No More Heroes

by Stephen Thompson

  Everywhere I looked I noticed people in full possession of themselves: laughing and joking, reading the Metro, listening to their iPods, gazing absently at the ads on the tunnel wall. A couple of kids were pointing at the tracks and giggling, maybe at the sight of mice. To my eyes, the people didn’t seem to have a care in the world. Their composure seemed to be mocking me. I couldn’t be sure how I appeared to them, but I guessed from their indifference that I seemed normal. It was a small comfort to know that I didn’t look unhinged, even if that’s how I felt. Even the American couple, who had initially kept a wary eye on me, were now ignoring me. With these thoughts in mind, my breathing evened out a bit. I was calming down. But the instant I saw my train approaching I got an attack of prickly heat and my throat became excessively dry.

  Slowly, the train came squealing to a standstill. The noise was so distressing I involuntarily covered my ears. As usual, the commuters made a mad dash towards the edge of the platform and started bunching up on either side of the electronic doors. I remained rooted to the bench. I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to get up. My legs felt numb. The train finally spat out the exiting passengers and those boarding scrambled forward to replace them. At the last second I stood up and shuffled the short distance from the bench to the train. I left it so late that the closing doors almost squashed me. But that was the least of my problems. There was not a seat to be had anywhere, so I had to support myself with a combination of my rubbery legs and the overhead railing. When the train suddenly lurched into motion, a surge of bile rose from my stomach up to my throat. I had to swallow hard to stop myself from vomiting.

  For the next few stops I clung onto the overhead railing and planted my legs as firmly as I could to avoid too much swaying about. With so many people crammed into the carriage and with the ever-changing motion of the train as it wound its way through the tunnel, this was no easy feat. Waves of nausea washed over me. Having a seat would have helped, but I was never quick enough or in the right position to grab any free ones. And then things took a significant turn for the worse. Due to what the driver announced as ‘signal problems up ahead’, the train stopped in a tunnel. At this point I felt myself swoon. Convinced I was on the point of collapse, I took the desperate measure of sitting down on the carriage floor. Squeezing myself between the throng, I positioned myself so that my back was flat against the Perspex partition and then slid down on to the floor, drawing my knees up to my stomach to make myself as small as possible.

  I drew a lot of stares from those around me, scornful, judgemental, even hateful stares, but by then I was beyond caring. Clutching my small backpack containing a change of clothes and a few toiletries, I sat and waited for the train to get going again. Looking around, I had the sudden macabre thought that if an explosion were to go off just then, dozens of people would be blown to smithereens, and that thought prompted me to examine some of the faces of the people standing near me. I don’t know what I was looking for, some sense of who they were I guess. Maybe I was trying to connect with them on some level, trying to get past the barriers, barriers that rarely come down except in a crisis or a catastrophe. When I thought back to the bombing and how close I had felt to all the survivors and even to the dead, I could hardly believe that only a few weeks later I was sitting on the floor of a tube train, feeling scared out of my mind, hoping to be ignored.

  In the middle of having these thoughts, the visions began, flashing before my eyes in rapid succession. Once again I saw the room, that dark, depressing room where it all took place. I saw Mitch, his eyes wild with rage, his knife drawn, yearning to tear me apart for my betrayal but afraid of the gun in my hand. I saw Benjy, looking lost, his loyalty hopelessly divided between his two best friends. And I saw myself, ordering them around, high on coke and power, full of self-loathing and the desire to blow my own brains out. In between the visions I struggled to get perspective on my surroundings. My spatial awareness became shot. I couldn’t work out where I stood, or rather sat, in relation to the other passengers. At first the man standing in front of me seemed to be within touching distance, and then he appeared to be out of reach. Likewise the little girl holding his hand. I almost reached out my hand to test the distance between us. But I didn’t. I didn’t because I was desperate not to appear crazy or threatening. I fought like the devil to keep a lid on things.

  I felt like crying out, but my pride wouldn’t allow to me to behave that way in front of all those hard-faced Londoners. I didn’t want to give them the added satisfaction. To them I must have seemed like a nutter sitting there on the floor, but I didn’t want them to start treating me like one by moving away from me. Normally on a tube I wanted as much space for myself as I could get, but in that situation, the closer I was to my fellow passengers the better I felt. It meant I was normal. It meant I was sane. Some of them were clearly scared of me. I couldn’t say I blamed them. They didn’t recognise me, they didn’t know who I was or what I’d done, and even if they did, it wouldn’t have mattered. It hadn’t been two months since the bombings, they were still on edge, still wary of anything or anyone that looked suspicious or out of the ordinary. I felt the same. As soon as I stepped into that carriage I started looking around for anyone, man or woman, with a backpack. Who was to say there wasn’t another suicide bomber lurking in the carriage? For all those passengers knew, I could be one. I wasn’t Asian, I didn’t fit the racial profile, but neither had Germaine Lindsay, a black guy like myself who’d blown up the train at Kings Cross.

  At last the driver apologised for the delay. Soon after that the train hissed and sighed and juddered to a start. Within a few minutes the visions ceased and the agitation I had been feeling started to wane. Just to be on the move again had given me a shot in the arm. But still I remained on the floor. With each successive stop the train became emptier and more and more seats became available, but I remained on the floor. When it pulled into Edgware Road, I became so scared I couldn’t even open my eyes but there was no escape from the memory. I was right back there. I saw it all. The train pulling into the station. The doors opening and staying open. The people getting on, the others getting off and crossing to the platform opposite, but mostly I saw the faces of the people who’d been in the carriage with me that day, none clearer than Mohammad Sidique Khan. As soon as I pictured his face I opened my eyes, half expecting to see him sitting in front of me, but the first thing I saw was a pigeon. It had wandered in and was walking around looking for food. Outside the carriage, people were milling about, looking up at the notice board, checking which train they needed to catch and on which platform. I sat on the floor and watched them, impatient for the train to get going, more impatient than I’d been on the day of the bombing. The doors seemed to take an age to close. Finally, I heard, ‘This train is now ready to depart. Please stand clear of the closing doors.’ The doors slid together, trapping the pigeon. It didn’t seem to mind. It waddled along the carriage in my direction, its head bobbing up and down and jerking back and forth. It didn’t seem to notice me and when it did, it shot me a quick sideways glance then continued on its way, pecking the ground as it went. It came so close to me I couldn’t fail to notice that one of its claws had been damaged, was essentially a stump, and that its eyes were very milky.

  As the train pulled out of the station, I began to wonder whether I would be able to get off at my stop, which was drawing ever closer. When it left Westbourne Park and began its approach into Ladbroke Grove, I realised I had to do something or face the very real prospect of riding it all the way to Hammersmith. I had to act. Turning to a black teenager who was sitting nearby, I said, ‘You couldn’t gimme a hand, could you? I’m having a bit of trouble standing up.’ At first he looked at me as if I was a turd, but then he began scrutinising my face more closely and I saw the light of recognition appear in his eyes.

  ‘Wait a sec, ain’t you that brer from the papers…the one who saved all them…’

  I nodded and he immediately leaped forward and helped me to my feet
.

  ‘Rah! What happened to you?’

  ‘It’s long,’ I replied. He tried to usher me into a seat but I told him I was getting off at the next stop. When he said, ‘Me too,’ it was music to my ears.

  He held on to me till the train pulled into the station and then helped me first onto the platform, and then out of the station altogether. Before we parted company he said, ‘You gonna be alright from here, blood?’ I nodded, we touched fists and he bounced off down the road. I had been leaning against the station wall and when I tried to walk my legs wobbled, but they didn’t give out. More staggering than walking, I made my way to my brother’s flat, cursing the fact that he had, for what he had described to me as ‘a change of scenery’, decided to move all the way from Hackney to Ladbroke Grove.

  Before I went to see him, I had confided in Theodore about my anxiety over travelling on trains again. Not only had he said, ‘You gotta get back on the horse, bro,’ he’d been most insistent on the point. Yet when he opened his front door and saw me, his first words were, ‘Maybe you should have driven after all. You look terrible.’ It was intended as a piece of gallows humour. He had no way of knowing what I had just been through, but even so I resented his blasé remark.

  Theodore had come a long way since the days when he and his gang went around brandishing sawn-off shotguns and demanding money with menaces. In many ways he had led a very charmed life. For all the crimes he had committed he had never spent so much as a day in prison. Then there was the small matter of him cheating death. I once told him that he was a ‘jammy git’ and he replied that luck had nothing to do with it, that it was all God’s work. When I asked him if it was God’s work that he had been stabbed to within an inch of his life, he said, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ That was him. Everything he said or did was shaped by his belief in God. He once showed me something he wrote for his church pamphlet, which was a good example of how steeped he had become in his faith.

  ‘The most important thing for me now is to live a pure life. To strive for anything less would be unworthy of me. From now on I aim to be righteous in all my thoughts and actions. The cynic would say, ‘’Don’t be a fool, Theodore. God doesn’t expect you to be perfect,’’ and straightaway I would say, ‘‘Maybe not, but He loves a trier.’’ And that is now my purpose in life. I want to please God. He has given me a second chance and I want to show Him that I’m worthy of it. To do that I must first accept that I exist only through His grace and then live my life in strict accordance with His laws.’

  He was a Christian. Pure and simple. He believed, with all his heart, that Jesus was the son of God and that He had been sent from heaven to redeem us from our sins. On that his position was fixed and I never once saw him deviate from it. His faith was strong and complete and I have to say that I envied what he got from it, the security it gave him. If we’re all searching for something to believe in, something to give meaning to our lives, his search had ended. As a result, he was the most peaceful person I knew. He wasn’t constantly straining at the leash like I was. He had none of my cravings. If he hungered after anything it was to have a closer relationship with God. He certainly didn’t feel any guilt or shame about the misdeeds of his youth, unlike me. He had, he said, been to the Holy River and washed himself clean. What did he care about being judged by people when the Supreme Judge had absolved him of his sins? From what he had led me to believe, he had but two bugbears. He was slightly dissatisfied with his job – he worked for a big DIY store – and was frustrated by his inability to find the right woman to settle down with. In that sense he was not unlike millions of other people, but he was unusual in that he never complained, he never whined, he didn’t believe in shaking his fist at the world. ‘I bring everything to the Lord in prayer.’

  I had made up my mind not to burden Theodore with my ongoing problems. For the first evening I spent with him I kept to that promise, we talked about everything except the bombing, but I couldn’t keep it up and by the end of the second day I had confided in him about the visions and how badly they had been affecting me. ‘There are people you can see for that, you know? Counsellors and such. I’m sure you can even get that kind of thing on the NHS.’ I also told him that I was fed up with leading a double life and that I regularly felt the urge to unburden myself of my ugly secret.

  ‘Confession is a part of healing, Simon. If you don’t confess what you’ve done, if you don’t own up to it, you’ll never be free of it.’

  ‘Yeah, but who do I confess to?’

  ‘To God.’

  ‘But I don’t believe in God.’

  ‘Then you really are lost.’

  He then ordered me to bow my head and, as he always did whenever I went to see him, he offered up a prayer for my salvation.

  Before I left him, I asked Theodore whether he needed money for anything. ‘I got quite a bit for the article, so I was wondering…’ I had barely finished my sentence before he started shaking his head. ‘I’m good. But I know a couple of people who could always use a few extra quid. You could send them a cheque. Better still, why not take it to them in person?’

  It was a familiar tactic. He wasted no opportunity to try to push me in the direction of our parents. He was never so direct as to say, ‘Things are not right between you and those guys, they haven’t been for a long time now, do something about it, Simon,’ but he would allude to it. He spoke regularly to Mum and Dad on the phone and would call me immediately afterwards to pass on their regards, even if they hadn’t asked him to. More recently he had been trying to get me to go to Jamaica. ‘You should get out there. I’m sure it would do you good to spend some time with the folks.’ The child in me, the one who liked to do things his own way and in his own time, always resisted these promptings, but underneath I was happy that Theodore took the trouble, for no matter the distance between us, no matter that I hadn’t seen them in years, at the end of the day I had a responsibility to my parents. If I sometimes forgot that then Theodore was always on hand to remind me.

  To spare myself the ordeal of travelling back to Kings Cross on the tube, I opted to take a mini-cab to Kings Cross station. In the cab on the way, and then later on the overland train, I mulled over some of the things I had discussed with Theodore. By advising me to talk to someone about the visions I was having he had given me much food for thought. Counselling. I couldn’t see the harm in it. I had to do something and that seemed as good a thing to try as any. What did I have to lose? Theodore had seemed certain that I stood to gain by it.

  He had also been pretty convinced that I would benefit from spending a bit of time with the folks. I felt the same. Over the years I had become virtually estranged from my parents, but since the bombing their pull had been getting stronger and stronger. It wasn’t going to be easy, but I had to try to find a way to re-connect with them, and as a matter of urgency. They were not getting any younger. The fact of their mortality was something I could no longer turn away from. It was time I went to see them. The only problem was I had no particular desire to go to Jamaica. I had no interest in the place. In contrast to Theodore, I didn’t regard going there as some kind of pilgrimage that had to be undertaken before I kicked the bucket.

  I had always been uneasy about my Jamaican heritage. As a child I resented it. I wanted to be English. That’s how I saw myself and that’s how I wanted others to see me. For my parents, the matter was a bit more complicated. They encouraged us, the younger generation, in our Englishness, but at the same time wanted us to acknowledge our Jamaican side and were scandalised if ever we tried to deny it. This was something we regularly did, especially at school, where a lot of the white kids would tease us and call us racist names and tell us to go back to our country. As we got older we began to realise that no matter how hard we tried, in the eyes of certain sections of white society we were not and never would be English. I couldn’t speak for Theodore, but it made me sad to be denied something I felt belonged to me. But I wasn’t going to beg. If I wasn’t welco
me in the club then it couldn’t be worth joining. And so, feeling rejected, and with my tail between my legs, I turned towards the very thing I’d been running from, towards Jamaica. The music, the food, the lingo, the attitude: I embraced it all. And yet for all that there remained the issue of authenticity. When it came right down to it, I was not the real deal. I was not born in Jamaica. I had never even visited the place. So how could I call myself a Jamaican? In the end I came to accept that I was neither one thing nor the other, neither English nor Jamaican. I was something in between, something vague and indefinable. I had accepted it but I wasn’t happy. I doubted I ever would be.

  * * *

  The guys at Blockbuster had left the choice of pub up to me. My leaving do, my privilege. To avoid any chance of bumping into Trevor, I chose a bright, noisy sports bar in the centre of town. The evening was a success, meaning there was a lot of alcohol and a lot of juvenile behaviour. And the whole thing only set me back about two hundred quid. When I got home I could hardly get my key in the door and no sooner was I inside than I sparked out, fully dressed, on the sofa. I slept fitfully, disturbed by bad dreams. In one I was drowning and in another I was being dragged, screaming, towards a guillotine with a masked executioner standing beside it. I woke up around noon the next day with a parched throat, a pounding head and a feeling of having been in the wars, yet grateful that I had at least been spared my usual nightmares. I staggered to the bathroom to empty my bursting bladder and when I saw myself in the mirror I had quite a shock. Someone, probably Dave, had written the word ‘Fanny’ in black marker on my forehead.