Fullalove

by Gordon Burn

  If it’s Thursday it must be the blue polka-dot-pattern tie and the charcoal jacket. Conversely (and much more usefully), if it’s the blue polka-dot-pattern tie and the charcoal jacket, it must be Thursday. The times beyond counting when it has got to that time of the day and a glance down at the colours rolling over the hump of my stomach has steadied me and given me a bearing; a hand-hold on the tilted deck, a fixed point in the churning chaos.

  It is a trick that wouldn’t work for me today though, because today my neckwear is of the mourning variety, glummest black, in honour of a former colleague, Curtis Preece, just thirty and everything to play for, who is lying twenty-five feet away from me in a cedar casket, under a single tasteful cross of Arum lilies, before the altar of the church known as the ‘Printers’ Cathedral’, St Brides.

  Curtis had come to the notice of Howie Dosson when he interviewed him, and many other prominent media figures, for his university magazine. He was on an instant upmove that left Sebastian-Dominic, to name one, looking as if he had never got out of the traps. Curtis made his name breaking the story of the Cabinet Minister discovered dining naked with three boys in chorister drag, had quickly become a familiar face on late-night television, and was already being spoken of as editor material. He had in fact just been appointed launch editor of a new through-colour, youth-oriented Saturday supplement (‘A Nova for the nineties’) when, a week ago, he removed his shoes, folded his jacket neatly on top of them on the platform, and jumped in front of a west-bound District Line train.

  The original driver spotted him and braked in time, but he walked on into a tunnel, waited at a bend, and then threw himself in front of a train where the driver had no chance to stop. It turned out he had left a single-line streamer message scrolling right to left across the screen of his terminal at the paper: ‘Perhaps you’ve confused me with someone who gives a shit.’ Seamlessly repeated, white on infinite blue, half-bumper sticker, half-suicide note.

  The choir are singing something that, even inside their freakish blizzard of human noise, doesn’t sound like a hymn:

  What have I got

  That makes you want to love me?

  Is it my body?

  Or someone I might be?

  Something inside me?

  You better tell me. Tell me.

  It’s really up to you.

  Have you got the time to find out

  Who I really am?

  The order of service says that this is a song by Alice Cooper, although it is hard to believe. Printed below the lyric, for some reason, is Curtis Preece’s favourite recipe for mango chutney.

  ‘Brace yourself for the choir, man. They’ll cut your face off. They’re really loud,’ Heath had said when I was accosted by him on the way in. He was crouched behind a part of the graveyard wall at St Brides that gave him the cover he needed to snatch ‘gut shots’ of the brass of both papers as they were decanted from their Jags and Daimlers and Audis, the doors mock-deferentially held open for them by chapel fathers redunded from the print, bung artists, squarers, recidivists in vaulted mirror-peaked chauffeurs’ caps.

  He was especially keen to get the proprietor and, more particularly, his consiglieri in their thousand-guinea winter-weight suits, recurring archetypal figures down the ages, whispering in the doge’s ear, drafting designs for the king’s gardens, official astrologers to the czar. Slipping from the in-car, air-conditioned environment to the cool, candle-lit interior of the church, moving swiftly yet unhurriedly through the humidity and grit. A scene from a film by Roberto Rossellini – or do I mean Vittorio de Sica? – black and white, made on odds and ends of stock in the years straight after the War, ordinary people as actors.

  The women are dowdied down, in keeping with the occasion. The men, though, seem pumped up, enlarged, ready to take on the beast in the jungle, should it spring out at them, and wrestle it to the ground. (A further, not-altogether-gratuitous cultural allusion, here. Minnie Kidd, Henry James’s maid, said she heard the Master on his deathbed shout out: ‘It’s the beast in the jungle, and it’s sprung,’ one of the most frightening things I have ever heard.)

  Tosser and Ronnie Duncan arrived in separate cars wearing similar alumicron suits, solid-coloured at a distance but dissolving into tiny nailhead patterns, like billboard-scale posters, when you come close. Both wearing photo-grey tinted lenses and shirts with spring-metal stays in the collars; both reflecting the razor-edged geometry and hard bright colours of the new newspaper building, unrecognisable for the rumpled, crotch-at-the-knee slobs they were just a year ago.

  Pacing up and down outside St Brides was Peter Conmee, taking alternate gasps on a kingsize cancer-stick and the nozzle of his Medihaler. Conmee, once a respected foreign editor, now given the job of vetting expenses, functions on half a lung. Even smokes in the shower, so legend has it, with the aid of a small umbrella contraption he has rigged up. Sarky remarks from people going in that he was unable to hear over the noise of his hawking up catarrh and his rattling cough.

  ‘I’d just stay here if I was you, old lad.’

  ‘“Take my breath away, awaaay.”’

  ‘I see you’re wearing Players today, Pete.’

  Curtis Preece’s mother, the Anna Magnani figure, arrived escorted by Clit Carson, Clit in a floating, asymmetrically cut, wraparound black kimono affair. The Tube train driver is here in the wheelchair he has been confined to since the accident. Ashley Cann and Annie Jeffers, it seems, have entered into some kind of life-swap and come as each other: he now wears a nose bolt and has moonlight-blond hair – platinum with the blue roots showing; her tufted, savagely cut hair is aubergine purple.

  A sprinkling of Garrick Club ties; one Garrick Club bow-tie; the candlelight reflected in big chrome-rimmed bi-focals, old-maidish half-lenses with clear plastic, fun-coloured, tortoiseshell frames, several on retaining chains; standard blow-dries; silver hair cut quite wavy and long; red-faced men turning into toby-jug versions of their younger selves. A sudden choked-back sob; Clit’s fingers intertwining with the mother’s.

  Ronnie Duncan steps up to the lectern to deliver the Address. ‘St Augustine was once asked where time came from.’ Fingers white-knuckled around the carved oak, arms tensed as if at the top of an up-push of his morning Canadian Airforce workout. ‘He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. “Man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither …”’

  Tosser is irritably consulting his watch, scribbling memos to himself on the cuff of his shirt. ‘All of us gathered here this morning who had the good fortune to know Curtis will agree with me that he conformed as close as any of us to the heroic image of the journalist defending the truth against the many dragons of darkness in the modern world …’

  Myc Doohan, in the pew in front, is wrestling with a fistful of Jack and Jills, transferring the totals, plus service, to a swindle sheet; doing slow-brained calculations on a piece of scrap paper. ‘… his death is yet a further tragic reminder that, in a world that is so fast, so unnatural, and so attractive, we all of us spend too much time human doing and not enough time human being …’ (Evidence of the hand of Robin Carson. Barely suppressed groans.)

  The body (suspiciously light) is carried out to the choir singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, and borne off to a marble orchard in far north London trailed by a single earful of mourners.

  As soon as it has gone there is a wild scramble into the cars, a race for taxis, the slightly druggy pace of fifteen frames a second wammied into fast-forward mode; out of the forties black-and-white shadows into sun-splashed no-grain Ciba-chrome. A dramatic exodus; a fleeing from a world now occupied by the usurpers of insurance, banking, commodities speculation; the familiar turned on its former owners, inducing feelings of sadness and dread; a world changed beyond all reckoning, the field of ruins.

  Behind the stained facade of the old Express building, stockades of desks, telephones heaped like bones; th
e desk where I wanked away my promise every day for four years, the phone on which I had my first conversation with Even.

  The tiered white wedding-cake spire of St Brides floats on the Express’s black deco curtain wall, gridded and fractured, like a deeply moulded shaft of light; like the spook they are all fleeing.

  The Express building, popularly known as the Black Lubianka. Wren’s tallest spire rejoicing in the description ‘a madrigal in stone’.

  *

  In the brochurised version, the architect had a special tunnel excavated for the convenience of the stonemasons working on his masterpiece, invisibly connecting St Brides with the Old Bell. The cut or ginnel or alley that exists today is authentically lichen-walled and burrow-like, the rotting bases of the iron posts at eye-level, the wall of the crypt rising to above-head height.

  Once at this time in the morning you could have expected the Bell to be heaving. But there’s hardly anybody in except Doohan and Ashley Cann.

  ‘“The whole country watched the agonised care of the eight guardsmen who carried the box. And vicariously shared their anxious pain. But perhaps most marvellous was the slow move up the turgid Thames. There were things like the gantries of cranes dipping in salute and the music of a host of pipers. There were generals in improbable uniforms and what looked like all the rulers of the world standing on the steps of St Paul’s as if this were a family burial. A whole city looking in on itself as a dead body went by.”’

  I recognise this. It’s the piece Patrick O’Donovan did for the Observer on Churchill’s funeral, probably five years before Ashley was born. It is my duty now – I owe it to Myc – to step in and stop him before he gets on to the wit that flew among O’Dono-van and his crowd (Anthony Sampson, Terry Kilmartin, Maurice Richardson) at Philip Hope-Wallace’s table in the back room at El Vino in the fifties.

  ‘What’s up, Myc?’ Doohan is looking glum, sitting nursing a tepid diet-Pepsi. ‘You look like you’ve just been to a funeral. You’ve got a face like a toilet seat.’

  ‘What it is,’ Myc says, ‘is I know there’s a reason, but I can’t remember why I won’t talk to that cunt over there.’

  Ashley laughs, but he is still off rummaging in the document folder he has accessed in his brain. ‘Did either of you two ever know Ian Mackay, the News Chronicle columnist who spurned all efforts to lure him away from the paper he loved?’ We avoid each other’s glances, shuffle, shake our heads. ‘Ian had asked for his ashes to be scattered in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. So, after his funeral a party of his closest friends adjourned to the King and Keys with the ashes in a shoe box to talk it over. They then moved to the Punch, the Falstaff, and finally the Press Club, still in possession of the box. Over drinks they decided to scatter the ashes on the Thames near Cleopatra’s Needle. But when they got to the Embankment the box was empty – it had a hole in it. They returned to the Club and consoled themselves with the thought that they had left a little of him in all the places he loved best. Boom-boom.’

  What do we look like? Three white shirts, three black ties. The Guise on a remember-when seaside reunion tour with an erratic young pick-up drummer who would rather be with the Beastie Boys. ‘Did you hear the one about the Murdoch henchman in Australia‚’ Myc says, still on the subject of death stories, ‘whose wife slipped his American Express platinum card into his pocket as she bent over the coffin to kiss him goodbye, just in case. I should be so lucky. I’m struggling to hang on to my VAT rating as it is. It’s a status requirement these days, like von-something used to be. Baronial. If you’re not registered, they’ll grind you down.’

  ‘Is it enough to earn your age? You know what I’m saying‚’ Ashley says. ‘£27‚000 a year at twenty-seven.’

  ‘Your age. I tell you, I’m lucky to earn my shoe size. You can laugh‚’ Myc says, ‘but I’m not joking … Anyway, what’s the score with you and Annie Jeffers? The barnet and the whole bit.’

  Ashley colours, then presses his hands against his face, slowly squeegeeing the blood up into the sooty roots of his two-tone hair.

  All around us in the Bell are apothegms, injunctions and motivating slogans that hung in the newsrooms of the Street, ancient and modern. ‘Impact! Get it in your first paragraph! Get it in your pictures! Above all get it in your headlines!’ ‘Explain, simplify clarify!’ ‘The public is habitual and needs the same news in the same place day after day.’ ‘The public is interested in just three things: blood, money, and the female organ of sexual intercourse.’ ‘Everybody feeds off everybody.’ ‘Never lose your sense of the superficial.’ ‘Make it first, make it fast, make it accurate. Then’ (this scribbled across the bottom of the original, but retained in the interest of period resonance) ‘go and make it up.’

  Ashley, as usual, is wearing a lithoed or rubber-appliquéd T-shirt under his shirt, which has the effect of making his body look as though it has been imprinted with furtive, barely decipherable messages and logos – ‘Metallica’, ‘Kick Butt’, ‘Youthanasia’, ‘Zodiac Mindwarp’, ‘Back the fuck up’. Subtexts. Undercodes. The fetish tattoos of a Japanese yakuza, a junior mafioso from the Roppongi club scene. All public spaces resounding with the perpetual bull-session, slogan to slogan, in which ordinary, across-the-table conversation can seem like a banal interruption of the one-worders, the one-liners, the corporate zingers. ‘Phalcon’. ‘Skism’. ‘Gno-mist’. ‘Nike Jordan’. ‘The beautiful game’. ‘You’re just a wave, babe, you’re not the water.’

  ‘The individual is overwhelmed by an incomprehensible flood of signs, surfaces and space‚’ Ashley says in a time-to-hit-the-hay-old-timer sort of way when I blurt some of this out. Happy-trails. ‘The sensuality of information takes over, grainy, hydra-like, pimply, pocky, ramified, seaweedy, strange, tangled, tortuous, wiggly, wispy, wrinkled. We live in an inebriated state of consciousness. Which is why we need the murderers. Murder, rape, natural disaster, atrocity stories on a daily basis.’ The opening bars of the theme to Match of the Day play on a video football game. Another game, occasionally overlapping, jangles a snatch of the EastEnders theme.

  ‘There is a community need‚’ Ashley continues. ‘We need perpetrators. We need victims. These people create community. Communitas. By giving us stories that we can run with, that penetrate the din. The patterns and structures of stories work towards cultural cohesion. Community is in part built on members sharing the same stories. Which is where the reporters of the stories, the venerable tradition of journalism, the spinners of folk tales, come in. You, Myc, you … Hey‚’ Ashley breaks off suddenly. ‘Heath Hawkins – come on down!’

  ‘Oh wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful!’ Heath says, flinging himself across a bench seat. ‘And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!’ He peels off the black V-neck sweater he has on. There is a colour reproduction of the stars and stripes on his T-shirt. Above it, the semi-washed-out slogan: ‘Try burning this one …’, and below it, the single word: ‘ASSHOLE’. He has a Smiley patch over a hole in the knee of his jeans.

  ‘Living large, man. Living very large‚’ Heath says, replying to a question that none of us has asked. ‘Did you see those ill fuckers out there? Was that bad news at the wax museum, or what? Forget Rwanda, man. Namibia, Angola, Israel, Palestine. The Hashemites, the hereditary guardians of the holy places for over a thousand years, given the order of the boot by the Saudis. These shitehawks in suits, old Tosser and his cohorts. These are the uprooted, the lost peoples, the dispossessed. Scuttling back to their glass eyries, the dickless work stations, the sealed airless rooms, the gorgon at the desk. The deterritorialised workforce. Dead white males.’

  *

  Curtis Preece ex-ed himself off-peak at Blackfriars station, about two hundred yards from where we are sitting, which is nowhere he should have been. ‘You run fast, you smell bad‚’ Hawkins says. ‘End of story. That should be carved in granite on that guy’s grave. Tell you what, he certainly smells bad now, boy. Had to scrape him up, according to sources in the necropolitan u
nderworld. One double bacon-cheeseburger, very rare, hold the mayonnaise.’

  ‘The Dutch have a new word for it. The Dutch always have a new word for it‚’ Ashley says. ‘“Zelf-doding”. Which means “self-deathing”, as opposed to “self-killing”, which is what suicide translates as.’ He has knotted the black tie around his upper arm, Comanche-fashion, using his teeth to secure the knot like a smack-head in an art-house underground movie of the sixties, school of Andy Warhol, Andy’s children, street trash apotheosised.

  ‘Did you hear about the death’s head?’ Ashley says. ‘Curtis claimed that a shrieking death’s head had started to appear occasionally at the top of his screen. And he wasn’t alone. Quite a few people think they’ve seen the same thing. Hold down the option key, hit the shift key three times, your computer makes this funny trilling sound and an object appears at the corner of the screen that could, if you were sufficiently paranoid, look like a death’s head. It’s not a virus or a worm or anything to get hot and sweaty about. It’s just a weird software thing. I tried to convince Curtis of this more than once. I even demonstrated it to him. But he was sufficiently paranoid. He was beyond convincing.’

  Persistent eye, nose and throat irritation; skin rashes, nausea, lassitude, breathing discomfort, dull but unrelenting pain in the hands and arms … Panic attacks, morbidity claustrophobia, a whole shitstorm of anxiety neuroses and phobic states … This just about covers the spectrum of complaints in the year since we have been taken off the tit and shunted out to the place none of us has yet got used to calling Merry Hill Newsplex Plaza. (Packages will reach us if addressed simply to ‘Merry Heir’.)