Fullalove

by Gordon Burn

  Although several men have claimed to have killed Shane Norwood, his family have never found out for certain who, if anybody, did; the body has never been discovered. His father’s personal odyssey since the abduction has been a gift for the news media. There have been a series of other, widely publicised romances, and several public brawls. At one point Sean Norwood was rumoured to be hanging out in Dublin with Alex Hig-gins, Jerry Lee Lewis and some of the members of U2. There was the gun incident, following hard on the heels of the knife incident; and then, just over a year ago, he went into somewhere called the Exodus Recovery Centre in the West Country to dry out.

  He emerged to tell the harrowing tale on the same shows on which he had originally appeared, three years earlier, to talk about Shane. Soon there was the autobiography, which is still in the upper reaches of the best-sellers after five months, kept there by his new-found popularity as an afternoon quiz-show host.

  I am looking at Sean now, playing to an audience of three through the sidewardly spiralling dust motes in The Cinq-Mars. He has just asked a woman called Esme, who is already taking home a computer chess game and a Kenwood cordless kettle, which sex symbol’s original name was Norma Jean Baker, and Esme has given the correct answer, which is Marilyn Monroe. ‘Marilyn Monroe!’ he says, as if she had just recited Otto Harm’s third law of thermoneutics and nuclear fission. ‘If you’d been given that name, you’d have changed it too, wouldn’t you, Esme?’

  Sean Norwood’s face glows throughout its 625 lines with sincerity, humility, vigour, and a creamy resonance – no sign of human hurtability there. But whenever I look at this face, I see the counter-image – the face I saw on the night his son disappeared, as we sat passing the bottle of syrupy rum: a face transformed by the ecstasy of pain, the rapture of grief; scalded by tears, smeared with phlegm and giesers of green snot. It is the sort of moment phots like Heath Hawkins see it as their life’s calling to capture: human features calamitised by pain or terror; the moment of absolute animal abandonment.

  The theme music is being brought up gradually now, and Sean Norwood is doing what he does at the wind-up of every show. ‘Say “Goodbye, Shane,”’ he says to the contestants, who, familiar with the format, are already waving in unison at the portrait of Shane Norwood which dominates a corner of the set that has been kept in darkness until now – a big blown-up innocent picture – the picture of innocence – surrounded by the hokey glamour of several dozen twinkling pearloid bulbs.

  The makers of the show have not plumped for the sharp, professionally posed portrait that was available, showing Shane smiling and well groomed. They have opted instead for a snapshot picture – a second-generation print enlarged from copy negatives and pushed until it has a crude, documentary feel at odds with its showbizzy setting. Because of its lack of definition and precision, it seems irradiated with muted pathos; glutted with event-value.

  ‘Bye, Shane,’ Sean Norwood says, when the contestants have finished waving their goodbyes. And then, turning to camera: ‘Bye, everybody. And remember – be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful. S’long. See you next time.’ Cue credits.

  ‘Bye, Shane,’ a voice calls from across the bar. It’s the man who sold me the plaster dust-collector, still sitting with his lopsided bag of junk on his knee.

  An ambulance is travelling in our direction with its two-noted siren sounding. ‘There’s my taxi,’ the man says, but he doesn’t move.

  *

  My landlady, Mrs Norstrom, is an engaging old bigot who spends her days in her housecoat and her vivid russet wig lighting up and coughing into the phone and watching television at her kitchen table. She used to run the place as a rooming-house in the fifties, and a sign that used to hang in the street window then – ‘No Irish, No coloureds, No dogs’ – dangles from a coat-hook in the kitchen now, so that these two antiques (of sentimental value only) are often what you see (if you can see through the condensation and the spuming cigarette smoke and the low-lying clouds of fry-up fug) when you open the front door into the spartan hall.

  I was aware in the early years of my tenancy, when she could still make the stairs, that she used to go and grub about in my flat when I wasn’t there. I knew, but, because it fed into some romantic Greeneian notion of the aromatic genteel squalor of Earls Court doss-downs and Kilburn bedsits (a notion that the wheezing crumblies and crones who were my fellow tenants did nothing to contradict and was, if anything, reinforced as the yuppy eighties got under way), I didn’t care. There was less alienation involved in this new life than in Saturday-night come-casual supper parties and balls-aching conversations about extra-virgin cold-press olive oil and the human catastrophe of Somalia and the school-run – the life I had left behind.

  What was she going to find up there in any case, other than the odd incriminating bottle or tumbler on the edge of the bathroom sink (I sometimes still like to start the day with fizzy vitamins or Alka-Seltzer beefed up with a four-finger splash of vodka), the odd stroke book spreadeagled on the floor, cockeyed piles of plates crusting over, and other common-or-garden evidence of the married bachelor life? Like Fowler, the Vietnam-based hack in Greene’s The Quiet American, I was finally not involved. Not involved. Let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. ‘I wrote what I saw: I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.’

  Apart from Even and Tristan and Jennifer, and Therese ‘Gumshoe’ Norstrom, I can count the number of people who have been in here on the fingers of one hand and still hold a hamburger. I am that peculiar specimen that this odd profession produces by the containerload: the cocooned mixer; the gregarious loner.

  If – when (oh and I’m increasingly inclined to think of it as when) – the fetid odour leaking into the common parts via the draught space at the bottom (and the top, and the sides) of my door results in the alarm being raised and the emergency services being called – Mrs N gawping up the stairwell, hair evenly quilted into squares of baldness by her curlers, dressing-gown clutched modestly at her throat; the rest of the inmates hanging out of their doors in their thermal underpants and crochet shawls and thick, pilled night apparel, the nails of their aged toes clicking like beaks against the chill old-as-the-century tiles, players in an award-winning, promenade production of the Marat/Sade – if/when the time comes for outside agents to break their way into the Greeneland of my humble, down-at-heel accommodation, you can bet the farm that they will home in on the one item flagging its oddness and incongruity, convinced that here they have stumbled across the key which will unlock the sickness of my soul, throw a revealing beam through the murkiness of my parasitical, sadsack personality.

  High on my pillow, standing sentry over my blackened, worm-meat remains, will be the companion of my declining years, my confidant, my china, my (if you insist – and, let’s face it, you will insist, liking the sound, the inference, the suggestion of some strange intimacy, the subtle but palpable eroticism) – my fetish.

  Physically, my polyester-wadded friend will by then be in the same desperate shape as myself – dust, light, damp and pests (the larvae of the carpet beetle, the spore of the clothes moth) taking their toll of his pastel nylon pelt; the stuffing of polystyrene pellet mix and low-grade synthetic waste trickling out of the open leg-and body-seams; the raised script of the label sewn into the seam-edging of the half-wasted, half-elephantiasised foot – Fullalove – made illegible by coffee, wine, egg, soy sauce, ketchup and other tricky-to-deal-with stains. He will be looking, that is to say, as he would have looked if he had ever reached his intended destination all those years ago and been made to take his chances in the world.

  ‘Hello, pally’ or ‘So pal, what can I tell you?’ or ‘Any messages?’ or ‘Well pal, what’s new?’ Words addressed to a two-foot-long by foot-and-a-half-high, orange-and-yellow plush, saucer-eyed Everypup, sitting obediently where I placed him many hours earlier, patiently awaiting my return. The head is a big head – bigger than it should be for the body, like a baby’s – an
d the street lights throw its shadow many times bigger than lifesize across the unlighted room. My room has the look of a child’s room in these (invariably inebriated) moments – an unimpeachable, safe place – and never fails to strike me as a place I want to be.

  *

  There’s a joke that runs round what I suppose we have still got to call Fleet Street every time a story breaks that is big enough to have Tosser Dosson and his competitors slapping their chequebooks on the table. The Mail/Express/Today/Sun/Mirror might have got alongside the wife/daughter/mother/mistress (the joke goes), but ‘Clit’ Carson has got inside the wife/daughter/all of the above.

  In another era, Robin Carson would probably have been a snatch-man – an operator whose job was to acquire pictures of people who were no longer in a position to be photographed (murder victims, people who had died in some disaster or other) from people who, for obvious reasons, were usually reluctant to part with them. A common tactic, once the snatch-man had weaselled his way into the house, was to suggest to the distraught mother/other that she nip into the kitchen and make a cup of tea. While she was gone he would strip the walls, sideboard and mantelpiece of every picture he could lay his hands on, and leg it before she reappeared. When they had been copied, he (sometimes) just pushed them through the letterbox.

  But different folks – the baby-butchers and child flayers, the gerontomonsters and paedobeasts, the blood-satanists, human goulashers and media-wise thrill killers who make today’s running – demand different strokes. And Robin ‘Clit’ Carson, the best-known unknown star in the Fleet Street firmament, has risen triumphantly to seize the moment.

  ‘In like Flynn’ is the expression often used about Carson by the older managerial suits, men among whom the phrase ‘the four-F Club’ – ‘Find ‘em, feel ‘em, fuck ‘em, forget ‘em’ – still has some currency if not a great deal of personal relevance. Carson’s skills as a cocksman have earned him a Saab 900 convertible, a serviced flat in Kensington and the dubious privilege of charvering the female family members of some of the most notorious sickos and psychopaths of recent years (and/or, not unusually, the female family members of some of their victims). The primary objective is the same as it ever was: to relieve them of all visual material in every medium for a minimal outlay. Once that has been achieved, the secondary objective is to take them out of circulation so that the competition can’t try to box them off or get them to do a turn without you knowing. The country house hotel (room fax, cable television, sauna, squash, Michelin-starred restaurant, forest-or lake-views optional) is ideally suited to this purpose, and has the added advantage of militating for the desired interviewer-interviewee legover situation. (Or ‘The opportunity of assuring her that she is not alone, engulfed, in her adversity’, as Clit would undoubtedly put it.)

  Although doing a kindness to the women connected by blood, marriage or happenstance to notorious atrocity cases is a non-job filled by an un-person – it won’t show up in the records; there is nothing on paper: ‘editorial consultant’ is Robin Carson’s official job description – he has established himself as a property now worth well into six figures in the transfer market. (He has been turning out for our team for two and a half years, although there are currently rumours of an attempt – I’ve heard £125K mentioned purely as a sign-on – to lure him away.)

  If the picture you’re beginning to piece together from this is of somebody who thinks he’s the first piece of white bread to come wrapped in plastic, then you’re not much mistaken. Apart from his natural endowment – and of course there is endless edgy speculation about exactly how big, as well as endless playtime jokes about writing to length and making stories stand up and letting the subs have an extra nine inches – he is the owner of a body that has been remorselessly built up and stripped down, toned and tuned and lathed, stretched and finessed until it is performance perfect.

  Naturally he jogs, and never fails to cause consternation when he squeezes into the lift after lunch with sweat streaming over his deltoids and pecs and dock-rope-like sternocleidomastoid muscles. Several times a week there are re-runs of the scene in A Streetcar Named Desire when Marlon Brando swaggers into the house and peels off his T-shirt (‘Hey, you mind I make myself comfortable? My shirt is sticking on me’) and Vivien Leigh as Blanche Du Bois, taking in his abdominal obliques and the cleated forearms with the raised basilic veins, dissolves in embarrassment and confusion. There are men too – I’m sometimes one of them – who choose the fire-stairs or the atriumed front entrance rather than risk a crushing, scrotum-tightening, close-quarters confrontation.

  Carson is thirty-two or -three, blond and (except when he is out earning his keep, when he wears easy-to-spot, big-name logos and strafing Big Lunch ties) studiedly understated in his appearance. ‘I think how people dress’ – I promise I have heard him say this – ‘is a function of where they are in the search for their bodies.’ He goes in for loose unstructured jackets with exposed surface seams; expensively simple shirts made out of Sea Island cotton and Thai silk; flapping macs, stout outdoors-man shoes and designer document-cases and backpacks. At a guess, you would say he was in advertising or poetry, or a popular form-master in a fashionable prep school. (Carson claims to have gone to one of the minor public schools, but is so up-rooted and free-floating, part of nothing, adrift from any sense of a conventional code or tradition; value-free, morally chaotic – that this, like so much else of the Gatsby-esque about him, has to be uninspired invention.) His one distinguishing feature – although Clit himself obviously regards it as his single serious disfigurement – is the strawberry birthmark that pokes out of his shirt and laps round the lobe of his left ear like a burning admission of the covert relationship he enjoys with the dirty devices of the world.

  So far, I suppose, so fairly predictable. What is less predictable is how he goes about getting a result in situations that, at a first glance, don’t exactly seem charged with erotic possibility. The key is to ignore the big picture – the testosterone-charged galoot with the schoolboy-parted hair, still labouring under the illusion of eternal health and strength – and concentrate for a second on his face. What you see is not the chronic vivacity peculiar to the piranhas of the smiling professions, nor the vaporous mask of plausibility and ingratiation corona-ed with creeping guilt; what you see with Clit is something infinitely more sinister – the inward, doped-over look of the meditator or chanter, the socio-therapeutic New Ager; the ‘enabler’ he sells himself as being.

  Carson has run the gamut of gurus and consciousness crazes: TA, TM, EST, Arica, rolfing, transpersonal psychology, yoga. And, if nothing else, one thing they have taught him is a way of making himself heard through the cyclone of psychic noise that sweeps in round the household of the latest basher-and-slasher or serial killer. The pleas and bullyings and hastily drafted licences and contracts fisted through the door by other journos are part of the frenzy – part of the carnival jabber and babble; Robin Carson’s overtures, on the other hand, set out to get noticed by being like a whisper or a ululation.

  He makes his initial approach via a message written in crowded copperplate on the back of a picture postcard with overt mystical or inspirational content, usually reflecting his latest spiritual enthusiasm. In the period that we have been casually yoked together as a team, these have included pictures of the Seven Pagodas, the shrines on the seashore at Mahabalipuram, Madras; the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Bangkok; and portraits of Sri Chinmoy, Meher Baba, the Dalai Lama, and a pouch-cheeked Mongolian monk brought to public notice by one of the younger Royals and the owner of the Body Shop, who then had just established an ashram in Bourton on the Water in the Cotswolds.

  Carson briefly sets out his stall – ‘I’m emotionally available. I’m willing to go into the darkness with people. I hear the fear and am willing to go with them where it hurts’ and so on; lists some of his greatest past successes – X, the Lust Killer, Y, the Motorway Monster, Z, Manchester’s Baby-faced Serial Sex Murderer; and ends with a quotation f
rom the Scriptures or a Sufi proverb or Zen koan.

  Two years ago, Robin Carson was in the honeymoon period of his infatuation with the American beatnik-turned-Trappist visionary, Thomas Merton. He went about with postcards of the giant reclining Buddhas of Polonnaruwa in Ceylon, which Merton had visited a few days before his death; also a paperback book containing Merton’s collected wit and wisdom which I suspected at the most Clit had only ever dipped into, but had gone over key passages in pink or yellow to give the impression of a close reading. (‘What is important is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body but entangled in our own mind.’)

  It was with these weapons that Carson set out to get into the pants of the wife of a man whose crimes had been excitingly dire enough to be given maximum play on television and in the papers over the previous year and a half.

  George Arthur (‘Joe’) Stires was the manager of a small refrigerated warehouse in Keighley, in West Yorkshire, that was used for storing live shellfish – crayfish, langoustines, oysters mainly from the west of Ireland, which went into large glass-fronted, oxygenated tanks. The cargoes arrived and departed at odd hours, and Stires had to be there to unlock the gates to let the drivers in and out. He had an old ottoman bed in a storeroom on the premises, where he lolled or lolloped like some great marine beast, some barnacle-backed crab or jelloid bottom-feeder. He whiled away the hours reading – he had a collection of books on judo, karate, palmistry, hypnotism, devilry, torture and Gilles de Rais, the Black Baron – and filing bits of scrap metal down into tiny needle-and scalpel-like knives, some of which he part-wrapped with strips of white cloth, which gave them the look of bandaged limbs or miniature, swaddled corpses; the others he inserted into two rag bands which, it was discovered when he was arrested, he wore tied lethally around his wrists.