I didn't want to go home to my family home smashed up, broken up like that graham greene short story or something. The bike ride home across the city was bleak enough; it seemed all the city I could see was in confusion, upended in its crammed streets with sewage spilling out through ducts across streets that had in places been torn like paper. Not everywhere of course. Outside many homes people stood or squatted in confusion. Some were packing their cars and planning their immediate departures, some seemed blasé, many were weeping. How can you account for all the people? The man smoking a cigarette as he walked into a gas leak, the child screaming for his mother outside Linwood park. People weeping and embracing and confused and scared and all the while black smoke poured in the distance from the city. And there in the city, the office workers with blood pouring over their office worker shirts and the curious lines of people in single file running out of the square seemed so awful and terrible and you know beautiful, because it was both terrible and beautiful of course. That could have been the worst thing about it for me, as I ran up into the Regent building I felt both acutely aware of the situation and divorced from it. Lit in the gloom the building had its last performance, cinema four's triumphant ceiling collapse- it's own vile display in splintered wood and masonry and insulation and plastic flapping and intricate and ugly and definite. And as I ran back up to the projection room for the first aid kit, I didn't really think of anything other than the horrible fear. And wanting to weep. The man's body felt so damp you know, the smell of the blood was so unfamiliar and he was in so much pain but he could stand and we lifted him out and out. And it was terrible and so bleak and awful, and you didn't know if the building would fall or anything but we had to try get the people in the elevator out. Even though we couldn't and the phone network was down and they didn't have a torch even though we work in a cinema and it is like essential or something. And I am lying in bed and it keeps running through my head, buildings collapsed, the terrified man running down and telling us that a man was trapped in cinema four and he looked so paralysed by fear and everything was so confused. And getting to my parents house to find it ruined on the inside, but it being fine because as I dropped the bike my parents were there and we were all together and embracing and safe and warm. And of course, I had the guys blood all over me but he looked like he made it and the people got out of the elevator or something, thats what Sandra said. She said go home, and I did. Past the Cathedral and its dead bodies, past the First Trinity Congregation Church with its failed bracing and its lying all over Manchester street, past the Christchurch Club collapsed in on itself, past the people and the fear and the broken streets and home. And I didn't want to see my home ruined and I didn't want to see so many things.
