by Gordon Burn
I’m drinking Belikin (‘Belize’s #1 beer’ according to the label) out of the bottle. Hawkins is crouched over a table, engrossed in his crack paraphernalia. ‘Yeah, man,’ he says. ‘You shitting me?’ He has a jerried-together ‘works’ consisting of a plastic Pepsi bottle, some perforated tin foil and an empty biro casing. He makes some final, fiddling adjustments: grouting, tapping, tamping. Then there is a big druggy moment – a hallowed hiatus – while he takes the smoke deep down into his lungs. A sooty deposit blooms inside the bottle; his face is obscured momentarily by a duster of dirty grey smoke. There is a loud exhale. ‘Mmmmm,’ he says, before this thickens into a cough. ‘Oh yeah! Major chubbies. But major chubbies.’
Heath is wearing a pair of tiger-stripe fatigues with soft-soled Gucci moccasins and a white T-shirt with a small NASA emblem on it. He’ll put on a caramel-coloured cashmere jacket before we leave.
‘Don’t be such a chickenshit, Normsky, try some,’ he says, already preparing more ‘rock’ in the microwave. I hold up the beer bottle, indicating that I’m happy with what I’ve got. ‘Okay, once a juicer, always a juicer. I know. But here’s a medicament which allows you to seize control of your pilot light. I’m depending on you not to punk out on me tonight. You’re not going to punk out on me, are you? Here. Have a hit. Just to be sure. Put the glide back in your stride. Feel what it’s like to burn with a hard gem-like flame for once, instead of guttering like an old smudgepot. Guaranteed orbit. Blow your head off.’
Heath is in business in this area in a modest way, scoring cocaine, crack, ecstasy, ganja for friends, and (surprisingly thoroughly) checked-out friends of friends. The revenue is useful, but he says (and I believe him) that it is the ‘conspiratorial ambience’ he is hooked on and that he looks to to keep an edge. There have already been a couple of inept coded telephone conversations in the brief time I’ve been here about ‘aunty’ coming for ‘tea’ and the time that tea will be poured. Hawkins happily admits that he is paranoid, and sleeps with a loaded M-2 carbine and a machete under his bed.
The patterns on the well-worn rugs scattered around and on the loose covers on the furniture suggest the inscribed façades of mosques and Mayan temples; Berber tattoos. ‘X’ (I mention the name of another blood-and-guts photographer we both know) ‘puts his pictures away under lock and key every night so their souls can’t get at him.’
Surprisingly, this fails to raise the expected derisory rasp. ‘They are the denizens of the other world. They seem to be looking back at us from some other place, as though to tell us something. The dark seamy corners, the neglected populations. You have to get close enough to get the picture, but get too close and you die.’
Heath has started strapping his hands with green gaffer tape, having first prepared twelve-inch strips of tape which he has stuck all along the edge of the table, like a seasoned corner man. Before embarking on this, he distributed lens caps, rolls of film, light metres and other pieces of necessary equipment around the cargo pockets of his fatigue pants. This has given him an awkward, padded-out look, but inside it he still looks limber, kick-box thin. He shrugs into his jacket; takes a last deep inhale of the joint he has had going to even out the buzz of the crack cocaine. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Time to move this gig east.’
We are halfway to the door when he remembers he has forgotten something. He retrieves the small velvet drawstring bag which has been hanging around the neck of the elephant Buddha, and loops it over his own head, a gesture he has perfected so that there is not a chance of him disturbing his hair. ‘Benign senescent forgetfulness. Long-term brain fade,’ he groans. ‘Jeezus Godhelpus. Okay. Dead-body detail time, this time. Let’s make some frames.’
*
We are in the golden valley – the valley of goods and services, lights and signs, two undifferentiated, pin-hole lights ourselves in the sequined belt of lights as monitored by the Met’s traffic blimp or helicopter hovering overhead. The only easy route to where we are going is through the business ghetto, with its simple planar geometry, its hard-landscaping and bold international symbols; its developing security presence – uniformed men at desks keep coming up like pictures in a flicker book as the lights go on and a hazy summer dusk deepens. I see us reflected side by side in the curtain walls, woozily distorted by the mirage ripples and subtle dents, Heath Hawkins driving. The surge, and the dawdle, a country song (another country song) – ‘By day I make the cars, by night I make the bars’ is how this one goes – on the tape.
As proof that we are moving, department-store windows begin to offer blazing clement weathers, the inevitable colourful abundance: nipples pushing against sheer fabric as if exposed to a cross-draught, skirts pinned and petrified to look as if they are being lifted on the wind; the almost familiar faces, the nearly convincing wigs. And in the doorways, the collateral damage of advanced urban life, preparing a bed for the night: the hingeless and the homeless, with their harmonicas and bongos and layered filth, their community spirit and scurf-necked patient dogs.
Buoyed on the sounds of Memphis and Nashville, we glide by rape sites and murder sites, scenes of hit-and-runs, child snatches, vendetta assassinations, carjackings, care-in-the-community neck stabbings, and their commemorative shrines in varying conditions of completion – the full gamut, from newly layed and composting flowers, to cinderblock bunkers with decorative ironwork grilles and creosoted roofs, plastic bouquets in Third World vases, flickering candles, Christmas lights, bottles and mirrors to deflect the remaining malignant spirits, and pictures of the deceased hologramically – hyperdelically – rendered or cheaply photocopied and sheathed in plastic.
And then the angle of elevation changes and we soar into an aerial shot – up onto the ribboned flyover, forced all at once up close against cluttered bedsits (collapsed suitcases, string-tied boxes forced into the spaces between ceilings and wardrobes; thin partitions bisecting windows, interposed between sinks and beds, quarantining weary soul from weary soul); then the italic signs and steamy sculleries and rookeries, the staff kennels of chain hotels; the stepped terraces, industrial clerestories and diagonal zoots of the eighties economic miracle; the decorative Arab fascia and stylised Native American motifs. ‘London,’ Heath exults, nose pointed roofwards, both hands off the wheel. ‘The planet’s heart chakra.’
The press pen opposite St Saviour’s is only sparsely populated – it’s pub time; several pairs of aluminium ladders lean against the barriers, labelled as to newspaper, padlocked and chained. Opposite, under the vertebra’d white canopy of the hospital, Scott McGovern’s fan base is holding up. After three weeks, you could reasonably expect some evidence of erosion or attrition, some bowing to the demands of hearth and home. Instead, the women resonate with a sense of power and purpose, daily reinforced by repetitive chant and prayer, rhythmic ceremony and song – the raisers of megaliths, the builders of henges.
At the rear of the hospital, a pair of tall metal gates swing open, permitting us entry to a loading and delivery area. The gates grind shut behind us, and a light on a security camera mounted above a row of industrial dumpsters blinks from amber to red. The bulky silhouette of a man appears briefly in a lighted doorway at the end of the yard, and then the door clicks closed again. There are diamond-shaped reflector signs saying ‘Hazchem’ and ‘Bio-hazard’. Vehicular weight has ploughed ruts into the bricks of recently laid York stone. Bluish puddles have collected in the depressions. We wait in silence.
‘Time-lapse recorders maintain up to 749 hours of images on a two-hour cassette,’ Heath eventually says. He has begun chopping lines of coke on a flat mirror compact he has fished out of a coat pocket, using the edge of a credit card. ‘It’s obvious – isn’t it? – that the purpose of surveillance devices is to create suspicious behaviour, rather than detect it. We are witnessing the development of an environment almost wholly owned and managed by a corporate hegemony. Machine eyes are objects gathering information.’ There are four lines, two apiece. When we have finished, he collects stray p
articles from the mirror and the edge of the Optima card with his middle finger and rubs them along the line of his gums. He runs a check on his nostrils in the rear-view mirror, then unrolls and pockets the twenty note I have given him, the second time this has happened tonight, but I say nothing.
We listen to the traffic noise; the lilting music of a distant hymn being sung by the women. There is a deep-down, basso profundo thunderous sound, and we vector away from each other and – after all these years – crane our heads sideways to catch a glimpse of Concorde going over. It is a commonly observed part of the London day: people stopping in parks and on streets and bridges to stare at the sky and watch Concorde’s trajectory of takeoff or descent, some transported by the clean lines, the sense of technological can-do; most alert for signs of wobble or falter, practising how to describe the way it just turned into a plummeting ball of flame. ‘How d’you always know a guy coming towards you is wearing his hair in a ponytail?’ Heath says in the reverberating silence. ‘You can’t see anything. But you always know, right?’
He checks the time on his watch against the time on the dashboard clock and puts something that looks like a prayer shawl around his neck to conceal his cameras. The video camera begins a silent oscillation and, at the signal from the fat man, who has reappeared, we make a crouched run for it down the yard, keeping our heads below the beam of the motion detector, like visiting firemen in one of the world’s trouble-spots, weaving to avoid sniper fire from rebel groups in the mountains. ‘This is Charlie,’ Heath says when we are in and the fat man has secured the door behind us. ‘Charlie will give you some good shit. Charlie will fill up your notebook big-time.’
Because it is a new hospital (new, that is, in terms of the fabric: a hospital has stood on this site since the early nineteenth century), the security at St Saviour’s is considered state of the art. The incidence of mad axe-men and maternity-ward prowlers and syringe-wielding orderlies, of bogus doctors performing high-risk peritonology, heroic neurosurgery, splashy angioplasties, has meant that security at all hospitals in the last few years has had to be stepped up.
And then of course there are the people like us – people like Heath and me. It used to be easy-peasy; a piece of pure piss: a pair of overalls and a pot of paint, or a Black and Decker and a Woodbine behind the ear and, bingo, you were in. A couple of stunts have been pulled since Scott McGovern was laid low: somebody posing as a junior doctor and demanding to see his notes; somebody else having flowers delivered to another patient on McGovern’s floor, with the number of his newsdesk and some money concealed. But these were gestures that owed more to a nostalgia for the old ways than any real expectation of a result.
Now that we have crashed it, I have a vivid sense of us as migratory tumours or parasite invaders, unwelcome boarders being scanned by the hospital surveillance apparatus in the way advanced imaging techniques hunt down a pocket of pus or a locus of inflammation in the body’s dark halls and caves. Hawkins thinks we will simply be carried from the point of ingress to our eventual destination like cellular debris riding the rapids of the lymph channel before passing poisonously into the flowing stream. Put it down to the amounts of substances consumed.
Like Clit Carson, the part of the hospital where we presently find ourselves doesn’t officially exist. According to the plan which is available for public consumption, the area that makes up Charlie’s night-time kingdom consists of a lecture theatre, administration offices, and storage. This leaves about a half of the square-footage unaccounted for, a blank on the chart, where you will in fact find the morgue and the post-mortem room, a sluice room, a furnace room, a number of side-rooms filled with the honest brightness of clamps, scalpels, kidney-shaped bowls, hydraulic corpse technology. This is the place where death is – the incipient organic decay, the mephitic odours; the place where the bodies come.
It is also where Heath comes, when word reaches him that they have got something good in. In the way certain waiters at certain restaurants, and certain doormen at certain hotels, get on the blower to the paparazzi when they’ve ‘trapped’, so Hawkins has established a small network of morgue minders and corpse handlers who bell him when they have anything noteworthy in the way of physical peculiarities or deformities, interesting examples of scarification, mutilation, post-mortem carnivore chewing, branding, tattoos. Tattooing – stigmataphilia – is Heath’s current area of special interest, combining, as he believes it does, secret ritual, traditional art, physical pain and sensual pleasure. St Saviour’s in recent months has produced a man with a life-size portrait of himself apotheosised as an angel in multicoloured inks on his back, and another man whose back was completely covered with a tattoo version of the poster of a ball-fondling, bare-buttocked woman in a tennis dress, popular among chem-eng students in the nineteen-seventies.
This sequestered place is actually on the ground level of the building, although the absence of windows gives it an airless, basement feel. Visitors go up a curved ramp to the main first-floor entrance at the front of the hospital – currently home to the McGovern faithful. The walls are battleship grey, the ceilings low and pipe-lined, dull bulkheads. There are stainless steel anti-scuff panels at waist-height that hardly show any sign of wear. The composition floor is embedded with a kind of silver-gold microglitter whose dancing liveliness seems inappropriate in such a place, like giggling in church.
We file in and follow Charlie down a shallow, rubber-covered incline. A bad smell drifts back from Charlie – formalin? ether? whisky? the smell that comes from prolonged exposure to evisceration and dismemberment? Flesh lies in folds at the back of his neck, and judders at every jarring footfall. Flesh billows around the armpits of the hospital-issue uniform, sagging and moving like breasts.
We keep following Charlie past a room piled with used bandages and dressings, an alcove lined with boudins and cutlets in bottles, and have just passed a scullery area containing rigid white plastic aprons and calf-length rubber boots when Heath suddenly stops. ‘Can you hear that?’ He is standing under the metal panel of an air intake or ventilation duct. ‘Here. Cop a listen. Pretty nutso, what d’you think? But you must hear,’ he says, when I tell him all I’m hearing is the sound of liquid draining into metal pans. ‘You don’t hear them? The murmuring souls? The howls of the unburied? The souls condemned to wander unhappily until their mortal remains have been laid to rest? That weird wilderness sound? Well, there it is, Normsky, there it is.’
We turn left into a concrete hall, and catch up with Charlie who is standing by a central refrigerator containing sixty drawers. A red digital readout flickers as the temperature rises and falls: 35 degrees, 36, 35. The walls are tiled in swimming-pool blue, and dim grids of fluorescent light hang from the ceiling. I don’t notice it at first, but one of the drawers is open on the second tier, and inside it is a woman’s leg lying on white gauze, flaccid, marbled, slightly bent at the knee. It immediately reminds me of the party shop near where I live, and the row of inflated legs doing a jerky can-can in the window twenty-four hours a day, round the clock, non-stop. No doubt it reminds Hawkins of something else: of Khe San and Qui Nhon and Hue, body parts in the branches of trees, dead Vietnamese with lighted cigarettes and worse pushed into the slots of their mouths.
There is a blackening red stain on the gauze where bone and marbled muscle tissue protrude from the thigh. Charlie says the leg was found in a London canal and will be given its own funeral – buried so that it can be exhumed if necessary, in a coffin, with a priest present. Hawkins, who doesn’t judge it to be worth even a frame, propels the drawer shut with his knee. ‘I think,’ he says to Charlie, ‘that we’re looking for something off your top shelf.’
Charlie goes to fetch a trolley, and Hawkins drifts over to some lift doors wide enough to accommodate entire life-support systems; beds complete with IV tubes, heart monitors, traction counterweights, none of which, being surplus to requirements, ever get as far as this floor. He seems convinced that the shaft is also a conduit for what
ever it was he thought he was hearing a few minutes ago. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t hear this,’ he says. ‘It sounds like some deep-space receiver picking up fragments of communication flows from Earth. Sobbing whispers heard deep in the jungle at night, howls carried on the wind, trees and plants moaning in awful harmony. Tribal people calling to each other through the manioc leaves in the jungle of screaming souls.’
Charlie has wheeled the cadaver into the post-mortem room, where you get a better light. Slipping his hands under the back and knees, he log-rolls it onto a ribbed dissecting table made of stainless-steel, not caring whether he minimises the degree of bounce or not. He peels back the sheet to reveal a face in sublime repose; in a state of almost seraphic innocence which belies its owner’s reputation as one of the major hate figures of the day. We all know the background, but Charlie proceeds to run us through it anyway, determined to give value, like a tour guide at a cash-strapped stately home, or somebody on television describing the chesterfield sofa that is the day’s star prize.
What we have in front of us is a bozo who got his kicks from preying on elderly people living alone. He was wanted on charges of burglary, vicious assault, sodomy and rape when his stepmother, certain he was the man that police were seeking, went into his bedroom while he was sleeping and stabbed him once, expertly through the heart.
Hawkins has wandered off halfway through Charlie’s recital, and has been standing with an ear pressed against the gap in the lift doors. ‘It was a small town in the forest with a lake and a fishing fleet and many ox wagons and rickshaws and bicycles. Most of the houses had walls made from long, braided leaves of a reed that grew by the river, and roofs woven from palm fronds,’ he begins once Charlie has finished. ‘Through lanes among the houses ran children and stubby-legged short-haired dogs. Profuse schools of fish arrived in the river during high water. As the river withdrew, they were confined to ponds in the fields; the villagers caught them in buckets. The days were always hot, and in the air was the damp fertile smell of the river.’