london april 30 1999

I was in Soho the day the bomb went off.

More specifically, I was in Soho Square with Marcy and Tony. Marcy had wanted to go to Covent Garden, but I wanted to go nowhere in particular and do nothing in particular. I had almost completed my university degree, and life was good and slow and chill. But Marcy won. Tony had to leave us to make his shift at work. Some bar in Angel.

Marcy and I walked down to Covent Garden, I can't remember how we got down there. Probably the long way, through ChinaTown, around Leicester Square. We (she) achieved what we (she) had set out to do, and started walking home, which was a fourth-rate hostel in Endsleigh Gardens, and not much of a home to head back to. We walked back, taking a slight detour so we could head north on Charing Cross Road. Although it was a longer route, it was safe, and fun, and filled with many people I knew well, who led interesting lives, and who were always glad to see me.

Charing Cross Road had been cordoned off. Marcy and I had been hearing sirens for most of our walk back home, but when you lived, worked, studied, and played where we did, sirens were part of our everyday white noise. But the cordones were surprising, and so were the number of policemen. Cops on the street were nothing to wonder about, but the number of them, along with the ambulances and fire trucks, were definitely not normal.

A nail bomb had gone off in Soho. Brixton and Whitechapel had been bombed on April 17 and 24, and no suspect had been found so London was nervous. And what everyone had been fearing (and Southall had been expecting), had happened again.

I remember the fear and apprehension. But most of all, I remember the anxiety. After we had gotten past Soho, taking a longer and unwanted route, they started bringing the casualties to the hospital just around the corner from ours. I'd been to that same hospital to get a broken thumb set - it took me half a cigarette from our place to the emergency ward.

The rest of the evening was full of worry+people+ringing phones and pagers. Worrying about people I knew who lived or worked or hustled in the area and trying to get a hold of them. Worried about people worried about me and trying to reach them as well, including Tony, who had been trying to find me.

The next night I went to Hanover Grand, to a weekly night that had quickly turned into a show of support by and for London's gay community. It wasn't much of a party - everything was still so raw and confusing. Soho's got heart, still - they might want us dead, but we'll still party. A misconstru(ct)ed we-shall-overcome sort of vibe.

I don't know why I've been thinking about that day so much. I don't want to, nothing positive ever came out of it. Three people died in Soho, London's gayest neighbourhood, and my neck of the woods in my mid to late teens. Brixton - just down the road from where I grew up, and chock-a-block with black folks - was bombed. Whitechapel, so Bangladeshi it should be renamed and home to many friends, was bombed.

A neo-Nazi group called the White Wolves claimed responsibility for the three bombings, and somebody called David Copeland was sentenced.

I don't want anything but to forget - I have no desire for closure, for PTSD counseling (I don't need it, nothing happened to me or mine), I just want to wipe the days those bombs went off out of history.

I have a tendency to distill events into the life lessons they have taught me, and on April 30, 1999, I learned something I'd rather have never found out - people die for the ugliest reasons, at the hands of other people they've never met. Ergo this world is a twisted, sick, messed up place.

And it doesn't get any better, kid.