On the night of the crash, just hours before her death, photos of the injured princess were valued at three hundred thousand pounds.
7
At the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, as the sky lightened, Diana, Princess of Wales was pronounced dead from internal injuries.
In a nearby corridor where he’d waited through the night, the British Ambassador wept and wept like a child.
On hearing of her death, Shehnaz Shafi, 39, a Pakistani who had had his photo taken with the Princess the previous May in his village near Lahore, poisoned himself.
In Hong Kong, a young man jumped out of the thirty-third floor of a tower block. Cuttings about her death were found nearby.
When Jon woke me that morning with news of the unconfirmed reports, I lurched from sleep and sat upright. ‘What?’ I cried. I sped down the stairs to the TV.
After my teenage vigil at the Hotel Nova Scotian, I’d lost all interest in celebrity and royalty. I would have blushed to have been found reading a copy of Hello magazine. Yet the news on our television seemed to seep from the sad dream of our young marriage; from what a friend had once described to me as our slow car crash of a year.
That morning, on our rosy chintz sofa, I stood up often, switched channels and news programmes in search of the latest reports. I moved like a sleepwalker who is able to perform simple, mechanical tasks. Outside, Jon stood in the back garden, clearing the pond of the weed that had started to smell in the heat.
8
The day before the funeral, I told Jon I had a friend to see in London. I took the morning train to Victoria. On arrival, I stopped outside the station and selected a bouquet of miniature pink roses, although I hadn’t planned on any such display.
My excuse was History. Later, on the phone, I would describe to my parents my position on the Royal Mile when the Union Flag was finally lowered over Buckingham Palace. I would conjure the scent of those seas of decaying blooms. My narration was childish – for my parents, I told myself. The Queen and the Duke had waved and smiled as they were driven into St James’s Palace to view her body in the Chapel Royal. Yes, I said, the queue was endless. People came from all over the country to sign the books of condolence.
I didn’t admit to anyone I’d tried, too late, to join that queue. As I stood near its end, I told myself: I didn’t know the woman. It seemed important and merely decent to remain aware of that as assorted millions wept. I wasn’t about to be confused with the mad and the sad.
But I had been drawn to the queue by repeated rumours of visions in the room where her body was resting. Even the Independent had reported the phenomenon. I wanted to join the queue fraudulently, simply to sneak a glimpse of the oil painting upon which Diana’s face allegedly appeared. I wanted to witness for myself the collective dream.
Yet, as I hovered near the end of the queue, I realised it wasn’t Diana those witnesses repeatedly described. Not her, but her picture: ‘You know the pose,’ one mourner told me. ‘The picture with her head cupped in her hands. She’s got the tiara on as well.’
Floating above a portrait of Charles I, above his right shoulder, was the image of Diana that had once appeared on the cover of Vogue. Mourners beheld, not the ghost of her, but the ghost of her image. Even in death, she was, it seems, reduced to it.
I phoned Jon from a payphone. I explained that the trains were slow. Standing room only. Everywhere I looked, people were unrolling sleeping bags and claiming their position on the funeral route. I stepped over pillows, candles and provisions. The crowd was profligate in its grief.
And it came to me then, the silly lover’s test I’d once put to Jon years before. We’d been walking hand in hand, newly married, up the lane, past lambs and hedgerows. I’d grinned and tugged on his arm. ‘If I were to die, would you marry again?’
He didn’t laugh off the question or play the young hero and forswear the thought. He didn’t insist I take the words back lest some pagan trickster god of the fields listened at that moment. Instead he pondered it. ‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I suppose I would.’
9
‘Is she real dead or pretend dead?’ a small girl asked her mother as I walked away.
Princesses on biers usually open their eyes again.
In the underpass that night, she was found injured and semi-conscious, sitting in the footwell behind the driver’s seat. When she was prised at last from the Mercedes and stretched out in the ambulance, a tear in a vein near her heart opened wide.
10
The CCTV footage from the Paris Ritz is time-stamped and as lifelike as an old flip-book. It should have been ephemera. It should have been ‘wiped’ in the way the hotel’s security tapes were, routinely, each week. But here, she is alive once more, immortalised and moving in raw, stuttering frames.
First, rewind. Can you see? The camera on the Place Vendôme, at the front of the hotel, shows a legion of photographers and midnight onlookers who await her exit. Two decoy vehicles are ready, engines running.
On the recorder, the digital clock spins.
We move inside the Ritz now, into the foyer of her suite, and peer down like minor gods on Diana, her bodyguard, Dodi and the hotel escort. The floor is expensively tiled. They stand in a loose huddle. They confer. They nod. At seven minutes past twelve, they leave the suite. The four figures walk, in halting frames, to the service lift. She is tanned and her hair is very blonde with the sun and swimming of recent weeks. She has changed out of the linen trouser suit she arrived in that afternoon. She wears white capri trousers, a black scoop-necked top and black jacket.
As the doors of the lift close, she raises a chiding finger to Dodi, then laughs, covering her mouth like a mischievous schoolgirl. We don’t hear the joke. Her bodyguard checks the details of the route in a pocket notebook.
Above them, out of time, I want to press rewind again, to spool the clock back. I want a maid, bearing a stack of fresh sheets, to hit the ‘down’ button, stumble into their world mid-descent and delay them with her apologies. I want her to bother Diana for a smile, a word, an autograph. I want her to alter the sequence.
On they go.
11
At seventeen minutes past twelve, Diana and Dodi are captured on CCTV in the corridor of the Ritz’s service exit. Another lens. Their backs are turned to the camera’s eye. A staff member is making notes against a glass-cabinet wall display – next week’s laundry rota, let’s say.
Dodi slips his left arm around Diana’s back and pulls her close. His hand rests on her lower back, out of view (except for the camera’s, that is, except for mine and yours). She slips her right arm behind herself and laces her fingers through his. No one can see, she tells herself. They wait. She leans, discreetly, against his chest and into his groin. His thumb moves up and down her spine.
At eighteen minutes past twelve, their driver arrives from the street. Diana releases Dodi’s hand, straightens her jacket and gives her trousers a tug. His hand remains on her back. The driver steps into the street a final time to check the way is clear. She leans into Dodi again. The driver rejoins them to confirm the route they’re about to take. At nineteen minutes past midnight, on the 31st of August 1997, they step into the rue Cambon.
12
Twelve hours later, at the bus shelter on my street, I hear someone talking: ‘Everyone wants a piece of her.’ Present tense, even then.
The paparazzi word for the hunt is ‘monstering’. A few photographers, but only a few, make it to rue Cambon before her car speeds off. Picture the dismay of their faces, blurring in the windows of the black Mercedes sedan as it spirits her away from the Ritz that night. They’re too late, she assures herself. They’re running back for their motorbikes, but they’re too late.
When the car departs, it is twenty past twelve.
Two and a half kilometres of life remain.
Three minutes.
Her pulse is fast. The car passes bright awnings, building skips and darkened balconies. As it emerges from the hushe
d backstreets, the city is a pointillist vision of lamplight against the midnight dark.
Fountains splash. Two minutes remain. The ancient obelisk at Place de la Concorde pierces the night. A green entrance to a Metro station is dim. Marble lions sleep above a street corner.
Ninety seconds.
Look. Don’t look. Look.
Through the reinforced glass windows, the Seine rushes past. Diana turns and glances through the back window. The plan has worked. They’ve shaken the photographers. They’ve made their getaway. Paris by night is a live, radiant current, and in it, the river is shimmering, as if for her, when the sedan slips into the underpass beneath the Pont de l’Alma.
Her breath is slightly shallow. The night is close, humid, or so it feels to her. Her lover squeezes her hand. She thinks fleetingly about the cool, crisp linen of his bed; about the breeze that rises off the river and moves through his apartment. She is lulled momentarily by the memory of the slow-turning blades of the fan above his bed. Yes, she thinks, she is ready for sleep. She imagines her boys in their faraway beds, their brows sticky hot tonight. The cheek of her younger son is still velvet to the touch.
Twelve concrete pillars flicker past in quick succession. The exit is almost in sight when a white Fiat Uno appears (or doesn’t appear) and clips (or doesn’t clip) the Mercedes.
The Mercedes swerves catastrophically and slams into the thirteenth pillar at sixty-five miles per hour.
It spins and crashes again.
Thirteen pillars. Twelve quick frames. A fragile fragment of film. Or a strip of flimsy negatives, its images obscured. By the blur of high speed. By the smoke in the tunnel. By the skirmish of photographers who arrive minutes later. By the blitz of their flashbulbs and the emergency lights.
By fingerprints, countless. Long before. Long after.
By the uncanny double-exposure of our own private griefs.
13
In Praise of Radical Fish
Brothers, I tell you solemnly: it is not easy to become radicalised in a seaside resort. There are distractions. There are deckchairs. There is all that soft, watery light. What can a brother do but hope that the flame of his anger survives the refreshing sea breeze?
It was the Bank Holiday weekend, and I had coaxed Omar and Hamid to Brighton from Peterborough on the promise of a pre-jihad team-building weekend. If we could maintain our anger there, I told them, we could maintain it anywhere. Except I was the weak link. I still had to find the flame within. On Brighton Pier, while Omar and Hamid brooded like ayatollahs, I struggled with an embarrassing excess of good cheer. The day was bright, the tide was high. At the shooting gallery I managed to take out an entire row of ducks – only to spoil everything by returning to my brothers bearing cuddly toys.
Omar frowned. Hamid sighed. The X Factor buzzer sounded in my head.
Ham said, ‘No one may hold a cuddly toy when the call to Holy War comes.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘It is written?’
He and Omar exchanged a look. Ham knocked my head.
We were waiting for the call from the Emir’s man on the Dark Web, aka The Recruiter. Hamid had acquired a second mobile purely for the purpose of the call, and it could, he said, come at any moment. If we were deemed proper, The Recruiter would tell us when and how to mobilise. He would get us maps, through a third party back in Peterborough, and a list of required kit.
Ahead of us, at the railing, a white guy vomited into the sea.
‘Lim,’ Hamid said to me, his voice public-school posh and low, ‘listen. I am grateful for your efforts, I truly am, but’ – he cast an eye over the pier – ‘wouldn’t a few lurid games of paintball in Peterborough have served? Brighton, I think, is a city of Kuffar. We should not be here.’
I was out of my depth when Muslims talked like Muslims. My father had always worked shifts and found it difficult to take me to mosque. I made a mental note to check the glossary in my Islam for Dummies – £12.40 RRP less my staff discount. Then I slapped Ham on the back and told him all would be well.
Omar also looked impressively miserable. How did they do it? I gathered the toys in my arms and assured them it would only strengthen us to confront and renounce the pleasures of Brighton. ‘Watch,’ I said.
The girl in the candyfloss booth was called Joy. It said so on her badge – only she had scratched out the ‘y’ in black biro.
‘Did your boss get your name wrong?’ I tried.
She was pretty even when she scowled.
‘I’m Lim,’ I added. ‘As in Limazah.’
‘I’m Jo,’ she said. ‘As in Jo.’
I smiled and arranged the toys, like supplicants, in a semicircle around her booth.
She rolled her eyes but laid down her flossy wand and stepped outside to see. ‘I don’t like it when customers use my real name.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said.
She beheld the many lopsided smiles, then bent down and tentatively stroked a furry blue dolphin. In the light of day, her skin and hair sparkled with a fine residue of spun sugar. ‘You’re nice,’ she said.
Nice? Nice? If only she knew. With any luck, by the following week, I’d be sporting a Kalashnikov and the unattractive early growth of a hard-core beard.
Her nose stud twinkled in the midday sun. ‘Here.’ She took my phone from my shirt pocket and typed her number in. Then, in a moment’s afterthought, she added her name.
Three taps.
I couldn’t help myself. I punched the air.
‘Bye, Limazah,’ she said, smiling shyly and returning to her temple.
‘Bye, Joy,’ I said, and I walked-the-walk back to Omar and Hamid.
If anything, their superior anger had only improved in my absence.
‘What was that white girl doing with your phone?’ asked Hamid.
I laid my hand on his shoulder. ‘Most worthy brother,’ I said, ‘I take my balaclava off to you. I really do. You are a gentleman and a scholar. You know what to be angry about. I can only follow your lead. That’s why we’re here. To learn. To be tested. We must think of Brighton as the Endurance Course of the Soul.’
‘Did you endure?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I confessed.
He sighed again.
Hamid, a student of Islamic philosophy, had never travelled farther south than London, while Omar had never seen the sea except on telly. We’d met earlier that year at the Gladstone Street mosque in Peterborough and were all nineteen. Omar was unemployed, even though his father was big in dried fruits – Turkish apricots, figs, dates, sultanas, prunes. Omar and his old man had fallen out when Omar announced he’d rather die than follow in his father’s footsteps.
Die?
His father had laughed and mocked, and as he did, the words spilled uncontrollably from Omar’s mouth: ‘Yes, die! I will go to the Land of Honour.’
‘Ha!’ His father started shouting wildly in Turkish. ‘You think they will want you? With the amount you sleep? With the amount you eat? Ha! Do you imagine they will keep you in hair gel? But if it’s jihad you want—’
‘I will make plans,’ Omar bluffed. ‘You’ll see.’
‘—then it’s jihad you get.’ His father walked to his desktop, pushed aside a sticky bowl of prunes, clicked on easyJet reservations and opened a Google map of Turkey. ‘Here,’ he said, his blunt finger stabbing the screen. ‘Cross at Bab al-Hawa. Pack a compass. Don’t eat with your left hand. Don’t show anyone the soles of your feet. And send your mother a postcard.’ Then he clicked once, twice, three times, and Omar’s one-way ticket was booked.
I found him prostrate and trembling in the prayer room on Gladstone Street. ‘Listen, bro,’ I said, ‘you might not die. I mean, like, really. I don’t think martyrdom is strictly required.’ I racked my brain. ‘Besides, on Twitter, they’re saying it’s five-star out there.’ I slid my phone from my pocket and got down on my haunches. ‘Look at these pix. They’ve got Red Bull and KitKats, and shiny new PlayStations. I tell you, it’s Jannah on earth, man. And OK,
if it gets too intense, think Plan B: Ahmed, that guy who works Saturdays at Thomas Cook, says that conflict tourism is the next big thing. Omar, bro, adventure here you come.’ I whistled. ‘I’m jealous. Like, really.’
He looked up at me with the eyes of an abandoned child. ‘So you want to come too? You mean it?’
My words dried up. My tongue wouldn’t work. For a moment, I could only rock on my heels and scratch my head. What had I done? Was I a true friend or wasn’t I? Was I a brother? Finally I shrugged. ‘Like, yeah, OK, why not? Hamid’s on his way. Why not us? Christ, yeah.’
Omar was so relieved he didn’t even tell me off for swearing in C. of E.
Hamid was an altogether different case. He was pure of heart, the idealist among us. He had dropped out of university in London when he’d discovered the campus was – as he described it – ‘a hotbed of liberal consensus’. Whatever that was when it was at home. ‘Alas,’ said Hamid, ‘I would have learned more about Holy War in a squalid backstreet Internet café in Peterborough.’ Why, he wondered, weren’t Muslims rushing to defend the lives of other Muslims?
I reminded him that, in the Land of Honour, he would have to avoid words like ‘alas’ and ‘squalid’ if he wanted to make a good first impression and not have a plastic bag forced over his head and tied at the neck on Day One. He nodded. Hamid was posh, not stupid.
We had three tickets left for the pier. On the ghost train, our carriage tipped and skidded through the darkness. Skulls flew past and severed arms reached out to grab us, but we maintained our hard-man faces, no problem. Then, out of nowhere, three headless horsemen bore down on us, like the Janjaweed out of Sudan, and we hurtled deeper into the underworld.
I have to be honest: the sound of screaming was my own.
There is much to overcome.
Take the nudist beach that afternoon.
We had positioned ourselves, clothed and vigilant, at the beach’s western boundary. The sun hammered down, and we passed a bottle of water between us. The point of the exercise was, I explained, to learn to harden ourselves to scenes of Western decadence.
all the beloved ghosts Page 9