The day has become a shell. The curtains devour the light.
He lifts his hand and turns on the television
where the Jackal holds up his fist to a bulletproof court,
giving his occupation as “professional revolutionary”.



Outside, the road drones alongside drunks shouting;
a bus brakes and screams into the noise.
Something heavy is dragged across the pavement.
“We hope he might make a gesture of sympathy,”



a victim of the bomb blasts tells a Guardian journalist.
There is the music of broken glass. If the viewer moved towards
the window, he'd realise there is a teenage Olympic
ambassador looting the mobile phone shop below.



The Jackal's wife, the defence lawyer he married in prison,
comes to the microphone, wheelchair-bound.
“We're going to fight,” she says. If he reaches over
and pulls those curtains wide, he might see the Olympian,



pumped up on Valium and LSD, swinging from the Cenotaph.
She wears an oversized greatcoat, a stolen mannequin's leg
sticking out from underneath. The plastic corpse toes point
to reveal her destination: no gun shots or bomb blasts

​

will land her in a London prison for violent disorder.
There are sixteen month sentences, life sentences, and retrials
thirty years after the crime. There is a man sitting in a bedsit
above Peckham High Street, waiting for what will happen next.