by Gordon Burn
A key plot development for them all to chew over was the fact that I was not alone. Or, rather: Veorah B wasn’t setting out on her evening hike on her own as usual, but with a man – a suit – in tow, the two of them on apparently chit-chatty terms, each respecting the other’s space.
Like everybody who has got used to living alone (I should know), her routine is set, her timetable inflexible. At a quarter to six she had stood up and walked out of the room as if an internal alarm had gone off. She came back a few minutes later kitted out in white trainers with pink laces and thick tongues and something bubble-like, some transparent valve or gizmo, in the heel; plus a cardigan draped over her shoulders for when it grew colder later, with a chill blowing in off the sea. It seemed to be taken as given, without anything being said by either of us, that I would be going with her on her walk.
Although it is almost ten years since her husband bailed out, she said she never ceased to be aware of the possibility that he could be alive and lurking nearby somewhere, watching, nursing his hatred of her, waiting until she drops her guard. There had been reported sightings in Denmark, Manila, Prague and Australia. The last she heard he was supposedly living in a tent and working as an evangelist on the seafront at Blackpool. She keyed in a series of codes on a digital panel in the hall before we left, activating a complex network of electric eyes, smoke detectors, sequence-timers for the lights and mortice locks.
Five minutes brought us to a litter-strewn mailed area with shops specialising in beach toys and bulk-buy sweets and toffees and shabby holiday souvenirs set out in a circle around a dribbling fountain. Beyond it, at the end of a short concrete tunnel, was a harbour with blackboards advertising fishing trips and pleasure boat rides, and primary-coloured perforated metal benches set into pyramidal concrete slabs. A topless woman lay face down on a towel a few feet away from the caterpillar track of a giant dredger. The dustbins stood ankle deep in styrofoam trays and cups. Several children frolicked naked in a rancid, almost drained-dry paddling pool.
It was around here that Veorah started to put some distance between us, striding ahead on her pistoning little legs, skirting the dreck, and leading the way between bramble bushes onto a steep upward track that ran adjacent to some aggressively fenced-off back gardens but then quite soon brought us within sight of the sea. Every half-mile or so for a while, the same handwritten notice fixed to a tree. ‘Lost’, it said above a snapshot picture. ‘Brindle bitch. Answers to “Briggie”. Loving companion desperately missed. Small reward offered by pensioner owner for information leading to return.’
Blistered sea on one side. High-piled dry thorny scrub on the other. Breathless ‘hi’s and ‘good evening’s to maundering shell-suited, bum-bagged couples, desiccated outward-bounders, people wrapped in the skins of wild animals lamming off through the bracken towards stone outbuildings and cottages patched over with driftwood, cardboard, blue fertiliser bags.
When I caught up with Veorah she was doing stretching exercises on a grassy promontory that dipped gently and then collapsed precipitately in a heap of grey cuboid rubble into the sea. She was on the ground, contorted in a sort of semi-splits, trying to achieve a contact between the toe of one trainer and her head. Below us, two tiny figures were fishing off an oblique column of rock. In the deep distance, the hut where I had eaten hot dogs earlier in the day, its appearance inducing now a kind of loneliness and nostalgia that I recognised as sentimental, unearned. Power boats ripping through the old-gold.
She whipped back her hair, perspiring, blowing hard, and lay staring at the sky. I sat down on the grass slightly behind and not quite beside her and neither of us said anything for a while. On the path above us, the occasional evening footslogger, curiosity whetted by the recumbent figures, looking and not looking, walking for the sake of walking, imprinting the dust.
‘The flow of pilgrims in Mecca is counter-clockwise, against the normal passage of the sun. Whereas Buddhist pilgrims walk around their sacred stupas in a clockwise direction, along the path of least resistance, going with the flow.’ There was a map of the pilgrimage route around the Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku pinned to Veorah’s living-room wall, along with maps showing Irish holy places, medieval, Marian and twentieth-century shrines.
Skellig Michael, Lough Derg, Croagh Patrick, Our Lady’s Island, Knock. Awa, Tosa, Iyo, Sanuki. Fatima, Garibandal, Lourdes, Zeitoun in Cairo, Medjugorje. The Kop, Kent State, the Texas Schoolbook Depository, the Dakota building, Graceland. The place names joined with thick pencil lines to make the shapes I had at first taken to be diagrams for Formula One circuits or acupuncture points; the shapes traced and laid over one another in – I guessed – the search for correspondences, echoes, hints of synchronicity with the nine-sided, roughly kite-shaped figure you get – that Veorah had got – by linking the police memorial sites in a chain.
With the Yvonne Fletcher memorial numbered ‘1’, reading clockwise, in chronological sequence, they went: 1, 2, 7, 3, 5, 4, 9, 6, 8. The rape sites – 5, 2, 4, 6 – were marked by coloured pins. I was certain this was where the story was – ritual, shrines, post-literate paganism, folk mysticism – and had already made a number of unsuccessful attempts to get a conversation going in this area. ‘On the M25, the circular ringroad, there are fifty per cent more accidents on the clockwise carriageway than on the anti-clockwise one‚’ I tried again. ‘You are more at risk in the autumn and least likely to be involved in an accident if you choose to go anti-clockwise in the spring.’
‘My father thought this was heaven on earth‚’ she said, ‘these few miles of the coast. He bought a plot here for next to nothing after the War, and built a cabin on it with scraps of material he brought down by bus and bicycle on his days off from work. I was born in the shack town in a black timbered house on stilts called “Perseverence” spelled wrong. It was like growing up in the Wild West.’ The heat of the day radiating from the hard packed earth at twilight. She gathered a bunch of tiny, garnet-coloured flowers where she was sitting and put them in one of the button-holes of her cardigan.
We walked on for a while, in single file because of the narrowness of the path, until we came to some candles in coloured glass bottles planted in the earth. There was an offertory box for donations towards a more permanent memorial to the local woman who, a plaque explained, had been murdered at this spot almost exactly a year earlier while walking her dogs. There were bunches of flowers, a jade plant in a pot, a card printed on chlorine-free board from a renewable source, placed there by the woman’s son: ‘I used to watch you so intently when I was a baby and a toddler, I studied your every move. I wish I could say “See you soon.” Your son ——.’
A light flickered in a cylinder jar with Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech printed on it, the last few lines disappearing into the ground.
*
We took the circular route back to Seaton, following dimming lanes to a farming hamlet where the shadow show against the windows of the only pub easily reeled us in.
The Stand Alone was white-painted, broad-walled, erratically added-onto, thatched – and stood alone in the fork between two unlit roads, still little more than tracks. The apple-knocker rusticity extended inside, where the ceilings were low, smoky, con-cussively beamed, the walls bedizened with bridles, ferrets and weasels in cases, rods and reels, fishing flies mounted and framed. All of it, it became clear pretty quickly, by-the-yard and brewery supplied.
‘Bottle of Diamond White, tin of Tennents Super, packet of kingsize Rizla red.’ The first order I overheard indicated how far we were from the bought-in Isaak Walton idyll represented on the walls. The buyer was Elvisly coiffed, tattooed, female, slightly boss-eyed, part of a big group of bikers and their coozes who were the audience for an old yokel who was taking bets on two live crabs he was trying to get to race each other across the floor. ‘Prostitution, Alcoholism, Serious Substance Abuse but, above all, a really wonderful atmosphere’, a sign announced behind the bar.
We stood as far away from the crab Olympics as possible, which wasn’t far enough to stop the terrible smell of the old man mugging us every so often as he stumbled around, flapping his arms, trying to get the half-dead crawlers to put a spurt on. The bikers flicked cigarette-ends and burning matches at them, and doused them with Tennents and mad cider sprayed between their teeth.
We were asked to move after a few minutes – shift our shanks – so that a ladies’ dart match could begin, the darters each with a fag going in their throwing hand, a floret of brown mole nestled in the sparse underarm hair. Nasal redneck music, a small digital display running a repeating repertoire of jokes: ‘Joke,’ it flashed. ‘Joke … What’s small, red and sticky? … Answer: A baby with a razor blade.’ The stutter smear of dot-matrixed laughing mouths.
When was it I gave him the matches? – the half-full box from the White Tower, Fitzrovia’s finest, with which he was going to immolate himself. I can see it all now, of course: the open fire in his hovel, the crossed planks resting on the wooden crate, inched in slowly as they burned, the water to be brought to a boil for the crabs, the thunderous blowback when he poured the paraffin on … Oh I can see it vividly now. But I couldn’t see it then, when I made him a present of the matches to get rid of the spectacular smell, and was vaguely aware of him scrambling together his crabs (which he had tried to sell us) and lurching out into the night.
He lived only a matter of feet away as it happened, stumbling distance, in a terraced cottage whose front door opened straight into the road, and where I was next to see him, hair, beard and flesh aflame, listing slowly sideways on his sofa, turning into crackling, like the picture of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc who flambéd himself in the Saigon market in the early years of the war. (‘If only Heath was here,’ was my first thought. ‘This would go bosh! … right in the paper. As it is – four pars in the local free sheet, six pars max.’)
I’ve covered air crashes and therefore know what burning flesh smells like. It smells sickly sweet like pork, but acrid as well, like when you burn a saucepan and there’s that harsh bit that lodges in your throat. First, though, there was the smoke belching round the door, then the flames when somebody from the pub bolted out and stove the windows in. The rush to witness wasn’t immediate, or even total. The music kept playing (the pub looking starship-like in the still blue night), the visual display kept putting up its jokes.
There was a strange uncomfortable hiatus between the realisation of what was happening and the arrival of the emergency services on the scene. We stood in the summer light-rimmed dark, the fire taking a hold, trying on appropriate expressions, working up suitably laconic versions of the drama, denying the life charge, the excitement. And then the loudest, the most foul-mouthed (it would have to be) of the bikers, the one in the ripped Korean bomber jacket with the pouncing tiger on the back, started plainly, without a smirk, growing in resonance as other rumbling voices joined in: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing. He shall feed me in a green pasture and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort. He shall convert my soul and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me. Thou shalt prepare a table before me in the presence of them that trouble me; thou hast anointed my head with oil and my cup shall be full. Surely thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.’
‘Amen,’ the congregation said.
‘Amen,’ I said.
‘Amen,’ said Veorah Batcheller, who took the garnet-coloured flowers she had gathered earlier and placed them at the dead man’s charred door.
*
‘How did that happen?’ We were walking between high deeply concave dark hedges, a strong impression of the sea somewhere off to the left, completing our round-trip to Seaton. Shoulder to shoulder in the uncertain light. ‘Because you were there,’ she said. One foot in front of the other; breathing out and breathing in.
‘He was going to do it anyway, but you being there made it happen faster. Something in your personality, can I say aura, made it happen. You recognise the possibility of something happening, a man who functions in excitements other people create, and so it does. It’s sort of like sex. Some people give off sex and other people respond. It’s the same thing with madness or violence or whatever else. It’s in the air; it’s given off by certain people. You’re more like a medium. You give permission. You’re like an enabling factor.’
We parted at a municipal square on the promenade, Roman in intention, built as a spectacle, now semi-derelict, let go, people sleeping on the benches and in the shelters. I kissed her on the melted cheek and met living tissue rather than an advance outpost of death, a reminder of the death that is ensconced in the body, the first part of her to die.
*
The dog is doing nothing to let me down, showing gratifying signs of wear and tear, getting to look as dirty as a rag. I had agreed an extension with the hotel to six o’clock, which is how long this hit and run was going to take me: three hours tops. But it was after ten, my room had been given to somebo dy else and my travelling companion, my potchke, my fleutchke, my notchke, my motchke, was dumped nose-down on the top of my bag behind the desk in Reception, looking abject – orphaned and evicted.
But a few phone calls and a tenner in the right place got us this crib in an identical establishment down to the cockneys and the cooking smells a hundred yards further along the street.
I have been lying here for hours letting all of the above, Rohypnol or no Rohypnol, work through me, pelt past me, keeping me awake. Studying the curvature of the ceiling, mentally demolishing modern flushed surfaces, partitions, stripping the room back through its earlier incarnations, lying under only the top-sheet, thinking: Isle of View Isle of View Isle of View
Until a few minutes ago I got it. Simple. Isle of View. I love you.
I know too much. She has complicated herself beyond grasping. I know this much: I don’t know where to begin.
Six
Day 28. The noises from the other side of the wall that used to shock me awake, locked rigid, nerves peeled, have long since stopped. Have been stopped, I would suppose, for years. Doors slamming in the middle of the night, giggling, a booming bass, and then the sounds of slow, spirit-logged, smoke-in-the-hair, pre-dawn fucking. But I go on making my bed on the sofa in the living room anyway.
The choice to me seems simple: staying in the world, close to the safe comforts of the telephone, the television, the mini-fridge switching through its simple programme, the random acned array of electric indicator lights; or retreating to the back of the cave that the bedroom represents. The life and clutter of the one room standing in stark contrast to the inertness and passivity of the other. A dressing-table, a bed, a bedside table, a wardrobe. On the bedside table a stopped clock, by the bed a beaten pair of leather slippers. The bed stripped back to the mattress, level, bier-like, under the plain faded coverlet. A room to be gazed at rather than inhabited, registering an absence of human spirit; a room with a suspended, tableau look, petrified, Pompeian, the sense of having intruded on a domestic scene not long abandoned. (A city in the volcano, houses under the ash, skeletons in the houses, furniture and pictures next to the skeletons.) And me putting my clothes on in there every morning a joyless ritual performed on an almost bare stage.
Few people meeting me now for the first time would have me down as somebody whose tastes once ran to clothes that made a positive, even attention-grabbing, statement about who I was and where I saw myself in the world. But it’s true: I was a snappy dresser; clothes were an issue in my life. I dressed – so of course I like to think – with some esprit and élan. But then middle age grew over me like a thick skin on a custard. I physically thickened, my waist pushed yeastily up into the forties, my face became fatted with blanding prosthetic latex layers, the unclouded, undefeate
d me still gasping for air in there somewhere.
For some time I worked hard at persuading myself that the process was reversible; that it was something that could be turned in the opposite direction once I had recovered some kind of equilibrium; when my life had been hauled out of the ditch and made roadworthy again. Doesn’t happen.
I have stayed unindividuated, neutral, absorbed into the beige mass of the everyday walking wounded. I threw away foolish things – the suit from Tommy Nutter with the wasp waist and flared lapels, the Norfolk jacket made of burgundy velour, the look-at-me Mr Fish tie – and started to dress in accordance with my new status as a non-combatant. This has meant things picked up in the covered markets and shopping precincts and high streets of draughty small towns, where I have found myself with time to kill. (So much time to kill.)
The blue, the brown, the checked, the striped, the double-breasted, the zippered, the corduroy, the cotton; the one with the top button missing, the one with the fraying cuff, the one with the grease stain that never quite comes out. My life’s tatters, systematically sorted through and arranged on hangers on Sunday evenings, six hangers, six outfits, jacket, trousers, shirt, tie, an outfit for every day of the week: six alternative, inoffensive, pre-prepared presentations of the self. Six etoliated – six vaporised – Norman Millers coffined in a monumental wardrobe of walnut wood veneer.
The view from the bedroom window is across stunted narrow gardens to the backs of the houses one street over. Two floors down and diagonally opposite is the window of a woman who operates what a small sign by her bell describes as a chiropody ‘studio’, and on some mornings – this morning was one – while I’m putting my clothes on, I watch her moving in on the disembodied white foot in the DaRay halogen white light, light that is purposeful; and clinical, fiercely non-domestic; the professional intimacy of the light-flooded foot against the nylon-sheathed thigh, the overall pulled tight across the muscular buttocks, her scalpel hand working swiftly, industriously, shredding the calluses and verrucas, stripping away the ravages of time and labour; the dead cells, the particles of necrotic tissue spinning ecstatically in the light, like an upturned snowstorm paperweight.
