Free The Canal by Lee Rourke Page B

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 asimple 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