by Gordon Burn
It was dark when I woke, and close even with the window open. The sound of plates being scraped. The ping! of a bullet in a television western, a sound I hadn’t heard for a long time. The smell of drains – sweet and foul; somewhere under or around that, the green flatulent smell of the sea.
The hotel bar was full of cockney noise; drum-tight beer bellies and hair lacquer, the men wearing the ties or jacket insignia of some club or fellowship or sporting association; the women in lobe-dragging chandelier ear-rings and carpet slippers.
I took in some pubs. The Broken Doll. The Barking Dog. The Tite Barnacles. People waiting for other people. People already securely in the brotherhood of the bar. People watching each other’s drinks go down, hoping the other will drink faster. Hateful fuckers. Fault finders. Catalytic people persons. People wanting to connect, but not connecting, waiting for the alcohol to hit. People lean and young and unencumbered.
Gazing on other people’s reality with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism. ‘What is coming into being, we apparently have here in this bay one of the best collection of birds in Britain, and we are now getting from all over the country wildlife, naturalism, God-knows-what.’ Somewhere I heard this. I made a mental note, later a physical one. The solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking. The voyeuristic stroller.
The Oceanarium. Closed. The band shell, paint scraping off in giant soft flakes. The swimming bath, closed because of a breach in the sea wall. The Cyclone, the big dipper that swoops on its stilts and disappears into the banks of ornamental shrubbery alongside the railway. ‘Britain in Bloom’ planted out in flowers. Birdsong echoing in the station. Nicely tanked. Zapp Zone, a games arcade. Fuel food in the Kashmiri Veranda, where they sit you in a waiting area with copies of Watchtower, Hello!, Marie Claire, and take your money before they seat you at a table. A nightcap in a lounge bar full of dolorous clanging industrial music, the disc-jockeys in their foxhole canopied by camouflage netting. I listened intently for something recognisable, a hook, a key. None was forthcoming. But people were on their feet, hearing through the chaos to some concealed meaning, thrash dancing.
‘So, pal,’ I said when I got in. ‘What news from the Rialto?’
*
Vera Batchelor is her name, my reason for being in Seaton. Spelled – for reasons we haven’t gone into yet; for reasons we might never know – Veorah Batcheller. Suggesting the slave states and dirt cabins of the deep South; a big-hipped Dixieland vigour and swagger; both seats in the bus. Which, needless to say, wasn’t at all Mrs Batcheller’s manner when she ventured to correct the version of her name as I had it in my notebook. This was hesitant, apologetic, distinctly English.
It happened a week ago, at the memorial to the murdered policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher. Mrs Batcheller hadn’t seemed perturbed by my silent sneaking up on her, or even my calling her by the name of my wife, who she doesn’t resemble in any way. She had gone on collecting together the rubber bands, the slugs of moss she had prised from between the paving stones at the base of the memorial, the leaves she had removed from the lower stems of the roses she had brought, the dirtied Q-tips. She heaped all this in the centre of the paper the flowers had been wrapped in, and balled it up. She gave a securing half-twist to the caps and nozzles of the bleaches and detergents she had been using, then placed these in a bag with the words ‘The Big Shopper’ printed on it. The white stone seemed scoured and, in a way, reconsecrated; violation-proofed; purified. She made some ritual adjustments to the plants and flowers, then stood back for a few moments to appraise the order and symmetry she had accomplished.
The bag was heavy, but when I offered to take it for her she refused to let me, swapping it from one hand to the hand with a ruffled metallic hair-tidier around the wrist. It was hot, so she carried her jacket between the bag handles. The interior of the square was still full of lunching office workers and we crunched across the gravel, seeking out the blocks and tunnels of shade around the perimeter, two of the few people moving.
I remembered that a French writer once spent a whole novel recounting the day of a man who crosses the Luxembourg gardens in Paris on his way to see a doctor, runs into different people, watches them, and tries to reconstitute for each of them the experience we all have on the one hand of looking out onto the world, and on the other of being exposed to an internal reverie of images and fantasies. The simultaneity that makes us always somehow both inside and outside ourselves as we move about. I relayed all this to Veorah Batcheller not because I believed she would be interested so much as impressed by my bona fides and credentials. This was Carson with his buddhas and mystics and monks. People sat on benches with their eyes closed, faces angled to the sun. People lay on their backs on the grass, bagged remnants of their lunches lying beside them, glancing at their watches, deciding just five more minutes. I was saying that I was a cut above; that I was to be trusted, I wasn’t out to do the usual monstering job. I had mumbled my name. I thought I saw a glimmer of recognition. I wondered about my breath.
*
‘A faint evocation of a famous film actress in a small part in an early faded film.’ This is a steal from Greene that I have resorted to on too many occasions in my hacking life to risk using it again in my weirding of Veorah Batcheller. It applied to a couple of the women occupying tables in the Fountain Room in Fortnums. But mostly they were Japanese, some Germans, French, Americans. The Fountain Room was VB’s choice. That is, I teased out of her an admission that it was somewhere she had long wanted to go and had never been able to gather up the courage to go on her own.
She had read in a magazine that Adam Faith came there. That it was his home from home, business combined with pleasure, the place where everybody always knew where to get him. He was on first-name terms with the waitresses, who regarded him as their best tipper and favourite customer, almost a venerable West End institution.
It at least supplied us with a neutral topic of conversation, with enough by-ways, sidebars, and common reference that we were able to spin it out more or less for the duration. (Any mention of Yvonne Fletcher or pierced-penis rapists, any personal prying into the whys and whos and whats of her life, I knew at this point of course would be fatal. Don’t scare the horses.)
She only wanted tea, and was thrown for a loop when the waitress offered her the choice of Darjeeling, Earl Grey, English Breakfast, camomile and half a dozen others. Her hand shot inside the black leather bag she was holding on her lap and stayed there, closed tight around a packet of cigarettes and a cigarette lighter (there was no smoking) until it was time to leave. I kept wishing that Adam Faith would walk in, or that I had some lubricious stories, some hair-raising insider gossip about him to pass on, but I didn’t. I’d given her her first cause for disappointment.
She kept the left side of her face turned from me all the time we were together. But I didn’t realise that was what had been happening until we said goodbye, outside in the slipstream of the surging pavement traffic on Piccadilly.
Veorah Batcheller is a woman I would say of about forty-six – shortish, plumpish (solid, pneumatic, though, not fat – zoftick), with something wistful and displaced in her conjunction with the world, like the women you see boarding buses in the early mornings, their tiredness pointed up rather than painted over, as they think, with lipstick and mascara. She has kind, anxious eyes, and ‘well-planted’, as the Swiss say, luxuriant hair that has been damaged by the processes that have given it its ferrous glints and fixed the long corkscrew curls that cascade, water-spaniel-like, around a face that is only just beginning to lose its jounciness and skin tone. Only just beginning on one side, that is – the right side. The left side is strikingly fallen and prematurely aged – like a collapsed wall or a toppled stack of books; a shift in the earth’s plates; soil creep, glaciation. Flesh that has come loose from the bone and succumbed to gravitational forces. But it isn’t a horror show; it gives her a specialness and presence, almost as if she has been deformed into existence.
W
e shook hands and settled on a day when I would come to see her, which was today.
*
I lifted the receiver to acknowledge the alarm call, turned over, and woke late. The Duke is the sort of hotel of course where the shower curtain billows in and clings stubbornly to your body, turning you into a turkey in shrink-wrap. I towelled down and got dressed quickly before the mirror could demist and render a full deadly accounting.
Everything was just killing time until I was due to see Veorah Batcheller at three. I still get nervous. I felt jumpy; ragged, voided of curiosity, of questions; a curiosity-free zone. I’d been hearing the Balham arrowmen or bowlers crashing around the corridors for hours, belching, farting, full of hot gas and bolshie grey-shoe bonhomie.
Outdoors, the cavalcade was as before. Mad Maxers, goths, crusties, traipsing zomboid families. Edwardian arcades with window displays unmodified since VE Day – gentlemen’s cravats and sandals and ladies’ steam-moulded pisspot hats; old-time cakes with deep fondant icing sitting under layers of dust. I had a hot-dog with the works, and enjoyed it so much I had another, then regretted it immediately This was at a wooden cabin on a part of the beach where they let cars park in rows on the tawny compacted sand. Cars, dogs pissing against cars and, some way off, in the lee of the rocks, overnight encampments, fires still smouldering. The cabin looked like the shacks I saw yesterday from the train, only spruced up with a lick of blue paint and enlivened with advertising flags and pennants. ‘I am terribly bored,’ somebody had written on the corner of the picnic table where I was sitting, adding the time and date. In my dark business suit, my shirt and tie, I was inappropriately dressed. I could feel my collar melting, as the ‘furters revolved on their griddle, and waves broke gently on the beach, and the seagulls wheeled.
Pushing ‘7’ on the remote filled the whole screen of the television back at the hotel with the time. The second-pulsar between the two sets of digits was synchronous with the throbbing in my gut and in my head. Twenty minutes to my meeting with Veorah Batcheller. Thirteen. I read the cuts pertaining to the series of attacks at the police memorial sites squatting on the toilet. Trying to remind myself what I was doing here. Anxious to persuade myself that I could have any interest in rooting around in the reasons why somebody would make a regular round-trip of upwards of five hours to clean a memorial erected to a person she had never known. Was she a ‘Nothing-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven’ person? Pert slogans in pokerwork? Clouded Formica? Death by trinkets? Did I care? I unwrapped two new long-life batteries, removed the used ones from the tape recorder, got confused over which was which, and headed for the toilet again. Seven minutes. I pressed ‘play’ and heard: ‘Which do you hate more, serial killers or flab?’ Who was this? When? Ten years ago? Fifteen? My own ingratiating laughter, soon to be erased by my own entirely transactional noises of care and concern.
Veorah Batcheller lives just a short walk from the hotel in a house called ‘Isle of View’, which sounds like, but isn’t, one of the bed-and-breakfast establishments – New Moorings, Gulls-way, Lingalonga, The Bucket and Spade – by which it is surrounded and whose raucous pantomime of visual jabber shouts it down.
Right at Our Lady Star of the Sea, straight until the second set of traffic lights past the Kwik Save. I look at other people at times like this and, whatever they’re doing, wherever they’re going, seems preferable to the bit of business I’m embarked on. I project myself into the future by a couple of hours, and imagine I see myself coming in the opposite direction, duty discharged, the latest opinion-bites and macnuggets of life wisdom downloaded onto tape, my bucket full. (‘I just come to work with an empty bucket. And somebody fills it up every day.’ Tosser’s description of the news-gathering process is one I have seen repeatedly acted out on the swarming, Petri-dish beaches of Seaton. There is an almost too literal correspondence: snotty-nosed children turning out regular, bucket-shaped buckets of sand that sometimes stand up and sometimes collapse, but are always washed away by the next tide.)
Vacancies. No vacancies. Purple bricks, yellow grouting. Black and white architrave like a set of biroed-out castellated teeth, lipstick-red awning. Old flesh sunning itself in patioed front gardens, newspapers shielding their eyes to get a good squint at the buttoned-up stranger. (Cop? Bailiff? Salesman come to ease, tease, coax and wheedle her into having one of the synthetic rough stone walls popular with the rest of the street? – walls illustrating the spectrum that pale English skin goes through towards tanning. A blowhard come to persuade her of the anti-fade advantages of getting awninged-up?)
‘Isle of View’. A retiring single front squeezed in among the multi-frontages of its neighbours. A piece of industrial archeology bolted to the wall between the two upper windows: a squariel, symbol of thwarted energy and possibility; of all those project meetings and brainstorming lunches; all that booze, all those chemical assisters; all those breaking-the-mould dockos, talk shows, sit-coms still-born. Veorah Batcheller’s squariel: still waiting, willing, expectant; still ready to receive but nobody available to send.
The house name was written on a ceramic tile in a wrought-iron frame at the side of the door, black letters under a palm tree standing on a cartoon desert island. One, ring brought a chopped-up figure hurrying towards the reeded glass.
She was wearing an old Police tour T-shirt, the three faded peroxide heads on the front, a list of long-forgotten dates on the back. April 17th, my birthday, they played Leicester DeMontford Hall, I noticed as I followed Mrs Batcheller down a short, Haze-scented corridor and into a room where the curtains were partly drawn against the sun.
‘Coffee, tea, something stronger? I’ve got everything in the kitchen.’
‘Tea‚’ I said.
‘Are you sure? I’ve only got bags or bags. Milk and sugar?’
The left, the damaged side of her face, looked no worse than if she had just been sleeping on it: Slumberland tribal scars; an aerial photograph of the Kalahari; rilled sand. A hot redness where the neck of her T-shirt had been pulled out of shape. A comma-shaped tarn under the pulled eye. She stood in the flooded wedge of light, inviting this scrutiny, not averting her face.
The television was on but muted. Two men in green and damson All England Club ties reminiscing through an unscheduled rain break at Wimbledon. Frequent cut-aways to the crowd with their macs and Teflon kagouls and colourful promotional umbrellas, waving and gagging for the camera; the tented covers over the court; the ivy-covered pavilion. Modern invented rites; the sense of life as ritual; the performance by celebrants of prescribed behaviours. Back to the talking heads in the studio, one of whom was an old-time champion I knew I should recognise behind the glasses, beyond the Tampa ennui, under the hair dye too inkily dense for his papery pale post-operative face.
The sofa was low, velour-covered, squashy: like sitting on a nursery hippo. To the left of it, the sort of heavy wooden sideboard you would get individualised cereal cartons and pitchers of grapefruit and orange juice set out on in the mornings if it was in the front room of any other house in the street. Here there was a ‘still life’ of driftwood and ribbons, spray-painted gold, and a framed black-and-white picture of a pop group – a ‘beat combo’ as they would have been referred to when the picture was taken – called, according to the name written on the bass-drum, The Guise: a four-piece in dark suits and white shirts with stand-up collars, heavy pompadours and winklepickers with caved-in, turning-up toes, which carbon-dated them as late ‘61/early ‘62.
The walls were white-on-white – ‘classical’, sconce-cornered panels of satinised white wallpaper set into areas of flat-painted Spanish-plaster anaglypta. It was difficult to know what they actually were because they were obscured in shadow, but drawn on pieces of paper on the sideboard wall were a series of join-the-dots rhomboids, trapezoids, tetrahedrons – like diagrams for motor-racing circuits, tournament-golf courses, airport runway systems; line charts of acupuncture points, megalithic sites, the moons of Jupiter.
The motio
n-detector flicked on behind its milky casing when she came in carrying the tray. She was carrying cigarettes and a lighter in one hand and she went on holding them while she poured the tea, then placed them beside her on the pillowy pitched arm of the chair. She was wearing multicoloured leggings, bright-banded like ironstone, and a ring threaded on a fine gold chain that sat dead-centre over Sting’s nose.
They were still having weather in London; a slow pan from the crowd upwards through the centre-court bowl showed further rain clouds massing. Her curtains framed a cube, not much bigger than the TV screen, of brilliant blue. On the screen, yesterday’s hero was still going, his hair glassy black but with a hint of tan undercolouring at the temples and neck, like a well-exercised Dobermann.
‘Have you noticed you see more and more men and women with the same colour hair these days? The same colour as each other, I mean. Couples dyed out of the same bottle. It always suggests an unusual complicity, it seems to me. Active and passive. Each of them taking their turn at the sink. As if they were conspiring together in concealing something.’
Easeful, casual, apparently unscripted (actually unscripted in this case – it was one of those things you have no idea you’re going to say until you’ve said it). Ease, tease, coax and wheedle. The rules of engagement. The age-old human dispy-doodle.
‘Murderers’ wives‚’ she said. ‘“She must have known.”’ She smiled a lopsided smile, pushed with her fingers against the paralysed part of her face, realigned the corners of her mouth. She brought one foot up under her. ‘Hugh – Hugh was my husband – he had a thing about hair. He was obsessed with going bald. Even then’ – she indicated the picture of The Guise on the sideboard – ‘when he had enough for the four of them and some left over, he was always asking to borrow your mirror, always checking to see how much hair there was in his comb. He let it run rampant in the hippy era, peace, love, groovy. I used to plait it. Tie it up in bunches like a girl’s, braid it with tape and coloured ribbons. It was down to here. They used to make him wear a hairnet at work, gingham nylon with a funny little visor cap attached. He didn’t care.’
