Getting Away With It

London and the summer of 1999. So warm among the throbbing race mass, all lobbing around in the sun. Idling crowds, not doing a hand’s turn all day. Too hot to quarrel. Nevermind the nail bombs. Feeling the air move first with the shock of the blast: rice, glass, air, confetti, moisture; the law of moving bodies, a vast kinetic pay-load cutting, blasting, tearing your cheeks away; over there a torn and bloody tennis shoe is thrown to the street, inside only a heel.

Screaming random hatred and murder. The first bomb was in Brick Lane, the next in Brixton. Panic in the silly season. Kill those Black and Tans. The news: black with daggers and eye-masks, again and again and again. What’s happening?!

What really got me, though, was the execution of Jill Dando. The Mrs. Beufoy of Crimewatch telly. A product of careful nurture. She utterly bought it on her doorstep. BANG. One shot, straight in the face. And got clean away with it. Concerned cops much later framed up a chanceless half-wit. But you could feel the hysteria. Slapbang Armageddon. Finally curtains for the Nescafé generation.

I’m in bed with a stranger; he who awakes me. Suddenly and it’s a fluster. He’s embarrassed. He’s late alright. Late for his work at a photographic studio somewhere. Should I leave right away, or leave with him? I don’t want to be fractious, whatever that means. Forget it. It’s a way we gallants have in the Navy. Uniform that does it. Nevermind. But then again, this doesn’t feel like the brush-off. I look at him straight; I look for the lying in his eyes.

He would have me stay but – the eyes again. He doesn’t know me at all. I wish he had … I’m a man misunderstood. Who can we really know but ourselves? But one night only. We will meet again; he tells me this in the street. No really, today, later, after he’s finished his work. I’m too beastly awful weird for words: taking him at his word, I’ve palmed what I’ve taken - taken to be a copy of his latch key. Sitting there in a picksorting dish at front door.

So I’m a romantic. Breach of promise he shall not. The silence demoralises. What if he turns out to be a flirt, heart the size of a fullstop. Below in the street, the Hari Krishnas are marching early. I catch a whiff of incense rising from the procession below. Shout salvation in King Jesus. Happy the chanting, instead I find the news: “The Crimewatch veteran … killed by a single shot … at close range … the police are appealing for witnesses.” But that was her job.

Bored, I start rummaging. Wow. A black rubber butt-plug in the shape of Mickey Mouse. I see he’s taken an HIV test recently. This is wrong. Less of a sin is early libation. Last night’s frolics reached checkmate with frozen vodka. I open his freezer and out rolls wafts of icy fog. Where’s the Stolichnaya? Perhaps we finished it. More freezing fog rolls out. A bag of ice from the shop is melding to glassy blocks.

I can only see a frosted plastic bag which is full of something. I pull it out. It’s frozen hard what’s inside. Meat, it must be meat.

On the table now, I pull the bag away. It’s a baby – in fact, it’s a boy. The stone-hard weight knocks the wooden tabletop. It’s a doll, arms recumbent at its sides. The skin’s a dull necrotic grey, which still looks too real. White death, backwards birth; I scream like murder. It’s solid. More mist saunters out like breath, like a sigh. Black crystals of frozen blood marked the shutlines of the eyes and mouth. A lone tear had made its maiden voyage then stopped frozen sorrow; hard like the rest of him.

Who did this? The darkest places imaginable then some, I can’t … I simply can’t. I’m trying, but I can’t …

Moisture collects on the table around its form. I’m trying not to look now. The obscenity of its thawing confronts me. I can’t touch it, so unnatural: a mite of God’s clay, ambushed in ice. Every cell blocked, denatured, arrested, aborted. The temperature halting and holding an irreversible carcass, someone’s idea; atrocious infanticide – I’m fucking out of here …

Outside in the street I gasp for air. Why? Why did he have a frozen baby boy in his refrigerator? He wasn’t medical - not that that would mean it’s alright ... The mother? Was it kidnapping? Nothing in the news.

I’m walking fast now, up Old Compton Street. I must report it. This is the news. The tabloids will curse him. Can’t not tell. Fucking psychopath – no other explanation. I take deep breaths. People stop laughing as I barge into them. A drink: what I was looking for in the first place. Soho’s gay tourist favourite: the Admiral Duncan. The barman looks at me with a kind of indifference that could only have been affected over thousands of orders. A double, I think. Early afternoon but the place is quite busy already. I order another.

I laugh nervously. Then BANG! An end to everything comes suddenly. Not that I can really say I feel anymore, but if I had to, it’s as if a red-hot crowbar removes my face. Two men sitting at a table are blown through a glass wall out into the street. My eardrums have been blown out, so the immediate rupture, reaction and carnage, to me, is in silence for the last few seconds - then it’s black.

What’s left of my body is taken to University College hospital. Others are rushed in, nails embedded in their faces; or digits, hands, feet missing.

It was the third nail bomb attack in London in as many weeks. Later, a far-right splinter group, the White Wolves, would telephone a BBC newsroom and claim it was responsible for the Soho explosion. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police told a news conference that they would defeat whoever was responsible for these cowardly attacks. “We will catch them,” he said. And they did, eventually.