The Sophist 8: The one about being scared

I was lying in bed in Hackney when I found out. Another attack, this time at London Bridge. Then I heard the sirens going past; emergency services heading there from all over town. I scrolled and scrolled through the news on my phone. Compulsive scrolling, more more more, what have they done, who have they killed, where are they going. I turned on BBC Radio Five Live where eye-witnesses were talking about something that was - hang on, it was still going on. Now they were killing people at Borough. Running into a Mexican restaurant and stabbing the first woman they saw, sitting near the door. (And I thought to myself, because this is what brains do, they try to tell you how somehow you would have been able to save yourself in a way that other desperate people had not managed to save themselves - like you could still win a superiority contest against the dead - I thought to myself, well I knew there was a reason I always refuse the seat beside the door.)

The sirens kept going, ever more police vans driving through East London to get to the river, while my other ear was filled with the doof doof acid of Aphex Twin, who was headlining the music festival Field Day in the park beside my house, and my heart, meanwhile, was listening to the sound of the five-year-old girl wrapped around me in bed, gently snoring. It was midnight. The perpetrators of the attack in London Bridge were already dead but I did not know that yet. The news was unclear. The streets near me began to fill up with drunk happy people leaving the festival. I was none of the above. I went on Facebook and said I was scared.

And everyone else went, ach I’m not frightened, these things won’t affect you, don’t let the terrorists win, they want you to be afraid, they can’t touch us, hardly anyone ever gets killed, think of the Blitz spirit ffs, think of the IRA, there’ll always be something to worry about. People made clear that it would be letting the side down if we admitted to something as silly as fear. It would be irrational. We are English. More people die in car crashes! The media just hype up the terrorism angle you know! It will never happen to you!

Apart from one friend who didn’t say all that. He said he had spent a strange couple of days, before they identified Martyn Hett’s body at Manchester Arena, contacting ambulance and police services to ask, “Have you seen my friend Martyn who was last seen at the Ariana Grande concert and has a tattoo of Deirdre Barlow on his leg?”

At 3am I fell asleep.

The next day I looked at Twitter and people were taking the piss out of the New York Times saying that LONDON IS REELING - my friends were going haha, we’re English mate, we don’t reel, we’re off to the park tomorrow, we’re off to the cinema. And the next day I also went to the park and to the cinema, because it was the last day of half-term before school started again, and my kid needed entertaining, so we got a bus across London, and we did whatever it is that people do. We watched a film called The Boss Baby in which babies come from a big firm called Babycorp and drink special formula milk, babies are a mode of capitalist production, babies are deathless, breasts are milkless, puppies are evil, life is forgettable. There were also a few slapstick jokes about bums. The kid liked it, especially the slapstick jokes about bums. It was her second viewing of The Boss Baby. All of her friends have been to see The Boss Baby; it’s what they talk about in school. She ate sweet delicious popcorn and I ate a hot dog that tasted as if it was made of plastic and babies and bombs.

Last night, more sirens. Sometimes they’re so loud I wonder if she is going to wake up. She never wakes up. On the TV news, a woman who tended to a French victim on the bridge and spoke to her in French. Apparently the woman kept asking, in French, where her boyfriend was. Again and again.

This morning, more sirens. While typing these first paragraphs I have heard four separate sirens going through Hackney. I wonder if I notice them more now or if it has always been like this.

We walked to school this morning, hand in hand. On the way I saw a very dear friend and their child going in the wrong direction, and I said er where are you going, and my friend’s face was a bit bleak and there was a muttering of “I’ll text you,” and it later transpired their kid was more upset about the attacks than they had realised, and needed to be kept away from the playground chatter and the school talks about it. And then I spoke to another parent from our school, who had been wrestling with her conscience and decided to tell her little boy herself so he didn’t hear it from others, didn’t hear it wrong, which is what we all want to do. And the only problem with our great idea here is that, how the fuck do you tell it right? How do you go, look, the thing is, there are these murders in these random attacks and yes Saudi Arabia and arms deals and foreign policy and the War on Terror and British intervention in the Middle East and - sorry, you’re five, back to the big noisy bombs killing kids at pop concerts, sorry what.

I have read the BBC Newsround guidelines for how to talk to children about this and they say that you have to stress that these attacks are rare, and that the news only focuses on them because of their rarity.

I am wondering if the guidelines need updating.

I just stopped writing this for half an hour to send some emails and the sirens seem to have stopped. Soon they will start again. There isn’t a punchline to this story, I have no political point to make. I just wanted to write this to send a massive enormous hug of love out to anybody else who is reading this and quietly thinking, actually, yes I am reeling. Actually, I am scared. Actually, I have been feeling fucking terrified.

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