And I believed it.
His feet are barely touching the rolling track of the treadmill. His own life force is strong. Ashley told him that these machines cost nine thousand pounds each, a fantastic amount of money when you think you could run around the streets for nothing. Many people do: girls with bottles of water and headsets and a grim determination; men of all the physical types that you could imagine. Only children never run, perhaps not yet feeling the existential pressures. Many of them are anyway far too fat to break into a trot.
It’s not that easy to stay upright as you approach maximum speed while pressing the LCD arrows. He finishes every run with a minute at full speed, 16.5 km per hour. His footfall is not so light now; his feet pound the rolling track. He is breathing heavily, gulping, as he finally slows. After Jenni was buried he returned to Oxford only long enough to pack his things and say goodbye to his tutor and some friends. He was given compassionate leave, and went back six months later, chastened, but more determined. He hardly left his rooms for two years. Adam had left by then: he was two years ahead because he avoided National Service on medical grounds.
He does some light exercise on the cross-trainer; it’s firming his chest although his nipples remain obdurately puckered. Some of his friends have become monumental, with slabs of flesh on their chests. Their faces have assumed an imposing density, with floes of flesh jostling and competing. He aspires to be light and lean.
Ashley is inducting a woman into the mysteries of the machines. She has a helmet of bleached hair and is as rounded as a seal. Now he explains to her how the cross-trainer works: quick start, programmes, levels of achievement, heart rate, et cetera.
But she is not listening; she is intent on telling him about her domestic arrangements.
‘Then he fucking come home and pulls the fucking blinds down what I only paid for with me allowance. And then he pissed, can yer believe it, right on the fitted carpet, ’e’s that drunk. Fuck me, ’e’sananimal.’
Ashley continues, ‘And when you is settin’ the programme you like enter your weight here,’ and she says, ‘And then in the fuckin’ morning he only says I’m a slapper and where’s me bacon an’eggs.’
‘Now you start this one. Press here, like this, and I’ll be back in five minutes to see how you’re gettin’ on.’
‘Talkin’ of slappers, ’is daughter, she’s what I call a right slapper. She brung some bloke round at four in the morning, old enough to be her dad ’e was, they was at it like fuckin’ rabbits, screamin’ and shoutin’ and movin’ the fuckin’ furniture about. It’s a fuckin’ madhouse. That’s why I joined the gym, to get some fuckin’ peace.’
Ashley pushes the button and sets the machine in motion. His smile has a glazed quality now. David winks at him as he turns away but the woman, alert to insult, spots him.
‘What you winkin’ at, you cunt?’
‘Sorry, nothing, I’ve got blepharitis. I can’t help it.’
‘You’re that cunt off of the telly, ain’tcher?’
‘That’s me.’
‘Well you can fuck off an’ all.’
As he jogs home he feels enriched by these encounters. While he was waiting in blank corridors to interview maniacs and tyrants, he had neglected to notice what was going on in his own parish. This crazy rant is how some Londoners have always spoken. Although Dickens gave them the sentimental treatment, he was aware of the underlying desperation and fear: he felt it himself. This is the authentic voice – one of many – of the people, this welling of grievance, obscenity and self-pity. England’s golden age of politeness and deference and honesty was brief and probably mythical. At Global they prepared stories on the problem of lawlessness and out-of-control teenagers and mindless crimes of violence and schoolgirl pregnancy with relish, but they never suggested that in large swathes of the country this was perfectly acceptable, even traditional. In his experience, depraved behaviour is often the norm. One of his stories from Iraq was about the growing culture of pornography. He was the first to make the connection between the soldiers who thought pornography was harmless fun and the humiliation of Iraqis in the jails. These soldiers were pissing themselves laughing at the pictures of towel-heads pretending to give each other blow jobs; the soldiers were sending their hilarious holiday snaps to their pals, as you might send a picture of a bridegroom handcuffed, trouserless, to a lamp post in Prague on a stag night. At Global, stories were always rated first and foremost as a form of entertainment. Torture was understood to be voyeurism and so usually found its way to the top of the running order if there were good pictures to go with it.
He jogs up through Kentish Town. When he speaks to Sylvie and her friends he won’t tell them the truth about his experiences. They want to hear about the glamour and the excitement, the world leaders he has met. What they don’t want is an account of the endless waiting, the compromises, the hordes of desperate people in dusty hopeless places, the faked seriousness, the manipulation of figures...
The streets are anticipating winter: they already have a defensive look – they crouch. The bricks of the Victorian houses are streaked with mineral salts; the trees have lost their vitality. But he feels renewed, as though he is ecstatically in tune with the seasons and the place. He wonders if he isn’t going mad. If he is, he doesn’t mind. Ed has a theory that he is missing Nancy more than he realises, so Lucy says. In fact the feeling he has is one of relief, as though now that she’s gone he can love her memory without reserve, as once he loved her. All those resentments he felt when he heard that she had once taken the small children with her to her lover’s house have been dissolved. He feels free. Nancy spun little myths around the family, and he didn’t try to resist them, but now he is released from his contract. You don’t understand the notion of necessary fictions when you are young, but it is one most people embrace fervently when they know they are dying.
Sylvie lives in a flat in a tall Victorian Gothic house on the upslope of Highgate Hill. Near it is an enormous, apparently deserted, Catholic church. The Catholics don’t have good church architecture. As he rings the bell, a large, pockmarked brass dinner plate, he hears the dog Wolfie barking.
‘David? Come in, come in, first floor, I’ll meet you on the landing.’
The door lock snaps open and he pushes his way into the hall, which has a floor of brown and green tiles, an ecclesiastical look. It doesn’t suggest intimacy of feeling. The dog bounds down the stairs ahead of Sylvie, who is waiting above, wearing a long olive-green skirt, with a border of red flowers, and a thin cotton jumper. Her hair is frothing wildly on her shoulders. Her breasts are under a stricter regime than when he met her on the Heath. The dog stops barking and wags its tail. He pats it on its head, which feels greasy and rough.
‘Oh, look at you, right here,’ Sylvie says.
‘Yes, I am here. Thanks for asking me.’
‘Oh pur-lease. Come up. We’re all present. It’s the best turnout we’ve ever had. May I?’
She kisses him on both cheeks. She smells delightfully of fruits and something more mysterious, perhaps the essences of health-giving plants: that cataract of hair must require a lot of nurturing. He follows behind her up the faded carpet. Her fluent hips are at his eye level and the procession suggests a certain calculation. She flings open the door and he sees ten or twelve people standing to meet him as if at a surprise party.
Holding his arm lightly, Sylvie says, ‘Dedah – dedah – David Cross,’ and he shakes hands all round.
There seem to be only two men. He knows that these book clubs are usually made up either of married people or singles, with hardly any crossover. And he guesses that these are singles. He knows, too, how they see him: a representative of a charmed world, of a life lived out under lights, a man of wide acquaintance, who has sat down with presidents and dictators and crossed borders in trucks loaded chaotically with gunmen, and who has seen huge events from the evacuation of Saigon to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela. It’s true, but from these experiences, w
hat simple wisdom can he squeeze? Not much, except perhaps the understanding that people everywhere are in thrall to delusion. And also that the balance has changed: huge industrial empires and well-equipped armies can be challenged by small groups of people who have fallen in love with the absolute. But these ladies – they are coming into focus now – and the two men, want to hear his tales without necessarily requiring him to place them in a philosophical context.
Sylvie pours him some red wine, which he sips. He is her catch and she is going to stick pretty close. She guides him with one of her long hands. Her hands, he sees, are always active; they accompany what she says with complementary gestures. Also, her hands are quite rough, probably from dog management. Quite soon he has some names and some occupations. One woman works for the BBC in costume design and he sees that her clothes have a romantic leaning: a large silk flower is attached to her bosom and her orange hooped earrings are dramatic. Another says she is a lifelong admirer of his work, and also Sylvie’s oldest friend. She is a garden designer; he wonders if he should ask her to take a look at No.9 Inverdale Terrace before he sells. They seem to be about forty, or perhaps a little younger.
One of the men, who in profile has a strangely elongated face like the figures in an Egyptian painting, and a small goatee (which makes his face look even longer), shakes his hand.
‘They don’t make them like you any more,’ he says, echoing Ted, David’s driver. He seems to be suggesting that in this respect they have something in common. He is, he says, a life coach. His name is Glynn. David resists the temptation to ask what life coaching entails, because he suspects the answer will be very long, and will concern life choices and positive vibes and tips on how to cope with bereavement. Snacks are passed around. The vogue for elegant and exotic canapés has not yet reached this part of town: the snacks are rough-hewn. There is a large bowl of hummus with some celery sticks to use as cutlery, rolls of salami pierced by cocktail sticks, some prunes wrapped in bacon, smallish smoked-salmon triangles and plenty of nuts.
‘There’s more in the kitchen. We all made something, except the blokes, of course,’ says Sylvie.
‘How often do you meet?’
‘Oh, about once a month. It’s difficult with half-term and so on for some of us. But I don’t have children.’
Sylvie gives him this last information as if to indicate that she, like him, is a free spirit.
‘Only the dog,’ she adds. ‘I’ll just make sure everybody has something to drink and we’ll start.’
He is seated in a deep armchair, so that he has to look up to those on the wildly assorted seats. He reads an episode from his autobiography, about how he and a cameraman with a very small camera were smuggled from Pakistan into Afghanistan wearing burkhas:
We had chosen a relatively quiet crossing point at a village called Anyoor Ada, but even at this hour the road was busy and there were trucks passing with Taliban in their black turbans everywhere. In fact, black turbans are not their uniform, but commonly worn with the traditional dress that the Taliban favour.
As our truck crossed the border, I looked at Rick, crouching demurely in his burkha, and I thought this is going to be a very undignified way to die. The burkhas were itchy and the visibility from within limited, but I could see Taliban everywhere, searching buses, pulling young men out of cars. I heard a gunshot and saw a man dressed in a turban and a chupa, a loose coat, crawling on the ground, blood pouring from under his turban. If we had had any illusions about how dangerous this crossing was, we quickly lost them. After some heart-stopping moments we were waved through and our contacts took us on what seemed like an interminable drive to a house enclosed by a mud-walled courtyard, a sura, where we slept the night uneasily under goatskin blankets. The problem, we discovered, was that many small biting insects already lived uninvited in the skins.
I wondered, as we were roused before dawn, if I was really up to this. Rick, like all cameramen, was certain that in some mysterious way he would be protected by his camera, which he had been cleaning in the night by candlelight. That night, I didn’t share his confidence. We set off as the dawn rose over the mountains, which were at first hazy and delicately coloured, quickly to turn to a uniform harsh brown, and I remembered that in 1873 the British had come this way and encountered people dressed in the same costume. In the end the small British garrison that was left behind was massacred, months after the British proclaimed that they had conquered the lawless south. This is not a country, I thought, which plays by, or cares for, our rules.
A few days later when we filmed women whipped for some minor infringement of the law or executed for adultery, kneeling in the penalty area of the National Football Stadium in Kabul, I was sick inside my burkha. I wondered then why we were becoming involved. The idea that we could bring order and Western values to this place was absurd. Even the phrase, ‘Western values’, was ridiculous. And the smell of vomit was choking me. I felt that possibly there was something symbolic about this, but I couldn’t quite articulate what it was.
He finds that as he recalls the three wretched women being forced to kneel while a Taliban fanatic reads the sentence and the women are shot in the head with a pistol, one by one, watched by a large crowd in the stands, that he cannot go on for a few moments. Sylvie watches him anxiously, until he composes himself. If we come out of this alive, he remembers thinking, we will have an astonishingly powerful piece of video. He explains to the book club, who are appalled by the detail, almost panic-stricken, that he and the cameraman stood high in the stands to film and late that night by the light of a kerosene lamp he recorded his famous piece to camera, which began, ‘Today I have seen what no man should see ...’ It was immediately taken across the border to Quetta and sent by satellite to Global.
‘People said that we changed the world’s attitude to the Taliban. I have to tell you that Rick Matthews, my cameraman, died two years later in the Sudan, when a mine blew up the vehicle he was travelling in. I miss him still.’
He is aware of how easily he is able to pause and look at them for dramatic effect.
‘Any questions?’
Glynn, the life coach, speaks.
‘Would you say that it is true that you are a kind of voyeur when it comes to executions? You describe three such occasions in the book, as I recall.’
‘That’s a seriously dumb question, Glynn. David has reported from all over the world on all sorts of things,’ says Sylvie.
‘Yuh, but isn’t this book a little negative? A little doomy? There’s lots of good things going on in the world if you know where to look, but somehow the positive vibe always gets neglected. It’s all yobbos and youth crime and benefit fraud and so on.’
But the mood is against Glynn.
‘It’s OK, Sylvie. I’ll answer, if I can. In forty years of news, first as a print journalist and then as a television correspondent, it is absolutely true that things changed. Now, twenty-four-hour news is obsessed with holding the audience. Where I finished my career, at Global, they perfected the technique of holding the audience, so that sensation, shark attacks, celebrity scandal, child kidnap and so on – coming next – were used to hold the viewers over the break. The old idea of informing and educating the public – so the argument ran – was OK when you had the audience tied to one or two channels, but now commercial survival depended on keeping your audience. Those who wanted serious information, they said, knew where to find it in newspapers or on the Internet. As for the executions, I see them as the ultimate expression of man’s inhumanity to man. Somehow the problem of evil never goes away. It’s like a subclinical virus, ready to break out when the conditions are right.’
How fluently he can still justify and explain. There’s nothing intellectual about it, merely a kind of mimesis. For all those years he has assimilated the weasel words, the easy hypocrisies. He doesn’t tell them what was in his heart: the reality of Afghanistan incorporates the smell of mutton fat, the twisted mulberry trees in the suras, the perfume of melons
so evocative that the Mogul Emperor Babur wept whenever he was brought one, because it reminded him of his beloved Kabul – the looming mountains, the parched riverbeds, the 14,000-ft passes. He doesn’t say that Kabul has been the crossroads of trade for a thousand years; the caravans from China, Turkestan, Samarkand, Firzan and India had come this way over countless passes and rivers and owed nothing to the West. Afghan folklore incorporates the Old Testament, and Issa – Christ – is remembered as a nice bloke. Pity he didn’t have a brother willing to avenge the crucifixion. In the markets of Kabul, there were melons, peaches, apricots, pears, quinces and almonds, and eleven languages commonly spoken – Arabic, Pashto, Persian, Hindi and Turki just for starters. What did they want from us? Nothing.
Glynn persists.
‘I just think the news should be more positive. It should reflect the good and the positive in human nature.’
David looks at his long, crafty face. Really this Glynn is presenting himself as a man in step with the buzzy, upbeat zeitgeist, the heir of Norman Vincent Peale, the positive thinker. David guesses that he is the only one here who has heard of Peale. It’s people like Glynn, the over-simplifiers, who open the door to fundamentalists. He doesn’t say it.
‘I am sure we would all, in theory, like good news. But as you know the journalistic maxim is that dog bites man is not news, but man bites dog is news. You never hear about the rules a politician didn’t break. In some societies so-called positive news is all that is allowed, and in the end that just means unmediated praise for the ruling party. I remember about fifteen years ago watching an endless broadcast on Kenyan TV of President Moi greeting a delegation of Bulgarian agricultural experts. It was, frankly, arse-numbingly boring, as they tried to translate the sheep-meat production plan from Bulgarian to Swahili. The one good thing about satellite and twenty-four-hour news is that almost no corner of the world can shut it out. Dictators hate it.’
To Heaven by Water Page 13
