I'm Not Afraid, So Don't You Be Afraid




Ollie Matthews



 
© Copyright 2026 by Ollie Matthews


 Painting by Ilya Repin courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581.
Painting by Ilya Repin courtesy of Wiikimedia Commons.

Just one place is all I need. I don’t even need a table, just a surface and a chair will do. I’m looking through the windows. Every room in the pub is packed. Every chair is taken; the tables are piled high with plates and glasses and bottles. There are people of all ages, even children—football fans in their sky-blue shirts and scarves. The hubbub escapes through the windows. The rain seeps through my coat onto my shoulders. My hands are pink, stinging from the cold. The buses and taxis rip across the wet asphalt. Umbrellas clash at the crossing. The lights in the puddles are brighter than the street lights above.

At the weekends there is nowhere to go in Manchester. Nowhere to work. Nowhere to get a quiet moment. The Wetherspoons pubs are cheap: you can sit there all day for £1.56 which buys you a mug that you can re-fill as many times as you’d like at the hot drinks machine. For this price it is the perfect place to work for a few hours. All that is necessary for a day’s work is a chair at a table in Wetherspoons.

Yet in the evenings and at the weekends they are full and rowdy. People revelling, taking up every space revelling, when all you want to do is work. At these times there is nowhere to go. Work is denied you. That must be the greatest tyranny: to be forced not to work. It is, for me, why employment is best avoided.

I hurry across St. Peter’s Square. My wet clothes are cold on my skin. So hard am I squinting from the rain flurrying in my face that my mouth is pulled open and is drying up. I have a few ideas, a movement a character makes and a line of dialogue. It needs to go down. It is a desperate bid to get it down. It is a waste for everyone to revel. All I need is a chair and a table.

I pass the Cenotaph. The poppy wreaths from November still lie on the steps. A tram bleats. The lights burst off the wet slabs. All that is needed in this inhospitable world is a seat in a Wetherspoons.

I can tell from the outside that it is packed. Even so I go inside. They are all sat as close together as in a theatre or cinema. It is one general noise. There are skimpily dressed girls with pitchers filled with multicoloured ice; middle-aged women with glasses of white wine; short-haired lads with pints of beer; and a few City fans in their sky-blue shirts.

I weave through the tables hoping for one spot that has been overlooked, a factual anomaly of a table. Nothing. All revelling; all the world revelling.

I’m thrown into a panic. To go a day without making progress on my novel is a disaster. And the movement my character makes in a scene and that line of dialogue, perfectly in tune, will risk withering and dying in my confuddled head.

I am cold to the bone. I must write this scene; or at least jot down the ideas, sketch the rough outline. There has to be one free table somewhere. I could try the other Wetherspoons on the other side of the city centre. I could at least go inside the first one that was full of City fans. The moment a party get up to leave I’ll swoop down to take their space. After a decent stint of writing, I can feel satisfied about this day.

St. Peter’s Square is all colour and bleating trams. Like comets from outer space pedestrians cutting across the square nearly bump into me. You would think that given the broad space there was very little risk of a collision. But phone watching, headphones on, music blaring, people don’t see you till you’ve nearly hit them.

Another load of fans come off the tram, loud, revelling, heading to the pubs. Under the colonnade of the Town Hall building is a row of tents where some homeless people live.

It’s all wrong, everything. This miserable weather, everyone revelling preventing me from working. My novel needs more than snatched, stressed moments. I’m worried that I don’t think about homelessness anymore. I look over it and don’t notice it. I know we think the strangest things are normal. Of course I am a creature of my culture, but I have stopped being self-aware. What do I really care about at the end of the day?

I pass the Cenotaph again. This time my attention is drawn to one of the memorial stones that form a line on the green opposite the altar. It is covered in flowers—loose flowers, bouquets. From a distance it looks like a new grave. There are candles in jars flickering. It is the Soviet memorial. On it stand the words: “In honoured memory of the Soviet soldiers who gave their lives liberating Europe and in recognition of the brave people of the besieged Leningrad. 1941-1945. No one is forgotten.”

I have often cast my eyes on this stone and scanned those words as I rush past to Wetherspoons to work. Often there are fresh flowers by the stone. But never as many as this. What is the occasion? It is not Victory Day yet.

Then I spot a small laminated photo half-hidden by flower petals with raindrops running down it, glowing in the glare of the candles. I recognise the face immediately. It is like seeing a celebrity in public. They are already known to you and yet they always look a little bit different to how they appear on a screen: shorter, thinner, less striking. His name is written in Cyrillic alongside the years of his life. It is Alexei Navalny. Today he died.

Somebody had written in marker pen on a piece of card, the letters weeping in the rain: “Я не боюсь и вы не бойтесь!” (“I am not afraid, so don’t you be afraid!”)

I stop. They came all this way—well-wishers, the moved—from all over the city to lay down their respects at this little block of commemoration. In the rain I think of the man, seeing him here before me. The characters in the news cycle suddenly become real people when you see them in public. I woke up this morning to the news of his death. I felt something. A sense of hopelessness along with acceptance. I knew the moment I saw footage of him returning to Russia three years ago (after he had recovered in Berlin from his poisoning) and being detained by police at the airport, that he was a dead man. He must have known this too. He kissed his wife goodbye at the passport control before being led away by police. She was wearing a face mask in compliance with the Covid restrictions and so it wasn’t a kiss on the lips. He looked calm.

I imagine what his final moments might have been like. What his guards went through, the doctor who pronounced his death. His wife receiving the news. The order-givers, and the moods and reflections that reverberated up the vertical of power.

It is a tragedy in the pure sense. The latest scene in this most heart-rending thousand-year drama. For Russia is the most masterful playwright of all the nations. Its actors assume monumental burdens and through their suffering and dilemmas expand our acquaintance with the human condition. I imagine how it is to revel after another City victory, or for a policymaker in Number Ten to feel ambitious for our country. These things do not strike me as real expressions of the human will but rather as recycled communal beliefs. I wonder if this is how it felt in previous societies when their religion died away.

For a second I think I feel the wind that blew through the penal colony where Navalny died today. He joins the ranks of countless Russians who have perished in wilderness camps. I hear the silence of Russia’s emptiness. It is a brutal emptiness. That silence is like the last bar of a slow, tragic ending of a symphony. The British equivalent would be the sound of the sea.

I think of Ivan the Terrible when he killed his son. The legend is he had insulted his son’s wife; when the son challenged him, Ivan flew into a rage and struck his son and heir on the head with a sceptre. In Ilya Repin’s painting, ‘Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581’, the tsar cradles his son as he lies dying from his head wound. The scene is a room in the palace, the predominant colours being the red of the carpets on the floor, and black from the shadows and Ivan’s caftan. Both men’s faces are covered in blood. Ivan holds his son by the waist and the head, his lips are pressed against the dying man’s hair. Ivan’s eyes are wide and bulging. He stares off, unseeing. We are seeing the realisation dawn on him of what he has just done. In a single moment of madness he has murdered his son, and not only that: in slaying his only capable heir he has extinguished his dynasty. He knows this, he is facing this knowledge as he sits there cradling his dying son. I read in his face the most terrible emotions a human has to deal with. Hot regret, wild shock. Grief is yet to arrive on the field. He knows that the rest of his life will issue from this one moment. And that he has just plunged Russia into mortal darkness. Within a generation the country will be subjugated by the Poles, and between war and rebellion and famine, up to half of all Russians will die. This is the Time of Troubles, the Turmoil, the brutalest chapter of Russian history, that is set in motion this very moment.

And the moment is still so close in time—a few seconds in the past—so can’t he reach out and touch it, make it not happen? Later he will feel awe at this hammer blow of fate. He might make a show of repentance before God, but I wonder whether really, if he believed anything, he suspected he was an agent of a higher will. It was an awe-inspiring conjecture that he had been led his whole life up to that terrible moment. The final result of everything he had done and had been. The greatest tragedy. Unfathomably beautiful when you glimpse, one instant, through the pain.

Modern people, we would seek to blame, because we believe things are perfectible, and when they’re not perfect it must be someone’s fault. We believe in evil as the counterweight to perfectibility, and we think evil resides in bad actors. We really tend to buy the assumption that all people’s interests can be satisfied if only we be better. Our flaws we can put a plaster on. We really don’t accept that flaws can be immutable. That the tragedy opened the day you were born, that it is playing out every day, act after act, scene after scene, until it reaches the final foreseen climax. That is a beautiful thing. Ivan’s face in the painting is a beautiful thing.

All over Manchester, City fans are celebrating another unsurprising victory. Many of us tonight, out in the wild of life—on the streets, in the pubs, in cars on motorways, shut away in bedrooms—are suffering from poor mental health, physical aches and pains, chronic conditions and terminal illness. We all stress about energy bills and the cost of a weekly shop. In dozens of locations there are dates going badly. Across the city, families are rowing, couples are doubting, people are lonely and are hurting. Somebody has just died. A sexual assault is happening just a mile away.

I am worrying about where I can work, how to present a scene that probably no one will read.

How do the lads feel on the front line in Donbass, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson? Their mothers in their small Soviet-era apartments? What was it like for Navalny to foreknow his fate?

The candle light flickers on his laminated face. I shiver. I turn to the pub. Little crystals spring up on the slabs. It is snowing.

The square has fallen silent. The pub has started to empty, and through the window I see a spare table.



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