she had not answered the phone or gone out. After cleaning already clean cupboards and shining already clear windows, she sat to read the paper. In her habitual, well-rehearsed way, she acknowledged the dead. There had been a bomb in a distant marketplace, one of several that day. A filament snagged and slowed the story down, her habitual soft focus pulled into unexpected sharpness. Somehow that detail caught her; a marketplace, perhaps the most domestic public space there is. People shopping for food, plastic buckets, scarves, aluminium pans. A place providing easy acquisition of the humbler tools of life: domestic wares, phone parts and gaudy cases, vinyl handbags, eggs, cabbages. Mothers buying an evening meal, teenagers shopping for the excitingly new and obligingly affordable. A man buying a bucket so he could clean his house. These ordinary people doing ordinary things, they would be the dead.
She thought of there being no dinner in some households, because the shopping never came back from the market. A husband whose anxiety makes him fear, as if seeming finally by prophecy rather than grinding habit, that his wife has been killed. A family who wouldn’t know for long hours where their father had gone. Somewhere in a town where death might just as easily come at the hands of a checkpoint soldier, a sniper, a drone. Somewhere in a world where escape from such horror resulted in thousands of drowned bodies day by day, as boats and brutal businessmen cast people to their fate in the deceptive, seductive glint of a blue sea that pretended to show the way to safety.
Over the next days, the people behind the numbers began to materialise when she picked over stories in the news. As she was standing at a supermarket checkout she was hit by a surge of connection to the others in the queue. They were ugly and beautiful, unkempt, elegant, all mixed. Their banal ordinariness for once caught her attention, linked them to those killed by bombs in markets in Iraq or by roadsides in Afghanistan. The young man with a backpack and scraggly beard, buying four hooped-together cans of lager and some broccoli and biscuits, trousers carelessly rolled above bare brown ankles. The woman with tired eyes and pink plastic earrings, grey showing at the roots of her black hair. The old man with beige slacks and an olive cap, a small brown shopping bag ready for his bread rolls and two bananas, a small shakiness in his hands. Anna felt a tender kind of love and sadness for them, those ordinary people caught there in a tiny moment of complex lives, as those killed were caught in what became the last moment of their lives, when a crude bomb exploded near enough to kill them. Any one of them, all of them, could be one of the bodies, a life behind the numbers. She made her way through the queue and looked intently at the young cashier, haunted by a sudden picture of her, dead amidst the rubble of a faraway town, her mouth open, small teeth exposed to the heat and dust of disaster. She felt the upwell of a sob, an echo that pulsed in her chest, an inappropriate urge to shield the unknown girl from a fate that was not hers, from any fate that meant her harm.
Later, when she was walking through the woods, she thought about the nameless people killed that morning in a suicide bombing in Baghdad. What did she know about that distant place? Who were the people hidden in that neutral measuring? Her curiosity pulled them to her; she started to fill them out, describing them to herself.
She imagined first a woman in her early forties; she saw a living body, warm, plump, sensuous. She saw black hair, falling in curves like layers of raven wings. She saw her clothed in stretchy turquoise trousers, a pale-yellow top. She saw the woman asleep in bed at night, lying curled on her side, holding her husband’s muscular brown forearm. Other pictures followed, describing the woman’s busy life. She imagined her escaping briefly from the tumult, quietly sitting on her own, on a stool in her scruffy but beloved garden. Anna picked out these details with ease, with love almost. The woman from Baghdad seemed to appear in her mind, complete in the accumulation of random details. She has stayed within easy reach of Anna’s thoughts ever since, a mute companion. Filigree ghost-patterns of love and grief crept across Anna’s hollowed insides, like lichen, like salt crystals blooming on the innards of a calcified cave.
She imagined the others – a boy, men, women, a young girl. She saw in them ordinary beauty, a precious banality that at once made their deaths a terrible sadness. She saw curves of cheekbones, the sweep of a jawline, an array of clothing telling its own stories. The wonderful idiosyncrasies of ordinary people. She saw secret passions and hidden dreams, loves and pains, desires and hopes. She saw what was lost when they died. She imagined one of the men wearing corduroy trousers. It occurred to her that she didn’t know if men in a hot place would wear corduroy trousers, but realising how extensive her ignorance of their life was, she accepted a broad interpretation of differences and commonalities, accepted too that her own background would tell in the details more than it should. Her experiment must be one that remained ideally universal, and perhaps pragmatically crude.
Anna was taken unawares by her experiment – her anger was replaced by tenderness. As the characters came to her she felt a bond with them, and sadness at their death, a confusing mourning of dead people who did not exist. As she walked through the woods, wintery light drifting down through the leafless branches, she saw the people standing amongst the trees, waiting and still, silent in the unexpected cold, caught inexplicably for a moment in this English woodland.
She continued paying out in words and mental pictures what the numbers alone could not. She began to write them down. It was impossible and too gruelling to be comprehensive. But she kept to a steady, dutiful acknowledgement. Some of them, especially the first woman, she thought of often, in idle moments, enriching the picture she had made, thinking of her sitting calm and content in her garden, adding details to the story that she told for her. What had grown was a hushed but powerful love, a love built from recognition, from accepted kinship. People whose heartbeats and bones matched her own, people whose lives held nothing and everything in common with hers.
So today, as on many other days, Anna makes coffee then sits at the kitchen table and reads. It is quiet; the only sound comes from the clock on the wall and a faint murmur of wind outside. Amongst today’s stories, seven unnamed people have been killed in a roadside bomb. Holes left everywhere by the sudden absence of people that seconds before lived and breathed, families reaching for each other across craters of loss, a whole that has become less than a half, incomplete. Anna pictures seven people, how they look, what they care about, seven people to stand in for the ones who died in a town with a name she has already forgotten, a name she could not pronounce anyway. They materialise before her, easily and clearly; their lives run like a movie, ordinary and utterly beautiful. And she is hit anew by the terrible tragedy of their deaths.
She reaches for the latest volume, a worn exercise book, the dull green cover turning up at the corners. The book has been fattened by the dense writing covering most of the pages. She flexes the book in her hands, rolls her thumb across the edge to find the empty pages at the back. Those too will soon be filled; people die at such a rate. And though she cannot mark them all – the bombed, the drowned, the packed bodies suffocating in boat holds and locked lorries – she will keep adding to her tribe of invented ghosts. She writes quickly, stopping to think, finding in her mind’s eye the details that make the person real, real enough to matter, real enough to mourn. The first one she imagines as a plump girl of eight, in a flowered dress, passing by the hidden bomb on her way home, holding onto her aunt’s hand. She picks up her pen and starts to write the dead.
30 November
Seven people killed by a roadside bomb.
She is a girl of eight, warm with puppy fat and pretty dresses. She likes to eat teacakes, picking off the chocolate first with tiny nibbles. She eats all delightful treats this way so they last and last. A life so simple and so sure that a sweet and pretty cake is the greatest joy she can imagine.
Soft hair on a twelve-year-old boy’s head, the nap pushed into improbable freestyle licks. He has large top teeth, showing slightly whatever he does with his mouth. He walks with a Krazy Kat lope, chattering in the still-high voice of a boy. Every so often he pauses for a small moment, head on one side, teeth on his bottom lip, then resumes his joy-filled commentary.
This
