Viva Viva

My reflection stares at me from the black of the computer screen. I look tired. Drab. Like a pencil sketch that needs to be coloured in. I click the mouse to make it go away. That’s better; a bird’s eye view of some faraway land – or maybe it’s Wales – all mountains and conifers and green rolling hills.

“Miaoooow”.

A cat has entered the fray – kitten, rather. 

She jumps onto my desk, positioning herself perfectly in front of the screen. 

I knew she’d follow me up here. She must be wherever I am, a fact that comes as a surprise to me. I thought cats were meant to be independent? I thought they were supposed to give you sassy side-eye, flicking the v’s as they slink away. This one seems to think she’s a dog; woman’s best friend, always there, clicking along at my heels. 

“Hello, Ziba.”

I run the back of my finger under her jaw, a snowy collar of cotton wool fluff. She closes her eyes and purrs her approval. This is lovely. But she's sitting on the keyboard and I need her to go down now. She obliges, leaping into the soft mound of the laundry basket. And so. Where was I?

I need to write something. Or maybe I should clean the bathroom. No, write. I pick up my phone. No, don’t look, not now. I throw it away, onto the bed. But just the urge to look is enough. Enough to remind me of what I would have seen, had I looked.

I feel the beginnings of rage crackling inside me. If I feel like this, like I could set fire to the world, like I could tear off heads with my bare hands, how does that father feel? The one walking stony faced at 4.30 in the morning, the limp body of his daughter across his arms? Or the mother whose six year old lies breathless, bloodless, stabbed 26 times in a country she fled to for refuge? Or any of the thousands of parents in Gaza, carrying bodies, holding bones and flesh that once were their children. I take a deep breath, exhaling loud enough for the kitten to open her eyes and raise her head. 

“It’s ok, go back to sleep”.

She blinks slowly and lowers her head again, curling it into her body, wrapping a white tipped paw across her eyes. My phone vibrates. I get up and look. An email from John Lewis saying my Click and Collect is ready to pick up. God, look at me. Sat here in a place we call the Western Hemisphere, the global North, land of the fat and unfettered. Here I sit, dry and cocooned; unafraid; not too cold; coffee in my cup; getting pings to pick up Christmas presents – more things that none of us need. Outside, it’s still raining. It hasn’t stopped all day. It falls with a persistence, an insistence, as if it's calling for attention, calling for us to listen. It’s the rhythm of fury. Tiny droplets spatter the window and dribble down, racing each other into oblivion. I take a sip of my coffee and wince; it’s cold and acrid. I check my watch. It’s only 12.53 but the sky has deepened into the mauve grey of late afternoon. 

I think of the woman, walking along Salah Al Din street, towards the lie of an imagined safety. I think of her hungry baby, crying in her arms. I think of the Israeli sniper who aimed his rifle and pulled his trigger and shot her baby in the head. I think of him speaking into his megaphone, ordering the mother to throw her baby’s body onto the side of the road. I think of her refusing, of the soldiers who surrounded her, of the guns pointed at her. I think of her being forced to relent, of the moment that tiny body left her arms, abandoned like a bag at a bus stop. I think of her having to walk away, screaming a sound you hope you’ll never make. I think of the weight in her body. Of the weightlessness in her arms. 

And then I think of all the people who look the other way. The ones who occupy the ‘neutral space’ just as Israel occupies the land of Palestine. Those that want to talk about Hamas and self-defence and the semantics of rivers and seas. The ones that only months ago raised voices and flags to speak of Putin and taking in Ukrainian refugees and how awful and how awful and how awful. The ones that just don’t care – not when it’s brown babies dead at the side of a road. Not when it’s the wrong type of mothers and fathers weeping. The ones that cry anti-semitism when the truth is too inconvenient. The ones cowed by those cries. The ones that stay silent when they should be screaming. 

To me, they are all that sniper. 

I take another sip of my cold, acrid coffee, wincing again. Outside someone is clanging something, banging something, building something. I can’t hear myself think. But maybe that's for the best.