The Canal

by Lee Rourke

  I continued to talk about that day.

  “I often think about what turns ordinary human beings into mass murderers and terrorists. There must be more to it than mere religion, fanaticism, fundamentalism. There must have been other key factors? … It’s all so futile. So pointless …”

  “You’re wrong, of course …”

  “Why? What makes you think that?”

  “There is a point to it. Of course there’s a point to it. There’s got to be a point to it, otherwise …”

  “Otherwise what?”

  “Otherwise it’s not worth doing …”

  “So, you’re saying there is a point to the London bombings?”

  “Yes.”

  “A point to the mass murder of those innocent, everyday, working-class Londoners?”

  “Yes, there has to be. Why else would they have done it?”

  “But it’s all so futile …”

  “It’s the banality of evil, that’s what it is. Ordinary human beings doing extraordinary things. It happens. It happens in all wars … Human beings haven’t changed, just killing machines have …”

  “But it’s wrong …”

  “I know it’s wrong. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a point to it …”

  “What were you doing?”

  “When?”

  “On Thursday the seventh of July, 2005?”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “Yes, sleeping. I slept through the whole thing …”

  “How?”

  “I was tired. But I knew it was going to happen.”

  “How?”

  “I just knew. It was obvious to me. It was obvious to everyone … I woke up that day. I don’t watch much television so I didn’t know immediately. It was only when I heard ladies talking about it in the newsagents that it clicked. It wasn’t a shock to me. I just wanted to know who they were.”

  “The victims?”

  “No, the suicide bombers. I knew it was suicide bombers. I wanted to see their faces—they were so young, and so … extraordinary.”

  “Extraordinary?”

  “Yes. Who else would physically turn themselves into a machine primed for mass destruction? These are extraordinary people to me, ordinary people transformed …”

  “But you can’t say that!”

  “Yes, I can. I can say whatever I want to say: the suicide bomber is an extraordinary human being. An extraordinary individual. An extraordinary machine …”

  “A misguided individual, more like. This is nonsense.”

  “No. It’s not. It’s nothing new either.”

  “I don’t care, it’s horrific. Those people … the victims … It’s all so wrong.”

  “But you know as much as I do why they do it.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes. You do. There’s nothing left to believe in anymore. All is fiction. Somehow, we have to invent our own reality. We have to make the unreal real. It’s interesting to note that a sizable minority of extremists are recent converts. They have nothing else to do. We are empty. You know that …”

  “Yes, I do … Everything is boring.”

  “Exactly …”

  I felt closer to her in that moment.

  It was a horrific conversation but I felt closer to her. She appeared more open to me, more susceptible to things … more aware. I was uncomfortable with what she was saying to me, yet she excited me that moment more than I ever thought possible. She inched even closer, whispering each word into my ear; I could feel her breath on my cheek. She was so close to me.

  I was finding the urge to grab her too much.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  My own urges for destruction had always been with me. In what seemed a harmless game to me at the time, I had, in fact, made my own homemade explosive device as a teenager. It was a crude device made from Lego, masking tape, the charcoal and oxidising agents from fireworks, and a simple fuse—I used a brand called Air-bomb Repeaters that has subsequently been banned. The idea to make an explosive device came to me in the classroom after a chemistry lesson with a teacher I hated. The idea was a bit of fun—I wasn’t aware of the danger or the illegality of my game. It never occurred to me that what I was actually doing was in any way wrong. I didn’t think my actions to be a deviance in an otherwise normal existence. I am in no way pathological; my conventional values and morals have always been pretty sound—but looking back it is obvious to me now that they weren’t, nor have they continued to be. I don’t think I understood what irony was back then, so it couldn’t be described as anything other than a banal act of violence. No one pushed me into doing it—I acted alone. During that same winter the Provisional IRA were involved in their own banal acts of violence. At that time I couldn’t really entertain the idea that my own efforts to create my own explosive device, no matter how clumsy, and those acts of the IRA cells in mainland Britain could in any way be related, but now, as I listened to her, her warm breath on my cheek, it all became quite clear.

  I cannot begin to describe the joy I felt when I first detonated my rudimentary device. It was in London Fields behind what is now called The Pub in the Park. I forget what the pub was named then. I remember lighting the fuse and running away. The anticipation of the explosion was like an itch deep within me—completely unreachable. It seemed to take an age, but I knew not to run back to it. And then, taking me by complete surprise …

  BANG! … The thing went off. It was the birds fluttering out from the trees above my head that startled me more than anything. People came out from inside the pub, too. I kept running, all the way home without looking back. When I got there I ran all the way upstairs without acknowledging anyone. I turned the TV on in my small room and hid under my duvet. I was convinced that the police would be knocking on my door at any moment. I don’t think I slept that night, at least I’m not sure I did.

  The following morning, quite early, I returned to the spot where I had detonated the crude device. My heart was beating, my palms sweating. I thought the police would be waiting in the foliage to pounce on me. To my amazement the explosion had left a small crater in the soft earth. I stood over it. I gasped. Red entrails and fur were scattered around it, the last remnants of a grey squirrel that had been cut down. It looked like it had been blown to smithereens. Either that or a fox had devoured it in the night. Even though I knew it was wrong I began to laugh, even though I knew this image of the dismembered squirrel would haunt me for the rest of my life it was still, up to that point, the greatest feeling I had ever experienced. I felt real. Like I had achieved something. Now, years later, it sickens me, it leaves me numb, like I can’t breathe.

  “There’s something that’s been worrying me about all this …”

  She spoke these words to me slowly. Ever so slightly our cheeks touched, glanced, her skin as soft as a peach, warm—as I had imagined it to be. It was as if I’d known her all my life. It was if we knew each other inside out. This closeness will never leave me.

  “What has been worrying you?”

  “There’s something about them …”

  “Who?”

  “…”

  “Who?”

  “…”

  “Who? You can’t just say that to me and stop!”

  “Suicide bombers …”

  “Suicide bombers?”

  “Yes, suicide bombers. There’s something about them …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s something about them that affects me, touches something inside of my … deep inside of me. I can’t explain it, I can only begin to tell you about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They … excite … me.”

  When she said this she was so close to me her wet lips brushed against my cheek like a kiss. It sent a shiver so intense down my spine that I thought I was about to collapse. I was sure she wanted to kiss me, to hold me, to be solely with me. It felt like I had finally witnessed the reality of her, a
s if everything had been configuring towards this moment. It hadn’t, of course, but I didn’t know about that. I was trapped. I was convinced it was meant to be—that moment, those very words, that closeness, that physical closeness we were experiencing at that most naked of moments … And then I began to think about what she had said to me and it began to leave me cold. I had listened to that word: excite, with all its connotations. It rankled deep within. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to say. I sat there with her cheek, her lips close to mine, her breath caressing my face, the humidity of it causing the shiver within me. My body was paralysed and completely static. It took the greatest effort to move an index finger. I dared not move my head. I dared not move my face away from her. I wanted to stay like that, for that to be it, for nothing else to ever happen again. Absolutely nothing.

  It’s funny, life. Up until that moment I never thought I’d say something like that, let alone think it.

  She became silent for some time.

  It became hard for me to think of something to say. Nothing would have sounded right at that moment. I was truly empty of everything except a desire to fuck her with everything within me: every cell, every drop of blood, every ounce of oxygen fuelling each and every muscle. I wanted it so much. But I was completely powerless to make it happen. I truly was.

  I looked up, momentarily alerted to something in my peripheral vision, up by the iron bridge and the Banksy graffiti. I’m sure it was a fox with a rat in its mouth. But it couldn’t have been, as it was broad daylight. I didn’t know much about foxes, but I was positive they kept a low profile during the day. But there it was, up by the iron bridge, running with the rat between its sharp teeth without a care in the world. I’m sure it was a fox.

  “Why do they excite you?”

  “It’s hard to explain …”

  “But surely you must have some idea?”

  “The majority of suicide bombings are often carried out with the aid of a vehicle—a truck, a van, a car … or a civilian aircraft, for instance. But sometimes the suicide bombing is carried out on foot—a simple explosive belt attached to the bomber. When the bomber sets off in either their designated car, van, truck … whatever … when they attach their explosive belt and set off towards their pre-planned target, they are transformed, they are extraordinary … They are pure machine.”

  “But they excite you?”

  “Yes … I’m … Yes, they do. They have something we don’t …”

  “What?”

  “They defy death, whereas we fear it. They embrace it with open arms. For me there is something real about that. It is purely that, coupled with their use of technology and machine, that excites me. I think of them often … I stare at their faces … I watched the footage of 9/11 over and over and over again when it happened … I still do. It was such a beautiful image—I feel guilty for saying, for thinking this, but I can’t help it. Every time I see those images, or any footage of a suicide bomber, I feel … I feel shivers of excitement running through me.”

  “I don’t understand that, for fuck’s sake … Watching those moments of massive death and destruction over and over.”

  “I’m not asking you to understand. I’m asking you to listen.”

  “I don’t think you should tell me these things …”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. You know it’s a common misconception that all suicide bombers are poor, that they come from impoverished backgrounds. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Okay, those who detonated themselves in London were predominantly working-class, but they weren’t poor. Most were educated, too. I often think about them. I often watch the news reports I recorded, the CCTV footage of them. Those extraordinary young men. I often dream about them, their brown skin. I speak to them in my dreams, I caress them in my dreams, I fantasise about them during the day. Am I a sick person for doing this? Should they be on my mind the way they are?”

  “I don’t know what to think. People think the strangest things. We all wake up from dreams that make no sense to us from time to time …”

  “But these dreams make perfect sense to me.”

  “Oh … I …”

  “You know, the majority of these suicide bombers show no outward signs of psychopathology. Most people, those not involved, have no idea of their intentions. It’s no surprise to me that their relatives and friends are apoplectic when they find out. But my dreams … They are increasingly sexual. But not pornographic, if that’s what you’re thinking. Just a tangible element of sexuality is involved. I touch these men, their bare skin, as they wash, as they prepare. I touch the explosives, I’m there during the bomb-making process. I help them put it together, I help them fit it into the rucksack, I help them put it on. I caress the material …”

  “It’s just a dream. It’s boredom.”

  “It’s more than that. ‘Let me die with the Philistines!’ cried Samson. The concept of self-sacrifice is nothing new to western society. The Christian Knights Templar sacrificed one of their own ships and hundreds of their own men just to kill twice as many Muslims. This is nothing new to us. I am not alone. We grew up with tales of the Japanese Kamikaze pilots and bombers during World War Two. Aircraft as flying bombs is nothing new to us. It was in your father’s lifetime that Japanese naval officers would man and steer torpedoes; who, after aiming the torpedo at their intended target, would proceed to shoot each other dead as the machine hurtled towards its victims. We act like this is a new thing. But it’s not, is it?”

  “And you find self-murder exciting?”

  “Yes, especially the recent bombers, more so than those who piloted the planes into the World Trade Center. The CCTV footage of the London bombers is just so modern, so normal. They looked so real, there is nothing untoward in their actions prior to the catastrophe. Then they became those extraordinary beings … Yet in those images there’s no intimation that they were about to transform themselves. They were completely part of the ebb and flow of the city, walking into that railway station, not once looking out of place.”

  “You have to tell me more about your dreams … You have to.”

  She ignored me. Thinking back, it is no surprise to me that it wasn’t tales of suicide bombings I was after. I simply wanted to listen to her speak intimately about those things that were hers alone: her desires and fantasies.

  “Most people believe religion to be the sole cause of the suicide bombers’ actions. I refute this …”

  As she said this I saw the fox again as it rummaged for food on the other side of the canal by the iron bridge. It looked content and happy, if a little malnourished.

  I pointed over to it.

  “Why are you pointing over to that dog? I thought you wanted to hear more about my dreams?”

  “It’s a fox … It’s not a dog …”

  “Yes it is. It’s clearly a dog.”

  The fox continued to look for food, oblivious to us both watching it on the other side of the canal. It was definitely a fox. I wasn’t sure why she thought it was a dog. I never asked her. My hands were trembling. I wanted to put them on her thighs; I wanted to hold her. I felt foolish, like I was in some sort of dream, or caught up in some sick prank.

  “You know, aside from my dreams … These modern suicide bombers are the dark side of the moon. We can never truly see them, be them, understand them … Yet they are constantly with us, only ever surfacing when the time is right. It’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “Sometimes their actions are my dreams—their actions have been exiled into my unreality, my world beyond.”

  “Tell me about your dreams, about them, what happens in them?”

  “I’m turned on, of course … Is that what you want to hear?”

  “No … You’re turned on by what they do? By their actions?”

  “Just by them. They are in a room with me and I am watching them bathe and wash and prepare … I watch them as they calmly pack everything they need. I touch them, stroke their skin. I
wake up every time, distressed, the sweat dripping from me, my heart beating. This dream returns to me over and over again … I cannot stop it …”

  I was finding it hard to control myself as her warm breath caressed my neck, under my right ear.

  I’ve never been able to fully remember my dreams. In fact, I was always jealous of those that could, to such an extent I would make mine up so I could be like those people who tell you their interesting and meaningful imaginings from the previous night. If I did remember my dreams they were usually images of random colours, roads, faces, sounds, and feelings. Nothing was ever coherent enough to piece together into a narrative. Over the years I began to accept these fragments as pieces of me that didn’t need to be unravelled, or put back together to form a whole. The whole doesn’t exist. I rather like them, my dreams, as they are: meaningless and nonsensical. I must have had dreams about people along the way. Private dreams. Dreams that I would never tell a soul. It must have happened to me, but I can’t remember any of them. Even the embarrassing dreams of my teenage years have left no mark upon me—it’s like they never existed.

  A couple of years ago I got talking to a stranger in a pub on Kingsland Road. He had just sat himself down next to me. At first, I felt extremely uncomfortable, but his presence soon began to calm me down. I had had a busy day at work and I was trying to relax with a warm pint of Guinness. At first he pulled out a book from his bag and began to read—I have no idea what this book was, but it was thick, with a very light blue cover, possibly of clouds. Thinking back it was his movements when reading that annoyed me—the pauses, the hand on his chin, and the slight nods of the head—and I was quite relieved when he actually put down his book and began to speak to me. He had a northern accent, although it was soft and lilting and not as abrupt and thick as they can sometimes be.

  “One of those days.”

  I glanced up from my pint of Guinness and feigned a knowing smile in the hope that that would be the end of it.

  “I said, one of those days …”

  “Oh … Yes … I suppose so …”

  “I’ve given up …”

  “Oh … Given up what?”