A Partisan Diary

Sunday, December 11, 2005

six thirty

Children were blown out of their beds. Someone phoned the BBC and said everything had gone black but he found his friend. They couldn't get out of the door because it was twisted but they could go down what was left of the stairs. He thought he wasn't hurt. The BBC person said "I don't know what you are talking about". Later she apologised. That was after one thousand mobile calls, texts and video pictures. They heard firecrackers in Taunten and plane crashes in Westminster and in Hamel Hampstead the roaring was followed by a pressure blast and then explosions.

Someone else phoned and said "It is coming from the refinery. I have smelt gas there for two weeks". Thereby giving the cause before the event happened.

We all have become prophets. There is a collective mind which is free of the official narrative. We were trained by the London bombs. We knew the man shot then was not a terrorist. We knew the phone system had been shut down and now we know the cloud approaching us is toxic even though the police announcement saws it isn't. "Then why is it black mommy?". Some of us heard the car alarms yesterday. We thought an earthquake was coming. I awoke before the windows rattled.

Everyone knows of the vast petrol vapour bombs the Americans used in Iraq. Everyone knows that heat and flame with metal and plastic makes toxic fumes. Everyone knows the wind direction and everyone is phoning their lovers before the cloud comes and they shut down the phones again.

It is another officially designated emergency incident. Everyone knows how fragile this society is. When the Member of Parliament comes on to reassure us as any incident like this is immediately political and he has instructions in a manual everyone knows he is bullshitting. The company spokesman comes on after the MP and says that their first thought is to find their employees so they can't say anything else now except there has been an incident. The blue orange flames at this time are 200 feet in the air. It turns out that only two employees were there to watch over sixty million gallons of leaking aviation fuel. They are missing but this isn't official. The spokesmen say we are not to worry because it is an industrial area and not a suburb. It was early morning. For him.

Except we do worry because some of us know the workers who were up in the early morning in the factories there making chips for the MacDonald's in the city the next day. Some of us have friends in the sink estates next to the refinery fence. Some of us even know the gypsies encamped in the scrub.

The news stations now ask for video phone shots of the flame. They are now competing for extra-ordinary coverage. Fools creep close to the flames with their mobiles. As usual the police and firemen hurl themselves towards some unknown horror.

By now all of us know about the bad safety, the rotten town planning, the official narrative of political spin. The explosion was only thirty minutes ago. We all know before the Prime Minister, before the head of the Police, before the hospitals.

Bhopal, Baghdad- the smoke is coming. Children blown out of their beds.