#72: Armistice Day
11 November 2023
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I am sitting in Burger King on a Saturday morning and the rain outside my window is straight and hard and unceasing. The sky is thick and grey. Treacherous weather out there, with thunder rolling in from puce clouds over the Brussels ring road. It’s proper Low Countries wet, the grass verges on the shopping centre’s borders are sodden, muddy tracks. The water gathers in great unabsorbable pools on the slick concrete mass of an abandoned car park. It is a doodgewone - dead ordinary - wet Saturday in November..
The mall is closed today, like everything else is closed today, though it’s not clear that anyone was told and the food court is still accessible. Listless teenagers sit in on the ground outside Belchicken, waiting for their number to be called or for something to happen, or just to pass time hiding from the storm. Burger King is busy with families seeking shelter and distraction from the enforced quiet of a Brussels Armistice Day. I can see from my table other parents with their children in tow, squealing kids stamping around the place and their parents staring at nothing, suffering manfully through their parental calvary. They don’t want to be here, and neither do I, but what are you going to do? There are worse fates out there.
Sitting near me is a grandfather with damp woollen flatcap still on, dripping from its peak. Beside him, his gangly grandson is cleaning off the table to make room for a couple of red plastic trays with their lunch on them. On another table a woman in a gold sequined top and paper crown is wiping away ketchup from the edge of her daughter’s mouth. Their table is strewn with the debris of a demolished happy meal box. The girl has on a crown of her own perched between the roots of two long pigtails, cocked to one side and covering half her forehead. Beside them is another child, this one with a bow wrapped around its head but otherwise shielded from my view by its mother. I can see that their table too is messy, like a bomb hit it, and the child picks their way through the rubble for any buried fries. A knot of young lads with new moustaches and tough, practised gaits walk into the restaurant and look around for a spot that won’t disturb too many people, taking up residence nearby the flatcapped old man and getting down to the business of deciding their order. Royalty-free dance-pop on the radio drowns out any opportunity for earwigging. Chairs scrape across the floor. The smell of raw and cooked onions, sweet and sticky, hangs in the air alongside the muffled smell of drying rain jackets and the artificial orange of my drink.
I look at my watch to see how much longer I have to wait before N’s birthday party, in the next-door entertainment centre (we would have called it a Leisureplex back home), is finished. Across town the king should right about now be paying his respects to the patriotic dead, and not far from where he’s standing others will already be gathered in their thousands, tens of thousands according to the news later in the evening. Under their banners and umbrellas and flags and their proscribed slogans, other families will be readying themselves for their own calvary across Brussels.
Our biggest worry, the thought preoccupying everyone sitting around the Burger King, is when the weather’s going to break. And if it isn’t, whether we can escape to our car or bus or metro without getting wiped out. Or whether there is any point in running at all, and wouldn’t we not be better off just sitting it out and hoping for the rain to pass on.
I used to think that Belgian rain wasn’t like Irish rain. That it comes and it doesn’t leave. Irish rain at least is unpredictable, you never know when it might stop, or start, and it can disappear just as quickly as it arrives. With Belgian rain, usually, you know it’s here to stay once it starts. It has been raining already for a long time now, for what feels like the whole winter. Later that day or maybe the week after, I'll read that it has been the wettest and the darkest winter in years. When I go to get blood drawn in a few weeks’ time, the results will show in bright red ink I have extremely low levels of vitamin D. Dark days, indeed.