My birthday was never my birthday. It was always overshadowed. People came with funny accents. They all went to the church. Mum and Dad took me as well. Everyone was sad. The people with the funny accents cried. Then we went to the garden I always played in. This time, people I knew cried. Then we went out of town, near the nature reserve and everyone cried and put white roses down. Mum sent me up with one, pointing to a little plaque. People cried even harder.
It was only later that I understood. That the day I was born, 270 people died. One life. Just one little life. It's not much, is it? Compared to that number. Two-hundred and seventy. Some of those were people who lived down the street. Could they have been my friends? Would Lyndsey or Joanne have babysat me as I grew up to get some extra cash?
And when I was twelve-and-a-half (the half matters at that age), I began seeing them. The dead. Mum didn't understand why I wasn't sat that my grandfather had died. I couldn't explain. Papa was sitting next to me, chattering away. I tried to find out about it. All I got was stuff about clairvoyance. I didn't believe that. There was no veil. It's just Papa stayed with me, like I wanted to remember him. Talking about fun times, good times. Times before Nana died and hot metal rained down out of the sky, destroying the peaceful little world Papa had loved with all his heart.
Later I realised it wasn't really Papa. What I saw was… echoes. Reverberations. Things leave impacts in their wake. Time moves on but the world remembers. It was my thirteenth birthday when the street exploded and the firestorm swirled up. I screamed and screamed and watched as people ran around, trying to put out the fires yet as insubstantial as ghosts. I spent Christmas in hospital that year. Then the man came. He had a suit and he smelt of the sun and he was shadowed by others. Women mainly. He looked up at me and explained what I was. Mutant.
It's an odd thing, being told you're not crazy, you just have a gift. A gift to see imprints left behind by events. I see the shades left behind by death. I hear last thoughts, last words. Papa died in his chair, asleep. He was thinking about me and how he loved me.
It's funny how few last words are those of hate. They're all thinking of their loved ones. On my next birthday, I went for a long walk. I listened to the voices. The words of the people lying in the road. They think of those they love –loved. Names and relations. The little girls still clinging to each other. The older told the younger to close her eyes, that it would be alright, while screaming for her dad in her head. The compassion of the woman who draped a blanket over the boy lying on the road, looking as if he were sleeping.
It touches me at the same time as it sickens me. Who would want to kill the little girl with plastic flowers on her hairband? If she'd lived, she'd be older than me. As it is, she's frozen forever at about…what, six? Seven? I can't tell. I want to hug her, to tell her that it'll be okay. But I can't. I can't touch the shades. And I can't talk to them either. They just whisper their thoughts to me, the cacophony of fear and terror and pleading. Oh, they plead. They all plead. Don't let me die. Not today. Not now.
But their thoughts change. They don't plead. They want to cry for those they love, who are going to be left behind. And I want to hold them all, to tell them that yes, it hurt –oh, how it hurt- but that the scars will one day heal. I want to hug them. The man crying for his baby girl, the boy wondering about his birth mother. Will she ever know what happened to her son?
I left later. But I always go back in December. Not for Christmas. I'll take it or leave it. Not for my birthday either. But for the pleading dead, who need something only I can give. Witness. I listen to their last thoughts and I try to honour them. I wish I could tell their loved ones how their family called out to them in their last breaths. But I can't. Mr Wisdom informed me about secrecy. I'm near enough guaranteed a job in the government department after I leave uni. I can never tell anyone what I see.
So all I can do is watch. Watch and remember. It's what they deserve.
In memory of all 270 victims of the Pan-Am 103 Lockerbie bombing, which happened 25 years ago tomorrow.