First chapter
Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will
stop. Well I wouldn’t know about that I mean rock ‘n’ roll
didn’t stop when Elvis died on the khazi it just got worse.
Next thing you know there was Sonny & Cher and Dexys
Midnight Runners. I’ll come to them later. My point is it’s
easier to start these things than to finish them. I suppose
you thought of that did you?
There’s a reward of 25 million dollars on your head but
don’t lose sleep on my account Osama. I have no information
leading to your arrest or capture. I have no information
full effing stop. I’m what you’d call an infidel and my
husband called working-class. There is a difference you
know. But just supposing I did clap eyes on you. Supposing I
saw you driving a Nissan Primera down towards Haggerston and
grassed you to the old bill. Well. I wouldn’t know how to
spend 25 million dollars. It’s not as if I’ve got anyone to
spend it on since you blew up my husband and my boy.
That’s my whole point you see. I don’t want 25 million
dollars Osama I just want you to give it a rest. AM I ALONE?
I want to be the last mother in the world who ever has to
write you a letter like this. Who ever has to write to you
Osama about her dead boy.
Now about the writing. The last thing I wrote was N/A on an
income support form that wanted NAME OF SPOUSE OR PARTNER.
So you see I’ll do my best but you’ll have to bear with me
because I’m not a big writer. I’m going to write to you
about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away.
I’m going to write so you can look into my empty life and
see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he
leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart
and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its
sharp edges. I am a mother Osama I just want you to love my
son. What could be more natural?
I know you can love my boy Osama. The Sun says you are an
EVIL MONSTER but I don’t believe in evil I know it takes 2
to tango. I know you’re vexed at the leaders of Western
imperialism. Well I’ll be writing to them too.
As for you I know you’d stop the bombs in a second if I
could make you see my son with all your heart for just one
moment. I know you would stop making boy-shaped holes in the
world. It would make you too sad. So I will do my best with
these words Osama. I suppose you can see they don’t come
natural to me but I hope this letter reaches you anyway. I
hope it finds you before the Americans do otherwise I’m
going to wish I hadn’t bothered aren’t I?
Well Osama if I’m going to show you my boy I have to start
with where he lived and I still do. I live in London England
which I agree with you is a bad place in lots of ways but I
was born here so what can you do? London looks like a rich
place from the outside but we are most of us very poor here.
I saw the video you made Osama where you said the West was
decadent. Maybe you meant the West End? We aren’t all like
that. London is a smiling liar his front teeth are very nice
but you can smell his back teeth rotten and stinking.
My family was never rotten poor we were hard up there’s a
difference. We were respectable we kept ourselves
presentable but it was a struggle I don’t mind telling you.
We were not the nice front teeth or the rotten back teeth of
London and there are millions of us just like that. The
middle classes put up web sites about us. If you’re
interested Osama just put down that Kalashnikov for a second
and look up chav pikey ned or townie in Google. Like I say
there are millions of us but now there’s a lot less than
there were of course. I miss them so bad my husband and my
boy especially.
My husband and my boy and me lived on Barnet Grove which is
a road that goes from Bethnal Green to Haggerston. There are
2 kinds of places on Barnet Grove. The first kind are very
pricey old terraced houses. The estate agents call them
Georgian Gems With Extensive Potential For Conversion To
Fully Appointed Executive Flats With Easy Access To The City
Of London And Within A Stone’s Throw Of The Prestigious
Columbia Road Flower Market. The second kind of places are
places like ours. They are flats in dirty brick tower blocks
they smell of chip fat inside. All the flats in each block
are the same except that the front doors don’t match on
account of they get kicked in as often as they get opened
nicely. They built our tower blocks in the fifties. They
built them in the gaps where the Georgian Gems had
incendiaries dropped on them by Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was the last chap who hated London as much as
you do Osama. The Sun calls him the MOST EVIL MAN IN HISTORY
and he made the gaping hole in Barnet Grove that they built
our tower block in. I suppose it was thanks to him we could
afford to live Within A Stone’s Throw Of The Prestigious
Columbia Road Flower Market so maybe Adolf Hitler was not
all bad in the long run.
Like I say our flat was in one of those tower blocks. It was
a small flat and you could hear the upstairs neighbours on
the job. They used to start uh uh uh very soft at first and
then louder and louder uh uh oh my god UH and after a bit
you could listen as hard as you liked and still not know if
you were hearing love or murder. It used to drive my husband
crazy but at least our flat was warm and clean and it was
ours. It was an ex-council flat which is to say we owned it.
Which is to say we didn’t have to struggle to pay the rent.
We struggled to pay the mortgage each month instead there is
a difference and that difference is called EMPOWERMENT.
I didn’t work I looked after our boy. My husband’s wages
paid the mortgage and not much else so by the end of the
month things were always a bit wobbly. My husband was a
copper and he wasn’t just any old copper he was in bomb
disposal. You might reckon bomb disposal wages would of
stretched a bit further Osama but you’d reckon wrong if you
didn’t reckon with the horses the dogs the cockfights in the
back room of the Nelson’s Head and whether it was going to
be a white Christmas. My husband was the sort of bloke who’d
take a punt on anything so thank god he had a better track
record with bombs than the 11:31 at Doncaster. When we were
behind on the bills I used to get teeth-chattering scared of
the bailiffs Osama. Whenever I could squeeze a fiver out of
the shopping money I used to stash it under the carpet just
in case my husband blew everything one day and they chucked
us out on our ear. There was never more than a month of
mortgage under the rug so we were always less than 31 days
away from the street or only 28 days if my husband blew the
lot in February which sod’s law he would. But I couldn’t
hold his flutters against him on account of he needed a
thing to take his mind off the nerves and his thing was no
worse than mine Osama I’ll tell you about my thing in a minute.
In bomb disposal the call can come at any time of the day or
night and for my husband it often did. If the call came in
the evening we would be sitting in front of the telly. Not
saying much. Just sitting there with plates on our knees
eating chicken kievs. They were Findus they were more or
less okay they were always his favourite.
Anyway the telly would be on and we’d probably be watching
Top Gear. My husband knew a lot about motors. We never could
afford a new motor ourselves but my husband knew how to pick
a good secondhand one. We mostly had Vauxhall Astras they
never let us down. They used to sell off the old police
Astras you see. They’d give them a respray but if the light
was right you could always see POLICE showing out from under
the paint job. I suppose a thing can never really change its
nature Osama.
Anyway we’d be watching Top Gear and the phone would go and
my husband would put his plate down on the sofa and take the
phone next door. He wasn’t supposed to tell me anything
about the job but when he came back through the lounge there
was one sure way to tell if it was serious. They always knew
which were the real bombs and which were most probably just
hoaxes. If it was a hoax my husband would sit back down on
the sofa and gobble the rest of his chicken kiev before he
left the flat. It took him only 30 secs but he never did
that if it was serious. When it was serious he just picked
up his jacket and walked straight out.
When it was serious I used to wait up for him. Our boy would
be asleep so there was only the telly to take my mind off
things. Not that it ever would of course. After Top Gear
there was Holby City and then it would be Newsnight. Holby
made you nervous about death and chip pan fires and
Newsnight made you nervous about life and money so between
the both of them they could get you in a right state and
leave you wondering why you bothered with the licence fee.
But I had to keep the telly on in case anything happened and
there was a news flash.
So I used to just sit there Osama watching the telly and
hoping it would stay boring. When your husband works in bomb
disposal you want the whole world to stay that way. Nothing
ever happening. Trust me you want a world run by Richard &
Judy. At night I always watched the BBC. I never watched the
other side because I couldn’t stand the adverts. A woman
with nice hair telling how this or that shampoo stops split
ends. Well. It made me feel a bit funny when I was waiting
to see if my husband had got himself blown up. It made me
feel quite poorly actually.
There’s a lot of bombs in London these days Osama on account
of if you’ve got a message for the nation then it’s actually
quite hard to get on Richard & Judy so it’s easier just to
stick a few old nails and bolts into a Nike bag of
fertiliser. Half the poor lonely sods in town are making a
bomb these days Osama I hope you’re proud of yourself. The
coppers make 4 or 5 of them safe every week and another 1 or
2 go off and make holes in people and often as not it’s the
coppers on the scene who get the holes put in them. They
don’t show it on the news anymore on account of it would
give people the screaming abdabs. I’m not big on numbers
Osama but once late at night I worked out the odds on my
husband getting blown up one day and ever since then I had
the screaming abdabs all on my own. It was practically a
dead cert I swear not even Ladbrokes would of taken your money.
Sometimes the sun would be up before my husband came home.
The breakfast show would be on the telly and there’d be a
girl doing the weather or the Dow Jones. It was all a bit
pointless if you ask me. I mean if you wanted to know what
the weather was doing you only had to look out the window
and as for the Dow Jones well you could look out the window
or you could not. You could please yourself because it’s not
as if there was anything you could do about the Dow Jones
either way. My whole point is I never gave a monkey’s about
any of it. I just wanted my husband home safe.
When he finally came in it was such a relief. He never said
much because he was so tired. I would ask him how did it go?
And he would look at me and say I’m still here ain’t I? My
husband was what the Sun would call a QUIET HERO it’s funny
how none of them are NOISY I suppose that wouldn’t be very
British. Anyway my husband would drink a Famous Grouse and
go to bed without taking his clothes off or brushing his
teeth because as well as being QUIET he sometimes COULDN’T
BE ARSED and who could blame him? When he was safe asleep I
would go to look in on our boy.
Our boy had his own room it was cracking we were proud of
it. My husband built his bed in the shape of Bob the
Builder’s dump truck and I sewed the curtains and we did the
painting together. In the night my boy’s room smelled of
boy. Boy is a good smell it is a cross between angels and
tigers. My boy slept on his side sucking Mr. Rabbit’s paws.
I sewed Mr. Rabbit myself he was purple with green ears. He
went everywhere my boy went. Or else there was trouble. My
boy was so peaceful it was lovely to watch him sleep so
still with his lovely ginger hair glowing from the sunrise
outside his curtains. The curtains made the light all pink.
They slept very quiet in the pink light the 2 of them him
and Mr. Rabbit. Sometimes my boy was so still I had to check
he was breathing. I would put my face close to his face and
blow a little bit on his cheek. He would snuffle and frown
and fidget for a while then go all soft and still again. I
would smile and tiptoe backwards out of his room and close
his door very quiet.
Mr. Rabbit survived. I still have him. His green ears are
black with blood and one of his paws is missing.