Fullalove

by Gordon Burn

  Wet or dry?

  Ice and a slice?

  A whisky and splash.

  The Ding-dong’s?

  Bass in a thing with a handle – I need something to hang on to at my time of life.

  The usual.

  ‘Miss KP’ emerging out of the slippery back-of-the-bar duvet of bagged peanuts.

  Guest ploughman’s. Guest sandwich. Guest sausage.

  Okay. We have: Kung Po chive. Piccalilli enchilada. Deep-pan Bombay duck. Egg-fry guacamole. Fried-egg nan. Peshwari scruncheons with gerkin. Sweet-and-sour bap.

  The sneaky guy at the bar keeping an eye on the bandit to see if it has dropped.

  Pubworld. Publife. Lifeworld. The felt-fact of aliveness (with a chaser, a stiffener, a lager-top). I had been adrift from it for three, perhaps four hours. I was feeling the pangs when Myc Doohan piped up. ‘There was a little chicken lived down on the farm. Do you think another drink would do us any harm?’ Myc Doohan no longer drinks himself, as it happens. But since he has been on the wagon his best friend has been Mary Warner. It suffuses the fabric of his clothes, announces him, clings to him like a miasma. Sitting next to Doohan you can get stoned on the smell of his jacket. I knew it was going to be him and I guessed what he was going to say. I inhaled him before he spoke.

  Myc Doohan and I climbed the greasy pole together, working for rival papers – and came skidding down at about the same time, to bite the dust. But whereas my difficulties have been mainly in the head department, he has had to make himself available for major invasive procedures (liver, spleen, lung).

  Two things I know about Myc Doohan: he wears a surgical corset, and cowboy boots with scuffed buckles on the side. The corset is because of the purple scar that starts at his sternum and does a sharp right at his navel; the boots are for the added inches. Myc isn’t small – he’s average height – but he believes he is, which is the same thing. The dope keeps his face an unhealthy underbelly green, so the broken veins and busted capillaries swirl in it like the red ripples in ice cream. There is a glowing nimbus of pale hairs fringing his slightly out-turned ears. Most nights will find him dry crawling the pubs along the river (his system speeding from the caffeine and artificial sweeteners in the chain-drunk Cokes, sugar-shocked), skimming stones across the dim water at Chiswick Mall.

  When we detached ourselves from the pack some of the McGovern faithful called us by name, and whistled and jeered. I felt cocooned from them in Doohan’s musty, barny, wolf-like scent, and as we walked I listed for him some of the odorous qualities associated with various well-known diseases: diphtheria emanates a sweetish smell; yellow fever’s scent is reminiscent of a butcher shop; scrofula (which I have a touch of behind the ears and knees, most painfully between the fingers) has – appropriately – the aroma of stale beer; typhoid fever smells like fresh-baked brown bread; diabetic coma is acid-fruity.

  The walking teased out another few threads in the frayed bottoms of Doohan’s trousers. It is a fine June night, sappy and benign, and we kept on walking past The Run Rabbit and The Captain Murderer, and came in here, to The Cherry and Fair Star, where we knew we wouldn’t be left finger-painting patterns in the glass rings on the Formica and glumly staring at one another during the gaps in our flabby, fitful conversational work-out. We parked ourselves gratefully at the table where young Ashley Cann and old Walter Brand (once ‘The man with a passport to the world’ in the News Chronicle, former deputy editor of the Reveille) were chewing over new type fonts and the dear old, dead old days.

  ‘Degenerate, Manson, Exocet, Dead History Bold, Skelter, Arbitrary,’ Walter was saying. ‘The Wellington, the Wig and Pen, Poppins, The Stab in the Back, The Top of the Tip, the back bar of the Harrow, Rhona’s killer fry-ups at the Albion, the long bar at The Feathers, Auntie’s where Rene the sexy landlady made sure the barmaids always had bosoms of great splendour, Little Alfie distributing the enemies after ten o’clock,’ Ashley said, as usual off on his own trip.

  It was like a harbourside tableau from the hand of some journeyman Victorian dauber: Walter in his cavalry twills, suede chukkas and lumpy Arran sweater, whiskery, grandfatherly wise; Ashley in his Converse All-Stars and baseball cap with the ‘I Cops’ slogan, gangling, prone to facial skin eruption. ‘The London Apprentice’ or The Search For Knowledge’.

  Ashley is twenty-two and in the grip of something he calls topophilia – the capacity for devotion to a place. He is an habitué of the rat-runs, warrens, courts, snack bars, public houses, drinking clubs and trysting places of what used to be Fleet Street. Like an elephant that knows where to go to die, led there by the memory of something that hasn’t happened yet, Ashley is drawn compulsively to the building that Sir Edwin Lutyens designed for the Press Association and Reuters, to the black vitrolite and glass façade of the old Express headquarters, to Whitefriars Street and Bouverie Street and Wine Office Court, to the blackened shell of Northcliffe’s Carmelite House.

  Nobody knows where this fixation comes from. His father is a professor of music at Aberystwyth, and from an early age tried to steer Ashley towards playing drums in an experimental noise rock band. All the time he was filling the house with the sounds of Varese and Ives, John Cage, John Adams, and Terry Riley, though, Ashley was carrying out comparative analysis of typefaces and headline densities on the Mirror and the Sun, assessing the influence of graphic scanners and laser letterpress platemaking, and what their failure to penetrate the page signified vis à vis the emotional payload of a story and reader reification; inhaling the inks from enhanced and traditional rag newsprints and logging the results; annotating and cross-referencing the most common sites of victimage (the shabby alley thick with nettles and tall weeds for public assault; the neat front room in the quiet street for domestics).

  He ran away from home for the first time at the age of twelve. He was found tucking into a steak and stout pie at the Cheshire Cheese, with a biography of ‘the muckraker for God’, W. T. Stead, open on the scub-top table in front of him. They brought him home and bombarded him with Webern, Sun Ra, MC5, but Ashley’s destiny was set.

  ‘Lee Howard,’ Ashley will suddenly announce. ‘Editor of the Mirror under Cudlipp, had a bottle of whisky on his desk from the moment he arrived, called everybody darling, grew alarmingly larger and larger until he could no longer get into a suit and wore a kaftan instead.’ Or, ‘Duncan “Tommy” Webb, the great investigator, somewhat dramatically protected at his desk by bullet-proof glass.’ Or, in connection with some casual remark, ‘A good page one, right-hand second lead, 24-point Century Bold across single column.’

  ‘Tell me again,’ Ashley said to Walter across the table in The Cherry and Fair Star, ‘about the time you were interviewing the King of Greece.’ It is a story that has attained folkloric status. Walter was interviewing the King; the King, alerted by something in his manner, asked to see his notes; Walter handed over a single page containing the drawing of a big black cat.

  ‘Not that old chestnut,’ Walter said. ‘It’s got whiskers on it by now.’

  ‘But I’m trying to keep alive an oral tradition,’ Ashley protested. ‘I feel like Alan Lomax with his old Uer immortalising country blues and field hollers, the plangent picking of turbaned mammies and blind old black men in Mississippi and the Carolinas, Fletcher Henderson’s seasick piano.’

  We were joined just then by Annie (real name Honoraria) Jeffers, who had been changing in the lavatory. She was wearing ribbed black tights and heavy workboots with a denim jacket tied by the sleeves around her middle. Her hair was cropped and the stubble dyed white-blonde, with just the roots left dark. Her on-the-job-hackette’s clothes were stuffed in a Schipol Duty Free bag, one of a collection she keeps in a clapped-out Nissan filled to the sun-roof with rubbish for recycling that she has been carrying round for months, the dark glass and the white glass, the newspapers and cans, sorted into bin-liner bags.

  ‘The sex-pest boyfriend’s still pursuing her,’ Walter said.

  ‘Yeah, filthy bastard,’ Annie sa
id. ‘Let himself in yesterday and went off with some of my knickers.’ She resat the small metal bolt that she wears in her right nostril during the off-duty hours. ‘Binoculars trained on the front door, weeps and pleads with me in the street, trails round after me like a ragged medieval whatsit mendicant, bells me a hundred times a day He’s developed an ideational disturbance. I’m an object of unwanted attention. Features think it’ll make eight hundred words.’

  ‘He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good dot, dot, dot,’ Myc Doohan said. ‘You can have that as an opening sentence. Take it. It’s yours. Mine’s another Coke.’

  ‘Teale-green, citron, avocado, pumpkin. Approximately in that spectrum? Muted brights. Or were they black?’ Ashley said. ‘Lace with a gossamer undercolour? The incorporation of a pattern language capable of renewing the communicative power of the surface. Contour-cut to minimise VPL. What colour were they?’

  ‘One plain white, one pair oysterbeige.’ Accepting the offer of a light from Doohan, the flame flared briefly in the silver bearing of Annie’s nose-bolt. ‘Donna Karan, New York, bought as a present. “Dry-clean only” label in the back. Come on. I mean. Can you imagine?’

  ‘My darling brown-arsed fuckbird.’ This was me. I was three big vod-ton’s in, expecting to fly. ‘James Joyce to Nora. According to the recent cache of coprophilia turned up at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, or one of those places.’

  ‘I am on the fringes of erotomania in a way,’ Walter volunteered. He was lifting his sweater and fumbling with the waistband of his trousers. He pouched out a couple of inches of peach silk between the buttons of his braces. ‘It seemed natural to me that when my wife died last year I should wear her lovely silk knickers under my Y-fronts, summer and winter. I suppose it was intended as a tribute to her. I don’t know anyone else who would do this! I remember her every day because of it.’

  I waited for Ashley to chip in with something about private memory becoming largely subsumed in public spectacle, one of his specialised subjects, but he was busy keying data into a palmtop PC. ‘Flong pages. Pie-ups. Moodies. Low-mist inks,’ it said on the liquid crystal display. A member of the bar staff brought Walter his dinner – a white plate brimming with off-white foodstuffs: boiled potatoes, white loose-skinned chicken, pale beans sitting in a pale cornflour gravy, which the barman looped a trail of as he put the plate down.

  Walter unfurled the utensils and tucked the red brewery napkin into the neck of his shirt, and we all involuntarily stopped to watch him eating, all projecting him into the same unhappy future of rubber undersheets, plastic bibs, maggot-infested leg wounds caused by the long-term neglect of the profit-creamers in charge of the private death-with-dignity institution where he will linger until the day comes for them to pat him on the face with a shovel. (Walter is well over retirement age but, on a paper where the average age on the editorial side has dipped to thirty-four, having somebody with Walter’s road-miles around, as they expressed it to him, provides a bit of much-needed bottom. A few years earlier, they had worked out that it would cost them more to sack him and make a redundancy payment than to go on forking out for his salary.)

  Guessing the tack our thoughts were taking (it couldn’t have been difficult), Walter said: ‘Being old doesn’t necessarily mean a life that is sick, senile, sexless, spent or sessile. Spare me the caregivers and the nurturers … Don’t mind me.’ Walter lifted the gravied chicken leg off the plate with the fingers of both hands. As he opened his mouth to receive it his face became simultaneously death-like and gruesomely vivid, aureoled in the white light of a motor-driven Nikon.

  It was like time-to-go-time, when the house lights show up all the cigarette burns and smashed glasses, and the tide-lines of furtively discarded crap. There were islands of tough marsh grass on Walter’s cheekbones that hadn’t been discernible before; tundra in his nose; gristly knobs and plaques and bosses of flesh; deltic tangles of veins; white matter creaming in the corners of his curdled eyes. For a strobic second, he looked like a carbuncular, Arcimboldo portrait of himself, composed entirely of artichokes and radishes, celeriac and beets, plantains and ugly tubers. Chicken grease coursed through the clumps of whiskers he had missed while shaving, came together with saliva and tertiary rivulets of grease and drooled off the end of his chin.

  Walter had become an exhibit in Heath Hawkins’s ongoing project which concentrates on media reptiles drinking and eating – ‘on the gargle and in the trough’ – and in general succeeds, as he had just succeeded with Walter, in making us look authentically reptilian: thickened skins; orbital protuberant eyes; flicking fly-catcher tongues. He believes the pictures symbolise the human appetite for the morbid, the salacious and the horrific which we are here to stoke up and feed.

  ‘The continually stuffed body cannot see secret things,’ Hawkins said. ‘Isn’t that what they say, Walter?’

  ‘Heath Hawkins.’ Ashley was excited. He had what appeared to be a rose-pink aura round his lanky frame. ‘Specialities: bird decapitators, puppy stranglers, woman beaters, wife poisoners, child molesters …’

  ‘Mr Click-clack-Kodak,’ Heath Hawkins confirmed. ‘Mutilations, torture, necrophilia, autopsies, bestiality, road accidents, work-site carnage, a good blaze

  ‘The naked shaking animal,’ Ashley said. ‘Killings, atrocities, butchery, gore. The shameful and menacing experiences that show humanity at its worst. You believed in the beginning that there was a psychic shield. But as more people died, and more friends, you learned there was not. Best-known quote, after your car was hit by a hand-detonated mine set off at a distance by guerrillas: “It was as if I had been to my own funeral. I knew everything – who wrote, who called, who came, who didn’t.” Second most-famous: “I want to turmoil people. Take them out of that comfort zone,” a clear echo of McCullin’s, “I wanted to break the hearts and spirits of secure people.” A child of privilege, your fascination with extreme violence is your attempt to know the world by knowing the worst it has to offer. Please state your current worldview in a way that would be suitable for a white-on-black, centre-leg pull-quote of fifty words or less.’

  ‘My grandmother used to have a saying that when hell was full up, the dead will walk the earth,’ Heath Hawkins said. ‘We’re seeing it now They are the dead. Out there. In here. Look at them.’

  Heath Hawkins looks like one of the ruined beauties of the West Coast white jazz scene of the forties and fifties: Art Pepper, Stan Getz, Chet Baker after their best blowing days, even their junky jailbird days, were long behind them, and death was clearly on the horizon. He has greased-up, greying copper-bronze hair that falls forward in a scimitar shape when he is helling round getting images of suffering and ruination to stick to the film, and stone-washed vacant blue eyes. Tonight he’s wearing a tonic suit with narrow trousers and a single-breasted jacket, and a T-shirt that says ‘Fuct’ across the front in the lettering of the ‘Ford’ logo. He has a knotted saffron-coloured cord around his neck, and a small, pendant black velvet draw-string bag. As usual, his hands are taped with the same plastic tape he uses to protect the body parts of his camera. Visible on his fingers, and on his face and neck, are the open skin lesions that cover the rest of his body; they are caused by a parasitic protozoa picked up a decade or more ago, transmitted by a genus of blowfly in Salvador or Nicaragua or the Congo or the Lebanon or Guatemala or Biafra.

  ‘So,’ Hawkins says. ‘How we all enjoying this latest gruesical? A gas, or what? All it’s missing is a body. Still no smudges of the battered and broken, is there? I tell you, Norman, we got to get the fuck in there. Go team-handed. Smush up right in the guy’s face. Bang off some snaps. It behoves me. I mean, a couple of hours after she’d croaked it, Monet was in there painting his old lady, getting down the blue and the yellow and the grey tonalities of death. And for sure he’s feeling no pain, old McGovern. Not no way is he feeling any pain, right. He’s pure, insensate vegetable matter. I enjoyed your piece by the way
. Good going. But, listen. We’ve got to crash it, man. Do it. Go in with me. Run a raid on the factory of bad karma.’

  Hawkins has become as habituated to hospitals as he once was to famines and foreign wars. His first portfolio after he had hung up his flak jacket, his shrapnel-holed olive drabs, came together over the months he spent lurking in the Casualty Department of a busy inner-city hospital, homing in on torn flesh, screaming faces, meaty wounds, following his subjects into emergency surgery, prowling the morgue. The hospital management had to ask him to leave in the end.

  He kept taking pictures of his first wife through her slow death from cancer; the ravages of chemotherapy, the bifurcated scar of the mastectomy blown up into images of high-contrast, extreme graininess.

  He met Murrayl, his second wife, at a police scene-of-crime murder reconstruction in a town in the West Midlands. Bearing a strong resemblance to the murdered woman, Murrayl had volunteered to put on clothes similar to the ones the woman was wearing on the night she died, and follow the route from the commuter station to her home ten minutes’ walk away that she was taking when she disappeared. Hawkins had approached Murrayl at the end of the photo call and a few days later persuaded her to lie down in the weed-choked alley adjacent to a Salvation Army Citadel where the body had been found. He photographed her with a supermarket carrier bag taped over her head and her clothing disturbed, resting against a bunch of flowers with a card that said, ‘From regulars and staff at the Railway Inn. A tragic loss.’ Murrayl went on to do some glamour modelling and, now separated from Heath, currently works as a nineteen-forties-costumed cinema usherette at the Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank.