by Lucy Ellmann
I found a little café called Saint something or other. Everything in Canterbury’s called Saint something. But this place was at least trying to be French in the manner to which I’m accustomed (coffee and croissants, though minus the Gauloises and Gallic charm). There I sat, reading the paper like I was some normal man, but the more I read, the more furious I got—with Bee, for getting herself into this! Couldn’t she have ducked? no. Just a few minutes either way, and it might never have happened. Why’d she have to go out on her bike that particular day, why that field?
The facts were these: Gareth Lode, a British soldier, had returned from Afghanistan to find that his ex-wife was refusing him access to their joint progeny, because of his violent outbursts in the past. Old girlfriends confirmed that he was violent—they’d reported him to the police years before. Lode was in trouble with the Army as well: he’d tortured too many prisoners, even by their standards, and his superiors considered him volatile and unpredictable. They’d warned the Canterbury police about him, saying that he was “nervy” and might do something weird. The police did nothing (of course).
Everybody was tiring of this asshole, in other words, but he wasn’t tired of being an asshole. So he stabbed and strangled his ex-wife in front of their children. The kids were next—neighbors heard them screaming and begging for mercy as he smothered them. Then he armed himself with a gun and went over to his mother’s house, somewhere in Canterbury, and shot her. A murderous tour around town followed, with Lode randomly shooting dozens of women in the street, mostly middle-aged women, always aiming for the face.
I knew from gun rampages in America that if a guy wants to do this, there’s no stopping him: you pretty much hand him the keys to the city and the Colonel Gaddafi Certificate of Permission to Wreak Mayhem. But it was still hard to believe that one guy had gotten away with this much death—“three years’ worth of murder in a single day,” as one paper put it. Afterwards, Lode hid in the woods, where he demonstrated several survival skills he’d learned in the Army before blowing his own brains out, surrounded by trigger-happy cops.
His last stand in the woods, along with his apparent hatred of women, had earned him his own little fan club, many of whom had raced to place garish bouquets and controversial condolence messages outside Lode’s Canterbury barracks, saying, “RIP Gareth,” and, “Gareth, you wuz wronged.” One guy traveled down from the North of England somewhere with his three sons to lay a wreath at the Lode shrine. He described it as a good day out for the kids, and educational! In his opinion, Lode had done what any man would do when pushed too far: explode.
But it was the newspapers’ exultation in the story that really got me. I wasn’t used to it: in America, this kind of crime gets one day of front-page coverage, tops, then it’s as if it never happened. It was now two days since the Canterbury event, and the papers were still slobbering over every detail, tracking the guy’s every move from birth to death, offering blow-by-blow, bullet-by-bullet chronologies of his progress, maps charting his route, “interactive graphics” (whatever they were), diagrams, satellite photos, and full-color pull-out sections to keep for posterity. Now and then, an editorial in which some lone fool asserted that there was no reason to tighten England’s already tight gun laws. No, of course not. Why deprive everybody of another massacre? The Queen’s beleaguered subjects need their entertainment.
The papers were thrilled with the death rate: they could barely contain their glee. “Savage” Lode had outdone many mass murderers of the past. By killing twenty people, twenty-one if you counted Lode himself, he “beat” all their previous gun massacres, “leaving the charming streets of Canterbury stained with blood.” The what? And the death rate might rise yet, they cheerily warned, given all the injured now screaming for their lives in a variety of charming hospitals.
They made a killing spree sound like a shopping spree! In fact, Lode himself had paused to pick up a new pair of trainers in the middle of it, while sales staff cowered in a corner.
Now came the tales of lucky escapes—people who’d sensibly hidden as Lode passed them on the street, people who’d been perilously close to the areas he covered, people who’d merely thought of going to Canterbury that day, and various characters who’d known Lode at some earlier point in his life. There were pictures of him as a baby, as a boy, and talk of his fixed stare, his many grievances, his money worries. What about my grief, my grievances, my fixed stare?
Lode’s brother had been unearthed and interviewed: he insisted Lode was one of the nicest “blokes” you could ever meet, who’d fought for his country while the divorce lawyers were giving away his visiting rights. It was all their mother’s fault, the brother said, for being severely depressed when they were young. He didn’t like Lode being described as “violent and controlling” either—to him Lode had been “sweet.” But isn’t beating up all your girlfriends, stabbing your wife, smothering your children, and shooting dozens of women in the face about as violent and controlling as a man can get?
With espresso-fueled nausea, I waded through these outlandish documents, not even sure what I was looking for. There was hardly a single reference to Bee individually. Compared to their exhaustive treatment of Lode, the description of his victims was perfunctory. They were defined by their ages and occupations: barmaid, housewife, hairdresser, Health Visitor, university lecturer, receptionist, waitress, sculptress… A treatment that seemed to reduce them to almost nothing—when they were people for godsake, people on whom other people counted! It really doesn’t matter if they were bookish or banal. They meant something to somebody, and to themselves. (Maybe even to a few pets, who’d now have to be rehomed or put down.)
everybody means something.
But at least we were spared all the claptrap American gun outrages inspire, with the candlelight vigils, extremist defenses of gun ownership (as if owning lethal weapons were a good thing, rather than an incontrovertible sign of barbarism), and mawkish talk of god. After the Tucson murders, Obama had to lay it on thick, with “Scripture tells us this” and “Scripture tells us that.” Everybody said it was his best speech ever! Come to think of it, there probably was some dumb religious rigmarole going on in that hokey cathedral of theirs—but I wouldn’t be going.
A young guy with long black hair and a face like the Mona Lisa sat down at an upright piano, in the corner of the café, that I hadn’t even noticed, and started playing 1960s tunes with some panache. The joint was jumpin’, in an English kind of way. Customers became more animated, clapping politely between numbers… and I felt myself relax for the first time since I heard of Bee’s death. Not because music is some goddam relaxant, but because it gave me another metaphysical plane to be on. I needed that more than coffee.
Any music was a help, but what I really wanted was Bach. So I struggled to my feet, went over and put a bit of money in the guy’s tips teacup on top of the piano. All I said was, “Bach,” and then sat down. But he didn’t play me any Bach. Maybe he didn’t do classical music, or he hadn’t heard me, or he never played requests. Whether I’d blundered into another faux pas was of little concern to me anymore, since I’d now spotted on the front of one of the papers a reference to an obituary of Bee. I turned to the appropriate page, trembling.
The American sculptor, Bridget Hanafan, who has died age 53 as a result of the mass killing in Canterbury on 23 May, produced some of the most appealing public sculptures of recent years.
Born in the American Midwest in 1958, Hanafan studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she gained a reputation early on as one of the foremost sculptors of her generation.
After a hiatus caused by an unhappy marriage, Hanafan started producing works in clay, culminating in her first one-woman show in 1994. Commissions for installations and public projects soon followed, along with a number of prestigious awards and fellowships.
Recently, Hanafan had relocated to Canterbury, in order to take up a post of artist-in-residence. There she enlarged on a series of assembla
ges begun in New York, which she dubbed Coziness Sculptures, life-size re-creations of domestic and rural scenes intended as “a glimpse of something good”. Hanafan was exploring sculpture as a means of contributing to a sense of well-being in the spectator.
By including lighting and audio elements as well as family heirlooms and other found materials, Hanafan combined an awareness of personal struggle with a delight in the textures of everyday life. In touching works that are autobiographical in nature, she promoted the pleasure principle, revealing a newly humane approach in contemporary art.
She continued to expand her range of techniques. Two carved stone figures by Hanafan were recently installed in an underwater setting in Canterbury’s River Stour. The grace and ingenuity of these pieces demonstrate an artist of burgeoning power, ambition and imagination, whose work was about to take off in a wholly new direction.
Hanafan was Gareth Lode’s final victim. She leaves a brother.
My sister, “humane”—I liked that. But I never knew she could carve stone! And what was with all these awards she never told me about? I folded the newspaper and tried to swallow some more coffee—but at that moment the pianist started playing Bach (a bit of Goldberg), and I had to hold the paper up to hide the tears streaming down my face.
Back in the hotel, I tried phoning Mimi and flushing the toilet. No answer from either. It occurred to me now that Mimi probably knew nothing about what had happened to Bee, given her aversion to the News. American coverage of this English disaster was no doubt scanty: we like our gun crime homegrown. I hadn’t even told Mimi Bee lived in Canterbury, as far as I could remember, just that she was in England somewhere.
I sank into a poky little armchair and watched the News myself, but it was all about the gunman and the government, and the way they pronounced “gunm’n” and “gubm’nt” sounded exactly the same, to surreal effect. I gave up, stuck a piece of Wrigley’s Dubm’nt in my mouth, and fell asleep.
Later, my cop picked me up and took me to Bee’s apartment (there was her studio at the art school to deal with too, when I was ready). Her home was on the first floor (ground floor) of a small row house in a grim part of town, but Bee had done her usual number on it. She was always amassing stuff from junk shops, or the gutter, I don’t know which, and the place was one big altar to ephemera—though, I admit, it was kind of cozy.
This was what Bee worshipped: shells, coins, leaves, flowers, champagne corks, here a doll’s arm, there a small chipped china dog on a velvet cushion, and a colorful African basket. A lot of old dark-blue medicine bottles decorated the window sills. And on a table, a tiny clay man was selling clay sausages on strings from a tiny stall. Bee’s collages and photographs adorned the walls. The smell of Bee was there too. I had to sit down for quite a while.
But what was I going to do with it all? Bee’s obituary-writer might have appreciated her taste for “heirlooms” and domesticity—but I was the guy who’d have to pack it all up, or give it away! The sadness of her medicine cabinet, or her fridge, equipped with coffee beans, and bread and cheese for grilled cheese sandwiches; the pile of dirty laundry. The innocent signs of someone in the midst of life, who didn’t expect to die. Depressingly, I found several fleece garments. I couldn’t imagine Bee ever wearing them! But that’s what poverty and a cold damp climate can do to a nice Manhattan chick. She was so cold. She once told me she had to wear her winter coat just to cook in that tiny kitchen.
I was cold too, and didn’t know how to work the heating system (if there was one). I also had a sense of shame, in invading my sister’s privacy. I needed air. I felt like I was being buried alive in there! I reeled out of the building, gasping, and walked around the block. At least it wasn’t raining. Instead, they were having what they deemed a “heat wave” (a few sunny days); this fine weather was often mentioned in the massacre reports. Much was made of the paradoxical(?) fact that dreadful things sometimes happen during clement weather. “The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day…” Were they all insane? Would the massacre be more comprehensible conducted in sleet? Or were they suggesting Lode had been maddened by the heat? (Another fine excuse.)
Bee had described to me the way they all rush outside whenever the sun comes out, drop everything for twenty minutes’ sunbathing, and turn bright pink. For Bee it explained all of England’s problems. “No concentration skills!” Ah, Bee.
I turned a corner—and came upon the martyrs’ memorial that had so rattled her. It wasn’t grand or very antique, just a small concrete obelisk with a Maltese cross on top, plonked on a mound of jagged stones in the middle of a miniature triangular park.
Everything in Canterbury’s tiny—except the murder rate. The place was made for midgets and maniacs!
The names of the forty-one martyrs were carved into the sides of the monument but, sure enough, two were listed merely as “Bradbridge’s widow” and “Wilson’s wife,” showing the disrespect that had infuriated Bee. To me, their anonymity gave these two women a kind of confederacy the other martyrs lacked. But they did seem somehow forlorn.
I walked on, past Fryer Tuck’s Fish & Chips (shut) and into a leafy lane that seemed almost bucolic in the sun, full of bumblebees and purple stinging nettles. I avoided getting stung by either and continued down the alley. It reminded me of one of Bee’s graveyard inscriptions I’d found among her papers:
WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH
PEACEFUL LANES SO GREEN
REMEMBER US AND THINK
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
I did.
They were speeding up the preliminary inquest and Bee’s autopsy for my benefit, so that I could take her ashes home with me. But it would be a few days yet. Meanwhile, I sorted through her stuff, arranged for it to be packed and shipped to my apartment, and settled her bills. Her landlady offered to give me back Bee’s deposit on the apartment, but I told her to keep it. This couldn’t be easy for her either, having a tenant get slaughtered.
Finally I went to the art school, explained who I was to a frightened secretary, and asked for access to Bee’s studio. Nobody knew what to say to me, nobody knew what to do with me in Canterbury (apart from the guy who played me Bach). It’s frightfully ticklish to have the brother of a murder victim hanging about. But after a long wait, they showed me into Bee’s studio and left me there.
My first tired reaction was one of horror, at the abundance of junk in there: I’d just have to get somebody to take it all straight to the city dump! There were stacks of wood, Perspex, corrugated iron, cardboard, and other materials. Bags of plaster, piles of cloth, lace, kelims, and other fancy items that might have belonged to one of Bee’s aborted Coziness Sculptures…
There was such a weight of work in there—it was like coming across Schubert’s unfinished symphony and wondering, What the hell? There were clay maquettes of sculptures Bee must have been planning to make, and many drawings and sketchbooks that I wanted to look at (later). And then, something I truly loved, positioned atop a grandiose plinth: the neat nest of some tiny bird, labeled with the words, “How cosy they must be.” This was something Auden had said, in response to seeing birds in a nest, and I’d told Bee about it (knowing how much she liked to be kept informed of all references to “coziness”). This heirloom I wrapped carefully in a lot of paper, to take home with me.
Then I made a list of what, as far as I could tell, needed to be done in there, and was about to go when I noticed something soft and white peeking out from behind a partition. I scrambled over some boxes and peered through a gap—and there was my mother’s bed!
Not the real one, no, that was long gone. This wasn’t life-size either, but bigger, so big that when I twisted my way through the gap in the partition and stood beside it, the bed was shoulder-height—just as Mom’s bed used to be when we were kids. Kind of spooky to find yourself suddenly dwarfed by your mother’s bed, forty years later. But it wasn’t icky, it was cozy! The bed was covered in the same kind of soft white knitted bedspread Mom always had but bigger, with
the same kind of corny bobbles all over it. I was tempted to bury my face in it, it looked so warm, so real.
I patted it to see if it really was as soft as it looked, and all I could think about was the crap Mom went through on that bed of hers, something only Bee and I could know; our kind mom who saw us through, for what good it did her. Her sad end came to mind, and her funeral. When I started wondering what Mom would have said, if she’d lived to know what happened to Bee… I laid my head against my mother’s bed and bawled like a baby.
I was accompanied to the inquest by my faithful policeman, who helped me push past the reporters at the door. “Keep those reporters away from me or I’ll kill them,” I told him.
The inquest was handled with unexpected kindness, but they couldn’t save me from the results of the autopsy. Even though I’m a doctor, I’d never expected to have my sister’s entrails described—all to confirm that she had died instantly as the result of a bullet to the head, which had passed through both hemispheres of the brain, causing the inevitable series of organ shutdowns.
I left the courtroom barely conscious, shaking all over. It would have been a good time to shoot me: I couldn’t have defended myself. It was then that an enterprising journalist sidled up and asked me if the inquest had proved conclusive or provided “closure”. I pushed the bastard away.
“You want closure. I want my sister!”
I hoped I’d be all alone at the crematorium, but a few of Bee’s friends turned up, whom she’d never told me about: three women who taught at Kent University and hated it, for reasons they were too furious to go into. They took me to a pub, where an unseen parrot squawked all evening; I could barely speak at all. They bought champagne and told me great stuff about Bee, fun stuff. We didn’t talk about Lode.