Chris Cleave - Incendiary

I let myself slide off the boat into the soft sucking mud. It was a disgrace that mud. It was as old as London and I swear it stank of diseases people forgot the names of 500 years ago. This whole city is built on plague pits and murder holes and I sank into it right up to my thighs and I puked and cried and puked again. When I couldn’t puke any more I struggled through the mud up to the stone wall of the bank. There was a ladder there made of rusty iron hoops and I pulled myself up it. I had to keep stopping. I was so cold and tired and I never was what you’d call sporty.

I came up right under the Tower of London. Everything was quiet. There was no one about at all. I’d lost my shoes in the river and I walked with my arms hugged round me and my bare feet on the cobblestones. I was so cold I was shaking like our washing machine on a spin cycle. I walked past the high walls of the Tower with the stinking mud all over me. Black rats were scuttling and squeaking around my feet. The streetlights were out and it was dark as you like. It had stopped raining. There were gaps in the clouds where you could see a new moon and the stars very bright.

I kept on walking quick as I could to get warm. I kept my head down. You couldn’t see where your feet were going and I was trying not to tread on anything nasty. The churches started chiming 10 o’clock. You could hear their big bells booming through the sound of helicopters. Those choppers were all over the sky and one came down low over the Tower. It came along the street towards me with its searchlight flashing off the wet cobbles. I pushed myself right up against the Tower wall and I watched the circle of light move over the spot where I’d been walking. It carried on down the street and then it stopped because there was a bloke caught in the beam.

This bloke was naked and his skin shone blue white in the searchlight. He was a young chap maybe 20 years old and there was blood pouring down him. The blood was coming out of his mouth and you could see why because he’d bitten his tongue half off and he was still chewing away at it. With one hand he was holding a butcher’s knife and with his other hand he was playing with himself. When he saw he was caught in the searchlight he looked right at the place where I was hiding in the darkness and he screamed with rage. Then I suppose someone in the chopper shot him. I didn’t hear the shot over the racket of the rotors but I saw the chap’s neck explode in a burst of red and I saw his body sit down on the cobblestones. He sat down very neatly on his dead bum with the one hand still holding on to his thing. The searchlight stayed steady on him till the first of the rats started to move in through the edges of the beam. Then the helicopter pulled back up into the night.

Nowadays I suppose that chap was just some lunatic who escaped in the panic but at the time I didn’t know what was going on. I thought maybe everyone had gone like him. So I went very careful after that Osama and you can’t blame me. It took me 2 whole hours to walk back to Bethnal Green. I didn’t take the streets I took the footpaths and the back alleys and I went across gardens like a fox. When I did catch a glimpse of the main streets there were soldiers standing all along them. The soldiers had machine guns and armoured cars and I even saw some tanks though god knows what they were in aid of.

There were a few other people in the alleys on the way home but this time none of them was trying to rape me or eat me thank god. I started to feel a bit better because they were just ordinary people like me in Nikes and Pumas trying to get home through the curfew. We looked at one another in the half-light from the helicopters and you could see this same expression on everyone’s face. It was the look of people who’d woken up expecting one sort of day and got something completely else.

Barnet Grove when I got there was dead quiet. No people out on account of the curfew and no lights anywhere because the electric was off. Half a dozen cars were burning and there was no one to put them out. Melted rubber from the car tyres was running down the gutter at the side of the kerb. It boiled and bubbled like the lava when a volcano erupts and it disappeared hissing down the storm drains. The stink was horrible.

My boy was waiting for me in the street outside the Wellington Estate. He waved hello to me.

—Oh my boy oh my poor little boy are you alright?

My boy grinned and climbed into one of the burning cars and sat down on the bare white-hot springs of the passenger seat. He smiled out at me while the flames licked around him and the windscreen popped and shattered.

A helicopter was hovering low at the far end of the street. It was coming our way. Its rotors whipped the orange flames of the burning cars into this roaring white. My boy looked up. He was excited. The helicopter was getting closer. You could hear its rotors over the roar of the flames. My boy twisted his head out through the melted glass of the passenger window to look at it. Chopper he said. Chopper chopper chopper. He always loved that word.

The searchlight came onto us and it stayed there. It was a bright white light like a camera flash and you couldn’t look up into it. A megaphone voice came down out of the sky. STAY WHERE YOU ARE it said. YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF CURFEW. DO NOT I REPEAT DO NOT MOVE. Yeah right. Like I was just going to hold still while the coppers got a good steady aim. I just legged it and ran into the Wellington Estate with my poor boy screaming LEAVE MY MUMMY ALONE up into the burning sky.

I sat down in the stairwell of our tower block to get my breath back. I sat there for half an hour shivering till I found the strength to climb the stairs to our flat.

Someone had shoved a letter under the front door and I picked it up after I let myself in. I put the letter down on the kitchen table and lit a couple of candles and they started flickering on account of there was a nasty breeze in the flat coming from the windows which were all smashed in. There was broken glass all over the floor and the smell of burning tyres coming in from the street. I went into the bathroom and turned the battery radio on. THERE IS NO CAUSE FOR ALARM it was saying. I started the bath running and I went back into the kitchen and popped 4 of my pills out of their packet and drank them down with vodka. Then I opened the letter.

My brave friend, what can I say, except let us remember the happier times? I did so enjoy choosing those clothes with you and I will never forget how stunning you were in them. Please wear them sometimes and remember I wasn’t always a bitch to you. You must loathe me for the choice I had to make. I searched my heart and decided it would not have been helpful to the country for us to run the story. The paper has been very supportive of me as I made this difficult choice and they have offered me some wonderful opportunities, which will mean security for my son when he is born. I hope you will find it in your warm heart to understand and forgive me one day. As someone who has been a mother I know you will understand that we must always do what is best for our children. Your friend, Petra Sutherland.

I burned the note and dropped the ashes on the kitchen floor. I took the candles into the bathroom. The radio was saying INITIAL ESTIMATES PUT CASUALTIES AT 100 TO 120. A HOTLINE FOR CONCERNED FRIENDS AND RELATIVES HAS BEEN—

I turned the radio off and got into the bath and lay back with my ears underwater listening to the sound of helicopters rumbling through the plumbing. I lay there till the water went cold and the candles went out.

Dear Osama I taped newspaper over the broken windows to keep the draughts out but still it’s been a cold winter. There is comfort in the small things of course I do like to watch the pigeons fly up over the roofs I do like the frost on the motors on a bright early morning. I got 1 letter from Terence Butcher on very thin blue paper his handwriting was shaky and it got worse towards the end so you couldn’t make it out. I would of liked to write back but there wasn’t an address.