Writelink Arena

Just to maintain a sense of reality over the coming festivities, and give you something to do when you’re bored with repeats of Wallace & Gromit in The Sound of Music, here is the first chapter of a new project.

The story centres on a man caught in a terrorist atrocity, and this chapter gives us background. He loses his hearing, but then he begins to hear voices in his head, and despite the assurance of audiologists, these voices begin to deliver some sinister information.

Psycho-horror/sci-fi, target completion of the first draft is spring/summer 2009.

Any and all feedback is appreciated.

[More:]

They say that when you lose one sense the others make an effort to compensate. A blind man, for instance, will find his hearing and his sense of touch improved.

On the whole, I’d rather have my hearing back.

It wasn’t an illness. I’m one of those pains in the butt who never took a day off in his life. Never been sick, see.

It wasn’t genetic. None of my family, parents, grandparents, kids, none of them had suffered from hearing problems.

It wasn’t an accident either. It was deliberate.

A premeditated act, perpetrated by freedom fighters from some country no one had ever heard of until they bombed Spinners Shopping Centre. After that, the downtrodden masses of Joravia were big news. How they were crushed under a totalitarian, jackboot regime which was supported by the big bad wolves of Downing Street. These people, some of the poorest in the world, lived in constant terror of their lives, in a small principality somewhere south of China, east of Java. A nonentity of a place which existed because none of its near neighbours felt it was worth invading or annexing. A nation smaller than the City of Manchester. A poky little island where crossing the road against the lights could earn you a public flogging, and stealing a loaf of bread would cost you your favoured hand. You had to feel sorry for the people of Joravia.

The bleeding heart, softy-softy, do-gooders played on that. Yes, the bombers were misguided, yes theirs was a terrible crime perpetrated against innocent people, but you had to maintain a sense of perspective, try to see it from their point of view. They were striking out against a repressive regime — the Joravian dictatorship — and targeting a deceitful administration — ours — which publicly condemned Joravian politics, but secretly ensured that General whoever he was remained at the helm because it was good for British interests.

So the five men and three women who between them planned and executed this appalling act, were not criminals in the ordinary sense of the word. They were freedom fighters.

Murderers. That’s what I call them. I don’t like our government and I can’t do any more to change it than they can do to change theirs. But I don’t plant bombs in shopping centres designed not just to draw attention to my cause, not just to create chaos, but to kill and maim.

Those cold blooded killers took the lives of 23 people that afternoon. They also took away my hearing. In ten or twenty years, they will be free to glorify their actions, perhaps carry out similar atrocities somewhere else. But those 23 victims, ages ranging from a six-month-old boy to an 85 year-old-man, would never have the opportunity to voice their disapproval of the Joravian regime, and the hundred or so who were injured, mainly by flying glass and falling masonry, would hardly be likely to come out in favour of the Joravian People’s Front. As for me, at those times when I don’t feel angry, I just feel sorry … for myself. I’ll never hear again. Not properly.

The worst of losing something like your hearing when you’re older is that you remember what it was like before. If I’d been born with defective hearing, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but I wasn’t born with it. I had 20/20 hearing all my life. I never needed the subtitles when I put on a video disc, now I can’t watch one without them. I could listen to Julian Bream or Jean Michel Jarre and pick out every pluck of the string, every touch of the keyboard. Now all I got was a muted orchestration with gaps filled in by my memory. Like listening to a hollow copy of a Beatles favourite. Everything is there, but you miss the essence.

People ask me if I had nightmares about it and I tell them, yes, but it’s not true. You can’t suffer nightmares when you don’t know what happened. I can remember before, I can remember after, but as to actual event …

Summer came that September day. Throughout June, July and August it had rained. There were floods in many areas and hoteliers all over the country forecast a washout holiday season. But that Friday morning, it was if all the fates conspired in favour of the bombers. The sun shone, hiding only occasionally behind a passing, cotton wool cloud, the temperature rose into the low eighties, and the town centre was packed with shoppers. Shirt sleeves were the order of the day. Shorts for many, skimpy skirts and tops, baring an obscene amount of flesh, babies wearing sun bonnets and little else in their trolleys. Summer.

I made no apology for stepping out to enjoy it with everyone else. The college was located just off the central ring road, a stone’s throw from the town centre, and we had seen so little sun since a mini-heat wave in May, that I decided to skip lunch in the cafeteria and wander into town instead. I dismissed my last class of the morning ten minutes early, told them to get out, enjoy the weather while they could. Did they argue? Would you?

That was the fates conspiring again, this time against me, ensuring that I would be passing through Spinners Shopping Mall at exactly the right time. No, not just passing through the mall, but standing within yards of that deadly parcel.

Everything, every tiny event, from the college receptionist calling me back to sign out, to the delay at the pelican crossing to the took part in that conspiracy. The length of the queue at Carpenter’s Sandwich Bar, and the young woman dithering over whether she had the right change were involved. If she had given the right change, if there had been one or two less people in the queue, maybe it would have all been different. But life is like that. How many times over the years had I thought, if only I had done this, if only I hadn’t done that, how much different would life have been?

Stepping out of college, joining the throng of students crossing the dual carriageway in small clumps between changes of the out-of-whack pelican lights, the air brimmed with the smell of freshly mown grass, mingling with the scents of the year’s final blooms: apple blossom, hawthorn and the town’s pride and joy; the riot of roses bushes lining the broad borders along the walls of the Civic Centre. The nostrils filled with the air of many perfumes as I passed other people, the ears sang to the sound of wasps and their angry buzz. The town was alive with people, sitting on benches, at outdoor café tables, on low walls, eating, talking, smoking, all bubbling with the joy of hot, sunny day.

By the time I made the temperature-controlled cloisters of Spinners, I was glad to be out of the heat. The hill from college to town was short, but steep, and my shirt was already showing the signs of sweat. I had only the one more class that afternoon, and fortunately, I kept a spare shirt in my locker.

Passing the entrance to Boots, I glanced right to W. H. Smiths, Jennifer Merton and Sally Brand were comparing purchases, heads bent over a carrier bag, peering in like it contained some living creature. Knowing those two it was probably the latest loose-leaf binder fronted by a collage of pictures of their favourite celebs. Sally looked my way, nudged Jennifer and they both waved.

As I walked by Ethel Austin, I noticed Glen Parks standing outside, but he was looking into the shop where I assumed his wife, Sylvia, was trying on dresses. As neighbours went, he was not the most sociable, but his wife pretended to be a socialite.

I turned right along Weaver’s Parade and joined the queue at Carpenter’s. In front of me was a young man in a grey pinstripe. He kept looking at his watch. I had him earmarked as a council employee, and judging from the times he checked his watch, many of them accompanied by an impatient sigh, he was due back at his desk.

A pair of Town Rangers — Police Community Support Officers they’re called everywhere else — meandered along the enclosed parade of shops, their crisp white shirts contrasting with the dark pants and caps, lending them that special air of authority. In the doorway of Clinton Cards a baby had managed to lose a shoe and when the young mother bent to attend to it, her shopping spilled on the tiled floor. The Rangers stopped to help her, smiling and joking, making a fuss of baby. Further along, three salespeople, two men and a woman, joked with passers-by, trying to lure them into a satellite or cable TV pitch. Summer.

Heading the queue at Carpenter’s, a redhead sorted through her purse, seeking something smaller than a twenty. She counted coins into her hand, in that curious manner all women have. Peer into the purse, snatch the coin between finger and thumb, drop it into the palm, pause to count how much is in hand, then repeat the process until the sums add up.

Grey pinstripe was becoming more frustrated by the second, and there were three others between him and the counter. Baby was acting up and young mother was frustrated in her attempts to get his shoe back on. Town Rangers were busy packing away her shopping again

Four people gathered in the centre of the aisle, two men, two women; friends stopping to chat. A cleaner came round them pushing her trolley along, a long-handled dustpan held at the ready to snap up any stray litter.

An ornamental bin stood in the middle of the parade, its outer coat made of cast iron to look like a piece of Victoriana, embroidered with gold banding, floral designs, and the town logo, a jumble of shapes which, when you studied them, were actually the letters making up the town name. The original bin had been plastic, but these were more formidable, less likely to be ripped away from their mountings and thrown into shop doorways in the drinking season.

The cleaner made for it. Time, I guessed, to empty the containers on her trolley, or maybe remove and replace the inner bag from the bin. The chatters moved aside to let her get at it, blocking my view of her. I was six feet from it and they saved my life.

She probably lifted the lid to empty the bin of its bag. The decorative clock projecting from the wall outside Poundland began to chime the hour. There was a flash of light and almighty BOOM. Grey pinstripe went down, his suit turning a dirty red. Something bloody came my way. They later told me it was a piece of one of the chatters. It hit me and everything turned black.

I never did learn what parts of the chatter’s body struck me, but it was the last thing I remembered. Everything else, I learned secondhand in the coming days and weeks.

The bin was made of cast iron, and the bomb, small but powerful shattered it completely. Chunks of cast iron flew everywhere, like shrapnel. A piece embedded itself in Grey Pinstripe’s head. Town Rangers were within ten feet of the blast, on the opposite side to me. One of them was blown through the windows of Clinton Cards, showered in glass, cut to ribbons, but he survived. His partner was less fortunate. She took a slice of cast iron in the chest, shattering her rib cage and piercing one lung before hacking into her heart. Young mother lost her right arm. It was found, still holding the baby’s shoe, several feet from her, but she too survived with many lacerations to her bared skin. Baby was killed when a large sliver of plate glass carved its way through him.

Behind Carpenter’s counter, the assistant caught the blast full face and was hurled back into the red hot ovens. She died in hospital three days later. Purse woman was thrown to the floor, her legs cut to shreds by flying glass and metal. She faced months of cosmetic surgery to repair them, and like many of us, she would need even longer in therapy to repair the psychological damage.

The town clock, jutting out at right angles to the wall, its owls perched either side of, and pecking at the central bell to chime the hour, fell from its mountings and landed on the tiles ten feet below where it exploded into bits, flinging more metal and masonry in all directions. An octogenarian passing nearby was speared by the minute hand, a 12” lance of mild steel. Some arsehole on the Internet later joked that he was dead on time. It was the kind of politically incorrect gag that did the rounds on the net and over the mobile texts, and pushed me to asking myself how often I had received such jokes and laughed at them. They didn’t seem funny anymore.

Panic is built into all animal systems and human beings are no exception. Early man used it as a means of hunting. He would panic a herd of beasts until they ran round in circles, making them easy to pick off.

Panic hit the Spinners that afternoon. People fled in all directions at once and the only consistency was in their direction: away from the explosion. The first victims were the satellite and/or cable TV salespeople, their stand knocked over, one of them crushed and killed underfoot, the others carried off on a tidal wave of humanity desperate to save itself.

Narrow exits at all ends of the mall became crowded with hundreds of bodies trying to get out through doors designed to allow no more than four to pass. Three people, including a four-year-old boy, were crushed to death in the jam, many others suffered injuries ranging from whiplash to broken ribs and in one instance, a broken neck.

Masonry, dislodged by the explosion, created another hazard. Chips and chunks of concrete, plaster and tiles flew around the vicinity like a hail of bullets. One man lost an eye, and was lucky to survive, another, not so lucky, man caught a stray bullet of concrete on the side of his head, which knocked him flat onto a jagged sheet of glass sticking up from the lower frame of Thomas Cook’s window. It sliced through his jugular and he bled to death.

A pedestrian precinct and a hot day, don’t make for the easiest access, and when the emergency services arrived, about ten minutes after the blast, they found their way hampered by crowds of ghouls, the lucky bastards who were out in the street and wanted to see what was going on, mingling with the frightened exodus of survivors.

Around the site of the explosion, fire took hold first in Clinton Cards, where the checkout girl near the doors was already dead, quickly spreading to Dorothy Perkins, Carphone Warehouse and Poundland, and on the other side, Waterstones. Sprinkler systems kicked in, but such was the speed and ferocity of the rising inferno, that they could do no more than damp it down.

Weaver’s Parade, already hungover with smoke from the bomb and short-circuited electricity cables, began to fill with toxic fumes from burning, man-made materials in the blazing shops. Those fumes would kill at least one more person and leave others with chest complaints. I was lucky. I was already out and the fumes never really got to floor level before the rescue services arrived.

Although the firemen did their bit, getting things under control, it took the police hours to clear the town centre, and during that time there was a constant stream of ambulances and paramedics coming and going. Every Fire Station in the area, and some from areas beyond, put trucks out. A & E departments in six hospitals went onto alert. Doctors, arriving from all over the county, categorised the injured: life-threatening, critical, urgent, non-ambulant, semi-ambulant, ambulant. They later told me I’d been wrongly classified as urgent. I wasn’t, but they didn’t know that at the time because I was completely out of it.

Fleeting scenes rush into my mind: looking up at the smoke filling Weavers. Something weighing me down. A fireman, wearing breathing apparatus, striding over me. A paramedic looking away to other victims. The interior of an ambulance. The anaesthetic cleanliness of A & E. A doctor/nurse speaking to me.

Maybe the images are real and maybe my memory is drawing on old episodes of Casualty to help fill in a four-hour gap of nothing. The next thing I really knew was waking up in a hospital bed with the clock reading 5pm and I couldn’t hear a damn thing.