Brixton and Paris

It’s Friday night and I’m in a club in Brixton. It’s called Phonox. Big boxy black speakers hang down from the ceiling over the dancefloor, leant in at such an angle that they surround you, reminiscent of bullies on a playground. Except instead of demanding your dinner money, they demand to know why you’re not dancing.

A DJ called Tessela is playing and it’s packed. It’s packed to the point where it’s daunting to fight across the room to the bar or the toilet. Once you’re on the dancefloor, you’re not going anywhere else. We move as one: the crowd a writhing mass of humanity, rocking in time to the 4/4. It’s relentless, the music spitting out of those giant speakers violently, as if grabbing you by the throat and insisting on being listened to. A celebration of life, reaching for lasers, letting out wild screams at the sky in pure joy.

It’s in the smoking area that I check my phone and see that something’s amiss. I come crashing back down to earth so hard that I almost leave an indent on the cement floor. Paris, Football, Concerts. So familiar, and yet it’s all alien, incongruous, spoilt. People out enjoying themselves on a Friday night, but it’s taken a horrific turn. I wonder who else around me knows, who else is thinking the same thing. How easily it could have been a nightclub in London instead of a concert hall in Paris.

Numbers fly back and forth, building each time, refusing to stop. I’m against the outside wall, neck cricked down as I stare into my phone, strangers' elbows still clashing against me. Laughter drifting above the crowd’s heads like the smoke from their fags. They sound distant, like they’re underwater. My friends are inches away from me, but they might as well be the other side of the world. I grit my teeth and seethe. It all irritates me: the right wingers blaming refugees, the left wingers blaming UK foreign policy, the people sending their ‘thoughts and prayers’ as if that makes an iota difference. As if anything does.

A few years ago I was sat in a lecture hall discussing how the media frames instances such as these. I was cold and rational, saying how a few ignorant religious zealots in caves were nothing compared to the Soviet Union with a full set of nukes. How the world is safer now than ever before. Smugly stating that hundreds die every day in the Middle East and we think nothing of it. That seems a long time ago now and rationality seems a long way away. I give myself into the hurt, the hatred on Twitter and Facebook. Stop fucking killing people you cunts.  

I can’t dance anymore. I go home hollow and numb.

The next evening, I go for a walk. It’s a Saturday night, but the streets seem deserted, unusually quiet. I walk and walk. I walk to the top of the hill, to Ruskin Park and look out at the city. It sprawls out and hums in front of me. I take off my woolly hat and let the cold air hit me. Breathing in deep, feeling the cold in my lungs. The London Eye is lit up in a French Tricolore. 

The pangs then hit me hard in the chest and I feel queasy, as if I’m still feeling last night’s effects. I think about the video of President Hollande I had watched before I went out. My French isn’t good enough to have followed the words, but I got “guerre”. It rolled about my head as if echoing. War. If the French define this as an act of war, the world as a whole may be about to change.

I look out at one of the great Western cities, and wonder if it’s changed already.

@JJReid13