Ordinary People

Ordinary People

As she stopped to catch her breath she looked back and realised her mistake.

It wasn’t a mistake to blow up trains, the mistake was  to look back. All the training was about killing. Killing yourself, becoming someone else, someone who could do such things, do them again, being someone who never looked back.

If she hadn’t seen the bodies it would have remained what it should be: an abstraction. That’s how you, whoever you are or were, can do the job. You can’t take on a role, build on a layer over the old you, you are someone else. Name, narrative, no one, someone.

It was only seconds, but a lifetime is a sequence of seconds. It was long enough.

They weren’t supposed to have faces. Abstractions don’t.  As for names, well, she didn’t even have one herself now. But they were real enough. Hans from Hamburg, Anton from Aachen, Dieter from Dusseldorf. Not that anyone would recognise them now, wives, sweethearts, sisters. They weren’t supposed to have faces, so now they didn’t.

She wasn’t supposed to have memories. What are memories for anyway? Memories are analysis, memories have no discipline, memories are unexploded bombs.

What was a person like her doing with explosives anyway? On the course it was exactly like plasticine, it reminded her of her brother, the coloured sets he used to get for Christmas at the vicarage in  - no, no one needs that information, information, memories, someone else.

It was still on her fingers, the stench of  cordite. The only thing that surprised her was the lack of blood. The bodies were mangled, the faces had a kind of grin, but there was no blood. The only sound now was the hiss of the locomotive, it too was mangled, on its side now, breathing its last.

The sound of the bombs had affected her hearing. As the seconds went the silence was broken. A man, dressed all in black except for a coloured armband was shouting Yvette, Yvette, Yvette. She turned to look at where the sound was coming from. This man, with his clothes and accent like that play she had been in at Somerville in 1938.

She looked again at the bodies, the names she had given them, like a second baptism. Hans, Anton, Dieter. The acrid smoke of the bombs mixing with the smoke of the dead train, the abstraction was blowing away. They were Nazis, she had been shown films of them putting people on trains in cattle trucks. No one had a name anymore.

The man in black was still shouting Yvette, Yvette, come on, move. She looked round to see who the Yvette he was shouting at was. There was no one else there. Just her, Jean Richardson, The Vicarage, 22 Montpellier Avenue, in the city of…the old city, the one she had just blown up. Jean Richardson, killer.

(Acknowledgement: Ilkley Writers 2014 )