somewhere between talking shit and saying something real

They're demolishing Athlone halls from the inside out. Suddenly, this vast patch of sky where there were windows and concrete. You can see right up the corridors, to the walls that were someone's world once. Where pleasure moments hung before...

It's like a bomb's gone off where the halls once were. It's a warzone, fuck, it looks like Sarajevo or somewhere else.

I think, it doesn't look like here. It looks like Bosnia, Iraq, endless 'other' countries where shit happens.

What if shit happened here? What if someone, some country we've never heard of and can't pronounce decided that we, the citizens of the UK and America were living under dangerous regimes? That our decision to re-elect Bush and Blair is proof of some kind of mass brainwashing?

What if the Pentagon's refusal to allow UN personnel to interview Guantanamo detainees without supervision was seen for what it is, a fundamental breach of human rights? What if it was suspected that we were holding weapons of mass destruction (which we are) that could kill thousands of innocents in the East (which we could), or that we might suddenly turn on the world and start using napalm on civilian targets (which we have) and that our media is more full of propaganda and ideology than anything else(which it is)?

What if they came in the name of freedom? In the name of democracy, liberty, truth, what if they bombed us in the name of peace? In the name of God?

Not by suicide but by 'acceptable' war, planes soaring overhead, there's napalm on the Strand, there's troops landing in the seaports and stopping the motorways, there's rumours of torture of civilians in Hertfordshire and Cornwall, there's soldiers in green fatigues on our moors and walkways, there's rubble in our cities.

What if our houses looked like that?

*****

Is it globalisation or things just being shit that brings this man into my kitchen? He's Asian, he's from Sri Lanka. His name is Singrut, I think, he left because of the fighting. It's too cold here, he wants to go back but he can't because, he makes guns with his hands, not neat pistols with two fingers, but rifles that take his whole body to show and hold.

He ran a business in Sri Lanka, textile design. Now he holds out a carrier bag for me to tip Jay's fish heads into, now he asks permission to clean our kitchen and says thank you when we let him. We get pissed off at the interruption, he gets pissed off that his girlfriend is long gone, far away, and he won't say where..

I wish there were no guns in Sri Lanka too, though not as much as you.

He's a Hindu but he goes to church in Egham, lots of Hindus do. They marry Christians, go to church because it's 'the thing' to do.

Really?

Yeah, he says, as if to differentiate, we're not Muslims. He smiles apologetically. He's not Muslim.

Jesus, I whisper, that perpetual dance between blasphemy and prayer. Jesus.

*****

We talk about Sri Lanka in today's seminar, how rebellion and war can be performative. We spoke in the lecture about how 9/11 was so much like a disaster movie that the Pentagon turned to Hollywood for advice on how to anticipate further attacks, how terrorists behead their captives not in private but streamed on the internet, the medium of the global village. That fucking global village.

Helen tells us about Sri Lanka, about a university where the students captured the student committee, the equivalent of our sabbatical officers, in the middle of the night and beheaded them.

When the students pulled open their curtains in the halls of residence the next morning, the heads of the sabbs were staring at them from the fountain.

Rebellion as a kind of performance. Some things are done just for the drama, huh?

*****

This is a global village for me. There's a man in my kitchen cleaning up the shit me and my parents left on the table last night. I could do it myself, but he didn't want to get shot, so he's here now and never accepts cup of tea. So, so eager not to be confused with Muslims, so desperate just to be accepted and safe.

Round the corner, the half demolished halls look like Sarajevo, it's a warzone in the middle of campus.

*****

If I woke up one morning and found our sabbs dead outside, if Ana, Greg, Tristan and Nikki, the smiling faces from my SU wall planner were suddenly beheaded in the middle of campus. I wouldn't believe it. I would have to find some way to rationalise it, this elaborate hoax.

In the seminar, someone points out "well yeah, but if we were in a warzone, it wouldn't seem so strange. Horrible, yeah, but it wouldn't be the first corpse you'd seen, you'd believe it alright."

*****

What if I had to ditch my degree and claim asylum in some foreign place? What if I went and became a cleaner, worked shit money and had to learn a foreign language to say please and thank you to the country that dropped fire on my university and killed a cousin of mine? What if I stayed, and woke up one morning to see the heads of the sabbs lying outside Founders? What if I didn't have to think twice to believe it, what if that's just how life was for us, what if it was us?

There's a little bit of war on campus these days, it's cleaning my kitchen and lurking in demolished halls. Except it's not war at all. It's just what I see of war, because I've never had to believe that it's true.

If it was actually true.