The Night of the Hooded Dead. The Manchester Riots by Cminsh

At around 5.30 PM on 9^th August 2011 as the waning summer sun began to falter over the Mancunian skyline, the atmosphere changed. At first, it seemed to the regular shoppers and returning home workers that out of the sewers a terrible force was emerging. Be-hooded and running or riding bikes, they wove skilfully in-between the people appearing at first as blurs in the peripheral sight of shoppers no more than a wisp of danger at first.

Of no particular hue the Zombies were; white, black, brown and ginger but they all shared one trait; cloth, of varying design, wrapped tightly around their hideous complexions and hoods to protect them from the remaining sun of a bloodshot sky. Only visible, the dead Zombie eyes stared out across the awaiting street; cold and calculating.

Their targets seemed strange to the now fleeing people; who were at once trying to snaffle up the remaining modes of transport out of the apocalyptic city. Buses had stopped; trams and taxies avoiding the city centre to which the Zombies headed. All had deserted a city descending into madness. All that is, but the city dwellers, the curious bystanders and the press.

The Zombies headed in their hundreds, in small, full cars, carrying black bin-bags in which to collect their plunder or on bicycles that whizzed through narrow streets from target to target like guided missiles locked in and locked on. They all seemed to have the latest communication devises to which they constantly, BBM’d, MSN’d twittered and chatted to one another, updating one another on their prey.

The people were not the targets however, even if they had assumed that they were in the panic to flee; no; tonight the Zombies dine not upon flesh but on goods. Their prey tonight was THINGS not just any THINGS but Luxury THINGS;  THINGS that have been made insatiable to them from the interpellation of Television Ad men and billboards that adorn their run down streets; perfume, trainers, clothes, makeup, alcohol;  THINGS now behind glass and up until now, unavailable and sacred.

Until now.

But suddenly, with a smash of a window and the roar of a crowd like the breaking of a spell, all the promise that is associated with these THINGS in magazines and celebrity culture, is unlocked.

And crazed and drooling the looting began in the full glare of the press and the police. The Police at first, taken by surprised, weighed up their options. The mood was as dark as the police themselves. Was this a legitimate demo? There was not a badge, placard or ideology between them. Were they the dispossessed? The possessed more likely, by the way they attacked shop-fronts with a feral rage; egging each other on to greater and greater quarry and like chicken-coup foxes, destroying all that they could not consume or carry themselves.

So began, in the pit of the maze that is the streets of ancient Manchester, the cat and mouse game that lasted the night. Bikes and track-suits made the Zombies more nimble and speedy than the storm-troopers who followed them from crime to crime, fire to fire, moving them on and  capturing the odd one. Although, like a herd of springboks, lightening quick, darting down alleys and over barriers only the weak or the most drunken got picked off by the police, leaving the herd strong and resilient. Hour after hour, shops were stripped in minutes like a bleeding carcass tossed into a piranha infested stream. All seem lost, until a chink of morning light heralded the Zombies retreat into the gloom.

In the morning, the light had dispersed and with it, the last of the Zombies. The last few had slithered off groaning into the night to find darkness of a room, a bed and a new pair of trainers; the shoe asylum. They had gone home to convince parents how they had acquired a new wardrobe from just going round to mates.

In Manchester, the smouldering buildings and a carpet of glass was left as a reminder of the terror of the night before. And then the questions, always questions; at first unanswerable but there in the boarded up windows and puddles of vomit were questions, quietly putting up their hands in a silent stunned city, even if none could be mouthed in that moment.

Who were the Zombies? Where had they come from? And when night comes again; will they return? The consensus of ‘no excuses’ was now emerging, like the Zombies once had and the smell of these ideas were now permeating through the streets.

‘They were only thugs who wanted THINGS and didn’t want to work for them,’ some said. ‘No excuses for mindless violence’, others declared – ‘the zombies had to be caged – like the animals they were.’

Then, Zombies always do get a bad press. You never see a positive Zombie story- do you? They are lost permanently and can never be returned to the loved one, brother or sister they had once been. They are always blamed for the bad that they do and treated as inhuman for the things they desire, flesh or THINGS, a desire that they initially never courted or wanted and one which is almost impossible to slake.

Admittedly, if the Zombies are not human, it makes it easy for us to bash them with spades, blow out their brains or decapitate them. It would seem a simple program to eradicate this ‘Feral vermin’ seems to be afoot. The language of persecution abounds and has a new and urgent legitimacy.

Twitter resounds with the cries of ‘rats’, ‘cockroaches’ and ‘scum’, all of which are to be mercilessly destroyed. There are renewed calls  to blow them off the street with rubber bullets, wash them down the drains with water cannon and to cage them excessively and, it would seem, few have the nerve to look in the mirror and see the Zombie’s we’ve all become in our thirst for revenge.

 And yet it was we as a society, not them, that allowed advertisers to reduce us to slaves for THINGS that in a richer world, we would never need. We never, during our busy lives, stop to consider how every shop glistens in the promise of a better life and the extraction from a world, for these young people, of meaningless chatter, unfettered boredom and terrible role models.  Who would not want to escape Zombie life?

We could cut off their heads, decapitation being one of the best ways to eradicate Zombies but haven’t we done that already?  With Children's services being cut by 26%, or £45.1m in Manchester; we have penalised the most vulnerable amongst us because of the actions of the very rich. Cuts, yes, they’ve already had the cuts.

 Many of these young people have seen ‘the little’ that they perceive society gives them, taken away or about to be taken away. How can we expect them to be reasonable and respectful humans, if they no longer feel connected to their communities or feel apart of the broader society? We cannot condone individual acts and yet it is essential we ask questions. We cannot, noses in the trough, wonder at the anger of the hungry.

And the questions do remain, larger than ever.  Refusing to look at the underlying issues, and jailing these young people, however vile their actions won’t prevent what happened in Manchester, London, and Birmingham and as a society we must accept this, before we can rebuild our communities and regain the trust that seems to be lacking. As any teacher worth his salt knows, it is often the most difficult student at the beginning of the term that brings us most reward; given patience and perseverance.

We must also collectively decide whether a society that functions solely on the acquisition of THINGS and the advertisement of THINGS is a healthy one.

Zombies love to feed on brains, this much we know. However, you can feed brains to someone without opening a skull. Let’s give our young people the education and wisdom that so many seem to be lacking and reawaken them from their living dead state.  If we invest in education and children’s services for the most vulnerable we may come to understand the Zombies we have living among us and eventually they will assimilate into our towns and cities and we can all avoid another apocalypse.