understood with reference to the past? What if some behaviour just appears to be senselessly self-destructive without that reference?

      And what if you look into that history, knowing the key to be there, but can’t find it? It must be there, for where else could it be?

      This day, then, 7 July 2005, more than ten years ago – the first day I stayed home from work and got drunk. Where the nightmares of dust and smoke and burial began. Was that the Rubicon, the tipping point? No; it was a unique and terrible day, and afterwards I went back to work as normal and it was still quite possible to leave beer in the fridge unopened and forget about it, and so it was for months or years after that. Perhaps there were underlying traits and tendencies and pathologies that could be traced back further, but at that point in my life I was only as fucked-up as the average person. Although …

      More than ten years ago. Mine was a very long drop.

      Alan was not dead, or trapped and blinded in a sweltering hell while rescue workers battled to reach him. He was alive, and above ground, and calling my phone.

      I surveyed the pub: a big, bland railway Wetherspoon’s. It was almost empty and nearly silent, no music, no one playing fruit machines, no football, no giveaway background noises. There was only one other customer, a guy about my age, who was using his phone to take a picture of his shoes. A radio was playing in the kitchen, but it was safe to answer the call.

      ‘What the fuck, man?’ Alan was whispering, in a quiet place himself. There was anger in his voice, but it was not ruling over other emotions: confusion, and perhaps even concern.

      ‘Alan, hi.’

      ‘What the fuck happened to you, man?’

      ‘I was sure I could smell smoke. It was freaking me out.’

      ‘That’s … There wasn’t any smoke, man.’

      ‘I’m sorry.’

      ‘It’s Oli you want to be sorry to, you need to get here sharpish. I’m here now, said you were delayed. Where are you, are you on your way?’

      ‘Yes.’ About a third of a pint left.

      ‘We’re doing the shoot. Get here fast and I think you’ll be OK.’

      ‘OK. Thanks. Sorry.’

      ‘Oli’s a nice guy. You’ll be fine if you get here in the next five, ten minutes.’

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