before shoving it safely back in my coat pocket. The clanging and scraping and groaning of the train quickly faded out as bluesy Fifties electric guitars faded in, then an electric bass like something out of Grandmaster Flash reminded me that we were in the Nineties and the drums kicked in and we were off.
I used to find travelling round the city such a stress, I tell you, but now with my own personal soundtrack pumping through my head it’s just like being in my own music video. People don’t seem so threatening any more – they’re just actors in my video. A funky song from Prince and I’m strutting through the crowd like a Sexy MF, a ballad from Boyz II Men (hey, don’t knock ’em, they’re great vocalists; cheesy, I know, but they can sing) and I’m sauntering through the street annoying everyone trying to get past me who thinks that I must be a tourist otherwise I’d be scurrying along as frantically as them. And as I stared at the wooden slats that made up the floor of the train, I imagined I was on a pier – not Brighton or Southend, Christ, no! Somewhere a bit more…classy, romantic even…I don’t know, on a quayside in Miami or Venice Beach perhaps – this music was transporting me. And now this voice, sighing goodbyes, stabbed in the guts by the inevitability of dying love. Looks like Melody Maker actually got something right for a change when they said that this debut by Jeff Buckley was important, a future classic album. There’s not much coming out these days with powerful songwriting and great singing, I tell you. It’s either great singing and crap songs – Boyz II Men. Or crap singing and great songs – Oasis. Buckley’s voice was…beautiful…got to try this out with some of my students. The song was sad, but I was enjoying the technique and feeling a bit superior that I had not made the same mistake as the character in the song – getting involved.
As the song just continued to build, without looking back, one crescendoing chord sequence after another, I became self-conscious for a moment that my exhilaration might be showing a bit too much on my face – I wasn’t sure if that was a smirk from the girl sitting opposite me from inside her cave of black hair, as black as the little mice in these tunnels, their fur dyed by years of grime and fumes. Funny…I couldn’t’ve cared less if she was a minger or twice my age. But she wasn’t, so I grabbed the discarded newspaper on the seat next to me (luckily it was the Guardian and not The Sun) and I held it up to my face.
UN troops stand by and watch carnage
said the headline. I read it probably ten or fifteen times without taking it in, as my mind was still on the passionate end of the ‘Last Goodbye’. But then another track started, all harp-like guitar and choirboy falsetto. I checked the track number on the Discman: 8. I laid the newspaper on my lap and pulled the CD’s booklet from the inside pocket of my coat – I never leave home without the booklets, I tell you, I’m the kind of music anorak that has to know the track titles, who wrote them, who played drums, who produced, blah, blah, blah…This one was ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ by Benjamin Britten, apparently. I stuffed the booklet away again, flicking my eyes ahead to try and see without really looking if the girl thought I was sad…Is that a stud above her lip or a mole? Either way it’s…I hid behind the newspaper again…saucy.
The classical vibe of the track swelling in my ears and its almost unintelligible words meant I found myself focusing on the words on the page in front of me instead.
French and Belgian forces are evacuating expatriates but leaving members of the Tutsi minority, including local employees of international organizations, to their fate, reports Mark Huband in Kigali.
A few yards from the French troops, a Rwandan woman was being hauled along the road by a young man with a machete. He pulled at her clothes as she looked at the foreign soldiers in the desperate, terrified hope that they could save her from her death. But none of the troops moved. ‘It’s not our mandate,’ said one, leaning against his Jeep as he watched the condemned woman, the driving rain splashing at his blue United Nations badge.
‘Not our mandate’ – what’s that supposed to mean?
The 3,000 foreign troops now in Rwanda are no more than spectators to the savagery which aid workers say has seen the massacre of 15,000 people – mainly from the traditionally dominant Tutsi minority. The killing started after President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart – both from the majority Hutu tribe – died in a rocket attack on their plane while returning from peace talks. His presidential guard and the Hutu-dominated army unleashed a campaign of terror. Opposing them is the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, dominated by Tutsis.
The Belgian and French troops are here to get foreigners out. So far they have ferried about 1,000 from an assembly point at the French school to military aircraft. Rwandans, including staff of international organizations, are left to their fate.
About 275 Rwandans staying in one hotel have been barred from leaving on European military aircraft, a Belgian Red Cross employee said yesterday. ‘All of them are Tutsi. They are going to be assassinated. It’s disgusting that they don’t take them. We have all their names and we are going to publish them when we get to Belgium,’ he said, before being evacuated with his Rwandan wife.
Sick!
Less than a mile from the airport yesterday, army trucks filled with foreign evacuees were blocked when they drove into a massacre where machete- and knife-wielding Rwandans lined the roads smiling as their victims lay dying.
On the way to pick up the evacuees, the convoy had passed the bodies of two newly killed men sprawled in the muddy courtyard of a house. As the convoy returned past the same house less than an hour later, the body of a woman and two more men lay with the two already dead, their eyes wide open. The woman had had one of her legs cut off.
On the other side of the road the bodies of three men lay with fresh wounds. Watching the convoy were the killers – young men, two women with clubs, old men and children. Close to one body stood a man with a clipboard in office clothes. Beside him stood a well-armed government soldier in smart uniform. Halfway up the hill lay a pile of corpses. From nearby houses women, old and young, were casually led to the pile and forced to sit down on it. Men with clubs then beat the dead and dying bodies which surrounded the women as they sat, screaming, pleading for their lives…
The music in my headphones was too mournful, too perfectly suited to reading about such awful things. It was as if a gushing tap had been turned on in my chest and it was quickly filling up. Once my chest was full, the warm water had to flow up my neck and into my head, and if I didn’t do something about it quick, it would overflow from my eyes. I chucked the newspaper back into the seat that it came from and popped the headphones from my ears like a couple of corks that let the vintage 1994 Northern Line plonk fill up my world again.
Phew! That was close. I flicked a look at the girl opposite to see if she’d noticed anything. She stretched her green and white striped sleeves, gripped them and buried her hands between her thighs as if she was trying to keep warm. It wasn’t cold in the train. I was probably giving her the creeps. Camden Town couldn’t come soon enough. I jumped up before the train stopped – a split second before, so did she.
Oh, great, now she thinks the creepy bloke is following her!
I tried to get ahead of her, so she couldn’t possibly think I was after her, but just succeeded in colliding with the people in the flood coming the other way. So I tried walking slowly, so she would quickly lose me in the crowd, but that just got me a barrage of ‘tuts’ and huffs aimed at the back of my head. So now I was walking side by side with the girl and I had made myself just about as conspicuous as possible – as conspicuous as an average-looking bloke can down Camden Tube on a Saturday with its time-warp tunnels
