by Gordon Burn
The house was full of yoghurt, filtered water, and people flossing. ‘But Daddy you can’t eat that,’ Jennifer would wail when she saw me sitting down to my ‘empty’ calories (usually Frosties and a ketchup-topped bacon sandwich) in the mornings. I tried to explain that I liked the taste of diesel oil after it had been whipped up into a huge lump and pumped into doner kebabs and cheese slices and tangy snacks with flashes offering the chance to win a VW Golf Cabriolet and happy cartoon characters on their packets (my passport to the twiglet zone). Got actual pangs for the taste of Wonderloaf with its industrial yeast, treated flour, negative air and carcinogenically refined white sugar (unrivalled at soaking up the alcohol still sloshing round the system from the night before).
And I wasn’t just being perverse. I knew the stuff I was cramming into my body was crap, but I also knew there was something seductive and pleasure-giving about it that had to do with resolving the distance you feel between the way you understand the external world and your emotional response to it. I was also convinced that in some ways it was a class issue (part of the reason I felt like a put-upon minority in my own home). Both my parents might have reamed out their systems with E-numbers and saturated fats and carbohydrates, but at least they didn’t spend their last years (I told Even) looking as if they’d just been given barbed-wire enemas. It seemed that the stringier Even had got, the more solemn she had become. ‘Food’s a very political area,’ she’d explode at me. ‘You don’t seem to realise. Take a lot of cheap shit, make it look palatable and taste palatable, and people make fortunes. They have to keep selling this shit that people like you think is delicious to keep making money from it. There’s not much money in selling a parsnip.’
‘Do you know what you’re turning into?’ I’d snap back at her. ‘You’re turning into the sort of woman they seal the water glasses and toilet seats in hotels for. Mizz Crab-Apple, 1977.’ And so on.
Even had a theory, from which she wouldn’t be budged, that my breakdown was virtually one hundred per cent diet-related. And while she had me as a passive victim, I submitted to her regime of gin-seng and royal jelly and vitamin and mineral supplements. But, as I recovered, we reverted to our former positions, and bumped along, agreeing to disagree.
We had been separated for more than two years when Even met Glen Leithauser at some trade show or food industry convention, and within weeks (even now I’m hazy on the exact timetable – it might even have been within days) of meeting him decided to up-stumps and begin a completely new life in America. She took it as given that Tristan, then ten, and Jennifer, aged eight, would be going with her. I was in no position to argue, and in any case had always regarded myself as the big baby in the family; all three of them had always been there to pick up after and wipe and boost and coddle, to parent me. I loved them in a bred-in-the-bone, sentimental sense, but I didn’t know them any more than I knew the people whose lives I crashed or greased my way into most weeks of the year, whatever I might have preferred to believe. I only listened when I was being paid to listen and had my antennae twitching for something that would stand up as a strong lead. During the rest of my existence I was on auto-pilot, part man, part machine: RoboHack.
Even organised a brief hello-and-goodbye dinner in a restaurant for the three of us – me, Glen Leithauser, and herself. (It was in fact the first and, so far, the only time I met the man under whose roof my children were to spend those all-important formative years.) I wish there was some gross indiscretion to own up to; I wish I could claim that something bloody-minded and eternally shaming occurred, some brainwarp or rush of blood to the head, a sociopathic lunge, an attempt to skewer Leithauser with the fish knife (on special occasions – of which this apparently counted as one – Leithauser allowed himself fish). In fact it was all as chummy as hell, and it was ‘Glen’ and ‘Norman’ almost before we’d been treated to a recital of the specials of the day.
Leithauser was a pioneer in the field of organically grown fruit and vegetables – peaches, red field tomatoes, tomatillos, eggplants, squash blossoms. Four years earlier he had been selling tomatoes from a garden he had cultivated in a place outside Buffalo to a few restaurants in up-state New York. By the time he met Even in 1981, he was piloting a twin-engined Cessna turboprop and enjoying a reputation as Mister Juicy Organic Tomato of the Eastern Seaboard states.
He was a collegiate lunk with fine brushcut hair and aviator glasses with an irritating luminescent lemon-yellow tint and a certain born-again something about him. He projected the righteous aura, the baritone coolness of the NASA space-age heroes of the sixties, when he would have been only slightly younger than Grissom, Glenn, Shepard and co. In his Shetland sweater and his khakis and his white, just-out-of-the-box New Balance tennis shoes, he could have come fresh from dunkin’ a few balls in the basketball backboard attached to the garage of his ranch-style split-level. Even had had her hair cut in a new, neat asymmetrical style, shingled at the back, and the pair of them could have already been running for one of the cushier offices in the State.
For safety’s sake, we kept the conversation on sap beetles and ground rot and the line in state-of-the-art, value-added organic gourmet dishes Leithauser was about to start selling into supermarkets all across America. I was able to chip in a few nuggets about Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart and the then Richest Man in America, who I’d just read a profile of in a magazine.
‘Oh yeah, great guy for in-the-trenches retailing and, above all, marketing. The man who revolutionised the show with down-home values,’ Glen Leithauser said, quoting the article, so far as I remembered it, word for word. ‘The guy who I’d really like to meet though is this guy,’ he said, indicating the restaurant muzak, which was then playing a Van Morrison track. ‘I’d get really a heck of a kick out of going up to Van Morrison and addressing him by his real name, which is Ivan. Ivan. Can you believe that?’
‘Oh Norman has met all kinds of celebrities,’ Even said, with a look I had come to recognise over the years. To avert the next question, which is always Who is the most interesting person you have ever interviewed?, I jumped in and switched the conversation to the wine. It was a big thick bruiser of a Barolo, and I had it all to myself. They were drinking non-carbonated water without lemon. (A good-cop/bad-cop, third-degree interrogation of the waiter had eventually established that, yes, there was preservative wax on the lemon rind.)
Leithauser paid with the platinum card, then folded and filed the bill conscientiously away in his wallet. Some City boys, in striped shirts and felt braces, were having a boisterous time at another table, swigging champagne, skimming bread rolls at one another.
It was 1981, the summer of the riots. The summer my wife and children crated their belongings and moved out of my life. They have kept sporadically in touch. They send me pictures. Jennifer is studying mathematical physics at Boston University. Tristan graduated summa cum laude in merchandising, marketing and public relations arts and seems set to inherit what I’m sure he now regards as the family business. ‘It’s all about moving the merch off the shelves,’ he wrote on the last postcard I got from him. On the front was a colour picture of one of the new store format A&Ps that cater to an upscale consumer base and which Tristan believes represent the future of niche-marketed premium organic perishables.
*
A while ago, a man slipped into the seat next to mine in The Cinq-Mars and tried to sell me the sorts of things my mother used to call dust-collectors – souvenirs whose fate was to be forgotten – at fifty pence apiece. He was wearing no socks, and had boiled-looking blistered feet and ankles piling over his plastic trainers. He smelled equally of stale sweat and a stale pungent aftershave. He’d rummage in the hold-all balanced on his knee and pull out one small, damaged and insignificant object after another – a cracked vase, a porcelain pig with an ear missing, a glass giraffe or bambi, some Smurf-esque creatures; then a rawhide dog bone, a dented can of aerosol lubricant, all of it obviously the portable booty of a house-clearance; the effects
of somebody who had recently passed away. ‘Fifty-pee,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Fifty-pee. What’s your problem?’ I remained stony-faced. ‘Okay. Tell you what. You can have the lot. How’s that? The whole lot’s yours for a fiver.’ Eventually I took a small plaster basket with chipped plaster flowers clambering up the side just to get rid of him. It is sitting on the table in front of me now, looking like the little white cloud that cried. Inside it is a shrunken oasis of waxy green matter pierced by the stems of the dozens of flowers it must have once held. For an instant it reminded me of the fondant-like mass of the brain suspended in its jelly sac in the cranium, and of a quote garnered from a neuro-anatomist during my background researches into Scott McGovern: The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. Brain tissue is not regenerative; once destroyed it is gone for ever.
There is a television over the bar. A few minutes ago the barmaid was watching an Australian soap about hospitals and doctors. That has been replaced by the quiz show that comes on every afternoon about this time and is taken as a signal by the stragglers that they should be making tracks back to their under-vented, miserly-partitioned stalls and cubicles.
This is wallpaper television and perfectly suited to the time of day. The set is to a formula: glitter graphics; columnated desks like piles of coins, with coloured lights that flash and flutter at punctuating moments and can give the appearance of being activated by the audience’s applause, although this is pre-recorded. The contestants are the usual decruited business executives, stir-crazy housewives, pizza-faced forecourt attendants, and trainee sex offenders. The presenter is a recognisable daytime tellyperson – pulverisingly genial, bland as Philadelphia cream cheese.
‘Well,’ he’s saying, ‘it’s a while since we’ve seen our first contestant, Steven, from Cheadle in Manchester. He’s a laboratory technician and also interested in military history and Kipling. Is that fun, Steven? Kipling? I wouldn’t know myself. I’ve never kippled.’ (Canned laughter that rings poignantly around the now nearly empty bar.) ‘I will start as we always do with a general knowledge question for one point. Finger on the buzzer. Here it is. The French designer whose after-shaves include Kouros and Jazz is Yves-who …?’
The only thing that lifts the show above the ordinary is the quiz-master’s (they still call him this) route to the foothills of mini-stardom. Four years ago Sean Norwood was an estate agent in Croydon, in south London, with a wife, three children, and a nice home on a satellite development still in the final stages of completion. Then one morning he got up to find that Shane, the middle child and, at nine, the older of his two sons, was missing. An upper window had been forced, although Sean Norwood and his wife, asleep in the next room, had heard nothing. Part of a man’s size-ten bootprint was found at the point where the partly made-up road leading to the house turned into gravelled slurry. But Shane’s whereabouts have never been discovered.
I was at Glenwood Close (the neighbouring streets were Greenwood, Redwood and Laurelwood) by mid-morning, pitched into a situation as usual brimming with deadly negative potential. The estate was desolate in its newness and its evidence of status striving, wallet-strain and killer commutes. The whole thing could easily have whirled off the computer screens in the architect’s office and planted itself on the hundred and fifty acres of reclaimed sheep meadow, spruce and with all graphic co-ordinates intact (seven floor-plans, twenty-one different exteriors, no identical models to be built next to or facing each other). The place felt as aberrant, foreign and hostile that November morning as the event that had been visited upon it.
So here we all were. I made a note of the ‘Stranger danger’ warning notices at the entrances to the ash-and ilex-bordered play areas, and the ‘World Wildlife Fund’ sticker on the window through which Shane Norwood’s kidnapper had entered the house. Then I peeled away from the pack to go and find the abandoned mattress with its horse-hair stuffing and its continents of bodily stains which, invariably on these occasions, is never very far away.
I identified Sean Norwood’s father, Stan, as a family member within minutes of going into the pub. In the same way that some blind people eventually acquire a touch so sensitive that they can identify playing cards by the infinitesimal thickness of the shapes printed on them, so my senses are honed to lock on to people caught up in victim stories.
I knew straightaway from his accent that Stan Norwood was from the same part of the world I am originally from. He had been a fitter in the shipyards and had migrated to the soft south in the fifties to claim some of its featherbededness for himself. (He had had a string of jobs, and a string of illnesses, including diphtheria, testicular cancer and shingles; he was currently working as a delivery man for the Cookie Coach Company, a job that required him to wear a ‘Quality Street’-style cape-coat and squash hat and drive a vintage van with spoke-heels and olde-worlde sign-writing on the side.)
I felt my own submerged accent returning and growing steadily thicker as we spoke, establishing a mutual link (so I hoped) with the old close communities of the north, and an age when things were repaired rather than jettisoned, junked, thrown away. (A time – this was the clear intimation – when children could sleep safely in their beds without the fear of being carried off by an evil stranger. A time when the four walls of a house seemed to offer secure protection against the secret intrusion of terror.) And yet even as we waxed nostalgic about the rag shop and the old feed store and other local landmarks that had long ago been reduced to rubble and bulldozed under, I kept itchily turning over the configuration of the name – Stan – Sean – Shane – and wondering whether it represented some mutation or progression, rushing headlong towards this ineffable conclusion; the breaking of a line.
Stan – Sean – Shane. My feeling was that it was something that had happened unplanned and – even now, with the three names monotonously mantra-ed alongside each other in cold type (at first this caused chaos among the copy-takers) – went unheeded; that it signalled a cheery lack of introversion in the Norwood clan, passed down from generation to generation. I was impatient to fuzzle it up into some sort of angle, or present it in such a way that it suggested some pseudo-psychological insight that the competition hadn’t got on to yet.
When the grandfather looked like he was about to start making preparations to leave, I pressed my advantage. This had all the makings of a whopper, after all; a major ‘Hey, Doris’ story (and so it was to prove). And I knew the drift of the notes that would have been being pushed through the letterbox at Glen-wood Close all day (I had left one myself): ‘Dear Mr and Mrs Norwood, This is obviously a difficult/emotional/tragic time for you. And if you’d like to tell your story to someone who’ll treat it with sympathy and understanding, please give me a call on my portable. I’m outside the house now if you want to talk. Certainly we can offer you protection from all the other papers.’ (The money bids would come later; I knew X from The Star was already out there toting £5,000 in used twenties in a briefcase.)
I made my pitch to old Stan now, in person, as I helped him into his overcoat, in an accent that had become indistinguishable from his own. An hour later, to the fury of the rest of the pack kicking their heels on the pavement, I was indoors, eliciting the factoids of Shane Norwood’s life, riffling through the pictures, pocket tape turning, making all the right noises, face like a well-kept grave.
A doctor had been in to sedate the mother, who was upstairs with a WPC stationed by the bed. A uniformed policeman was in the kitchen, fielding the calls from hoaxers that had already started to flood in, interspersed with crank calls from those who claimed to know the boy had been taken by aliens. In Shane’s room, his bed had become a mound of flowers, cellophane-wrapped and with a business-card bearing a newspaper logo attached to each artful spray. Disturb the crinkled, expensive surface, and you could have expected to find sandy soil and smooth spade-shaped clods of mud, rather than the Arsenal duvet, the pattern of rocket ships and spinning ringed Saturns on the pillow.
The house, like th
e estate, was only partly finished. Some walls were newly rendered and bare; some parts of some floors remained uncovered; there were manufacturers’ labels sticking to the undersides of lavatories and sinks.
The three of us – Stan Norwood, Sean Norwood and myself – got through the best part of two bottles of Lamb’s Navy rum, and I left with some good tales. Better yet – I could already feel the sun of Howie Dosson’s approbation on my back as I took possession – I left with the tape Sean had shot with his Sony Handy-cam on a cross-Channel ferry just a few weeks earlier, and from which we were able to grab some good-value stills of Shane playing with his brother and sister. (The cassette went straight into the editor’s safe afterwards to keep it out of the maulers of our rivals. Tosser played for time with the Norwoods by bulling them that it had gone missing ‘at the printers’ and bunged them a cheque for £500 as a temporary sweetener.)
Sean Norwood, it turned out, was a TV natural. He had obviously been a bit of a ducker-and-diver in his time (although he didn’t have a record – the other papers immediately checked this, hoping to run a spoiler); he instinctively mastered the difficult feat of being distraught-with-dignity; made repeated appeals for the return of his son in a way that played expertly, though not cloyingly, on the universal reflex of tears; he looked good, he had an unfakeable feel-good factor, and the camera loved him. (This was whispered excitedly by young women with clipboards clutched to their chests in production suites all over London: ‘The camera loves him.’)
Very soon he was a powerful media presence, a fixture not only of the news bulletins, but also of magazine programmes, documentaries, phone-ins and talk shows. He started a foundation which campaigned on the issue of abducted children, sought new legislation and better education on child safety. A number of name columnists hailed him for having turned adversity to advantage, transformed personal tragedy into something positive, and found in his own catastrophe a cause. Five months after Shane’s disappearance, he moved out of the family home in Glenwood Close, and in with one of these columnists in her house in Acton. Within what seemed a very short time, she was penning a column on the impossibility of living with a severely traumatised male. Sean Norwood had already moved on to a researcher from Yorkshire Television by then and was living in Leeds, where he was reported to be drinking (and, some said, drugging) heavily.
