{"id":111624,"date":"2017-06-08T13:21:09","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T17:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111624"},"modified":"2017-06-08T14:12:22","modified_gmt":"2017-06-08T18:12:22","slug":"where-i-wasnt-when-manchester-bled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/08\/where-i-wasnt-when-manchester-bled\/","title":{"rendered":"Where I Wasn\u2019t When Manchester Bled"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

The Manchester worker bee, as depicted in a mosaic on the floor of Manchester Town Hall.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Like a nightmare from the past
\nTo the sound of splintered glass \u2026<\/p>\n

What kind of times are these?
\nThey drive you to your knees<\/p>\n

\u2014\u201cA Person Isn\u2019t Safe Anywhere These Days,\u201d by the Chameleons, a Manchester band<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I was eight and watching Saturday Westerns with my maternal nana in her Moss Side maisonette when the IRA bombed central Manchester in \u201996. My nana had a color TV, but she preferred to watch the world in black and white. I\u2019d helped her drain the settings. She had a budgie called Bluey and an Alsatian called Blacky and a serpent tattoo on her thigh.<\/p>\n

We were eating grapes.<\/p>\n

But my mother is convinced we weren\u2019t. Not when the bomb went off. Years later she told me she\u2019d heard the news before we left the burbs; she\u2019d taken me to see my paternal nana in Wythenshawe that day instead, avoiding town.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember worrying about my maternal nana or being awed by footage of the debris cloud\u2014like something out of Thunderbirds<\/em>, only not on a TV but on a street down which I\u2019d walked many times. I don\u2019t remember being relieved that nobody was killed. Then again, apparently, I don\u2019t even remember where I was.<\/p>\n

But I do recall how Manchester transformed in the aftermath of that bomb. We got posher shops, while nearby Hulme, where other relatives lived, a place then notorious for its crime and counterculture, continued to be demolished and redeveloped apace. That bombing\u2014which as of Monday, May 22, 2017, 22:31 BST, is no longer the<\/em> bombing\u2014caused an estimated 1.2 billion pounds in material damage and haunts the city in the shape of Harvey Nicks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All my writing has orbited that<\/em> bomb and failed to reach it. I feel I know for certain I was there. I know I was<\/em> happy at my Moss Side nana\u2019s, almost every Saturday, watching Gary Cooper do the right thing when everybody else wouldn\u2019t. I know I was well within earshot of the Corporation Street blast, whether or not I remember hearing it. There might be something vaguely hauntological to this stuckness, my obsession with Manchester\u2019s lost future and my fear of finding it. More likely it\u2019s just childhood nostalgia.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019ve circled another Manchester, another bomb\u2014this one incommensurate with the last; this one an atrocity destroying more than concrete, steel, and glass; this one erasing the other as it compounds the city\u2019s trauma, its transformative energy from Peterloo to now. Unlike so many in or from my hometown, I haven\u2019t truly lost. I will remember I was twenty-nine and partying on the Croisette, trashing films at the seventieth Cannes Film Festival while celebrating my own and celebrating myself, when the Manchester Arena was bombed. Twenty-two children and parents died. Here are their names<\/a>. At least 119 others were injured.<\/p>\n

Like many, my wife and I had worried about terror attacks in Cannes. Even half expected one. There had been a bomb scare at the Debussy Theatre the evening before we arrived and our anxious friends had texted us, checking that we were safe.<\/p>\n

The festival\u2019s much publicized heightened and tightened security measures meant men cradling machine guns everywhere: outside cinemas, restaurants, hotels, beaches, those ever-posher shops.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you feel safer?\u201d I asked as machine guns passed our dinner table.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d a friend said, reluctantly.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d another said. \u201cNow I\u2019m just scared of them<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Being in Cannes then meant missing the first four episodes of the long-awaited Twin Peaks<\/em> revival. I am one of those lifelong Lynch devotees. My wife, too. A few years ago, we made the pilgrimage to Poulsbo and North Bend, Washington, to visit the Double R Diner, Ronette\u2019s bridge, Snoqualmie Falls, and other landmarks from the original show. But Lynch would soon be here with the cast to premiere his new series on the big screen. We were leaving Cannes before he arrived.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut we\u2019re here now<\/em>,\u201d I said, stressing the irony.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow there\u2019s a good problem to have.\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t hear about Manchester until that next morning, when my wife told me.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I told you last night,\u201d she said. \u201cI had a text after we got in. You\u2019d already gone to sleep. I woke you up to tell you, but you didn\u2019t really say anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, you didn\u2019t,\u201d I said, ashamed, unsure of whom I was accusing: her or me. I was too angry to cry and spent most of that morning texting family and friends back home, hoping everybody I knew and they knew were safe. A few close calls, but all were.<\/p>\n

Now, this film I had written was shot on location in Manchester, a few miles from the bombing, with a largely Mancunian cast and crew. The film is about Manchester horrors involving young children\u2014here, in the implicit context of gangland poverty, as well as the satanic ritual abuse scare, which crossed the Atlantic in the late eighties. The nine-year-old girl\u00a0who starred in our film had flown\u00a0over with her mum for its premiere. She had classmates at the Ariana Grande concert. For some time, the safety and whereabouts of these children were unknown to us.<\/p>\n

The program coordinator of Semaine de la Critique made a special announcement before introducing our film and wore his New Order T-shirt in solidarity with our city.<\/p>\n

Several people told us how sorry they were, how they understood what it felt like. One French woman pointed at her heart and said, \u201cWe know. We\u2019ve been there.\u201d Their kindness\u00a0made me feel guiltier and farther from home.<\/p>\n

I will remember where I wasn\u2019t. I will remember that I had the luxury of being somewhere else; of being dazed and smiling, uncomfortable as our film became unexpectedly politicized. I was here<\/em>, not there<\/em>. I heard only our director, on stage in the Palais Miramar, proudly dedicating our film to the people of Manchester.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

We had shot the film on the east fringe of the M60, the city\u2019s ring road, on two redbrick terrace streets in Oldham: a once-teeming textile hub, a decommissioned engine of the past, now only powering another lost future. Oldham was also the shooting location for Bryan Forbes\u2019s Oscar-nominated The Whisperers<\/em> (1967), which had used the baleful landscape of its decline to reflect the social isolation and social horrors affecting its most vulnerable postwar residents: children, women, the elderly.<\/p>\n

Filming in those houses, decked out with period details\u2014some, such as the analog TV, imported by our production designer; others already there\u2014felt like we were resurrecting the northern interiors of my childhood, my nanas\u2019 front rooms.<\/p>\n

Oldham was once the embodiment of the industrious and industrial worker bee. In the wake of the attack, the bee took off on social media, a symbol of Mancunian toil and our city\u2019s indomitable spirit.<\/p>\n

Bees buzz<\/em>. \u201cHaving a buzz\u201d and \u201cbuzzing\u201d are perfect examples of Mancunian dialect. Our city\u2019s buzz<\/em> is our communal mongrel blood, coursing through veins ever-expanding, ever-connecting, to offer and strengthen our city\u2019s energy, our joy, our release. There\u2019s a reason Manchester was and is a global innovator of both Western work<\/em> and play<\/em>. We have the best parties, the best DJs, the best bands in the best venues. You know this because we invite you. We buzz our wings and gift each other.<\/p>\n

And I heard those buzzing wings when we made our film. Waving children watched from top-room windows, standing on furniture to better see our endless takes in their street. Without notice, working residents gave us keys to their homes to help us shoot. At night, when the cold got to us and hunger had us flagging, they fed us oven chips.<\/p>\n

One morning, I spent two hours bothering the doorstep of a magnanimous tenant, listening to juicy stories about his street, his<\/em> Manchester. He offered me mugs of tea and asked me more about the film.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s set in 1990,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere<\/em>?\u201d he said, pleased.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

At Cannes, we were his representatives; through our film we represented the streets, the time and the city, as much as the work represented ourselves.<\/p>\n

Alice, the troubled protagonist in the film, features as an absent presence in three of my novels, which follow a local criminal, Henry Bane, through a nineties Manchester underworld. She is Bane\u2019s first love, and she is dead before my first novel begins; but her life is retraced by those who cared for her. Alice is last seen alive right before the \u201996 bombing. Now she lies across the loneliest hearts and liminal zones of the city. She is another lost future.<\/p>\n

But in the film, we find her present. She is there<\/em>, a drug addict, <\/em>but ready to sacrifice her own desperate needs to shield two children from violent forces\u2014social, economic, maybe supernatural\u2014forces which deny kindness and singular comprehension. However, these forces, with their cruelty and complexity, can wound her but can\u2019t defeat her. Not yet.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

From Cannes, my wife and I flew back home on the Wednesday morning, a day and a night after the attack. Our flight was delayed. We worried. It was fine.<\/p>\n

I went to work the next day. I hugged a colleague who had lived in Manchester, just over the road from the arena. She remembers watching crowds of young girls with their mothers, going to see pop stars every week. \u201cI couldn\u2019t stop crying,\u201d she said. \u201cI know how young they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

After work, I said, \u201cHave you seen the new Twin Peaks<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

She nodded, smiled. A scene in the opening two-parter reintroduces Margaret, aka the Log Lady, played bravely by the late Catherine E. Coulson, who was in the throes of a terminal illness during filming. Frail and full of feeling, Margaret phones the aged deputy police chief, Hawk, and delivers a typically cryptic message before telling him to watch carefully<\/em>. These two words are said with such clarity and wrenching compassion. Watch carefully. They\u2019re not a warning but a plea for his wellbeing. Caring words from a now-dead woman who lived just long enough to share them as Our Lady of the Log. They\u2019re a light of hope for Hawk, and for us.<\/p>\n

Finally, I could cry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tom Benn is an author and screenwriter from Stockport, England. He has donated his <\/em>honorarium<\/em>\u00a0for this article to the <\/em>We Love Manchester Emergency Fund<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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