The First Thing You Would Have Seen

The first thing you would have seen, if you were standing in the queue of the bank at that point, would have been the woman, distressed, but with a certain look of excitement in her eye, pointing a gun at the old woman’s head and pulling the trigger twice – BANG BANG.

The blood, you are forced to confront, as it wobbles through the air and covers you and everyone around you. You can taste it in your mouth and – even though you try to spit it out – you will taste it for weeks afterwards.

And then they’re gone, leaving a trail of destruction behind them. It seems like hours before the police arrive at the scene, and when they do there’s only two of them: the younger one, a young man with blond hair; and the older one, with a dark moustache and balding.

They see the brains of the dead woman, and the older cop pukes on himself. The younger one stares at the mess on the floor, with the bullet lodged in the floor-tiles, still smoking minutes after being fired.

You’re in shock, and so is everyone else in the queue, who still preserve the line they had been standing in minutes before the robbery. No one has taken advantage of the incident to skip places; civilised life continues unmolested.

You remember the swaying of the man’s head as he watched his female accomplice gun the old woman down; you remember seeing it and thinking how much it reminded you of something you saw once, in a film somewhere or in a half-remembered episode of a TV show from your youth, but how it was different close-up and made you afraid in a way you couldn’t say.

You wonder will you have to get the bus home now, in this state, covered in someone else’s insides. What will people say? You slide your foot away from something you had been standing in up until now and you feel your stomach knot in dread.

The footprints of the cops in the smeared brown blood on the floor; the oppressive silence, then the overwhelming chatter of the people there, then silence again; the impotent feeling of not having done anything, of not having been able to do anything, of knowing that should the same thing happen again, you would do the same thing again: nothing.