Fullalove

by Gordon Burn

  I was lying under a rigid, padded counterpane, so far as I was able to tell fully-dressed, watching the spokes of light become harder-edged, deeper golden, better-defined; listening to the haloed, picking up, quickening sounds of London at six o’clock.

  I was at The Quoag, better known as Bobby’s, the (very) short-stay hotel popular for generations with people meeting for ‘funch’ – lunchtime fucking, with blank receipts from the fishing-net-and-raffia-nested-chianti-bottle restaurant on the ground floor – ‘moodies’ – provided tout compris, so that the knobbing was eventually reimbursable as a justifiable business expense.

  There was a hot wire piercing my thalamus, hypothalamus, parietal cortex and limbic system, so that I didn’t dare raise my head above the horizontal. But lying flat made me feel something life-threatening was about to take place in the ribs region: there were fluids sluicing around my upper body, swamping my heart (what I judged to be my heart), which itself felt inflated, spongily engorged, when I was lying down. Something that I remember thinking seemed like orange juice seemed to be trickling out of my nose.

  The next time I woke, the lines of light were ticking across the ceiling with more purpose, indicating that the traffic had thinned. It was probably about 2 a.m. and I had wiped out almost a whole twenty-four hours. I risked sliding a few inches up the head-board and, with my left hand, groped inside the bedside cabinet. This happened, conveniently, to be a minibar, and I came up with some foil-wrapped peanut brittle and some International Party Mix in a five-ounce ring-pull can. When I had taken care of these (leaving aside the seaweed-glazed Japanese crackers, which I have never liked), it seemed to make some of the sense of panic paralysis recede.

  An hour, perhaps two hours later, it occurred to me to slip the trousers I had been sleeping in under the mattress, in an effort to get them to look at least half-decent when it was time to leave. I succeeded in kicking them off and folding them and arranging them more or less flat without glimpsing any evidence of the lowering brown oceans and exotic archipelagos of human stains. In the course of this (in the circumstances) tricky manoeuvre, though, my eye was drawn into the dark crevice of the bucking tongue, the throat where mattress peeled away from base and where I spied the dim, dog-eared, delaminated surface of what could only be porn. I plucked it from its hiding place, catching a confirming drift as I did so of the lewd inks, and fell back in the bed with all the dry-mouthed excitement of a secret debauche.

  Every page showed a pie-faced woman in congress with a German Shepherd or a Borzoi, frequently both. She wore a short brown wig in some pictures, engineer boots and a zippered leather mask in others; only from the dusting of acne on her pale adipose buttocks – acne like a map of the cosmos; galaxies and galaxy clusters, conurbations of stars – was it possible to confirm that it was the same person.

  I fell into a fitful sleep in which I dreamed of babies, dolls, disease, the corruption of the body – the things that go bad in the world of time, and decay. I woke with my face an inch or so from the wall, where, written in a tiny Rapidographic hand just below the lower edge of the paper dado (laurel garlands, prancing elegant-necked gazelles), I read the following: ‘Lipstick on a penis/a kiss on a running sore/sadness, madness, melancholy, and despair’.

  – ‘Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’

  – ‘I suppose you are Real?’ said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

  – ‘The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,’ he said. ‘That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.’

  I remember my father describing to me once how the men of his regiment, himself included, had looted the homes of innocent Dutch families during the liberation of Holland. This was in ’44 or ’45, just before the end of the war, when the ordinary squaddie hadn’t experienced home, and the comforts of home, for many months, in some cases years.

  It wasn’t valuables they looted, but the simple heimelig objects that they associated with peace and stability and physical and spiritual ease: sideboards, armchairs, those fringed chenille table coverings with depictions of windmills and dumpling-cheeked little dyke-pluggers in turned-up-toed clogs that you still find in some older Dutch bars today; they even took hearth-rugs and cheap mantel ornaments. The brass went hairless when they found the dug-outs converted into room-sets of cosy front parlours in Sunderland and Birmingham and Stepney. But they did nothing, because they could see the men were in the mood to kill rather than surrender the right to enjoy these potent reminders of a normal human existence.

  Everybody can always use a little Christmas, as Frank Sinatra once said, explaining why he keeps Christmas-tree lights burning in his house all the year round. Even Ronnie Duncan – big, don’t-piss-on-my-back-and-tell-me-it’s-raining, rooted-in-the-world Ronnie Duncan, forcibly uprooted from the mess of his desk and the fortress of his office and the consolations of nicotine, now the building is a smoke-free, open-plan, virtually paper-free zone – Ronnie Duncan has lately taken to towing a small module behind him as he moves about the office making his executive pronouncements. Officially, this cabinet-on-wheels is supposed to contain all the bumf the new clean-desking mandates prohibit him from leaving lying around the place. Unofficially, it is no accident that he now looks like a small child pulling a favourite choo-choo or tottering cube of alphabet blocks on a trolley, or that he appears indifferent to this childhood regression. (Many people have remarked on how unhyper, how eerily unlike himself he has been seeming lately.)

  I couldn’t have foretold that a fluffy toy given to me more than two years earlier by the wife of a serial child killer would be what I would reach for – something cuddly and sterile and acquainted with death – when life once again belly-upped and went weird on me. But this is what I asked Myc Doohan to go to my flat and get, when I eventually tracked him down. (He had spent the morning covering the opening by the Duke of Edinburgh of one of the new upgraded Poly-Universities – somebody back at the ranch’s idea of a joke.) Mrs N would give him the keys; he’d find the little dog in question by a stack of mouldering newsprint between the Exercycle (broken) and the window, abandoned but unresentful, an expression of absolute, insatiable neediness on its come-all, forgive-all machine-made face.

  Doohan was the one person I could trust to do this who wouldn’t make unhelpful suggestions. (Like: Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have me call a doctor? Or: Wouldn’t you prefer to be oiled and stroked to orgasm by a topless lady of your choice?) A man who spends his mornings strapping himself into a whalebone corset (couturièred by the London woman who post-operatively resculpted Andy Warhol and President Reagan among others) and his nights wanly communing with the oily city river is a man chasing his own demons. I also knew that Doohan was somebody who wouldn’t risk even a trip to the new University of the Outer Circle without taking his own charms and amulets with him: a brass pixie, a four-leaf clover, two silver dollars, a dashboard Jesus, and two St Christophers in case one was more effective than the other. (‘Oh world, world, world, wondrous and bewildering, when did my troubles begin?’)

  It was around one, I was vegging into day two of my occupancy of that twilit, garlic-reeking knocking shop, when I heard a key slip into the lock and opened my eyes to see an apprehensive – a frankly spooked – Doohan making his entrance. Hoisted on the heels of his tan cowboy boots, the kneed and bunched trousers of his suit dragging, thin hair slapped against his scalp, glasses steamed, the buckled belt of his leather coat trailing the floor, Doohan looked as if he had been bin-diving with the aristocracy of the gutter in Leicester Square. The paper sack in which he carried his belongings was sodden and collapsing; the newspapers clamped under his arm were flopping grey
pulp; the little dog looked like a consolation prize from budget bingo in its patchily opaque, dingy shroud. ‘I’ll just do a piss,’ Doohan said, disappearing into the bathroom, and re-emerged gulping on a joint.

  He paced the floor at the foot of the bed, lugubriously filling me in on the trade gossip I’d missed over the previous twenty-four hours: who was up, who was down, who was stuffing who. He had had a telephone conversation earlier that morning with a young photographer he had never met who he was meant to be working with for the first time. ‘I’m five-foot-eight, clean-shaven, ponytail, that kind of genre,’ the smudger had told him. ‘I’ll be with an assistant, blonde, of the female persuasion. You’ll be carrying a pineapple, I presume.’ ‘“My assistant,”’ Doohan said. ‘What happened to aiming it, holding the bleedin’ thing steady and pressing the tit? Probably still crapping his nappies this time last year. The wank in the bath.’

  And meanwhile the reason for Doohan’s mercy dash loomed between us, heavy-handed, unalluded to, mute. Doohan had deposited the dog on the bed without saying anything. I watched him concentrate on not looking at it the way you consciously try to stop your eye straying to somebody’s facial tic or intriguing stain or unusual physical deformity. A single smut had penetrated the factory wrap and lodged itself on the velvety muzzle. Otherwise it had made it this far unscarred and unblemished; it was a clean slate, an empty vessel.

  I looked at Doohan: winded; shot; his future behind him. I thought of the pair of us: the bad-news bears, the bathos junkies. We had started out so well. But something in our lives had brought us to this pass: two middle-aged men in a cheapjack hotel doing a ten-minute fandango around the cuddly creature one of them has become convinced possesses the magic necessary to deliver some tragically mislaid part of himself back to himself. I wasn’t ready to take up my bed and walk out of the room and at the same time was convinced I couldn’t spend another hour there without this primitive contrivance.

  Doohan offered me a hit on his joint. I declined. He inhaled it down to the filter, flushed the roach down the toilet, then shambled about gathering together his sodden bits and pieces. ‘I’ve seen rough, but you look dog rough,’ he offered as a parting shot. ‘Thanks, Myc,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the same for you one day.’ He made the peace sign when all that remained visible of him was one hand extended through a gap in the door.

  The condolence card with the swallows and Rachel Stires’s lines of doggerel on it had unstuck itself somewhere along the line and gone missing. The glue of the crimp-seal around the dog gave way easily with a soft hiss, a small aromatic explosion of polypropylenes and carbides, moth-proofers, flame-retardants, bonding agents, synthetic fur and filling. The facial features were folkloric, uniform, idealised, designed to punch all the age-old buttons. They didn’t ask anything specific, or say anything specific; they encouraged the owner – and I acknowledged that that was me now – to bring them to life by projecting the specific onto them. They were full of empty content, waiting to be filled.

  The chemical aromas diffused quickly. This was never a toy that was going to be invested with the warm milky smell of a child. It had evaded the wet earth and keening laments of its intended destination. Now as my life’s companion it was going to be filled with my smell: the smell of sour nightsweats, flopsweat, piney Karvol, gaseous emissions, and the mulchy, bubbling-under sub-odours of disgust, disappointment, fatigue and panic.

  I was timid at first about any overt display of affection. What a snooper lens couldn’t do with a snoutful of this. A frame-by-frame account of my slow-motion private smash-up. A gift for somebody with an eye for the grotesque and gamey. A Weegee, a Louis Liotta, an Arbus, a Heath Hawkins. (Caption: ‘His/Her central concern remained unwavering – it focused on the nature of being alone and our pitiful range of attempted defences against it.’) I glanced at the window. The blind remained lowered. Tentatively at first, I let my nose graze in the semi-lush, machine-cropped fabric. I was covered all over in a thin film of perspiration. I made myself familiar with the bunched legs, investigated the raggedy outsize ears. Then I tucked the little dog under my chin and drifted into the sweetest sleep with my arms clamped close around it.

  When I woke up I was irrationally (childishly) upset not to find it where I had left it. It took a minute or two to locate it under the bedclothes, snug in the hollow made by my drawn-up, foetal knees. It took me back to the days when a Townsend terrier called Ali used to burrow his way into the bed in the mornings and make a space for himself between me and Even. And further back to when I was a child, when my mother would wrap a hot water bottle up in an old cardigan before slipping it into the arctic sheets, a cooling core of heat encrypted in the leaden blankets.

  It was only when I retrieved it that I noticed the maker’s label sewn into a body-seam: Fullalove. And on the reverse: ‘Eternitoys (Div. of Jaykay Group), Vallance House, Vallance By-Way, Sleaford. Upkeep: minimal. Shelf-life: eternal.’

  Four

  Day 24. I ask Heath Hawkins a question, one I have long wanted to ask him.

  We are in what Hawkins usually refers to as his ‘hooch’ (a hangover from the Vietnam days) – actually the bottom half of a battered/bijou property in an SW postal district popular with dumbed-down, cokehead trustafarians, and older BMW-bohemians like himself. (I make it that Heath must be fifty-seven now.)

  The air is incense-rich, the lighting strained through flimsy pieces of ikat and paisley and tie-dye fabric that have been weighted with glass beads and cowries and draped over the shades of the lamps. There is a low table with the figure of Ganesh, the elephant Buddha, on it, along with a row of lard-like ecclesiastical candles. The candles illuminate a Tibetan mandala whose circular pattern turns out, when you get close to it, to consist of ingeniously interlocked copulating figures. One third of the room has an icy, Insectocutor-blue caste as a result of the light falling into it from the adjacent room whose walls are lined with tanks containing puffers, tangs, blue-face angels, moray eels and other slyly darting tropical fish.

  None of this, though, is what visitors to Heath Hawkins’s house tend primarily to remember. In an act of contamination or, the images they take away with them when they leave are the sepulchral, transfixing, bottom-of-life images that Heath’s shutter has opened up over the years to let in. This gallery of the dead and dying, the bestial and the grotesque – a few of the pictures framed, most enlarged and then simply taped or pinned to the walls; all of them in black-and-white – doesn’t appear to have been assembled so much as to have self-spawned organically, like a bacterial invasion, or a flocky pattern of cumulus damp.

  Before me where I am standing is an image from his notorious (unpublished) post-mortem portfolio. The corpse is that of a middle-aged woman whose head is turned to one side and buried in shadow. The incision that has been made from the throat to the pubic bone is in the process of being stitched up, with coarse dragging stitches. Clearly visible in the open stomach cavity is the cigarette Hawkins had been smoking a couple of seconds before he took the picture. Seeing him looking around for an ashtray, he has told me, the mortuary assistant, the only other person present, had taken the cigarette from him and casually stuffed it into the woman’s belly.

  Above this picture is the picture of a spliff-toting GI, his face painted up for night walking, around his neck a necklace of eleven human tongues. Below it, the picture of Walter Brand that Heath snatched in The Cherry and Fair Star three or four nights ago, and next to this an equally unforgiving studio portrait, a posed picture of Walter, his old cojones hanging low in, his arthritically ballooned knees exploding out of, a pair of his late wife’s precious silk knickers.

  Proceeding in a clockwise direction around the room we find blowups of:

  – an amputee in Yemen having the pulp of his shoulder wound cauterised with red-hot irons

  – a girl holding a doll giving birth to another doll

  – a naked Heath Hawkins photographed by himself, the fat-lipped black lesions articulating the surface
of his body like leeches

  – a group of children hideously impaled on a column of concertina razor wire in a public square in Saigon; the razor wire encircles their father, a formally dressed man, who is facing execution

  – a young black revolutionary being necklaced with a blazing rubber tyre in one of the townships in South Africa

  – Linzie’s, Hawkins’s first wife’s, sutured and fisted mastectomy scar

  – one of the ninety-five Liverpool football fans who died at Hills-borough, the grid-pattern of the boundary fence against which the life was crushed out of him branded on his face. (Hawkins had had to flip the body with his foot where it was lying on the pitch, something he had done many times in combat situations. Here, though, it had almost sparked a mini-riot, a small turbulence inside the greater turbulence)

  – two men, the uncle and grandfather, gazing at the four fingers of a small girl which have just been chopped off by her mother

  – a black vulture with human fat coursing down its feathers and tatters of knobby flesh hanging loose from its mouth, snapped in a border village during the Indo-Pakistan War

  Life with the crusts on, as Heath has a fondness for saying. Life with the crispyfuckincrusts on, man.

  ‘Tell me,’ I say to him. ‘I’ve always wanted to know. Do you ever get, you know … the horn on, taking pictures of this stuff?’