Rubbernecking

She’s called Daphe, the woman running the business training out of her Notting Hill home.

The Thames curves south from here by Chelsea, sluggish brown. The city’s awake and burning.

Have you been to see the damage yet? he asks, in our snatched conversation.

Almost gleeful in his hunger to hear details about the tower block which blazed leaving so many people missing or dead.

He says there’s photographs of the missing stuck to tree trucks, walls and railings. Black, brown and olive skinned and missing.

I don’t want to see this suffering. The ruins becoming a tourist attraction. Leave them with some dignity. Always having to endure the gaze in life and death.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.