What was it about an arena full of teen and preteen children and their parents, listening to an American pop singer, that so offended the man who detonated the bomb in Manchester last night? We don’t know for sure, although recent tragedies in Berlin, Nice, Paris, and London may give us strong suspicions. The bomber—whose identity is unknown, for now—is dead, along with twenty-two of his victims. Fifty-nine more are hurt, some with life-threatening injuries. The attacker triggered his bomb at around 10:35 P.M. last night, at the end of an Ariana Grande concert, in the foyer of the Manchester Arena, just as fans were coming out of the gig. The timing appeared to have been calculated to inflict as much death and panic as possible. In concertgoers’ videos, the terror in the arena is palpable. A girl recording one video asked the same question, over and over: “What is going on? What is going on?”
The bomb went off in the heart of a resurgent city. Manchester, once the “Cottonopolis” that drove Britain’s industrial revolution, formerly the engine of the most exciting music scene of the late twentieth century and currently home to two of the largest soccer teams in the world, has recently regained its swagger. The city is at the heart of the British government’s “Northern Powerhouse” initiative, which has sought to drive investment and improve transport links away from London. Just last month, Greater Manchester elected Andy Burnham, a Labour politician, as its first-ever mayor.
The arena itself is an unlovely building, situated next to Victoria Station, near big department stores and the Arndale shopping center—itself rebuilt after a massive I.R.A. bombing, in 1996—and with the red-brick tower of the Strangeways prison looming to its north. From very early this morning, the police cordoned off a huge area around the arena and the station. By the time the city center started to fill with workers, those cordons, and the police on foot and in the helicopters that circled overhead, were the only immediately visible signs that all was not normal.
Manchester is my home. I woke early to news of the bomb, and took the tram into the city center. The alarms in some of the shops near the arena wailed behind grills, still registering the explosion. Outside the shopping center, an evangelist in a coat and tie offered leaflets asking “What Is the Purpose of Life.” I saw only a couple of people with tears in their eyes but the mood was sombre, and turning to anger. Mancunians, in my experience, are rarely sentimental—except when soccer or music is concerned. They can be tough, funny, waspish, kind, mordant. As commuters went to work on the tram, as normal, this morning—there was no question of staying home for most people—I heard snippets of conversations about the bombing. “Kids!” one woman, who was wearing a business suit, said to her friend. That was the sum total of their conversation.
This morning, parents were still looking for children who had gone to the concert and had not returned. A woman named Charlotte Campbell appealed on social media and television for her daughter, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, who was missing. She had last received a text message from Olivia at around 8:30 P.M. the night of the bombing; it said that she was having “an amazing time.” Olivia had also thanked her mother for letting her go to the concert. After the news of the bombing reached the Campbells, Olivia’s father had searched the streets of Manchester while her mother had called the hospitals. Olivia’s phone, her mother said, was out of battery.
At 6:45 A.M., Ian Hopkins, the chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police, told the reporters who had assembled outside Force Headquarters that he believed the attack was conducted by one man alone. In the hours and days to come, there will be plenty of questions about whether that man was working as part of a network, whether he was known to police or security services, and, perhaps, how—as one man, apparently working alone—he was able to get so close to such a large number of people with such a deadly device. The investigation appeared to be moving swiftly. Around midday, in the bohemian south Manchester neighborhood of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, where I live, armed police arrested a twenty-three-year-old man in connection with the bombing.
Manchester will grieve and shake its fist all at once. It has now joined a list of cities it never wanted to join, for reasons few can fathom. The question that the terrified child in the video asked will continue to echo: What is going on?