by Amis, Martin
It was indeed Inez, and she had started as she meant to continue; but I sensed that she lacked the stamina to detain me for very long. And she soon quietened in my arms, only giving the occasional weak quack (just meant to keep me there)…The younger son, Gus, had had childhood asthma, and every other night for two or three years I administered the dose with the electric nebuliser, sessions in a blacked-out room that went on for an hour and sometimes twice that, with the threadily wheezing boy on my lap. So this was nothing; and in those days I was seldom bored or daunted by the company of my own thoughts – nor was I now, even on September 12. With Elena, the act of full disclosure always brought a measure of relief: the difficulty, the confused order of things, was now under competent supervision…As I lay there holding Inez my mind even felt free enough to indulge a hard-wearing memory from the time of my earlier marriage: repeatedly circumnavigating the little roundabout at the end of the street in twilight, holding hands with Gus (also, then, a two-year-old), who was trying out his first pair of real shoes, proper shoes of the kind someone older and taller might wear; every couple of yards he stopped and smiled upwards with eye-closing exultation and pride.
Inez’s swaddled body gave a pulse (a silent hiccup), and went still.
‘This is bullshit,’ Elena was already saying as he re-entered the kitchen. She had loaded the dishwasher and was drying her hands with a tea towel. ‘It’s all lies. No. It’s nearly all lies.’
There was a certain shaky levity in her voice that put him on his guard. ‘Tell me what to believe. Let’s go through it, and you tell me what I’m supposed to believe.’
She sat. ‘If we must…Then the whole story came out, writes Phoebe. “Story” is correct. It all went back to the Christmas of 1948 and a place called “Mariners Cottage” quotation marks near a town called Ainsham. Have I spelt that correctly? Has she? A-i-n-s-h-a-m.’
‘Almost. It’s Eynsham with an E-y. And Marriner’s Cottage is double-r with an apostrophe. I checked. Otherwise accurate. She could’ve got all this from the biography, but if she’d done that you’d think she’d spell the names right.’
‘Not necessarily. Not if she’s really clever. Kingsley and Hilly were going through a very rocky patch. He was in love with a student of his called Verna David. Ring a bell? Does it?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Maybe an ex-student by that time. Still. And yes I know. A grave abuse of trust. But you were more or less allowed to, in 1948.’
‘Not just in 1948. All my professors made passes at me and all my friends,’ said Elena. ‘Thirty years later.’
‘…I knew Verna.’ His early years were full of Verna, and her husband too (and they were both warm and welcome presences). ‘Verna was bright and very pretty. It was a big thing, but she somehow never fell out with Mum. Verna came to Kingsley’s memorial service. I introduced you. Remember?’
‘No. On the day before Christmas Eve your parents had a blazing row and he went off with a suitcase to Verna David. So there was your mother left alone for the “holiday”, left alone with the baby in a wasteland of village idiots. The baby was Nicolas, right? How old?’
‘Four months. And in those days, Elena, right through to New Year’s Day the world just curled up and died. You’d get the creeps if it happened now – no open shops, no lit lights. At Christmas England just curled up and blacked out.’
Elena was studying the envelope. His name – no stamp, no postmark. ‘Did she hand-deliver this?…You know, maybe she is really clever.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘She knows as well as I do how credulous you are.’
‘Oi.’
‘Now you listen. How impressionable you are. How easily swayed.’
‘Oi.’
‘How obsessive. You are. Especially when something like this happens – a world event. That you think only you are really registering. If I’d been her I would have struck today. To get you while you’re in shock. All wobbly and doomed.
‘New para. Ah here we are. All alone with the baby over Christmas. In a hayrick somewhere. Having been dumped by her husband. So, not surprisingly, your mother decided to retaliate. Good for her! exclamation mark. She sent a telegram to the poet from Hell.
‘Yeah,’ said Elena. ‘Your Phoebe picked the right day for it. The day after.’
*1 A technical point. Poetry and fiction are silent. As J. S. Mill put it, the literary voice is not ‘heard’; it is ‘overheard’; it is a soliloquy addressed to no audience; it has no designs on anyone…All opinion journalism, including literary journalism (and most literary criticism), is an argument that seeks to persuade; coming ex cathedra (from the pulpit), it is pedagogic, it is ‘interested’, and it demands the loan of your ears…This rather exalted distinction is not so much purist as idealist in tendency; it doesn’t apply to those who sit down with the express intention of producing a Bestseller, or a Masterpiece.
*2 Later that week I compared notes with a much younger novelist, and I asked her, I asked Zadie, ‘Do you feel the pointlessness of everything you’ve ever written and everything you’ll ever write?’ And she said, ‘Yes. Yes, at first I did. But then your fighting spirit gets going…’ This was true, and there was much to fight against: the opposition of forces and goals could hardly be plainer, could it – a matter of ‘everything I love’ versus ‘everything I hate’ (as Salman wrote in the New York Times). I could fight in the pages of the Guardian; but what could anyone fight for in (or with) fiction?…Christopher, incidentally, wrote about September 11 on September 11, September 12, September 13, September 20, October 8, October 15, October 22, and November 29, and went on writing about it in Hitch-22 (2008) and Arguably (2010) and elsewhere.
*3 ‘I know what fascism is,’ I might have answered him, ‘but what’s Islam?’ Everyone had at least heard of Islam, of course, but no non-specialist had heard of Islamism. And over the next weeks the bestseller lists of the First World hurriedly filled up with books on Islam (more than one of them by Bernard Lewis), as we very logically sought illumination about our new enemy. Far from ever wanting to ‘destroy’ Islam (as its leading voices claimed), the West needed to find out what Islam was…In media usage ‘fascism with an Islamic face’ became ‘the unsatisfactory term “Islamofascism” ’ (Hitch-22).
*4 ‘9–11-01. THIS IS NEXT,’ began the note included in the first of the anthrax letters, six days later (September 18): ‘TAKE PENACILIN NOW. / DEATH TO AMERICA. / DEATH TO ISRAEL. / ALLAH IS GREAT’…The anthrax letters killed five people and infected fifteen (and they cost the government $1 billion in cleanup and decontamination). Furthermore, they suffused the heart of every First Worlder with another sepsis of impotence and dread…It eventually turned out that the perpetrator was a man called Bruce Ivins, who worked in the national biodefence labs in Maryland. Ivins had a long history of mental ‘episodes’, suffering from a paranoia of pride as much as persecution (a committed threatener and feuder); he was thoroughly mixed-up all right, but he was neither foreign nor especially religious (‘penacilin’ and ‘Allah is great’ were mere chaff). Unapprehended by the law, Ivins went on a one-man suicide mission in July 2008.
*5 Beyond establishing the bare outlines, I had never really talked about it with Phoebe, either – and wouldn’t do so with any candour until 2017 (at which point she was seventy-five); as I had always subliminally supposed it must, the case history involved an additional and ulterior element of moral horror.
*6 Kingsley, whose third novel was called I Like It Here (1958), was never much of a traveller. In addition he couldn’t fly, he couldn’t drive, he couldn’t take a train or a subway unescorted, and he couldn’t be left alone in a house after dark without the company of close family or very old friends. Hence ‘Dadsitting’: his three children managed it by rotation. The system was institutionalised after Jane left him in December 1980.
*7 In Spain, at least, Parfait Amour enjoys a folkish reputation as an ap
hrodisiac. Whenever Hilly ordered it her husband was jovially nudged and elbowed by the waiters…That third husband of hers, my beloved and long-serving stepfather, was called Ali and he would later work as a postman. Which sounds promisingly egalitarian. Ali had no money or land or anything like that, but his full name was Alistair Ivor Gilbert Boyd and he was the seventh Baron Kilmarnock…A few months after Jane bolted, Hilly and Ali moved in with Kingsley as housekeepers, and this unlikely arrangement stood firm until his death in 1995.
Chapter 3
September 11
2: The day before the day after
The second plane
Look, now, at the filmic record of that morning. The live coverage starts just before 8.46 a.m. and what you see is a shockingly, a chasteningly bright blue sky. Yes, a strong blue sky – but an innocent sky.*1 An innocent sky, one that even in its worst dreams had never imagined anything like…
Until 8.46 that morning, or more precisely until 9.03, travellers were arriving at American airports with leisurely tardiness; and they were all right. For domestic flights, at least, they needed no photo ID; they kept their shoes and jackets on, their quarts of shampoo went unconfiscated; they strolled to the gate with non-travelling family or friends, paring their nails (if they felt like it) with Swiss Army knives, unfrisked, unblessed by the security rod…They were on the old schedule, and they were all right.
The sky humming in its blue, the leonine sun (‘Heat is the echo of your / Gold’, Larkin, ‘Solar’), the first of the two planes (they are both Boeing 767s out of Boston) – its unignorable roar, its apparently frictionless disappearance into the North Tower, ‘Holy SHIT!’ Is it an accident? This possibility, this ‘theory’, had a short life: it was noisily and gaudily refuted seventeen minutes later. And soon we see the second plane homing in like a cartoon hornet over the stocky black skyscape of downtown.
The public archive has only one shot of the impact of the first plane (hand-held, sudden, veering); by contrast, there are thirty different angles for the impact of the second (this was a component of Osama’s plan). Some are network-professional, some are semi-amateur, some are soundless, some erupt in shrieked obscenities, some just falter on…
‘Then it must be – deliberate,’ says a female voice; ‘So it’s – on purpose,’ says another female voice…‘That’s terrorist shit, man,’ says a male African American with decisive conviction. He said this on the dot of 9.03 – twenty-eight minutes before President Bush, speaking from Florida, rather more cautiously gave voice (‘an apparent terrorist attack’) to the same opinion. No, not happenstance, and certainly not double happenstance…
And one other thing. What you’re watching is mass murder, but it is also multiple suicide. We are often shown death or its aftermath (warning: some viewers may find…), but we are never shown suicide. We were not shown the atomisations of the ‘skydivers’; we are never shown suicide bombers as they self-detonate – we are not shown ‘martyrdom operations’: over suicide a veil is quietly drawn.*2
There were many suicides on September 11. The overwhelming majority were the jumpers, the leapers (roughly 200 of them) – and they were only nominal suicides; they were people who very suddenly had to choose between one form of death and another. Those plummeting figures represented the outer limits of pathos and despair. And meaninglessness, too: they were not dying for any reason they knew about…Those at the controls of the fourth plane, its black box tells us, spent their last seconds (before they ditched United 93 in some pastureland in Pennsylvania) hesitantly chanting God is great. They hadn’t found their appointed target. Imagine, then, the fervent chorus in the cockpit of United 175, whose immolation (seen from thirty vantage points) was unmistakably triumphal and ecstatic.
…So here was a new kind of enemy: preternaturally innovative, daring, and disciplined, and not at all afraid to die. So it seemed to us, in September 2001.
GMT
It was 08.46 Eastern Standard Time (EST) when the first plane struck the North Tower. At that moment, over in London, it was 13.46 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – or, more grandly, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – and I was gazing admiringly and proudly and relatively innocently at the discoloured knuckle on my right hand. Yes, that wound of mine, received as I said in mid-July (through unemphatic contact with a brick wall), was doing wonderfully well: take a good look at the dime-sized scab (don’t stint yourself), with its resilient ridges; in a few weeks it would surely wither away or just drop off, putting me well on the road to perfect manual health. Yes, my wound was set to disappear more or less without trace by Christmas or even as early as Halloween…
Someone working in the yard at the rear of the house had his radio on, and the gaily babbling voice abruptly modulated into a tone of mature concern. I went to the window and listened. Reports were coming in that ‘a light plane’ had ‘collided’ with a building in Lower Manhattan. At that point the words were overwhelmed and scattered by two rival city noisemakers (chainsaw, car alarm), and after a while I went back to the desk and the exercise book. But my mood was wrong – meaning I couldn’t seem to get in touch with the novel I was trying to write.
So I went to the kitchen and activated the kettle, and the TV. It had just gone two. Now before me, on the screen, was a thing I’d never encountered before – an aircraft looking and behaving like an animal, like a cross between a carnivorous bull and an ink-black shark, seeming to rear up in greedy anticipation before putting its head down for the urgent rush of the charge…It was of course the second plane, and that jolt it gave (I later thought) was a reflex of the pilot, Marwan al-Shehhi, as he saw the achievement of his predecessor, Muhammad Atta. In the very last second before contact with the South Tower, with a quixotic flourish the second plane tipped its wings from the horizontal to the near-vertical – an angle of perhaps forty-five degrees.*3 And soon both buildings would wear lantern-jawed grins with oily black smoke frothing out of them.
Seconds later the telephone rang. It was Dan Franklin, my editor – publisher at Jonathan Cape, with some queries about the paperback of a collection of essays that had appeared earlier in the year. And why would anybody want to know anything about that? The collection – dismayingly it now seemed – was called The War Against Cliché. And who cared about cliché?
‘Are you happy with the quotes? I wanted the LRB on the front cover, but they –’
‘Dan,’ I said. ‘Two passenger jets have just crashed into the World Trade Center…Thousands dead. Nobody knows how many thousand.’
I called home as I watched the first Tower coming down. Elena was calling home too – the house of her childhood, her mother’s house in Lower Manhattan (and there was also Elena’s sister and brother, both nearby). We talked at length about organising the girls, and about shopping, and about having what used to be known as a quiet night in.
I called Washington DC, and got the machine – but Christopher, I remembered, was on the road somewhere in the west. Washington DC had also been attacked, by the third plane, which was flying so low, a witness said, that it seemed to be driving to the Pentagon (and driving at 500 mph). I had another look at New York. Manhattan was barely visible beneath the fouled sky. Manhattan had gone under.
I called a couple of friends in SoHo and got dead lines.
All off
It was Tuesday. And at four o’clock every Tuesday (and every Thursday) I attended an exercise class in Notting Hill Gate. So I thought I might as well act normally, and there seemed no point in not going…On my way out I had another brief session with my scab; whereas the carapace, the protective crust, gave no pain when I prodded it, the ambient area, I found, was still stringently tender to the touch.
Then I walked down the cobbled mews and under the arch and out into the street. Early autumn, and no weather to speak of, no weather one way or the other. As I passed the primary school on Elbury Avenue I slowed and slowly rocked to a halt. The children were being given a fi
nal flail in the playground, and I was abruptly riveted by the texture of the noise they made. This was the noise of ingenuous energy and excitation; but it now sounded like mass panic – a ragged crackle as loud as their lungs could make it…
At the crossroads again I paused, and stayed there for two or three cycles of the traffic lights. It seemed a curious arrangement – with the cars: how they stopped and patiently crouched in position when the lights went red, then crept meekly forward when the lights went green.*4 From where I stood on the kerb it felt waywardly literalistic, almost whimsically quaint, to heed the dictates of the lime, the gold, the rose. An anoraked youth on a bicycle was approaching with an arm trustfully out-thrust, dramatising his firm intention of turning left…
The users of the thoroughfare had not yet absorbed the other lesson of that particular day. That lesson was about the pitiful flimsiness of all prohibitions.
When I’d done my pilates, when I’d waved my arms about and flexed and wiggled my legs in the air and performed ‘the sock stretch’ (so you can still get shod when you’re eighty), I headed for the Sun in Splendour, as normal, to join up with my pubmates Mike and Steve, to drink beer and smoke cigarettes (a process that Steve, the older of the two, forgivingly called ‘retox’) and play the Knowledge. Nothing much was said when I joined them, on September 11; we communicated with flat smiles and with little upward jerks of the chin. Then we shrugged and ordered our pints and (as we normally did) moved to the brick-red slab of the Knowledge.
With the Knowledge, you insert the pound coin, and the screen flares into a map of the world (vividly modelled on Risk – one of the most addictive boardgames of my childhood); you advance from your assigned starting point, Poland, say, or Peru, and you try to invade contiguous countries by answering three multiple-choice questions (and getting on the road to winning a small cash prize). After half an hour, and after much failure, we were poised to complete the conquest of Irkutsk (worth two quid), and had only one more question to go. Now the screen said: