ORDINARY TIME

(for those affected by the weekend’s attack on Friar Gate, Derby)

The night had done what nights like that night do: spilt lager light on rain, on chip-shop steam, on girls in heels, on lads in jackets through with talking bollocks, football, work, a dream

of nothing much. A vape. A burst of song. A taxi edging up like some bored shark. The usual brave stupidity along a city street determined to seem dark

and safe enough. Because that’s how we live: by trusting pavements, traffic lights, the lot; by thinking all this shabby world can give is queues and rent and weather. God knows what

we’d do without that faith. Then came the car. No myth. No fable. Just a hatchback’s rush through flesh, and noise — making the ordinary far too quickly strange, too suddenly a crush

of dropped things: one white trainer, someone’s phone, a handbag burst, chips bright against the street. The sound was not dramatic. More a groan the world gives out when metal answers meat.

And that’s the worst. Not grandeur. Not the swell of history or some black-bannered cause. Just how the foul, ridiculous, private hell can rip through Friday night without applause.

A woman, seconds since, had laughed at chips. Two blokes were arguing whether Derby’s done. Someone was texting, something cheap on lips, some poor sod halfway through saying, “Another one?”

Then blood. Then sirens. Then the blank-faced stand of people who have seen too much too near. The awful shuffle of a human band not knowing whether help or flight is fear.

By morning, bins. Deliveries. The usual. A gull inspecting grease-stains by the kerb. And all the shops resumed the old refusal to let the world grow honest with a verb.

Because if streets remembered what they keep, no bastard town would ever go to bed. It’s we who do the forgetting, cheap and deep, and call it “carrying on” instead.

Still, something in the paving must have known how thin the peace is, how we live by luck: one moment chips and rain and going home, the next the whole damn frame unzipping. Fuck…

Yet even then — absurdly — life persists: a cone put out, a bus-stop lit, doors shut, some Sunday couple, shopping in their fists, stepping round where horror’s mouth stayed cut.

And maybe that is all that can be said. No lesson worth the saying. Nothing grand. Just that the living still must go on, led by habit more than hope, and hand in hand.