Here we are again

2015. 2016. 2023.

So, here we are again. 

Another terrorist attack in Brussels. Two innocent people murdered. And the perpetrator on the loose.

When I saw the news break last night that there’d been a shooting just down the road from us, I put it down at first to an escalation in the drug-related gang violence that's been ticking up in the city in the past 12 months. This fucking city, I thought, before closing the tab on my computer and returning to watch the football. I couldn’t really focus on that either. Not because of the shooting but because it was bin night and because I was preoccupied with the pain of a throbbing wisdom tooth and the worry about what the dentist intended to do about it in the morning. 

It soon became clear that it wasn’t drugs-related. First the confirmation of the two dead. Then suggestions of terrorist motivations, unconfirmed reports of a video confession and news outlets sharing a video that purported to show what had happened. Of course I watch it before I know exactly what I’m watching. But I keep watching when I realise what it is. I can’t help myself. Then come government statements that fans can’t leave the Belgium-Sweden game, and that everyone else should avoid unnecessary journeys.

I realise I’m sitting more or less in the same place, doing the same things, I was the first time the Belgian government told us to stay indoors and be alert for possible terrorists in the streets of Brussels. November 2015 was when “lockdown” entered the Brussels lexicon, in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris. I remember wild rumours circulating on Twitter about possible attacks happening or about to happen in Brussels. I remember following at a distance the clear-outs of bars and streets in the centre of town, checking in regularly with Ryan Heath’s feed for updates about what was going on. I remember the gallows humour on twitter as people checked in on each other and shared photos of their and other people’s cats as fear sublimated into a kind of giddy anxiety and everyone tried to keep the dread at bay. We were only just then becoming familiar with the name Salah Abdeslam, whose name and face and city-wide months-long manhunt bob in and out of the news headlines until March 2016.

I remember my mind going to banal places back then, worrying about if and when the creche would be open in the morning, would I be expected to go into the office for work, would the shops be open. Tonight is no different, though the kids are older now. You don’t have to explain to an 18 month old why they’re staying at home with their parents for a day, but a seven and a nine year old will have questions. Unavoidable questions, because even if we chose not to tell them - though, why wouldn’t we? - it’ll be on the nightly kids news anyway tomorrow evening, along with stories about environmental degradation and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

I’m wondering whether my dental appointment will be going ahead tomorrow. Should I put the bins out, with an armed killer possibly still roaming the streets? Should I lock up the bike for the night? We are after all only a five minute straightline drive form the scene of the attack. I mean, it’s nonsense of course, utterly selfish preoccupations given two people have just lost their lives. But your mind goes where it goes and at times like these it’s easier to dwell on the practicalities than face the panic that is leaching into your thoughts. 

I think back to November 2015 - when in the end nothing happened in Brussels - and I think how naive we were then, in a way. The violence perpetrated in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in London, Madrid and Paris, was then still alien to Brussels. We were unfamiliar with the presence of heavily armed soldiers patrolling the streets and the metro stations, though when the violence did come to us in March 2016, we became used to a militarised police presence. An abiding memory of that time and the months afterwards was the sight of large khaki armoured trucks stations outside Simonis metro station. It could have been that spring, or it could have been two years later, such was the way recollections of that period have fused together in my memory. 

And then one day they were gone, the soldiers. The talk of oscillating threat levels ended, and attention moved elsewhere. Salah Abdeslam and his accomplices awaited their trial, the tying up of loose ends from time best forgotten. Lockdowns came back of course, but it wasn’t the same. Stepping out of doors in 2020 meant you were more likely to catch Covid than a bullet. 

2023 is not 2015, nor is it 2016. There was no gallows humour in Twitter, just numb shock and outrage. No cute cats either, because that kind of Twitter doesn’t exist anymore. Elon Musk and a decade of algorithmic manipulation have seen to that. It feels as if our naivety is gone too; we no longer have the privilege of thinking “it could never happen here”, because it did and continues to. Those years after March 2016 were hard ones. Hard for the victims and their families, hard for the communities caught up in the aftermath, hard for everyone living in Brussels adjusting to a new, uncertain reality. It made people harder too, something which the deprivations of the pandemic seems to have exacerbated. Are we more flinty, more brittle, less empathetic in 2023 than we were then? It’s possible. Will we see the same expressions of community solidarity we saw in 2015 and 2016? I have my doubts. 

But there’s something more too. A sense that the city itself is exhausted. Brussels barely survived intact after March 2016, and the work put into the years that followed to restore some kind of normality and self-respect to the city were hard ones. We had barely reached equilibrium before Covid-19 wrought its own kind of destruction. Think about the homelessness crisis, the crack epidemic and the public safety crisis in metro and train stations across town. Barely a month goes by without a gang-related shooting in streets almost within earshot of our house. Think of the violent street protests of 2022 and the souring political atmosphere, or even just the grimy, garbage-filled streets that everyone in Brussels is intimately familiar with. 

We sometimes revel in the fact that Brussels is a chaotic place, because like it or not we draw energy from that chaos. But lately it feels as if the chaos is winning, that our political class and structures are too exhausted from their efforts to maintain even a sheen of some kind of stability, and that their and our grip on order and control in the city is being violently loosened by this encroaching chaos. And that tonight the chaos took its latest victims. The things we tried to convince ourselves were a bug are becoming a feature of life in Brussels. 

Back in November 2015 we didn’t know what was coming for us and for the city. And we don’t know now either. All I know as I write this is that there are two murdered Swedish football fans gunned down on a Brussels street corner and the perpetrator still out there. Maybe in the morning they will catch him. Or maybe they won’t and we’ll be subjected to another Abdeslam-style manhunt. 

After everything the city has been through, and with everything going on elsewhere in the world, how will our reaction stack up to March 2016? I’ve no idea. It’s late and I’m tired, and I’m worried about the schools opening in the morning and how I’m going to sit the kids down and explain what happened without frightening them too much. I’m worried about the dentist and what they’re going to do to me tomorrow. Whether I should put the bins out or not. Whether any of this makes any difference when two people who just came to our city to watch their team play football are dead, killed by a fellow Brussels resident.

I do decide to lock up the bike. I fumble with the heavy chain as I loop it around the frame of the bike. Above me a helicopter whirrs in the night sky above the house, and police sirens whoop in the distance. 

I leave the bins. Who knows if they’ll be picked up in the morning.

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Events have obviously advanced since last night, with the death of the perpetrator. RTBF is a good place to keep abreast of developments.