Fullalove

by Gordon Burn

  The cabling and ducting, the heating, cooling, lighting, plumbing and sewage systems all came on-site factory-fresh, and went in clean and true and apparently uninfected. How do I know? I know because, almost from day one, I was there, in hard-hat and gumboots, shadowing Owen Allen of Boyd Allen and Partners up ladders and down into the thin black slurry of the foundations of the fast-food, design-and-build khazi whose progress it was my penance to cover for the benefit of shareholders, in the annual company report.

  Owen Allen is a hack who believes that cricket boots and strident striped cricket blazers teamed with designer face furniture all year round disguises the fact. The simplest description of the development he came up with would probably be ‘Disnoid’ – a bit of mirror-Gothic here, some imitation palazzo there, a Renaissance portico somewhere else; interior cobblestone walks, five-storey sheet fountains, ‘period’ carriage lamps. Standard, off-the-peg decorated shed.

  But in the course of regular visits, over a period of about two years, I had to listen to his horse manure about ‘the symbolic interpenetration of nature and culture’ and ‘the grammar of layered planes’; references to Mayan temples of sacrifice, the raked pebble garden of Ryoanji, and English eighteenth-century crinkle-crankle walls. I had to look interested while he bored on about circumstantial distortions, expedient devices, eventful exceptions, exceptional diagonals, superadjacency, equivalence, and pretend I was getting it all down. We were witnessing the rise of a building which made the workplace an aesthetically charged location. Under the polished surfaces, meanwhile, filth accrued.

  Fungal spores and pathogenic bacteria incubating in the air intakes, filter traps and water tanks. The building as a lumbering, limping animal, a failing organism, with which none of us needed any encouragement to identify. Tubular organs obstructed, metabolic processes inhibited, blood vessels eroded, vital centres destroyed, biochemical balances deranged …

  I can quote Sir Arthur Palgrave here with no fear of it being blue-pencilled, as it was in my final report: ‘Coeval with the first pulsation, when the fibres quiver, and the organs quicken into vitality, is the germ of death. Before our members are fashioned, is the narrow grave dug in which they are to be entombed.’ Bioslime, bioviruses, mould-spores, baffle-jelly infesting the building even as it was going up. When it was up, one of the nifty touches of the architects (that glass counterpart of the crinkle-crankle wall, a serpentine curve) meant that you risked being blinded or fried alive at your desk.

  The site was a former swimming bath, public baths and washhouse, separated by a red route road from one of the toughest council estates in London. Fact: homes produce far more sewage than office buildings of roughly the same size – mountains of mucilage, cataracts of cack. And it is this, the contents of the storm drains, sewers and soil pipes, that seems to get drawn up into the building in a way nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain yet, making it smell sometimes like a tannery or slaughterhouse; a public lavatory in Madrid or the suburbs of Moscow. Uninvited bilge inching through the pipes; scum from the plunge baths and slipper baths of pre-history, a broth of matted hair and sloughed-off cells seeping into the system.

  *

  Still in the Ding-Dong, it is Myc who is speaking. ‘Did you know that one in three of all old women living on their own are found to have cat food down their knickers when they’re brought into hospital?’

  ‘Is it in tins?’ Ashley says.

  ‘Klit-E-Kat.’ Heath raises the biggest laugh.

  ‘Hang on a minute‚’ Myc says. ‘No, bag your faces. Is that my coat ringing?’ His mobile is in his jacket, hanging near the door. ‘How would I have heard, I’m in a meeting‚’ he says into the deviant-looking buckled-down black plastic sheath. ‘When did this happen?’ Indicating for us to keep the noise down with his hand. ‘Got it … Got it … Okay … I’ll get flying. I’m already there … A snap story‚’ he says, dipping the instrument of torture in his inside pocket, aiming himself at the door. ‘Some dipshit maniac has gone on the rampage among the McGovern faithful at the hospital. They’re saying two stuffed so far, a cutter job, loads of claret … Further misfortunes unfold.’

  Ashley has gone into his computer, which has responded with a soft but insistent bong-ing sound, and a citron pulse which is projected with the rest of the contents of the screen across the contours of his face.

  A couple of days after Curtis Preece killed himself, his girlfriend came into the office to enact a private ritual which involved sitting in his chair, handling his things, hugging everything which might have come into contact with him. She asked to have the last words keyed into it brought up onto his screen, and she leaned in close, bathing her face in the area of ozone emission, the text and graphic display suffusing her upturned face, the field around the screen taking her long, fine hair and drawing it to itself.

  She laid a single rose along the upper edge of the portrait of Curtis that is hanging by the cash dispenser at the entrance to the men’s toilets. On her way out, she threw a coin into the fountain in the main reception. The basin of the fountain is always scaled with coins, but it was the first time I had ever seen anybody do this.

  I was hoping to beg a lift to St Saviour’s from Heath Hawkins, but he has gone, legged it.

  ‘Life’s a bitch, and then they freeze your head‚’ Mick says.

  ‘Life’s a bitch, and then you turn into one‚’ Ashley says.

  The magnetic field of my animal instincts.

  Seven

  In the post this morning, a letter from Veorah Batcheller. (I had given her my home address, which is something I have hardly ever done. The phone here is ex-directory.)

  Dear Norman –

  You probably think there’s nothing worse than having to listen to somebody’s dreams and there I agree with you. But I feel the need to tell somebody – somebody who knew me in my previous life even if slightly, before I set out on this adventure – I want to describe a dream I keep having over and over these nights.

  It’s a dream about Shane Norwood, who as you will know is the son of Sean Norwood somebody I have never given any great thought to before, I have been able to take or leave him.

  Shane I’m guessing would be a young teenager somewhere around thirteen or fourteen now if he’s still alive. I am convinced that he is. In the dream it is always the same basement or cellar area where the boy is being held – still after all these years. To start with it is always the same hammer horror film stuff and I want to wake up, open my eyes and run away. I am aware of feeling this even while sleeping (maybe it’s the odd circumstances I get my head down in these days – the back of a black taxi in a lockup garage in Muswell Hill for example last night).

  A wobbly camera shows a man’s feet going down a flight of lion [lino] covered stairs, old fashioned open toe style sandals, cheap nasty patterned socks. Down into the darkness with a hint of light from a narrow transom window at one end. You can see dead brown grass through the window, an empty blouse hanging on a clothesline swinging in a breeze. Another clothesline stretches across the corner at the far end of the room. A bucket and mop stand outside a cupboard door. A beat up sofa against one wall. A few chairs one of them turned upside down with the brown webbing showing. On the left is a smaller room where you might expect the washer and dryer to be. The walls are thick with padded insulation. A cheap kitchen chair is positioned in the centre of the room with a white bed sheet spread out under the chair and now we see Shane Norwood handcuffed and tethered to it. His knees are forced wide apart so he straddles the chair each leg bent back at the knee and his feet tied with the rope to the back chair legs. Swastikas have been carved on his arms and into his head and face. You assume at this point that some other horrible thing is about to be inflicted on him but what happens then is this. You see that the man who is holding him has brought a portable television with him down the stairs – a Sony Trinitron as it happens dirty white with a circular aireel which he stands on the floor by the door and plugs in. It is a few minut
es before half past 3 and the end of Sean Norwood’s show when the contestants wave at the big allumined picture and together shout Bye Shane.

  Shane raises his chin from his chest and parts his poor dry lips to talk. Bye he whispers and there is a small lurch as he tries to move one of his hands which are secured behind his back to wave. The tears well up and careen if this is the word I’m looking for down his face. But – But – his abductor the man who snatched him from the bosom of his family is crying as well. And we see that this is meant – real big hot hopeless tears.

  This as I say is a dream I have been having nearly every night. And my sense my intuition is that what happens in the dream also happens just like this on a regular without fail basis wherever Shane Norwood is being held. Which only proves I suppose that cheap sentimental gestures – like the valentine card, the pop song, no doubt some people would say my memorial work and the course of action on which I am now currently embarked – have a place. This showbusiness thing done for whatever motives is touching his life connecting him with the world and helping Shane to survive.

  I have a feeling I have been snowing you under with bits quoted from books (I have been in a kind of reading fever looking for ways to explain myself to myself and why I’m doing what I’m doing) but here is another one – A great city is a kind of labyrinth within which at every moment of the day the most hidden wishes of every human being are performed by people who devote their whole existence to this and nothing else. The hidden life of forbidden wishes exists in extravagant nakedness behind mazes of walls.

  Although it plays no part in what I originally set out to do my conviction now is that somewhere along the path I have set myself is the room where Shane Norwood is tied and tethered. I know you are a sceptic – a world class cynic – and that you have to be if you want to stay in your job but I feel I am coming closer to that room every day I keep walking swept along in the flow of ordinary daily life. If you think I haven’t totally gone berserkers and feel like catching up you will probably find me (see the map I sent you) at M9 – Higham Hill Rd near the junction with Mayfield Rd in Walthamstow East 17 – around tea-time tomorrow (Thursday). Perhaps I will see you then.

  Best wishes,

  Veorah

  The piece I did on Veorah Batcheller hasn’t yet made it into the paper, for a variety of reasons. The rapist seems to have peaked at four – there have been no further attacks in the vicinity of the police memorials for about two months, and so interest has cooled. Then the butchering of the fans camped outside St Saviour’s (a former boyfriend of one of the women, armed to the teeth with cleavers and kitchen knives, was arrested at the scene) has been getting maximum play. Crucially, though, the editor decided my piece on Veorah sucked.

  ‘If this is a story, my cock’s a bloater‚’ is what he actually said as he slung the galley-proof across his desk at me, adding that he wanted it whammed up. ‘Well whammed up. The kiss of fuckin’ life. Like: get off the bed and walk. We’re talking Lazarus. Where’s all the stuff about … I don’t know … her secret life as a stripper. Dressing up in policebint gear as a stripogram … Is she kinky about the girls in blue? … I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the one who went on the fishing expedition.’

  And in the meantime Veorah, partly (my guess) as a reaction to these developments, has put her life out on the street. Two, perhaps three weeks ago, taking as her starting point the memorial to Yvonne Fletcher in St James’s, she set out to walk the route which connects all the London police memorials, travelling alone, responding to whatever turns up, sleeping rough.

  Her motives for doing this seem complex and perhaps unknowable, even to herself: she has talked about a sense of compulsion and ‘inner necessity’ driving her to complete this ‘therapeutic itinerary’; of stepping away from the safe and familiar pattern of the everyday in an attempt to find some meaning in the broken pieces of her life; of performing a ritual of cleansing and reclaiming, of undoing harm.

  She recognised before she started that she was putting herself physically at risk, but believes the potential of harm has to exist if the aim is to live life at a deeper level than it is lived every day; it explains why she has been prepared to give up comfort and safety, accept cold and hunger, and eat whatever comes her way.

  After years of feeling she was a sitting target anyway, vulnerable to whatever darkness her husband might choose to bring down on her, she felt strengthened by acting in the world, stepping into the blankness of motorways, loopways and roundabouts, the modern equivalent of the cave or the hermitage in the mountains; walking straight and alone; insignificant, forgotten, metaphorically dead.

  This is paraphrasure and, to some extent, supposition. Veorah has a tendency to clam up when you ask her to explain herself head-on. I have been getting it in bits and pieces on tourist postcards (three so far – one of the plump, pink Lady Diana Spencer, one of a punk, one of the spot in the north transept of Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas à Becket was murdered in 1170); also on the backs of menus for tandoori take-aways and bagel boutiques; flyers for failing hairdressers, sandwich bars, tarot readers, minicab firms, the International House of Pancakes, whatever comes to hand. As if the high-toned content of the one side was somehow anchored or counterweighted by the prosaic nature of the information printed on the reverse.

  I wasn’t able to be there when she kicked off her travels at the Yvonne Fletcher memorial, but I caught up with her four or five days later, when she had got as far as Acton in west London. We had arranged a rendezvous at Wormwood Scrubs – the Scrubs – and when I got there she was standing in front of the security barrier at the main entrance to the prison. She was wearing sweat pants and a hooded top, both the Arctic white – the Arctic blue, really – of the soap-powder commercial. It would emerge that she had spent the night before dossing in the cashpoint hall of a Lloyds bank in Hammersmith, but there was no clue to this in her appearance. A sleeping roll was attached to the bottom of her backpack. She was wearing a white baseball cap with her hair pulled through the ‘D’ above the plastic adjuster and tied in a ponytail.

  It was a look – a popular variation was extra-outsize T-shirts that extended to and were knotted at the knee – shared by a number of the women trying to exercise parental control over shoulder-rolling hit squads of grey-faced children and herd them into the visitors’ centre. This was a box-shaped temporary building with board walls which were already being drilled from the inside by tiny Nike-and Reebok-shod feet and tiny impatient fists.

  ‘Are you a lifer?’ a poster asked. ‘Is any member of your family serving a life sentence?’ ‘Mental illness‚’ another said. ‘What does it mean?’ There were posters offering solvent abuse counselling, posters for the Wallasey Wives of Lifers and the Lifers’ Support Group; another warning ‘Don’t let drugs trap you.’

  ‘Chelsea‚’ a woman bawled as Veorah and I (who were we supposed to be visiting? What were we, nick sniffers?) slunk in. ‘Come back over here! What did I tell you, I’ll murder you!’ Aiming open forehands at the backs of Chelsea’s chubby bare legs, Chelsea bent nearly double, so that only one in four slaps connected, arched backwards, skipping forward in a circle, tethered by the hair. Scenes from the dark recesses of urban life, the flyblown cleats and areas, the blowdown estates, the swarming margins.

  A short while earlier an old codger had got on the train a few stops before East Acton and with great concentration started to redistribute cigarettes from a ten-pack of Superkings into the twenty-packet he was halfway through. He had a prize strawberry hooter, a prison-set sovereign ring knuckle-dusting every finger, and was sporting a rope-banded battered trilby. I remembered when it used to be fives – slim flat packets of five (the corner shops where I lived ‘broke’ packets and sold the cigarettes as singles) – being transferred to packets of ten. Everybody, for some reason, always took all five cigarettes in one hand at once and then had difficulty (as the old man had had) manoeuvring them into the host packet without mashing them. The tipless wh
ite tubes uncoordinated and recalcitrant, prefiguring the joints exploded by arthritis, the knobby arthritic fingers.

  Mission eventually accomplished, the old boy shook his wrist a few times, adjusted the expanding metal bracelet, and then put it to his ear to see if he could hear anything. Disappearing gestures, virtually extinct. Blowdown: controlled explosive demolition.

  In charge of the visitors’ centre was a woman who, even without seeing the gnawed nails and the raised tracks up the inner arms, you’d have had down as a Society girl – a Society beauty probably; early-fifties vintage, the Princess Margaret set – gone seriously off the rails. She had a lonely pensiveness among the anarchy and chaos; something about the way she batted away the fly that was skidding around the smeary wrapper of a sandwich whose filling was ruled faint against the slices of super-white. She handed us a pair of metal tongs to retrieve the tea bags from the plastic cups of brown-blooming tea.

  The only table that was unoccupied was the one nearest the children’s corner, something out of a tower block bedroom or women’s refuge; a pacifier for the sons and daughters of murderers and stick-up artists, the sprogs of villains.

  The main – virtually the only – amenity was a low-walled plastic enclosure bearing the evidence of successive onslaughts of sticky fingers. Covering all of the floor area inside it was a duvet with a Flintstones cartoon cover, and plunked down on this several hand-knitted stuffed toys – a Postman Pat, a brown cat with a pink bow-tie, a Dalmatian-type puppy, a kangaroo and, separated from the kangaroo, eyeless and more or less flattened into two-dimensionality, the baby it once carried tucked into its pouch. The use of dolls as explanatory notes in advance of life-threatening operations. Also as adult-substitutes in cases of sexual abuse of children. ‘Just point to where Daddy touched you. Did Daddy touch you there?’