When I was six I saw a ghost at school. The tall, thin, grey man would pop up in various locations: standing in the middle of the rose bed; looking round the edge of the classroom door; sitting at the piano in the music room after school had finished. Maybe my ghost was a product of my overactive imagination, maybe he was real. It's impossible for me to tell.
Three years ago last night I was spending a night in a hotel after a day of filming in London. I’m always on edge when staying in hotels, but on this particular night I barely slept a wink. I called G in the early hours. I feel like I’m not alone in this room, I told him. I feel like someone’s trying to keep me awake. I didn’t feel scared, just very aware of what felt like a presence. Each time I dozed off I could have sworn I felt someone tugging at my bedsheets, gently, insistently. Don’t sleep, don’t sleep. Through eyes folded with fatigue I watched the milky dawn bring the shabby room into focus.
Eventually I dozed off, to be awoken seemingly minutes later by my alarm going off. Exhausted, I made the decision to miss the early train back to Manchester, and I turned the alarm off. As an extremely conscientious worker bee, it was very out of character for me to be deliberately late. But I sank gratefully into an extra 30 minutes sleep.
Later, I was making my way to Euston on the Thameslink to catch a later train home. As I got off the train and headed to Kings Cross my sister A, always watching my back, called me to say that there had been a power surge and the tubes weren’t running. Unease began to jangle in my ears. In Kings Cross I was turned back from the ticket gate and milled aimlessly with other passengers. People started to emerge from the underground with soot on their faces, and suddenly the atmosphere became highly charged. Within minutes we had been evacuated from the station. Emergency vehicles descended on the scene from all directions, including from above where the loud thwack of propellors shouted danger to the confused crowds below.
I called G with an increasing sense of alarm. Already the mobile networks were jammed and it took me minutes to get through. Around me, commuters still desperate to get to work were piling onto buses, their tube journeys having been thwarted. I’m not getting on a bus, I said to G.
There are bombs on the buses! someone was shouting. The bus bomb hadn’t gone off yet, so at this point this was hysteria. Still people swarmed through bus doors, irritated.
It’s actually happening, I said to G. It’s a terrorist attack.
Don’t say that. We don’t know that.
No, it is. It’s a terrorist attack.
I felt strangely calm. I sat in a café round the corner, as we couldn’t leave a roped off area around Kings Cross. Twenty or so of us drank tea and smoked cigarettes- even though I’d given up a year before. We listened to the events unfold on the radio; Tony Blair confirming that London was under attack. At the heart of the chaos, drinking tea, we didn’t feel under attack, but the frantic wail of sirens and whirr of choppers outside the café window told another story.
At one point the sky flashed across the building tops and I waited for thunder. Instead I heard a flat, dull thud. A few blocks away, the shouted warning had come true. There was a bomb on a bus. Still I felt quite calm. I knew that we were safe in the café.
In the weeks following the attacks, those like me who were in the capital that day trotted out their near miss stories: if I hadn’t stopped to buy a newspaper; if I’d been working at the office that day- it could have been me. Today the families of 52 people will be running the mirror image of those thoughts through their grieving heads, as they reach for their beloved ghosts through a gossamer veil that's impenetrable as rock. If only she hadn’t been in the office that day, they might think; if only he had stopped to buy a paper. He would have been here. She wouldn’t have died. Woulds and coulds frame our catastrophic losses as they do our lucky escapes, but instead of being told with a gossipy relish- I should have been on the tube!- they’re milled silently, regretfully, internally. She should still be alive.
This week my family faces an anniversary too: it will be four years since we lost Helen. Four years since a bomb went off in our lives and hearts. Did I feel her, my little ghost, tugging at my bedsheets on July 6th 2005, whispering don’t sleep, don’t sleep? Would I have been on the tube, were it not for a whispered voice keeping me awake, tiring me out, insisting that she wasn’t ready for anyone to join her? Or is it just my heart spinning stories to hold me in a web of comfort? It's impossible for me to tell.
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