Step by Step

by Simon Reeve

  At the end of the 1990s both of us were also reconciled with our dad, despite all that had gone on between us. He had retired from teaching and become calmer and less combative. He no longer treated us like irritating kids. He talked to us like adults, and we became friends. We all spent time together, went for day trips together and on holidays. I remember James and I taking him to see Saving Private Ryan at a cinema on the King’s Road in Chelsea. I drove us all there but then couldn’t find anywhere to park. I offered to drop them off.

  ‘No, let’s stick together,’ said Dad, smiling. He was savouring a moment with his sons.

  We had to park half a mile away, and the film was about to start. We all ran together through the streets, jokingly encouraging each other onwards. We arrived, glowing with sweat. Dad was just beaming with joy and pure delight. At that point, at that moment, more than ever, we felt bonded, and together.

  And then after a brief period of illness he was diagnosed with cancer. He became mortal, in all our eyes. It was heart-wrenching, of course, but like so many others we found that illness brought us even closer together as a family and encouraged final forgiveness on all sides. James and I went with Dad and Mum for his diagnosis at Hammersmith Hospital. We held hands together. We cried. James and I were often able to go with him for the interminable rounds of chemo that followed. He seemed to be improving.

  I had been working on another book, about the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes and officials. Called One Day in September, the book was researched and written in parallel with a documentary feature movie of the same title which went on to win an Oscar for best feature documentary. My book, subtitled The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israeli Revenge Operation ‘Wrath of God’, was published in 2000. Shortly afterwards Dad’s sickness worsened. I had been on a book tour of the US, flitting from city to city with my then girlfriend, who was effectively my fiancée. We had planned to go south to Florida for a few days in the sun. I called home from JFK Airport in New York and spoke to Dad.

  ‘It’s not good news, I’m afraid, son,’ he said, trying to sound calm. ‘The cancer is back, and it seems to be really aggressive.’

  It was a hammer blow. I put down the phone, changed our tickets right there and caught the first flight home. I moved my office into a tiny room at our family home so I could be around him as much as possible and help Mum to take care of him. We did everything we could, garnered second opinions and tried all manner of treatments and a few quack ideas but nothing had any effect.

  He kept telling James and me how proud he was of us. I reminded Dad how he had spotted the advert in the newspaper that kick-started my little journey. I made sure he knew that without his encouragement I would probably never have made anything of my life. I knew and I know he always loved me.

  By the spring of 2001 he was largely bedridden. Soon he could no longer make it up the stairs and we had to set up his bed in the lounge. My dad was a strong man, but towards the end he sank fast. It was devastating to watch.

  I wrote the following in haste the day he died. It is perhaps the most deeply personal moment of life I can share, but we are too private about both the tragedy and beauty of death.

  On the morning of 28th June I arrived at Mum and Dad’s just after 11 a.m., made a few phone calls, did a little tidying, and woke up James, who was asleep upstairs in his old bedroom, trying to stay close to Dad. We knew the end was coming. I was on the phone to a funeral director when Mum shouted we should come quickly because Dad was going.

  I ran into the lounge, and it was obvious Dad was on his last legs. He was sitting up slightly in the bed, resting against my large blue cushion, with Mum sitting by his legs and James sitting on the other side of the bed. The whites of his eyes were turning yellow, and he was breathing slowly and with obvious difficulty.

  We sat with him, holding him, telling him loudly that we loved him, and surrounding him with family love. He kept his eyes focused ahead, looking at a photo of Mum, James and me that was stuck on the ceiling directly in front and above him.

  We asked him how he was, and he replied with just one word.

  ‘Wonderful.’

  It was the last word he ever said. We kept up a barrage of love, telling him he had been a great Dad and we would miss him forever, and then I said to him:

  ‘It’s OK. You can go now. It’s all right. Don’t fight it.’

  Dad winced twice, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth, and then he exhaled deeply. His life flowed out of his body.

  We cried, we hugged, and then I went out into the garden, cut some roses, and put them between his hands, which I folded across his chest. James rang 123 to get the right time, and we sobbed some more.

  Two hours later, we started to wash Dad, and dressed him in his best pants, vest, shirt, suit and tie. James buffed his shoes with polish and we carefully dressed his body. By the time we had finished our washing and dressing, he looked serene and peaceful.

  If a father has to die, it could not be more perfect than Dad’s passing. He looked beautiful, restful and content.

  I still think about him all the time. I just sobbed for an age when I found the note I wrote about his death buried in my computer. Grief is difficult. It should be difficult. Anna, my first serious girlfriend, taught me something vital. Her father died without warning, shot by a sniper. People would say to her things like: ‘Don’t worry, you will get over it. One day you’ll wake up and feel better, and you’ll face the world again.’ They were trying to be caring.

  ‘No, I won’t bloody get over it!’ she would say. ‘And no, I won’t wake up one morning and think, “Oh, everything is OK and it’s fine.” I don’t want to! My dad is dead!’

  She was adamant, and she was right, that all we can do is try to carry on. To accept. To incorporate death, grief and memory into our lives. People we love never leave us. They should never leave us.

  Losing my father was desperately traumatic. I miss him still. I have travelled the world and experienced countless cultures but nobody has since managed to change my view that while life can certainly be beautiful and memorable, it is also tragic and desperately, desperately unfair. Why is my father no longer around to see my extraordinary son? Why is there an empty hole in my family? I know he would love Anya my wife and adore my son Jake, his grandson. But knowing it is not enough. I miss him.

  We held his funeral at Acton Hill Church. The same church I had grown up in. Then we buried him in the cemetery. Two weeks later my then fiancée left the flat we shared near Ladbroke Grove in West London one morning and went off to work. I never saw her again. I called her that evening when she didn’t come home. At first, she didn’t pick up my call. When she finally answered, we talked briefly on the phone. She told me she had fallen in love with her boss. She mentioned the money he earned. She was sorry, but she was leaving me.

  I was devastated. We communicated by text and arranged for me to be out when she went back to the flat to collect her life. But that was it. We ended.

  It had been a difficult relationship, but it was another massive blow. I moped about the flat drinking heavily. Alcohol has never been my addiction, but I turned to it then, and I felt a deep trough opening in front of me.

  After losing my dad and my partner, that summer in 2001 was the closest I came to slipping back to where I was as a teenager, teetering on the edge of a bridge. My highs can be very high, but my lows are often still very low. I have never forgotten the feeling of the railings under my hands. The cold metal, the rush of traffic, the lorry horn. It is always within me. Always part of me. I was a slip away from tragedy. I know I am still.

  There have been many times since I was a desperate teenager when I have started to feel there was no hope, and no way out. But as I have aged, my experiences and, I think, adventures, have helped me to find comfort and solutions. As a tool for dealing with the lows I stick to my mantra. I put one foot in front of the other and take a step. I do something – anything.

/>   For many years in my early twenties, when I was in a hurry to make my life a success, thinking achievement would keep the dogs of depression from nipping at my heels, I had ‘MAFA’ written on a note pinned to my desk. It stood for ‘mistaking activity for achievement’ and was supposed to focus my mind on being productive rather than faffing. But then I realised, in moments of darkness, when I am staring into an abyss while going through the end of relationships and depression, for me at least, activity is achievement. Activity or movement, any movement, rewards me, lifting me up out of the rabbit hole.

  As I have aged, acceptance has also helped. Depressive thoughts will probably always be with me. The negative voices can be hushed, ignored, sometimes even laughed at. But doubtless they will always be at least an occasional background whisper. Like grief, my answer is to face them and take them with me. So many of us are taught to think of everything as black or white, happy or sad, depression or normality, high or low. Life has taught me so often that instead everything is just shades of grey. Every life and every journey shares tragedy with happiness and light with shade. Even a simple moment of joy. Because, like life, even a moment ends.

  That summer of 2001 I was older and just a tiny bit wiser. I had a breadth of experience to draw on. I stopped drinking after a couple of months, started going to the gym, and reassured myself that one day I would find my partner for life. In the meantime, I refused to stand still. I remembered what I’d done after saving myself on the bridge and recalled the still serenity when I stood on that summit in Glencoe. I climbed out of the trough.

  Looking back now, my fiancée leaving wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. The relationship was rocky. Marriage would almost certainly have ended in divorce. We wanted different lives. On our first date we met in a bar and she turned up wearing a fake fur coat and next to nothing underneath. Exciting, perhaps. But not exactly a guarantee of a stable relationship.

  But that summer was still exceptionally hard. My father had just died in my arms. My fiancée had walked out on me. My beloved grandma was also ill. In a few months she would sicken, and then she would die. I would race to West Middlesex Hospital on the edge of Brentford, driving on the wrong side of the road with my hazard lights flashing and jumping red lights, because I was so desperate to get there before she passed. But I didn’t make it. In a blink of a life my brother James, mother and I lost a vital part of our tiny family. We were devastated. I felt completely bereft.

  And then 9/11 happened. And I had written the only book in the world about the group behind the devastating attack.

  CHAPTER TEN

  9/11

  My phone rang. It was James. He sounded breathless, and disbelieving.

  ‘Si, have you got the TV on?’

  ‘No, why? What’s up?’

  ‘Turn on the TV, quickly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just turn on the TV.’

  I switched on. The first tower had been hit. The screen was full of smoke billowing above the New York city skyline.

  There was a mention of a plane. I knew immediately who was responsible. I felt instantly sickened to the pit of my stomach. I watched for a moment, then dropped the phone, ran to the bathroom and was physically sick.

  Everyone remembers what they were doing when those two planes hit the Twin Towers. What Ramzi Yousef had tried to do in 1993 bin Laden had finally accomplished. Everything I had feared had come true. My mind was racing. Sources, contacts, and meetings all flashed through my head.

  Like many others I was struck by the obscenity of the scene. By the clear blue sky, and the dart of a plane cruising almost casually into the side of the building. As tragedy but also as horrific drama, it was epic and unparalleled. Although I had no relatives in the buildings or on the planes it was a devastating shock. It was what I had researched and written about. I had warned it was only a matter of time but nobody had taken any notice.

  My phone began ringing off the hook before the second tower had been hit. It did not stop ringing for a year and a half.

  Initially I did not answer. I realised I had written the only book on al Qaeda and I knew every news desk in the world would be clamouring for someone, anyone, who could talk about what had happened. But this wasn’t a news event for me, it was personal. I knew people who worked in those towers, I had spoken to them after the first attack. I pictured the inside of the towers. I had spent hours walking around them, and many hours more talking with people who would have been inside when the planes hit. How many were dead? How many were stuck in the fire with no way to get free?

  Finally I answered the phone and was pitched into a media feeding frenzy. I couldn’t blame them; everyone was desperate to know what had happened, why it had happened, and who was responsible. Within an hour TV news crews found my supposedly secret address and were waiting outside my flat. By the end of the day a Brazilian and a Russian TV crew had each turned up at an apartment where I used to live. Meanwhile I was being shuttled between the studios of US news shows in London. Other people started calling me too, people who should have had their own experts to rely on. I answered one call to find Downing Street on the line requesting a meeting. I didn’t see Tony Blair, but I did put words into his mouth.

  I spoke to the government and security agencies. I said the same sort of thing to all of them. I didn’t have a redacted spiel for the media and a secret one for those in power. I was a writer, and I had laid out what I knew in a book. It was all public.

  Then I went to the States, where it was one studio after another, for interviews, comment and discussion. And to talk to the bosses of some of the same spooks and operators I had been following around Washington just a few years earlier. I met senior people from the White House, and had meetings, a lunch and a dinner with people who were portrayed in The West Wing. I advised them to go after the culprits hard but pursue terrorists as criminals wherever possible like the British had successfully in Northern Ireland, ultimately helping to bring peace to the Province. I also stressed how important it was to resolve the underlying issues that were driving people into the arms of militants, including the Arab-Israeli conflict and Western support for corrupt regimes in the Middle East. People nodded, and seemed to listen, but those seemed like intractable issues.

  One of the great tragedies of the post-9/11 world is actually that the US President didn’t use all of the power the crisis gave him. He could have said that not only was the US going to pursue the perpetrators to the ends of the earth, but that the attacks had also shown that the US and the Western world were too dependent on oil from the Middle East, that money from the sale of the oil was partly being used to fund terror, and that there must be a peace settlement in the Middle East.

  Sadly they didn’t listen. I remember having lunch with a close aide to President Bush in the iconic Old Ebbitt Grill restaurant, a fixture on the Washington scene since the 1850s, just steps from the White House. He was focused not on the need to resolve motivating issues, but on a plan to hunt down and kill everyone involved in the attack. I said I could understand that desire, but that if too much force was used, inevitably mistakes would be made, innocents would be killed, and more recruits would rally to al Qaeda. ‘We have no choice,’ he said. ‘They came to us. They attacked us here. It was an act of war. We have to hunt them down. We have to kill them. We have to put their heads on sticks.’

  I was twenty-nine, and I was sitting down and arguing with officials guiding and advising the leaders of the free world. Why did they want to talk to me? Few others had looked at the issue from multiple angles as I had. Few others, it turned out, had talked to militants, Pakistani experts, Western investigators and intelligence agencies. I was in an unusual position. There were certainly individual analysts who knew chapter and verse about specific issues, but very few had been required to join up the dots the way I needed to do for my investigation and book. Plus in the aftermath of 9/11 the leadership simply did not trust their own experts.

  It all became
very weird very quickly. Post-9/11 America was a strange and deeply wounded country. Quite frankly – understandably – people went a little crazy. More than once people became completely awed when they saw me.

  ‘You’re the guy,’ said one man, ‘the guy who knew, and we didn’t listen.’

  Two young women started crying in a restaurant. They literally just wanted to touch my arm. Another woman saw me, paled and backed away, as if I was the incarnation of her loss. The entire country was shocked, wounded and on edge. Some thought I was a prophet of some kind and that I had been able to foretell this tragedy. Others seemed to suspect I might have somehow been involved with the actual event. Profiles appeared in the press asking how this guy from Britain could have known what was going to happen that day in New York. I didn’t know it was going to happen, but my research had led me to believe they would attack massive targets. Past experience showed that when the group failed once, they would try again. Nobody should have been hugely surprised that after the 1993 bombing the WTC became a target again. Some of the victims’ groups were asking – if I had known – why had the authorities not done anything about it? I had several upsetting encounters with desperately sad people who had lost loved ones in the towers and were trying to make sense of their nightmare. As time passed other books came out claiming I must have been an MI6 agent because of the access I had secured in the States and the intelligence information I had been passed. I can categorically say I was not. I had certainly been asked to work for intelligence agencies, but that was inevitable in the world I was in.