Home |
Five hundred feet per second - that's how fast it moves. So fast, in fact, that you cannot see it for what it is.
My six-year-old and I had just rounded the corner into Chichester Street, the concrete faux-stone on our right, when I turned, drawn by the flash. Moving at that speed, it looks like long black pencil-lines, horizontal against the sky, appearing and reappearing. Only when its flight is interrupted does it fall and break into tiny crystals. They are so pretty.
There was no sound of breaking or flying or falling. By that time, the pressure wave had already compressed our eardrums, sucked the air from our lungs. There was an aeon of not-breath while the black lines flickered, and suddenly the displaced air equalised, like a slap in the face.
I dropped to my knees and ran my hands over his body, checking that he was uninjured. He had that withdrawn, thoughtful expression that you see on small children when you say something to them that they don't understand. There were tiny shards of glass on the collar of his coat. I picked them off and - for some mindless reason - placed them carefully on the pavement beside us.
Then I gathered him up and ran because that's what you're supposed to do: get away, in case there's another one but there never is. They only plant them one at a time, you see, so as not to over-stretch the TV camera crews. I ran, and then I walked because he seemed to be so heavy. In a few more steps we came up to the silent blue lights, and people gesticulating and I couldn't carry him any further. A scrawled notebook appeared in front of my face:
ARE YOU O.K.?
Yes, I replied we're fine we're not hurt. Then they looked down at my legs and I looked down and thought: when did that happen? It was still quiet - restful even - so I just sat on the kerb for a while, to see what would happen next. They handed me another note which said:
AMBULANCES COMING: YOU ARE NUMBERS ELEVEN AND TWELVE.
Good, I thought. We have proper numbers now. Our identities have been re-established.
They started to bring some of the others in, on stretchers. I held the child to my chest so that he couldn't see, but there was no-one to do the same for me. One young woman was carried past; her eyes were open and we smiled at each other, the way numbers do. She was so pretty. The glass in her back was like angel's wings.
I couldn't help wondering: would it have been more difficult for them, the people who did this? I mean, if they had known that we were real numbers...