A man in a dark shirt and black jacket is also hanging about. Tight, thinning hair. Ruddy complexion. Deepset eyes. Solid. The short coat is a leisurewear version of a donkey jacket; a nudge towards the haulage industry. You’d guess: former driver with his own fleet, three or four rigs, concerned about fuel tax. There are two small silver badges on his lapel.
‘Bernard O’Mahoney?’ It can’t be him, this person hasn’t brought a minder. Before he answers, he signals to a previously unnoticed partner (waiting in the motor). His son. A young lad. Inconspicuous, well behaved.
Mr O’Mahoney is civil, slightly reserved; he frowns and grins. He laughs readily, but not always in synch with circumstance. You’d say, not having read the book: decent fellow, family man. When Sergeant skids in, elbow on wheel, bun in mouth, O’Mahoney cheers up. ‘I know you from somewhere.’
Everybody does. Sergeant has that kind of face, reassuring; wide smile, genuine sympathy for the person he’s interrogating. They know that he knows the story, all of it, no point in holding anything back. Sergeant is the best kind of spoiled priest, a confessor in a leather jacket. An On the Waterfront hybrid of pre-inflatable Brando and Karl Maiden. He’s a shape-shifter. Put him one-to-one with a Basildon hardman, up against the perimeter fence of a station car park, and he slouches, uses his hands like a New Jersey mafioso. He leans in, narrows his eyes against the sun. Turn him loose on a speedfreak conspiracy theorist in Lakeside and he’ll rap, nod, lick his lips – and be invited to the next monster rave at North Woolwich. Have him debate landfill scams with a Green Peace flake and he’ll radiate concern, grow invisible tattoos and talk very, very slowly in a stage whisper. He’ll lisp on demand.
We drive in two cars, over the railway line, through caverns of brightly coloured containers, under the A13, past breakers’ yards and out on to the marshes. Unlisted, this is one of Europe’s great roads. Drainage channel on one side, landfill on the other. Filthy lorries, trucks, vans trying to shove you into the ditch. A stench of unbelievable complexity: necrotic, polluted, maggoty, piscine. Magnificent. London, animal vegetable and mineral, rotting in the ground.
We pull up at the gates of the landfill site. Motorway. Bridge. River. Scrawny crows in a dead tree. A phone kiosk. A location so resonant that you’ve already been there, without knowing it, in dramas about autopsy detectives in unbuttoned Byronic overcoats.
Bernard O’Mahoney is uninterested, incapable of registering surprise. The immediate arrival of a carload of security uniforms is another non-event: O’Mahoney is a proscribed exile. ‘I left Essex because the police banned me from every licensed premises in Basildon. They banned me from the Festival Leisure Park (which includes McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and the cinema). They put it in writing: I’m banned for life. They just said: “Take a hike.” ’
O’Mahoney’s career curve is the best account I’ve come across of M25 psychosis. He got his start working on the crew building the road, evolved into a courier and e-rep at the height of rave culture, and is now in landfill. Labourer, middle management, independent businessman. The living embodiment of the public/private partnership.
I’ve always been involved in the haulage industry. Although I don’t fear members of the underworld who are after me, what I did in those days might worry your readers – ’cause I actually helped build the M25. I worked on it in the south-eastern section when it was first being built. There was a lot of car dealers and scrap dealers and the like. They got involved with drugs in Essex, because they had lots of money they wanted to wash. You know, they deal a lot in cash. There’s a lot of money sloshing around that’s not accountable. You know what I mean?
Thatcher’s orbital motorway was welcomed by ambitious villains. Access to the wide world. Avoid the Thurrock ramp and it was peachy. ‘Stolen lorryload of coffee beans to Liverpool for a relative of deceased train robber Buster Edwards… Down to Bristol, doing debts. Bash people up in Birmingham. We were always on the move. The more people you reach, the more money you make. Know what I mean?’
Landfill was a sound career move. A lot of the boys were working the old golf course number. A few of them made enough to retire to Spain, play charity events with Sean Connery.
‘Every landfill site in the country is dodgy. Except for the one I work on, obviously. The haulage I’m involved with is not running parcels up and down the country, it’s tipper lorries which run muck or waste to landfill sites. There’ll always be a problem with landfill because you see lorries running in and out, full of black bin liners. Nobody knows what’s in the bin liners and nobody’s going to take the trouble of going through them. So, inevitably, you will get all sorts of things ending up on the tips. Including people. Particularly in this area.’
There is no break in the stream of lorries, rattling and lurching over the marsh road. Behind the security gate is an apocalyptic landscape; shifting dunes of rubbish. With more being added every minute. That’s why the crows maintain their surveillance. That’s why flocks of gulls turn an escarpment of black bags into a snowfield.
From the summit of the new mountain range, hot landfill, you can gaze back on Dagenham; what’s left of the Ford empire. Bad management, race tension, outdated work practices. The holding pens, which once gleamed with multiples, waiting to be taken away by road and rail, are deserted. Lakes of petrol in Purfleet and nothing to use it on. Dagenham is the off-highway destination at which nobody wants to stop. A picturesque mess to drive through.
Satellite operations keep the docks ticking over. You can buy a container unit for your garden. Or you could go looking for your missing Peugeot 505. All over London, Islington to Dulwich, Peugeot 505s were vanishing: an unauthorised recall. When police, acting on a tip, swooped on a breakers’ yard in Dagenham, they discovered the disassembled sections of numerous Peugeot family cars. Cars with a nickname: the ‘African taxi’. Cars that had been ‘labelled and packed like sardines’ were waiting on two vast articulated trailers. Three hundred and fifty-five Peugeots, taken without permission, were ready to be shipped out to Zambia – where there is an insatiable lust for the brand. The immortality of the Zambian taxi, which can carry up to seven people in relative comfort, is guaranteed by a constant supply of spare parts exported from the East London deadlands.
As the journalist David Williams, investigating this trade, wrote: ‘If you look at any TV news bulletin from Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe, you will see these veterans of suburban commuter runs belting along dusty pot-holed streets, sometimes chauffeuring a passenger, sometimes overcrowded with local militia.’
So Dagenham is doing its bit for the export trade. Behind padlocked gates, DI Stephen Balding discovered ‘the biggest Peugeot flatpack in the world’. The machine-cannibalism operation kept the spirit of enterprise alive, using docks that the Ford Motor Company no longer required. That’s the nature of twenty-first-century capitalism, small and smart, lean and mean: steal to order. Target the Third World. Just like Thatcher and Ken Clarke, roving ambassadors of the carcinogenic combines, peddling fags from a suitcase to poverty-stricken backwaters. Who aren’t too fussy about planning permission for those nice new factories. Just like the moralist of the right, Dr Roger Scruton, paid a retainer to place pro-smoking propaganda in his broadsheet polemics.
John Whomes shows a lot of arm. You can’t read his eyes behind the tinted glasses. The head is razored. But the hands are articulate. An open-necked polo shirt. He’s happy to see O’Mahoney, their differences have been forgotten. They both put the Range Rover killings down to the Canning Town mob. They are cynical about the operations of the police and the judiciary. They know how the world works. But Whomes is determined that his brother’s story will be told: it’s a miscarriage of justice – and occupying a gantry on the M25 was the best way of getting media attention. CCTV road footage of jams, accidents, could be overlaid with a message: JACK WHOMES. INNOCENT OF RETTENDEN MURDERS.
Everything comes back to the motorway. Hauliers, landfill cowboys, minicabbers, doormen: they all have an M25
story, they all know Kenny Noye.
Whomes and O’Mahoney start yarning. The Rettenden Murders and the road-rage stabbing at the Swanley Interchange, myths of the road, are linked. Nothing was ever as simple as the black and white versions the tabloids peddled. Kenny Noye’s victim, the lad in the van, Stephen Cameron – according to O’Mahoney – was often seen at Raquels in Basildon. ‘The feller who died was coming back to us quite regularly. The club where Leah Betts’s pill was obtained. His girl friend is from the Grays area. I thought he was a bit leery, to be honest.’
The stabbing at the roadside, O’Mahoney insisted, was ‘an everyday thing on the M25’. The necessary consequence of travelling in circles in overheated metal pods. ‘People are screaming, jumping and boiling. He’s jumped out and Noye’s jumped out and Noye’s not a spring chicken and he’s probably getting a hiding, know what I mean? And unfortunately he lashed out with a knife, but he’s paying the price now, ain’t he? The papers and the police made a meal of it. No disrespect to the kid who’s dead, but if it was anyone else but Noye I doubt if it would have made the papers.’
Did O’Mahoney know Noye?
I only met Noye twice. Noye was a very good friend of Pat Tate, he met Pat in prison. Pat was working in the gym and Kenny had a fair bit of money he wanted to invest because he had too much around him at the time, gold.
Pat came out of prison and wanted a bit of capital to get going again and he asked Kenny for thirty grand, which isn’t a lot for Kenny. I went down with Pat to meet Ken in a pub near the raceway in Kent, Brands Hatch. He gave Pat the thirty grand and I think Pat never paid him back, true to form. Noye seemed an all right feller to me.
A mild, warm afternoon. An empty car park. Overlooking the A13. Starlings mass on telegraph wires. Whomes and O’Mahoney are in total agreement: the Rettenden killings, as described, are a convenient fiction.
O’Mahoney: ‘It’s bullshit. It’s total bullshit. I’ll put my life on it. I know for a fact that Jack Whomes and Steele did not kill those people. Everybody knows that it was the people from Canning Town.’
Whomes: ‘Those three men were shot by a marksman, an absolute precise marksman. I’ve seen every bit of evidence in the case. I’ve seen all the photographs – and they’re horrific, absolutely horrific. You have nightmares about the photographs, but you have to look, because it’s your brother there. I look at the photographs and I think they’re saying my brother did this. And I know my brother. I’ve been brought up with him. I’ve got four brothers, all close together, and there’s no way my brother could have carried that out. He wouldn’t even kill a sparrow.’
John Whomes understands: it always comes back to photographs and memory. The Rettenden killings are summarised by the image of a Range Rover parked in a country lane. Whomes had to market an alternative clip: the gantry at Junction 30. The white sheet with the painted words: FREE THEM NOW.
‘I wanted to cause a protest,’ he said. ‘They would use the footage of me up on the M25 instead of the Land Rover coming out of the lane. When they want to refer to Rettenden, they’ll have to refer back to me on the M25.’
The motorway, he knew, offered maximum visibility; ten lanes of traffic slowing to a standstill. Nothing else to look at. JACK WHOMES. INNOCENT OF RETTENDEN MURDERS. ‘People were going past, bleeping their horns, waving, putting their thumbs up. It was brilliant. It worked brilliantly.’
The two protesters stayed on the gantry, as on the bridge of a battleship; they were there from seven a.m. until lunchtime. The stunt, unlike Bill Drummond’s conceptualist scam, his dead cows hung from a pylon, worked: wide coverage, popular support. And there was an unlooked for bonus: seven hours of landscape vision, seven hours of shifting light and weather.
‘It was a strange thing, we were up there, and as you know the M25 is up and down, you can hardly hear yourself think… We were chaining ourselves up, wrapping tape to protect the gantry – and, all of a sudden, my mate Peter said, “Look what’s happened.” And it was just… you could hear a pin drop. They’d shut the road off and it wasn’t a noise at all. It was quiet. And then I thought to myself, well, that’s power. That’s a little bit of control. Now I’m in the driving seat. Now they’ve got to listen to me. It was lovely up there. It’s a wonderful road.’
Nobody, since Margaret Thatcher cut the ribbon, has known such silence. Gulls on the landfill tip. The tick of cooling engines. A lull during which the ugly ground at the road’s edge could reassert its identity.
‘You’ve got eight miles of tailback,’ Whomes said, ‘right back to the A127.’ Nothing moving. A phantom funeral procession for the ghastly Range Rover. A golden day to remember: from buying the chains at B&Q, to standing on the gantry, to being taken away in the police car. The John Whomes protest, the Swanky road rage killing, the cutting of the ribbon. Dominant images by which the memory-theatre of the M25 counters general paralysis, boredom. Iconic episodes that give structure to our amnesiac circuit.
3
Tucked under the neck of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge is the ibis (lower case) hotel. On closer inspection, the ibis functions as a no-case stopover for French truckers, for migrants who are never comfortable out of reach of the motorway’s acoustic footsteps. The ibis is trilingual: French, German and Franglais. Its symbol is a drooping opium poppy. Not the vulgar Remembrance Day badge tacked to the side of the absent Lord Archer’s Lambeth penthouse, but something limp and fin-de-siècle.
The romance of trafficking enlivens the franchise. The ibis is a legitimate operation, but its proximity to the road, its slightly suspect Francophile courtesy (‘naturally, we remain at your service day and night’), lets it fly a Casablancan flag of convenience. Rick’s Café rented out to Little Chef. The restaurant area has more wine than food; you write your selection on a pad, then wait. Customers, in small tight groups, or solitary and watchful, are universally tired. An elevated TV monitor seems to be fixated on winter sports, ski jumps. Without sound. A leap into thin air: Beckton Alp or the Thurrock ramp favoured by police for pulling drug couriers.
There are other ibis hotels at Heathrow and Docklands. The look is Las Vegas-Egyptian, sand-coloured, sharp-edged. The franchise sees the world as a desert. They serve the camel routes, in the shadow of motorway dunes and flight paths. The ibis, in Egyptian mythology, is a symbol of the soul (the soul of the M25). The morning. The ibis is sacred to Thoth. The ibis bird is sometimes depicted with the crescent moon on its head, signalling a connection to the watery element.
West-facing rooms in the Thurrock ibis look straight out on the motorway, the run to the bridge. Nowhere better for that Dr Seward moment, sunset over the Esso oil tanks, the paddocks of cars; a soul-shuddering epiphany in the cell of a fly-eating lunatic. Rooms in the ibis are cells – clean, anonymous, step-in power-showers. Motorway pilgrims are drawn to the site. I visited the heavily pregnant Effie Paleologou when she carried out her twenty-four-hour ‘labour’, photographing the road from a fixed position, one shot per hour. Random TV (a silent Blair and Hague). A DeLillo ghost story. Snatched sleep.
A Zurich-based architect, Liat Uziyel, undertaking a memory-retrieval project (begun with a battered London A-Z, found in Whitechapel), conceived a building that would wrap itself around the road. A self-curating museum of dreams. The walls of Uziyel’s house of memory would be of varying thickness; sometimes solid and sometimes thin as paper. Sensors would be triggered by passing traffic. Pilgrims, who had walked to this place from the city, would cleanse themselves, before lying in alcoves; or secreting objects, handwritten messages, in apertures. The M25, Liat decided, was about erasure.
The ibis hotel was the manifestation of her vision. The noise of the road invaded sleep, penetrating the double-glazing, sending a shudder through the spine. In their furnished cells, transients scoured themselves under jets of water, just a few yards from the cabs of long-distance hauliers.
Women were drawn to the ibis, the incubation cubicles. They recognised the underlying agenda, the therapeutic
prescription. The ibis dealt in elective amnesia, retreat and renewal. In every room there was a ‘Satisfaction Contract’, a ‘Keep Cool’ card that spelt out a three-step programme for the solving of mental or spiritual difficulties. ‘If, however, within 15 minutes your problem isn’t solved, we will pick up the bill.’ The ibis is a Zen centre, a monastery of the motorway. Five minutes in the lotus position, breathing deeply. Five minutes to tone up. Five minutes to relax, knees against chest. That’s it. Back to the road, refreshed. Ready to sell.
When Renchi and I walked up the bicycle lane and on to the bridge, police cars surrounded us. ‘You know you can’t cross over.’ We know. The 50 mph warning lights are flashing. Road spray soaks us. We set off in the direction of Lakeside.
Lakeside is older than Bluewater, but it’s based on the same geology: chalk. Quarrying, then defensive structures, tunnels, forts, redoubts. The fear of invasion evolves into invasion-soliciting technology, business parks and retail landfill. Lakeside has been a TV docusoap and now it’s an antiquated rehearsal for Bluewater. With its sorry Mississippi riverboat, its puddle of water, Lakeside is Mark Twain in an H.G. Wells culture.
What I like about Lakeside is the sprawl, the impossibility of navigating a path through its convoluted possibilities. They block roads, force you to detour. The retail experience is a kind of treasure hunt, a rally without maps. You get the maps, as prizes, when you achieve your destination. The maps are unreadable: a lake, a riverboat, pink grey green blue areas. House of Fraser, BhS, Bentalls, C&A, Argos, Boots, Marks & Spencer. Nobody knows how it works. You might spot Ikea on the horizon, but you’ll never find the secret entrance. Not the first time. (And if you do make it, you need a native guide to explain the system. The sets, mock-up offices and kitchens and bedrooms, which are not for sale. The huge, healthy Swedish hike through pine furniture is compulsory, a training regime before you’re allowed into the warehouse. What fascinated me were the books: real books in fake rooms, rows and rows and rows of Swedish editions of Patricia Highsmith.)
London Orbital Page 50
