by Gordon Burn
He picks up a wooden block with a half-circle cut out of it and brings it to where we are standing in the light, either side of the dissection table. ‘Our world is networked together using small mouth noises, which are speech, or symbols for small mouth noises,’ Heath says. ‘This is not a wide band for communication, this small mouth-noise thing.’
He slips the block under the dead man’s heavy head, and crouches low over him with his Leica, bionic taped hands and taped camera working together like a single piece of integrated machinery. Rimed in coke sweat, elbows planted either side of the body, Heath goes in tight on the words that are banner-printed across the forehead, tattooed an inch above the eyes: ‘Made in England 1965’.
A blob of perspiration rolls off his chin and quickly spreads to a button-size stain on the shroud. He stands, works his shoulders until they crack loudly, mops his face with the corner of the teatowel-like keffiyeh. ‘And so,’ he says with an exaggerated autocutie leer. ‘We come to the main award of the evening.’
The door to the service stairs, activated by Charlie with his card-key, had opened with a depressurised suck or pop which started a tonal pulse that rapidly increased in volume and didn’t stop until the door had been secured behind us. Except it didn’t exactly seem to stop so much as fade into a loop of related, repetitive electronic sounds. These have been combined with tribal music – reed flutes, chimes and gourds – and overlaid with the sound of rainwater dripping and trickling off ferns, birds chirping, insects buzzing, what could easily have been the amplified heartbeats of tiny animals; plaintive yodels and chants. ‘The sound of sad, open spaces. Weird echoes. The mantle of the warm jungle,’ Heath says. ‘They shot the water buffaloes, the pigs and the chickens. They threw the dead animals into the wells to poison the water. Dinks, slopes, slants, gooks.’
Charlie and I have reached the level of the main reception area. Heath is squatting on a stone landing one flight down, doing another couple of lines. One of the original oratories at St Saviour’s has been retained in the new design, the domed lead roof replaced with glass, and a rain forest environment of fan palms, pincer vines and monkey grass created in interlocking raised beds in the space underneath it. The yellow double-arch of a McDonald’s dominates the figure-eight-shaped concourse that has resulted: there is the neon doodle of a ‘Knickerbox’, the sign of the black horse illuminated over an automatic-teller machine, and all the usual high-street franchises and concessions – sited here not so much for reasons of customer convenience, I imagine, than as a loss-leading therapeutic strategy, a business-caring-for-you distraction from the nearness and inevitability of personal death.
We are witness to all this through the kind of candy-stripe, one-way mirror that induces reflexive guilty behaviour (Heath’s point) in customs halls and baggage reclaim areas. Two Indian women are steering wide-headed squeegee mops past the streamers of toilet paper that have been laid over a broken trail of vomit, their fuchsia and lime-green saris flowering exotically from the knee-length stems of nylon overalls. A yellow-faced man with a woollen cellular blanket safety-pinned at his chest waves goodbye to a visitor and begins wheeling himself back to his ward. A man comes in carrying a boxed pizza on the flat of his hand and paces in front of the lifts. A boy surreptitiously gouges a hole with a penknife in a moulded plastic seat.
There are plastic surfaces dressed in the appearances of other materials: quarried stone and endangered hardwoods; Dolomitic rock. The ‘architected’ rain forest muzak leaks from here to every part of the building via shafts and trunking and ducts. There is a perspex cube mounted on a pedestal nearby containing ropes of Mardi Gras beads, a comb, golf tees, toy wheels, a piece of rope, balloons, a plastic toothpaste cap, bag-gies, a plastic flower – the contents, Charlie says, of the stomach of a twelve-pound sea turtle that crawled onto a beach in Honolulu and died.
Now even as we are watching, the lighting dims, rises a few points, then stabilises at around the balming level expected in restaurants and wine-bars at this time of night. Scott McGovern’s face is reversed and back-lit on the posters taped against the windows; the low sandbagged figures of the women keeping their vigil on the ramp swim into focus. It is as if they have stepped out of their lives; surrendered themselves to an event for which none of the rules and experiences of their previous existence has prepared them. They are dead to the mundane, to real-world commitments and affiliations, and seem poised for an experience of transcendence or revelation.
On each floor, Charlie has to punch numbers in a lock to keep us rising through the building. Our footsteps echo on the stone. Perspiration courses through Charlie’s hair, basting the ridges of fat around his neck. He has to stop every flight and a half or so to draw coolness from the walls into his back and palms and recover his breath. ‘The palace of pain’. Pain Central’. These are Hawkins’s nicknames for St Saviour’s. And waiting while Charlie engages in his small struggle it is easy to imagine pain as part of the hidden infrastructure, conduited through the central service core with the water risers and electric cabling and information systems. Pain as information; pain pathways; localised centres of pain; the prolonged and inexpressible pain of cancer and burns and stroke, of the agonised bodies arranged in rows, waiting for the end of pain; for their white moment. The building pulsing with pain like a caved molar.
The floor numbers are painted by hand on the walls, bog-standard red on grey. When we reach 4, Charlie enters the four-digit code, then the two-letter codicil, and instructs us to wait until we get the signal from him to follow him through a second door which he opens with his computer card. ‘Affirmative!’ Heath giggles, sliding down the wall until he is resting on his haunches in this small air-pocket full of refrigerator hum and the smell of drying urine and disinfectant.
The fourth floor is the top floor of St Saviour’s. This part of it is decorated in pale pink, mocha, and tangerine, like a fashionable hairdressing salon. The same colours are prominent in the geometrical pattern of the curtains hanging at the window panels of the individual, one-and two-bed intensive-care cubicles. A nine-inch, black-and-white Ikegami monitor is tucked into a corner of the nurses’ station. It is when the picture on this flickers and switches to a set of doors reinforced with metal panels at the end of the corridor that Charlie, holding up two fingers to indicate that we have two minutes to do the necessary, gives us the all-clear.
Minimally prowed, subliminally contoured, the nurses’ station wouldn’t look out of place at a Club Class check-in or advertising agency reception area. It is unattended, but a waxed milk-shake carton is a sign of recent occupancy; a several-sizes-larger-than-lifesize Easter chick sits on top of a concertinaed wad of computer print-out. A single door is set into the recess directly behind the counter, and this is the door to Scott McGovern’s room.
He is invisible at first, obscured by the armoury of hissing and pistoned biotechnology ranged around the bed, submerged in the macaronic web of tubes dripping pain-killers, system suppressors, blood thinners, and diuretics into his body from above. Orange scribbles on a TV monitor show that blood is still being pumped to the brain from the heart. Green blips on another screen show the cerebral cortex giving up the fight for control of the emotive, animal centres in the deepest layers of the brain.
The bed is raised on blocks. Above and to either side of the bed rises a reef of adorability and bright plush – fluffy bunnies and cuddly puppies, orange jumbos, day-glo hippos, slogan teddies, purple chimps; goblins and gonks in jaunty kerchiefs, homemade vests and coats. Tier upon tier of machine washability, lovability, coal-black noses, dark plastic eyes.
An Alice-band incision runs from ear to ear across McGovern’s shaved, naked head. His face seems at once palid and inflamed, his lips and nailbeds blue. He has none of the repose of the gerontomonster we have been peeping downstairs. He appears fugitive, agitated; mouth twisted, eyes fixed in a dilated state of horror. The large fixed circles are unresponsive even when the flash strobes violently against the transparent plast
ic structure that sits over his face. It is circular, like the spare-wheel cover on a Shogun or Subaru, and one frame has convinced Hawkins that it has to go. He rips it back where it is Velcroed around the perimeter, takes a step back, and passes the umbilical flash attachment across the bed to me.
‘Higher. Hold it higher,’ he orders after he has loosed off a trial frame. ‘Down a bit. Lower the angle. Straight at the face. Great. One more. One more.’ He is arched backwards, leaning in with his body, leaning back with his head, giving himself options, making optimum use of what can only be the sixty seconds remaining. I look at McGovern’s head, light as a larva casing, hardly denting the pillow, inundated with light, derealised in brilliance. I look away. Hawkins’s trousers are tented at the front, taut across his erection. ‘We’re nearly there. Right at the face,’ he urges. ‘We’re there.’
My hands are perspiring. My sweaty prints are on the gun. My dabs. I’m in it up to the hilt. (‘Let him have it, Chris.’)
McGovern’s face once shone with publicity – with the glamour and consciousness of advertising, of television, of innumerable photographs. And it still has an aura; it is still ‘auratic’, but in a different way: it has been unmade; unpackaged; it shines with the aura of death. With the disc of plastic back in place, it looks like a picture of itself; the picture we have just half-inched. It looks like the xeroxed photographs of the deceased that it has become the custom to slip behind the light-reflecting wrapping around carnations or roses left at the shrines.
‘Good going. Nice job, boss. Wowsa, wowsa, wowsa,’ Heath Hawkins says. Then: ‘Hic est locus ubi mors gaudet succurso vitae. Better believe it. This is the place where death rejoices to come to the aid of life.’
Five
‘Hurray!’ thought the little Rabbit. ‘Tomorrow we shall go to the seaside!’ For the Boy had often talked of the seaside, and he wanted very much to see the big waves coming in, and the tiny crabs, and the sand castles.
When I was in the ascendant and the bean-counters in travel-and-accounting would call me Norman and visibly perk up a little when they encountered me in the lavatories and the corridors – jousting, joshing (‘You did put an “X” for “no publicity” on that last expenses claim?’) – in those days, I used to stay in the class of hotel, more-stars-than-the-Planetarium places, where the mirrors made you taller, thinner, bolder-outlined, more substantial; a real occupying presence. It is what you are paying over the odds for, this stroking. Mirrors that are flattering, magical and abracadabrant. Lighting that is sequenced, angled, theatrically filtered; lighting that makes the skin look simultaneously taut and pampered, inwardly glowing, washed with that heavily wedged, wintering-in-Cap d’Antibes money tone.
Now they – and ‘they’ are by and large the same people; the same spreadsheet tinkerers and calculator Liberaces; the same shiny-arsed sandwich-at-the-deskers – plough through guides and gazetteers making sure they put me into places where the mirrors are positioned to show you in the cruelest light; to creep up on you and catch you at the most lowering angles, zooming in on the rouches and swags of fat, the albinoid goose-fleshy skin, the smashed capillaries, all the things you have learned to assiduously avoid in the normal run of existence.
Places with alopecia candlewick on the beds and rooster-sized stains worked into the linty carpets. Places with no Chicken Noodle News to buoy you through the sleepless small hours; no cable porno, no dedicated showers, no minibar, no billing-back. Just the mournful kettle and the inviolable envelopes of Ovaltine and Nescafé; the fire-doors occasionally flapping; the old birdcage lift beginning its lurches through the building with the arrival of the kitchen staff around six.
Welcome, in other words, to the Duke Hotel, in Seaton, a once-popular (although never fashionable), now run-down seaside resort a little over two hours by changing-train from London.
I was only able to turn this into an overnight after a lot of wrangling; but my protestations about needing time to get behind the conventional faded exterior and soak up the atmospherics finally won the day. After a lightning assessment of the degree of dilapidation, then digging my furry friend out of the bag and propping him against my pillow, my search for atmosphere took me somewhere called Muffins Licensed Tea Rooms, where I ordered a high-tea of fried eggs, mushrooms on toast and a dab of baked beans, helped on its way with a couple of stiffening Stolly-tonics.
The Jack and Jill for this (a highly reasonable £8.73) I quarter-folded and added to the wadded ball of counterfoils and flimsies and bits of till roll for generally much smaller amounts that I have to collect for reimbursement purposes. A small humiliation that the graduate intake of slumming scribblers, the young tab hands, have made into a game. It has become a point of honour among them to only eat hamburgers, doner kebabs, pizza; to use the tube and the bus (‘to one travel pass, £6.80’, representing one week’s travel) rather than taxis. A way of saying they are different from us. Bicycles. A tactic to assert their non-culpability. These are the ones who voted the newsroom, all editorial departments, the canteen smoke-free zones. Get up in the morning and run. Meet their deadlines. Spend lunchtimes on the treadmills and pec decks in Body Awake, the in-house multi-gym. Queue up to be congratulated on the effectiveness of their hygiene practice by the dentist who anchors his mobile surgery in the car park every Friday. Wander the building accessorised with half-litre bottles of Highland Spring and Evian, offering each other strips of sugar-free gum.
Seaton, as you can imagine, is full of narrow cafés and greasy-spoons, all advertising their pastie/sausage/chips/Devonshire cream tea combinations in consternated jailbird freehand across the surfaces of paper plates. (Those old notices I remember as a child: ‘Customers are requested not to consume their own food on the premises.’) I settled on Muffins partly for its linen service and olde wheel-back chairs and the ‘Licensed’ in the title, but also for its open aspect, the people-watching possibilities it offered, being situated at the top of the main shopping street of the town, overlooking a grassed-over roundabout with the stone figure of a local worthy on it, grandly gesturing, and, beyond that, the tilt of the sea.
For the last few miles of its journey into Seaton, the local train had followed the course of a wide brown estuarial river, the expanse of mudflats fanning wider as the river approached the sea. At every station it picked up or put down elderly people with elbow-clamp crutches and wheelie shoppers, the occasional boy or girl in school uniform. Then I began to notice the travellers, people in medieval, nearly caveman, garb, getting off and on. Scarified faces; ears, eyebrows, noses pre-emptively barbed with tines, coils; untreated sheepskins lashed to their chests and lower legs; belts of hemp and string; beads and tribal pendants; buckled archers’ thongs; woad in their rasta hair.
Rough encampments, little clusters of timber-and-corrugated-iron shacks, started to spring up between the railway and the river. Makeshift settlements of wheelless vans, converted railway carriages, tar-papered chicken huts and ex-army tents. Communal fires. Naked babies. Bandana-wearing scavenger dogs.
Muffins was double-fronted, the big corner windows expansively curved. And into these fisheye frames stepped pretty much the mix as I had witnessed it on the train: retirees, cave-dwellers, simpletons, schoolchildren on the wag. Now joined by: the single homeless, the lone-parent families (the paper’s style book insists that we call them this, and it’s catching), the unfit mothers, the problem mongrel broods who gravitate here in the winter, unfurl their sleeping bags in the hotels and holiday lets and b-and-bs, and work at keeping the killer cold from establishing a beach-head in their bones. Of course it is no longer winter. It is June, nearly July. Nearly high-season, in so far as you can-conceive of anything rising higher than knee-level in such a blighted, light-flooded, end-of-the-line place. Time for them to move out and on. But move where? How?
They walk the streets carrying all they own in blankets, paper-wrapped bundles, black refuse sacks. Bundles balanced on bicycle saddles, wheeled in supermarket trolleys and lurching buggie
s. Battering husbands. Whippet wives. Babies in crooked glasses. Like some way-station in a border war; some refugee camp, the number for credit card donations flashed up on the bottom of the screen. Teenage grannies. Winterwear chopped, slashed, cannibalised for the summer. Skull-and-crossbones tattoos. Lost-to-the-world faces, in dream-sequence montage, swimming up to the menu card in Muffins’ window, staring blankly, lips going, conjugating egg, sausage, beans, pot of tea/egg, sausage, chips, beans, pot of tea/egg, sausage, chips, beans, round of toast, pot of tea. Two, three faces looking together, grey dead eyes, mouths silently working.
After a while the door opened and a woman came into Muffins Licensed Tea Rooms. She had an old-fashioned chorus girl figure, one hand resting on the shoulder of a boy who must have been aged about eight or nine. ‘You be a good boy,’ she told him when he was seated by himself at a table. ‘Jean will tell me if you haven’t been good, won’t you, Jean?’ It was obviously a custody situation, with Muffins the transfer point between parents. He had blond hair cut high up the back of his head, and a sign around his neck which said: ‘I only eat natural foods. Do not give me sweets or snacks.’
When Jean took my plate away, I saw that the placemat was a cork-backed photograph of the front of Muffins. There was the purple paintwork and the half-net curtains, and there in the left-hand window was the table where I was sitting. Except seated around it in the picture, stiffly animated for the local snapper, was a party of strangers – a sports-jacketed man and two smiling women.
For some reason, I found this deeply unnerving. I felt all the old demons stirring (mouth dry, heart hammering, numbness deadening the ends of my fingers when I paid the bill). Back at the hotel I took two Rohypnol and put the Rabbit on stand-by on the bedside table. Then I lay down with the little dog clutched close to me and grabbed some shut-eye.
