Waiting for the bomb

You wouldn't go to the shopping mall for just one or two things. It would have to be a sizeable need, at least three or four necessary items – maybe supplies for a school-going child, a prescription to be filled, food for the hamster, a watch strap fixed, shoes mended. Not some nonsense thing such as a copy of Vanity Fair with a huge mark up, a browse through the record shop, poppy seed cake and a coffee at Kapulskys.

However, if you had notched up some real credibility, like getting necessary stuff for somebody else, then you could indeed risk one or two nonsensical things. Though not all in one go. Spaced out like. Get the magga wagga this week. Get the coffee another time. The main thing was to ensure that if you got blown up, you would have put yourself in harm's way for some valid reason.

On the weekend after we came home from Israel four years ago, I found myself standing outside Dunnes in Ennis (more than a little annoyed that no one had checked my bag going in, what is this, you don't care about us?) and measuring the distance between it and O'Connor's bakery. Our family rule was that the three of us would stay together when we were out shopping. And I was seriously, on that July day, debating if I might not bend the rule a little and make a dash for an apple pie from O'Connors.

To live with the threat of terrorism is, well, there is no other way to put this, to be terrified. Ideally, you would, at the first sign of it, get the hell out of there and stay out. But you have made your choices and you have a life and work and commitments which can't be entirely dictated by those who will pray to God that they will be successful in separating your freshly painted toenails from where they were intended by God to be or sending bits of your limbs onto the balconies of people who were just standing there, having a scratch and finishing their morning coffee.

And so, you get on the bus where, in the wake of a recent attack, people are watching and wary. To get up from your seat and not immediately reach for your bag is to have about four or five people immediately, and none too politely, remind you to take it. In a country where the summers bring searing heat, you'd sit there wondering: is that man in the throes of terror himself because he's going to detonate something or is he perhaps just sweating and going home like us all for the second shower of the day?

Often times too, you'd study those around you and find them very pleasing, torn between thinking there isn't a bad egg among them or, then again, even if there is, well, the rest of them look like a pretty good bunch to go with to wherever you go after the business is over, after the lads with the bags have come around and scraped the flesh off the walls and pavements and your relatives have thought, well, God love her, she had not only been to work but had stopped on the way home to get potatoes and courgettes and some of those decent bananas that are only meant for export?

You have this silly, bargaining with madness dialogue going on because it is a defence against the helplessness, an effort to control the uncontrollable. You cannot do anything about those who set out to kill numbers rather than people. It is not personal. It is oblivion before it even happens. And so we bring to the potential event all the personality and individuality we can muster.

Sit on the back of the bus one day, on the front the next. Wear your lucky scarf. Try to make eye contact with people, or avoid it entirely. Sing Báidín Fheilimí and wonder how long it will take them to acknowledge Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Our grandparents sent us out with scapulars pinned to our vests. They were scratchy and uncomfortable but what they meant really cut to the chase. Somebody loved us, somebody feared for us, somebody wanted us home safe. Inshá'lláh.