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Tuesday evening

     well, that was an eventful and unexpected day. thought I was gonna have a day off doing me own thing, got called in anyway. before getting to work, saw the cloud, and joined some of the crowds gawping at it for ages, all of us totally clueless – facebook and twitter pinging people like popcorn, but nothing certain being said.
     finally saw the proper news as soon as I got to work, on the big screen above reception. everyone was just stood there watching. earliest reports saying at least 200 presumed dead, mostly children.
     no-one could really think. boss tried to tell us it was business as usual – but by lunchtime he’d let some go coz, well, we just couldn’t work. it was on our minds.
     for those of us who stayed in the office, it was on the radio. final death toll 235, of which 214 were kids. they caught the guy real quick, but mid-morning it was just a rumour, along with all the usual nervous suspicious debates about whether it was islamist slash white supremacist slash politically motivated.
     by lunch it was "a suspect has been apprehended". over lunch we watched the telly again as they announced the suspect had been named: nathan stold, 19, a kid from new cross. no known links to terror groups. more debate about why he did it: rogue islamist bomber, rogue white supremacist bomber, gang warfare. they’d clearly decided he was too young to be politically motivated. on behalf of my age group, I have to say that pissed me off a bit. pissed me off a lot, actually.
     nothing changed much as we all left early to go home, but I listened to the radio on my phone as I walked to the tube and caught their guy say about the video on the internet this kid had made. apparently that was how the cops had found him: he’d live streamed the whole event from his mobile from across the street. clearly idiotic as well as sick.
     well of course I expected the video would be taken down from the web by the time I got home. but you know what they say about the internet. once somethings online, its online forever. you just need to know how to find it. took me less than half an hour.
     the kid had called it "st anselms infant school get whats coming to em". it begins with just a crappy shot of the school from a distance away, nearly half the screen blacked out by some window frame or his finger or something. you see the parents arriving, mums mostly, gathering around the gates and nattering while the kids race around them. you cant really see much detail on the kids. their clothes are vaguely human-shaped blobs of colour, their heads and hands blending in with the sun shining on the brick wall between the school and the road, or the glass walls of the school itself.
     some of the mums are still nattering as the kids line up to go into school. some of them wave to their own kids. some are rocking prams while they talk, and some are holding hands with other kids who are either too young or maybe just too old for the infants. its ages 4 to 7 who go to infants. this school had a nursery too, so some of them in the building would be 2 or 3 years old.
     theres about 5 minutes of that. the mums aren’t quick to leave, apparently enjoying the chance to natter. dont they have anything else to do? if you didn’t know what was coming, youd probably switch off out of boredom. but there’s a slight shake to the camera. the kid is clearly waiting for something to happen.
     and then it does. a big white glare surrounds the school and theres a sudden buzz which makes you realise the video actually does have sound. for a moment it goes silent again, the school in the centre of the picture wrapped in a ball of thick red and orange flames.
     then the screaming starts.
     the 1st time I watched it, I felt ice cold. I wanted to scream with those mums. all those beautiful young lives. wasted.
     the 2nd time I watched it was no different.
     the 3rd time was the same.
     I think it was the 4th or 5th time when something else began to enter my mind, gradually appearing through the blackness of shock and grief.
     the redness of anger.
     after I’d lost count of how many replays, I switched to a tab for the latest news. they show’d a photo of the kid, nathan stold, at a party or something, backwards baseball cap on his head, staring at the lens with that "come have a go if you think your hard enough" look that kids think is cool.
     the redness of anger was replaced. by a brighter, more intense redness.
     Rage.

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