Did You Know Anybody?: On the Manchester Arena Bombing

“The morning after the attack, I almost broke down when a colleague asked if I was okay.”

I’ve been trying to write an essay about the Manchester bombings. 10:32 p.m., May 22, outside the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena. Twenty-three dead and 119 wounded. Where I grew up, where I lived until almost nineteen. Where I spent Saturday afternoons as a kid traipsing around Marks & Spencers five feet behind my mum; then, as a teenager spending the same Saturday afternoons either at Old Trafford or wandering aimlessly in a loop from the HMV at one end of the Arndale Center to Le Coq Sportif at the other, and back again. My wife often jokes that if I put the most important things in my life in a list she would come third, after our children and Manchester United. Some days, after an ugly loss that takes the best part of a day to get over, she reverses the top two.

I didn’t believe it at first, when she called from the car and told me to turn on the radio. Standing at the kitchen sink and listening in horror, hearing all of this from the safety of Northern California, over five thousand miles away. Removed geographically, yet viscerally torn by the news, piecing the disparate parts of it together from the local NPR station and the BBC and Guardian websites. And then, the texts from friends and colleagues making sure I’d heard, asking if I knew anybody. That’s the first question people here ask. Did you know anybody?

The answer being no, not personally, but, yes, knowing lots of people just like them. Still struggling to make sense of it. Going through the photographs of the dead and reading about them, the tributes from family members and loved ones, from teachers, from teammates on their soccer teams. Looking again at the photographs, like I said trying to make sense of it. Shaken in a different way than by the truck bomb attack in Stockholm, the Eagle of Death Metal concert in Paris. Those events were headlines in my world, but they remained headlines. I didn’t mourn the dead in any individualized way, study their photographs, find myself sitting in a meeting and all of a sudden unable to think of anything else, the room merging out of scale. Didn’t find myself lying awake, thinking about those families sitting in hospital waiting rooms staring dumbly at each other and waiting for the swing doors to open and a doctor with a clipboard to emerge.

The proximity makes this different—the ability to feel its imprint. To be able to place myself in those streets, in the adjacent Victoria station, knowing what it feels like to walk or run along that span of concrete, having stood on that platform innumerable times, getting on and off the train to and from home. Those memories shattered by the footage coming up on the news sites. Recognizing the accents, the fear in the voices, and being able to place those voices as those of people I grew up with, went to school with, stood on the terraces of the Stretford End with, complaining about Ray Wilkins and his sideways passes or the cost of a beef pie. Being able to imagine not just the lives of the dead and injured, but literally place them inside houses and classrooms and know what those houses looked like on what kinds of streets. Impossible to keep this at the distance of a headline. Felt instead in the throat and staying there. And now, of course, I have children; I can imagine in different circumstances myself, or my wife, standing outside the Manchester Arena waiting for, or with, our eleven-year-old daughter.

When my wife called to tell me to turn on the radio, I’d been running around the kitchen, going from A to B getting the kids’ dinners ready—doing that and worrying about the rat in the basement. We’ve been struggling with them since we moved in almost a year ago. “What’s that sound?” she said. “Do you hear that sound?” This in the middle of the night, and I mean the middle of the night. Not just after we went to bed but ghouls-and-goblins middle of the night. I couldn’t hear anything, told her to go back to sleep, that it was probably the wind. “There’s no wind,” she says, “look at the trees.” But I don’t hear anything. “Wait . . . that,” she says and points at the ceiling. Probably a squirrel on the roof I tell her, and add that that’s where the eaves are, to sound a little more technical and suave about it. She harrumphs, and I roll back toward the window.

Davey, the rat guy, came out the following week. He looked like a rat guy, which is not to say that he looked like a rat, but he looked like someone unfazed by rats. They give me the shivers. I think because they’re so furtive. They scurry, and how bold they are, the indiscernible eyes, and the tail, it being so different from the body. It took him almost five hours to do everything. Up and down ladders, setting traps in the attic, the basement, in and out of crawl spaces we didn’t even know about. We heard nothing for two nights and imagined the best and then the third night the familiar scrabbling above the bed. Scrabble, scrabble, scratch. Scrabble, scrabble, scratch, then a burst of acceleration and a sharp thwack! “Oh my,” my wife said, and I nodded. “Maybe there was just the one left inside,” she said. “Like Matt Damon in The Martian.”

And that should be the end of this. Except for the one in the basement, the one I’d been thinking about when my wife called and told me to turn on the radio. I’d been checking the traps intermittently. All empty until about four months ago, seven months after Davey’s visit, the trap adjacent to the water heater in the basement space has been sprung. I immediately close the door, take a breath, and open it again. The rat’s very dead. Hard to tell for how long. The tail’s caught in the trap. You hear stories about rats gnawing off a hind leg to escape from a trap. A tail, you would think, less emotionally significant though, to a rat, maybe as compelling an appendage. I don’t touch the body or the trap, the body surrounded by black dots like iron filings. I wonder if it starved to death or died from the poison in the bait. I’m surprised at how still it is, which sounds like a strange thing to say, but it was so strikingly still.

I closed the door again and left it. I didn’t tell my wife. I didn’t do anything, except think about it, and how still it was. I went in every few days to look at the body again. There was no smell, which seemed peculiar, and the body wasn’t decomposing, even as the weather got warmer in April and May. I read about the principles of abiotic vs. biotic biodegradation, autolysis and putrefaction. By all accounts the body should be decomposing, the accompanying smell like New Jersey in an easterly wind. Whenever I was in the basement watching TV or grading papers, I felt the presence of its deadness. Still there, four months on. The why part being where it gets complicated. Part of it is fear, the shiver factor, the not wanting to deal with this, not wanting to have to go in there and put it on a shovel and then into a plastic bag and then carry it through the house and put it into a garbage bin and wait for Friday morning’s pickup. Part of it, as the weeks became months, about denial of how fatuous I was being, and how inhumane, wondering how long I could sustain this.

But it’s also about a part of me feeling like it deserved that unseemly death because it invaded, because it brought leptospirosis into the house, because it ripped out the insulation and used it to build nests for future generations. When my wife lived in Chicago just after college, thieves broke into her apartment one night. They went through the place, took the TV, the VCR, the CDs. The most disturbing part being that they’d been through her bedroom, stood on the bed and ripped the four-foot poster of Elvis Costello’s Trust down the middle—right the way down, the two halves hanging like uneven curtains. That kind of invasion. The rats now, evidently, underneath my son’s bedroom, a dropping one day on the rug in my daughter’s room—the middle of the afternoon, like a middle finger just left there for us to come home to. I wanted it left in that trap as something to do with defiance and a refusal to be cowed. My own petty gesture.

“Unspeakable cunts” was the simple text message a friend sent, a friend from Liverpool, but also living in California. A friend with a PhD in literature from Stanford, and a law degree. This the only language he had available—the brutality of his message exactly what I needed, a recognition of anger, of savagery, of the savagery of this act, and savagery as part of a response. The morning after the attack, in the faculty room at school, I almost broke down when a colleague asked if I was okay. I was unprepared for the tenderness and the sincerity of her question. Still not ready for anything besides unspeakable anger. Now, after the settling down of the initial shock, the despair, the incomprehension, there begins the taking of stock.

Long gone from the news cycle, especially after the subsequent attack in London, the Russia investigation hearings and the UK’s snap general election. Still shocked, however, by the target, the targeting of the young. Trying to understand the loathing. Salman Abedi himself only twenty-two years old. The act of the irreversible statement and the need for that statement to not only be heard but to echo—to speak for something inside that can’t be heard in any other way, something unspeakably painful. And it’s been hard not to think about that, about the pain he must have harbored in order to be capable of this and to acknowledge that pain, at least as aligned with ours while, simultaneously, not wanting to feel anything for him besides anger, lest it somehow dishonor the value of the dead and their families.

Yet, I do keep coming back to his photograph alongside those of the lives he took. And I wonder about his family, about those who loved him. To shut that off would be in some sense to deny his humanity. To become part of the root cause, which has been, largely, where I’ve been living up until this moment. The truck bombing in Sweden, the bodies in Paris, the atrocities in Syria—headlines that remain headlines. Things shut down, treated as news rather than as end points in a series of individualized lives, each one worthy of mourning.

The rat went in a plastic bag into last week’s garbage. The body stiff with rigor mortis, but still not decomposing, perhaps because of the concrete. I thought about taking the body down to the bottom of the garden and burying it, but that seemed almost as extreme as having for so long done nothing at all. That, however, would have been the truest act of forgiveness. The unreasonable thing to do. In response to all the other unreasonable things.