Flesh and Blood

by Stephen McGann

  I saw a father, shocked dumb, carrying his young child, the limbs hanging limply: a scarf-clad pietà. Denim-clad teenagers weaving in and out of the line of policemen tore the advertising hoardings from the walls for use as makeshift stretchers. The policemen, watching, hesitated. Should they arrest these delinquents for vandalism? The grim absurdity of their position began to insinuate itself into their ranks. First one broke. Then another. Humanity reasserted itself against obedience. The police began to help the dying and the dead. Yet the ambulances still did not come.

  The bodies of suffocated victims were lined up in front of the North Stand, feet from where we stood. A row of corpses stretched along the turf – burgundy cheeks and hands like a grim smear on the vibrant green. Postmortem hypostasis is an intense purple-red discolouration of the superficial layers of the skin due to reduced haemoglobin in the blood. A garish ripening induced by oxygen starvation.

  We saw the St John’s Ambulance girls once more. They were standing on the edge of the pitch – pale and frozen with shock – clinging together for comfort as the horror danced around them. The young girl’s face, bleached white by savage experience, streaked with mute tears. My brother began to cry. Twisted sobs that fought against their own release. I didn’t cry then, although I would. Many times.

  I mourn the loss of many kinds of innocence that day – my own and that of others. I often think of those young ambulance women, and where they might be now. Their youth bestowed a fundamental right to triviality that the grotesque events had stolen. Their expected treatment of minor cuts or mild heat exposure had turned into a forced attendance at a massacre. Despite the many larger acts of injustice perpetrated that day, I regard their lost innocence as a vicious theft.

  It took hours before we were permitted to leave the ground. We were herded out of the twilit stadium in silence, and made our way towards the car. We needed to find a telephone. There had been no way to tell anyone we were safe. In an age before mobile phones, it was impossible to find a phone box within miles of the stadium that didn’t have a huge queue of supporters waiting to ring their loved ones. Our family had to endure the purgatory of the bereaved until we were a sufficient distance from events. Yet we knew we were the lucky ones. For many good families, that night marked the beginning of a torture that our own family would never have to experience.

  As Paul and I walked down a Sheffield backstreet, dazed by tragedy and wearing our scarves tight against the evening chill, we suddenly heard a shouted profanity above us, directed against supporters of Liverpool. Pieces of a paving stone were thrown from a high balcony in our direction. Shocked out of our daze, we ran for cover.

  Stones for the pestilent. The first of many.

  *

  Four days later. I’m lying in my bedsit flat in Kilburn, London. The days since the disaster have been spent in a distracting anxiety. I can still hear that persistent low roar of human shock mixed with confusion like tinnitus in my ears. The world I knew the previous week has been subverted – the soft borders of my life whetted into a sharper kind of edge. Every day I walk to the newsagent’s and purchase a pile of newspapers, scouring the reports on the aftermath for evidence of a deeper sense or purpose – an explanation that will clothe the horror I witnessed in the more merciful funeral garments of a shared human tragedy.

  As I walk into the newsagent’s that morning, the front page of the Sun screams at me from the newsstand.

  THE TRUTH

  Some fans picked pockets of victims

  Some fans urinated on the brave cops

  Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life

  It takes a few seconds for the enormity of the allegations to sink in. I pick up the newspaper.

  In one shameful episode, a gang of Liverpool fans noticed the blouse of a girl trampled to death in the crush had risen above her breasts. As a policeman struggled in vain to revive her, they jeered: ‘Throw her up here, we will her.’

  The letters are coyly blanked out, but the meaning is clear. Fuck. ‘We will fuck her.’ Liverpool supporters are being accused of joking about having sex with a trampled corpse as the dead bodies of their own supporters and families lay all around them. It’s a libel so grotesque it stops my breath. But so bold. So confident. On the front page of the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain. And directed, by association, at me, one of those ‘shameful’ Liverpool fans.

  A year after this now-infamous front page, journalists Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie described the events that led to its publication. They said that editor Kelvin MacKenzie had hesitated over the headline,* as he knew that to print such unsupported allegations beneath a claim of ‘THE TRUTH’ was a dangerous and provocative attack on part of his own readership – many of whom were currently burying their dead. Yet he went ahead.

  More revealing, perhaps, was that they said he’d originally planned to use an even more provocative headline, but had been persuaded against it. The original headline read:

  ‘YOU SCUM.’

  ‘Scum’ is one of the harshest insults in modern British urban slang. It’s short for ‘the scum of the earth’, an expression defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as referring to ‘the worst type of people that can be imagined’. The word ‘scum’ itself references a filthy layer of dirt that forms on top of a liquid.

  © Sun/News Syndication

  An insoluble, pestilential and disposable waste product.

  *

  The Hillsborough football disaster is a scar on Britain’s public life. It was the worst disaster in British sport, with ninety-six fatalities – and it ultimately became one of its most protracted and painful scandals. This was due to a long-term institutional failure to establish the true cause and correct responsibility for those deaths. The cause of the tragedy was a catastrophic failure of crowd management by senior members of the South Yorkshire Police service who’d been responsible for safety that day. In order to deflect blame, officers had deliberately leaked misinformation to the press. They claimed that Liverpool fans had caused the tragedy by their own drunken behaviour and actions – even accusing these fans of urinating on police officers and picking the pockets of their own dead. The accusations were grotesquely false; not simply insulting to the lives and families of those killed, but also to the many Liverpool supporters who had helped security personnel to stretcher victims away and give first aid.

  Yet the accusations resonated with the wider assumptions of the British public and media regarding the moral character of Liverpool fans. In contrast, the moral standing of those officers making the accusations seemed unimpeachable. The nation’s press therefore gave enthusiastic prominence to those false stories over the following days and months, and a hasty libel settled into an assumed truth. One publication, the London Evening Standard, blamed the ‘tribal passions’ of Liverpool supporters for causing the tragedy.

  Tribal passions. That incurable, pestilent tribe invoked again, more than a century later. Not simply a deadly event, but bound to the morality of the people who suffered it. Dr Duncan’s disparaging moral voice echoing across time.

  Despite an early report into the tragedy establishing that cause lay squarely with the police organisers, the libel continued and became established in the public mind. Politicians of all colours echoed this sentiment, rebuffing persistent calls for an independent inquiry. Despite the tireless campaigning of organisations like the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, the lies inflicted on the victims endured for an astonishing twenty-seven years. Eventually, in 2016, an exhaustive independent inquiry finally established the real truth: that the only pestilent tribe to infect the moral health of our nation that day had been the powerful tribe that lied to conceal its own failures.

  Despite the many subsequent public apologies and reappraisals, there remains a small private scar in those events for me, scratched into my arm as a painful caution against future complacency. It’s a lesson on the nature of pestilence.

  One of the curious aspects of public prejudice against
any tribe is that it flattens out the many delicate human distinctions existing within that group. Liverpool Football Club is a cosmopolitan and globally supported team. At that football match were many different types of character: good people and bad, idle and industrious, off-duty policemen, the unemployed, lawyers, single parents, rich businessmen. Actors like myself. All humanity – yet compressed by the prejudice of others into a single pestilence. The second head of the beast.

  Hillsborough taught me that a stone can still be thrown down at my family from the higher balconies of the nation I love if those in positions of power have enough need of it. People like me can be slaughtered without adequate mercy, sympathy or redress. A libel can be freely perpetrated against those I love. This can be fuelled by the press, carried in the prejudices of the public, and sustained at the highest levels of public office.

  Despite a century of medical advancement and social improvement, my family remains a pestilence of convenience to a nation in need of a more accommodating explanation.

  *

  * Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale, Stick It Up Your Punter! The Rise and Fall of the Sun (Heinemann, 1990).

  3

  EXPOSURE

  Exposure n.

  1. A medical condition caused by prolonged contact with extremes of temperature or climate. (cf. Hypothermia, Frostbite)

  2. The introduction of an individual or group to new stimulus, insight or experience.

  MEDICINE

  Homo sapiens is an amazingly versatile species. We’re able to live on every continent on earth and in a huge variety of conditions, from the freezing wastes of Greenland to the sweltering deserts of Africa. One biological reason for this is that humans are ‘warm-blooded’, or endothermic – able to regulate their body temperature regardless of external climate. This is known as thermoregulation, and it’s controlled in an area of our brains called the hypothalamus. Our body maintains its core temperature at a remarkably narrow band of between 36.5 and 37.5 degrees Celsius. This ensures that vital enzymes in our system can carry out essential cell functions. Our body is a ship that sails through life’s extremes with a portable boiler and a precision thermostat.

  Warm-blooded humans have taken a different evolutionary path to cold-blooded creatures, which must get their energy from their surroundings. This gives humans specific advantages and challenges. We make our own heat from the food we consume, so our bodies stay active regardless of how cold it is. Lizards can be sluggish until warmed by the sun, so limiting the environments and hours they can thrive in. Yet self-heating means more of our food is used for energy, so we need to feed more often to keep the boiler stoked. Also, our body can only do so much itself to keep its precision thermostat balanced. If temperatures are too hot, we sweat to provide a primitive form of cooling by evaporation. In cold weather we shiver to generate a little warmth. Hardly high-tech stuff. Luckily, the human body outsources its key thermoregulation responsibilities to our sentient brains. As intelligent creatures, we’ve learned how to clothe ourselves in extremes of cold, or find shade in hot sun. Together, the mind and body make a great heat manager.

  But what happens if extreme conditions mean we can’t help our body maintain its essential temperature?

  When core temperature becomes too hot – perhaps due to overexposure to hot sun – we enter a state of hyperthermia or heat exhaustion. This might only be a degree or so above normal, but already our body feels it; we can experience sweating, dizziness, fatigue and nausea. If it rises just another degree or two we reach heat stroke, and things get really dangerous. Our body’s ability to regulate heat is overwhelmed. We become confused, blood pressure plummets, and if we don’t get help soon our organs fail and we die.

  Similarly, it only takes a drop of a few degrees to induce hypothermia due to excessive cold. At first we shiver uncontrollably and hyperventilate. A few degrees further and the shivers stop, but we become drowsy, slurred and confused. If our temperature descends to 28 degrees or lower we lose consciousness and, eventually, our life.

  Hypothermia is accelerated if we become immersed in cold water. A sudden exposure to freezing water – for example, by jumping into an Arctic ocean from a sinking ship – may induce cold shock, a disorientating trauma state that compromises breathing and muscle control. After ten minutes in the water we are losing heat so fast that our body decreases the blood flow to our extremities in an effort to keep our core organs warm. Our limbs start to lose their feeling and movement – bad news if we’re trying to stay afloat. Before long, hypothermia takes us to a watery grave.

  Even if we manage to claw our way out of the water and onto something that floats, our exposure problems aren’t over. Exposed flesh has its own susceptibility to freezing temperatures. This comes in the form of frostbite. Frostbite is damage caused to the flesh by prolonged exposure to extremes of cold, beginning at temperatures around freezing point. This can be exacerbated by wind-chill and damp. As with the limbs in the water, the circulation to the blood vessels in exposed areas becomes constricted to protect the vital organs. The first stage is called frostnip. Initially only the outer skin is affected. There are pins and needles and an aching of the digits, then a localised numbness. If warmth is found, the damage won’t be permanent. If untreated, it progresses to hardness and blisters. Eventually the damage creeps deep into our bodies – to muscle, nerve and bone. Parts of our flesh begin to die. If rescue doesn’t come soon, we’re lost entirely.

  Yet, what is affected most by the malady of exposure? Is it just a physical condition, or is there a freezing of the spirit that precedes the hardening of the flesh? Does exposure to the experience of our predicament chill us faster than the wind and water? Or might the psychological extremity of our condition provide the mental fuel we need to express our true nature in the quality of our subsequent actions?

  Human beings are marked by exposure to significant events inside their brains as well as their bodies. At the front of our skull is an area called the prefrontal cortex. This is a significant area for what we commonly call our short-term memory – the place where we process our current lived experience as conscious thoughts. It’s a vast but impermanent network of electrical connections, shifting and reforming as the seconds pass. When a stricken sailor jumps from that sinking ship into the freezing ocean, his prefrontal cortex is assaulted by an adrenaline-fuelled processing of inputs from the human senses: the gasping cold against the flesh, the lurch in the stomach from the icy plunge, the screaming of desperate humanity nearby, the hellish vision of iron and varnished timber plunging into the abyss. The adrenaline is an important element. Our sensory input at times like this is not merely physical, but highly chemical and emotional. We’re in what we call our ‘flight-or-fight’ response – a primeval safety mechanism that heightens our focus, emotions and reactions in times of perceived threat. Events at these crucial times are given the highest priority by our brain.

  Within a short while, the shifting clouds of our heightened short-term experiences are turned into more permanent form as memory. This involves a region deep in the brain called the hippocampus as well as the cortex. The brain contains billions of nerve cells called neurons. These are encoded with memories by forming complex physical connections with other neurons through synapses – electrical and chemical junctions where information is exchanged, and links between connected pieces of information in the memory are physically established. Our memory is defined by the nature of these synaptic links.

  Not all memory is the same. There is implicit memory and explicit memory. Implicit memories include those subconscious manual skills we acquire, such as playing tennis or driving a car. Explicit memories can be simply semantic, like knowing the name of a town or the date of someone’s birthday. But the most complex explicit memories are episodic – meaning a connected sequence of emotions and events, a narrative account of a particular time and place or the step-by-step visualisation of our way to a certain destination. When we ‘remember’ events in our life, thi
s is usually what we mean.

  Recent research suggests that episodic memories are stored in both the hippocampus and the cortex. Yet such memories don’t just get filed away as a single item. Instead, they reside as networks of subtle or strongly associated images, emotions, thoughts, places and sounds. Recalling a single child’s face from the sea disaster may later be enough to bring the whole awful event flooding back for that stricken mariner. These networks are constructions of our reality – they’re not simply verbatim recordings of external events. We make our memories, we don’t just observe them. They are built using the emotions and perspectives we already possess, and then go on to shape our perspectives and emotions in the future. In this way, an episodic memory becomes a unique contributor to our essential and evolving identity – that thing we call our ‘life story’ – a marker for our character and place in the world, and a reference point for future behaviour and growth. Our memories are the building blocks of what makes us into us.

  So necessary is the exposure of our brain to new experience and its subsequent preservation that, without it, we can’t retain a functioning personality. If a human is denied interaction and stimulus early in life, then the brain fails to learn and develop properly. In the United States in 1970, welfare authorities discovered a thirteen-year-old child known as ‘Genie’. Genie had been profoundly abused by her father – locked up throughout her short life and deprived of all sensory stimulus. Despite subsequent efforts to rehabilitate her, Genie remained deficient in key cognitive abilities and language. Exposure is not simply a mark left on our bodies or brains by events, it’s an essential tool – the means by which we can learn and speak and grow and know ourselves. If exposure to experience is blocked, then it can’t help us to make memories, and we can’t become ourselves.

  Likewise, if we can’t retain the memories we already have, we can lose the self we cherish. The heartbreaking effects of Alzheimer’s disease are well known. Clumps of protein called plaques can form in the brain, destroying neurons and disrupting the storage and retrieval of memory by synapses. As our memories become lost, we slowly lose the anchor to our identity.