Blood on the Streets - Dianne Hofmeyr

This morning there was a body on the Fulham Road.

The first line of a thriller? Wish that it were. I can’t get the image from my head.

I rolled out of bed, pulled on my yoga clothes, tucked my mat under my arm and set off. As I came around the corner red and white tape sent signals. Before I had a chance to alter my pace I saw the huge pool of fresh blood… more blood than I’ve ever seen in one place. Things were scattered across the pavement. A discarded rucksack. Bits of cloth. A pair of trainers completely soaked in blood.

The body had been placed in a blue body bag. It lay against the wall of a shop like a rough sleeper stretched out for the night… except there was blood escaping it. There was no one there except a single young police woman taking notes and another policeman fixing up the cordon.

It was the blood-soaked trainers that got to me.

I kept struggling to breathe. In the yoga class it was difficult to still my mind and fill my body with life-giving prana.

A skin too thin. A writer’s eye too developed. Visceral imaginings too developed. I was glad it was August and the usually busy Fulham Road was empty of fathers wheeling their bikes next to boys bound for school or mothers tugging and herding sleepy children.

I thought of Gillian’s post about the school visit and the story that began with a body. Three of my novels begin with a body. One is a drowning, one is not really a body but the bones of someone being returned to her ancestral homeland, and the third is a very brutal knifing that takes place in the Temple of Karnak in the first chapter of Eye of the Sun.

It’s to this knifing that my mind keeps returning. Would I have written this scene so easily, so cavalierly, had I seen a real knifing, real blood and real bloodied clothing lying strewn across a pavement before I wrote it?

At the time my 36 year old son said of this passage – ‘Too much information, mum.’

In the moonlight the dagger is sharp and hard and unforgiving. The blade finds the soft spot just below his ribs and angles upward, seeking his heart. Two quick thrusts. Hard and brutal. The blows make him gasp with their suddenness. No words are possible now. He feels the sharp burn of the blade as the dagger is swiftly withdrawn.

I left it. And so did the editors. Why? Was I trying for sensation - as a tabloid might try to draw readership?

But a real life lost, very real blood spreading across the pavement and a pair of bloodied trainers has tripped me up this morning. If my first reaction was … thank goodness there are no children here to see it, why have I been so callous and cavalier in my writing for young adults?

We write of the real world, of knife crime and blood and what commercialism dictates and I don’t want to say I’ll never write of a murder again, but the body on Fulham Road this morning has pulled me up sharply. When I look at the shelves in a bookstore now I must ask, is the shocking reality of brutality too real to fictionalize again and again for the sake of commercialism in a young person’s novel? Are we encouraging readers to be inured? Are we inured?

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