by Gordon Burn
A recurring element in all the cuts (one of the great pleasures of the job, after a story has been filed and a line drawn under it, is binning them) is maps whose inky arrows and star-flashes and blocks of filler Lettratone indicate that they are maps of places where news has suddenly erupted; where the comfortable façade of daily life has been torn away. But that was then.
It’s now three years since Larry Brown, a policeman, was shot at point-blank range in a courtyard at the front of Orwell Court, a litter-strewn block of flats on the Suffolk Estate in Hackney. The man who ambushed and then killed him gave as his reason the fact that his girlfriend had dumped him the night before. He told detectives: ‘I blew your copper away because my girl blew me away. I just did it. The first thing that came into my head was to kill a policeman.’
It’s much longer – almost eighteen years – since another policeman, Stephen Tibble, was gunned down by an escaping IRA terrorist on a quiet street in Baron’s Court in west London. He was shot twice in the chest and died two and a half hours later in hospital. (Helen’s hand, looming out of the blackness, securing a picture of the dead policeman, captioned ‘Victim’, against the photocopier, has something of the aspect of a blackened hand gesturing from a shallow woodland grave within earshot of motorway traffic.)
Ronan McCloskey was on his fifth day of unsupervised duty as a policeman when he stopped and breathalysed a twenty-two-year-old man driving a Capri in Willesden High Road one night in May 1987. On the pretext of locking up the car, the man sped away with PC McCloskey trapped half in and half out of it. He drove at high speed for half a mile before crashing through a fence at the corner of Dudden Hill Lane and Denzil Road, NW10. Constable McCloskey was hurled against a concrete post and died of head injuries before he reached hospital.
Half the thirty-strong A-shift at Chelsea police station were killed or wounded in the IRA bomb that went off in Hans Crescent, adjacent to Harrods, just before Christmas, 1983.
PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death with knives and machetes during the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham in October 1985. (An attempt was made to hack off his head, with the intention of parading it on a pole.)
And at the sites of these and other police murders – Braybrook Street, Shepherd’s Bush, W12; Montreal Place, off Aldwych, WC2; Higham Hill Road near the junction with Mayfield Road, Walthamstow, E17 – permanent memorials have been erected in recent years: small funerary monuments of Portland stone and granite and white-veined marble; important materials in unimportant, sometimes tawdry, settings; desolate reminders of solitary death in bright hospital rooms; of sudden death on the pavement.
Although there are people who bring them flowers, holly wreaths at Christmas, and small potted plants, there were always others who, even before the events of recent months, said the memorials were a source of negative energy which they claimed to have experienced as fields and waves of radiation and soft singing static. They believed there was something fetishistic or cultic about them (one woman told me the memorial close to where she lives had been put there to spy on her), and would cross the street in order not to have to pass too close to the bad juju they were generating.
The first attack happened in April last year, in the vicinity of the stone erected in memory of PC McCloskey in Willesden: a young woman gagged and raped in some nearby bushes while walking home from a friend’s house. The second rape took place in a mews at the rear of Harrods, and this time a knife was used. The rapist struck for the third and fourth times in Hackney and Tottenham, very close to where the officers Blakelock and Brown were killed.
The connection between the attacks and their locations remained speculative until the arrival of a set of pictures from the attacker whose existence has been withheld from the public but which I was given sight of thanks to a long-standing sweetheart deal between my paper and the police.
I turned up at the appointed time at the enquiry headquarters and was shown into a cubicle room lined with battered file envelopes on industrial shelving and lighted by a huge rectangle window of wired glass. I was brought turbid brown tea in a mug with a faded Metropolitan Police badge on it – ‘The Badge of Courage’ the inscription read – and handed a buff folder by a detective sergeant whose ‘Sick bastard’ seemed as if it could apply to me as much as to the person in the smudges. It was a transaction loaded with these kinds of ambiguities, and I was aware of his physical closeness, of the close eye-balling he was giving me – on the look-out for some crotch action? any attempt to palm one of the slippery eight-by-tens? – as I undid the string-tie.
The penis in the pictures was that of (probably) a white male – the uncertainty was due to the fact that it was mottled, brown and pink; piebald like a horse. But the weird pigmentation was far from being the most distinctive feature: the shaft – and, in the later pictures, the glans – was pierced with bullet-headed silver studs, making it look notched, only semi-organic, and lending it the appearance of some kind of museumised medieval weaponry. The number of studs varied from picture to picture, but they didn’t keep sequence with the attacks. They shone with the same value metal sheen as the gold in the declivities of the carved inscriptions of the stubby, phallus-shaped memorials against which they were carefully, semi-erectly posed.
*
This square is a favourite route for taxis going in to the West End from the south and west. There is a steady black stream, sluggish and black as oil, conduited along the northern side and off into the narrow channel to Regent Street, making the turn at the exact spot where WPC Yvonne Fletcher was mowed down, shot in the back, and killed.
The memorial that stands here, the first of the police memorials to go up in London, is white with a granite plaque bearing the standard inscription ‘Here fell…’, with the name and date. After ten years, the white of the stone is so very white it looks like a keyhole of light projected on to the railings and the tough green-black plants ranged behind it.
Because it is June, it is too early for the overhead trees to be slaked with dust and particles of carbon, but late enough for the young, lush leaves to throw a cooling shadow, trapping the air underneath. Even on the brightest day the white stone to Yvonne Fletcher has the fluctuating quality of light flickering at the back of a cave.
It has not been violated. It doesn’t feature in the pictures. It is maintained in its pristine condition by a woman, a stranger unknown to Yvonne Fletcher at the time of her death, who makes regular expeditions from the small south-coast town where she lives to wash the stone and polish up the granite and set fresh flowers at the memorial’s base.
It is an activity that she feels no compulsion to explain. Attempts were made to get her to sneeze it out in the first months after the memorial was unveiled, but she had made a commitment to remaining silent and wouldn’t be budged. And in the intervening years, so far as I know, she has been free to go about her janitoring undisturbed. But these are slow newsdays (Scott McGovern’s death is still pending; the story will be stale buns soon). The coincidence of violent death and violent sex at the memorials is irresistible. It is a story that has to be kept at a rolling boil. Sebastian-Dominic dredged up a recollection of the woman at morning conference at the beginning of the week. A couple of calls to the budgie at the bill shop supplied likely days and times. And here I am, parked behind the cool, stone pillar of a shuttered building with an unobstructed view of the Yvonne Fletcher memorial, poised to invade its guardian’s anonymity, ready to pounce.
I had anticipated that she would be approaching from Regent Street to the west, or Piccadilly to the north, which narrowed it down to three streets (and two pubs – the Tom-all-Alone’s and The True Sun, from where I haven’t long returned – a final adiós to the meltdown hangover with which I started the day, buenos días to tomorrow’s). The route I hadn’t counted on was along the gravel path of the formal garden in the centre of the square with its lunching office workers and lurid flower beds and central statue of William III.
But that’s the way she
must have come, because now all of a sudden she’s there and already absorbed in her work: a medium-built, young-appearing middle-aged woman in trousers, a sweater and a rubberised anorak that she has taken off, folded and placed as padding under her knees. I know from sniffing around there that she keeps a container of water and a plastic atomiser wedged between the memorial and the metal fence; she has unpacked spray polishes and bleaches with emphatic labels and bright child-proof nozzles and a variety of other cleaning materials which are standing by waiting to be used.
Even before I break cover and take the first steps towards her, I have a vision of her life and a distinct image of a place I have never known. (Grids of lampposts, rows of urns and statues as points of identity and continuity in the vast space. The smell of real cakes through the doors and windows of the bakery.)
The whole of the south side of the square is undergoing renovation and all the buildings there have disappeared behind a false front – a simple-coloured, billboard-sized façade cartooning the eighteenth-century classical façades it conceals. Wide orange mesh covers the spaces of the windows, and men in safety helmets are visible there in such numbers that I feel like a show put on for their amusement as I emerge into this hot and intricately enclosed space. Through the path of the bullet that killed Yvonne Fletcher, through the accumulation of energies, past the place where her hat had lain, photographed but untouched, for many hours, a predator closing and closing on the unalerted woman on her knees.
It is an attitude that prompts a rush of images – darkly radiant, churchly lit images from pagan ritual and the scriptures. Ecce ancilla Dei. Behold the handmaid of the Lord. The Madonna of Humility. Hundreds of associations in a few seconds from far away.
But, at this point, three images predominantly: A man stepping round a woman who is on her knees with a brush and a bucket and abjectly imploring to be allowed to go where he is going. A woman looking up, blinking against the light that has just flooded the cupboard where she has been forcibly shut away. A woman bent to the task of scouring a ring of dirt off a bath with the radio playing some hit from her youth in the morning after her husband has set out for the job both of them know in their blood he will soon be losing and the children have left for school. (No matter how strenuous our efforts to put a space between them and us, our own lives constantly invade us.)
There is a tin vase tethered by a chain to the railing at the side of the stone. Wisteria and lavender in a glass bottle. Primrose in pots placed in a tricolour basket. I’m almost there now, almost on the woman, but she still hasn’t turned or given any sign that she knows that I’m approaching. It is as I am about to bring my hand in contact with the knotty open weave of her sweater, register the start of alarm, that I notice it has grown as quiet as cancer.
Amid all the noise of the city, there is an echo, an experience of quietness which is almost African in quality. ‘Even,’ I want to say. ‘Even, stand up. Don’t cry. Forgive me.’ But it is barely dawn yet where Even is living, in a quiet subdivision near a lake. The woman glances back at me sleepily, trustingly, when she feels my hand on her neck and hears the sound of my wife’s name.
Three
Like many people of my age, I can remember as a boy squinting in through the window of the pub used most often by my parents – a popular local called The Duchess of Sunderland, in their case – trying to piece them together from the morselated images made by the ground and intricately engraved glass. I’d stand on the low sandstone windowsill with my eye close up against the refracting bulb of a thistle or the distorting leg of a fleur-de-lys, trying to locate them and piece them together in the promiscuous press of bodies in the bar. It is always winter, and there is always a fire whose fire colour divides and bleeds into the pattern incised into the window like molten metal running in troughs; and there is an excited hubbub in which I try to hear things that I’m not supposed to hear, but don’t know what. I suppose I imagined forbidden things taking place in there: furtive gropings, banned substances being palmed, life-threatening infidelities – the dirty doings I read about weekly in the News of the Screws that they thought they had hidden out of harm’s way, and that I guiltily tugged my todger to when I was sure I was at home on my own.
The world beyond the glass represented, from my child’s perpective, a kind of deep-sea space in which they had the opportunity to immerse themselves – a luminous, beneficent, dense element – and in which I would immerse myself, when the time came. The barriered elsewhere of another world.
Since I came into my inheritance it is the pell-mell, workaday world that has taken on a dreamy aspect, observed, as I so often observe it, from the bibulous, business side of the frosted glass. In the last few years a new rhythm – a pendulum pattern – has imposed itself on the frantic comings and goings of the daytime pavement traffic. Outside certain pubs at a certain time of the day now you will see men in suits ambulating backwards and forwards, metronomically up and down, talking into wafers of angled plastic and maintaining the even pace of the big-cat enclosure or the prison yard. They never trespass beyond the physical boundary of the pub, or stray more than a foot or two from the windows, and are as much a part of the street life as Simon-the-pieman or the rag-suited newsmonger or the little flower girl with her tray of violets were in days of yore. They have become a modern, lulling presence: dark, unfocused figures, between drinks, jawboning about product-flow and component compatibility and profit centres, and intent on giving the impression that they are anywhere other than where they are, which is thirty seconds from the next chugalug (nobody is fooled). And always, in the background, the subliminal bloom of London’s red buses, fogged below the advertising streamer, clear above it, like old-fashioned doctor’s pick-me-ups, settled in the bottle.
The Cinq-Mars is one of many London pubs famous for its Dylan Thomas connection. There is nothing to commemorate the fact that Dylan drank here (it is well off the tourist route). But it was the Dylan link that gave me the excuse to make it the kicking-off point on one of my first dates with Even.
Even was a striking, even eccentric, dresser in those days. She bought most of her clothes at street-markets or charity shops, and wore her hair plaited or coiled in braids around her ears. She wore jet necklaces, amber ear-rings, fishnet stockings, Utility dresses, plum-coloured lipstick and ankle socks. She smoked slim panatellas and could hold her drink. It was my idea to start off at The Cinq-Mars and spend the rest of the night doing a Dylan Thomas pub-crawl, in character, as Caitlin and Dylan. (We had fallen gratefully on the Thomases as a conversational gambit the first time we went out together. Even told me that Caitlin had been a dancer with the Tiller Girls at the Palladium, and later with the Folies Bergère in Paris, facts which I didn’t know, and was pleased to learn.)
I wore a loud Viyella shirt and a Donegal-tweed tie for the occasion. Even turned up in a demob great-coat and a ratty fox fur with two road-crash heads and two pairs of tortured button eyes. She had a light ale and we stood at the crowded bar at The Cinq-Mars, which was a pub still popular then with the working man. ‘The heavy scents of the masses,’ I said, lacking all conviction, quoting I’m-not-sure-who, but not Dylan Thomas. ‘With their disturbing messages of the intimate life.’
‘Which March-the-fifth do you think it is?’ Even asked after a while. ‘The name of this pub,’ she said, when it was clear I had no idea what she was talking about. Nobody who went there on a regular basis used the French pronunciation. Everybody always referred to it as The Sink-Mars, and it irritated me that she didn’t know. I had always thought of the planet anyway, not the month. It had been a favourite watering-hole of Burgess and Maclean and their crowd in the early fifties, around the same time the Thomases were regulars. I considered telling Even this, but I involuntarily did something else instead. I lifted the flap on the pocket of the coat she was wearing, and tipped the two inches of beer sitting in my glass straight in. ‘That wasn’t supposed to happen yet,’ she protested. ‘We were supposed to build up to the bad behaviour
part. The fisticuffs, the public spats. But’ – here she took the fluff and sodden bus tickets and wet rubbish from her pocket and rammed it down my shirt – ‘if that’s how you want to play it, it’s fine with me.’
We continued on to The Uncommercial Traveller (ice projectiles, Chinese burns, upsetting several other people’s drinks), and then The Frozen Deep, where, both of us well on the way to being properly in drink now, the aggression took a serious turn. I got her in a half-Nelson until she begged to be let go; she ground a lighted panatella into the back of my hand, leaving an ash-rimmed glutinous crater. In a deserted garden square between The Frozen Deep and The Billy Bigelow we completed the process we had embarked on, and started hitting out at each other with an intention to really hurt. After a few minutes of this, Even took to her heels in the rain in tears, her foxes skinny and bedraggled, and I went and had another drink.
After the wedding (a quiet affair at Caxton Hall, although her father, the rag-worm and maggot millionaire, had pushed for a big production), we spent a week in a wooden birdwatchers’ hut on a tidal marsh in Norfolk, reading by candlelight at night, watching the contents of the chemical toilet bobbing perkily outside the door in the mornings.
Even lost the taste for drink when she was pregnant with Tristan. She never went back to smoking after Jennifer was born. By the mid-seventies, in step with the magazines who employed her, she was experimenting with ‘good’ carbohydrate-based meals – cereals, wholegrain rice, lentils – and soya-based meat substitute. By 1978, when I moved out, she was a wild-eyed, carotin-coloured, card-carrying convert. She’d lie in bed at nights boning up on passive smoking and hydrogenated fats and retin-A, her corded neck, her rope-veined hands, her swarthy chest pulsing out their admonishments.