by Nick Bryant
The transfer stage, when the embryo is implanted through the cervix into the uterus through a thin plastic catheter, also went smoothly. By now, we had fallen into the trap that commonly ensnares IVF first-timers, which is to say we were incautiously optimistic. Then our letdown came on the cruellest of days: New Year’s Eve. But we limped into the New Year determined to have another go.
This time, we were far more pessimistic, even though our egg harvest had gone better; and during the dreaded two-week wait – the time between the insertion of the fertilised egg and the pregnancy test – Fleur was convinced we would come up with another negative result. Not patient enough to wait until our official blood test, we freelanced and bought a cheap pregnancy-test kit from the chemist’s.
As Fleur handed me the plastic stick, I saw that it registered just one bold blue line. Failure. We had been through this agonising process on countless occasions before, but this time I lingered before throwing the stick away. There was now the pale hint of azure. Within a second, it had become a firmer shade of powder blue. Then light blue. Seconds later, it was bright and definitive: a lustrous shade of baby blue. False negatives are more common than false positives, so we were confident but still unsure. It would require a blood test at the clinic, which later that morning confirmed the certainty of pregnancy.
Given a November due date, I rather hoped that our newborn would arrive on Melbourne Cup day, thinking it might confer special powers like those imagined by Salman Rushdie at the midnight unfurling of the Indian tricolour. Presumably, the closer an Australian baby is born to three o’clock on the first Tuesday of every November, the better their tipping skills, bringing both enormous riches in later life and a mantelpiece buckling under the weight of invitations to cup-day luncheons.
Alas, the race that has such an immobilising impact on the nation had much the same effect on our baby, who waited another week before making his move. By then, my wife and I were fully primed, having spent a happy weekend in the countryside learning various calm-birthing techniques and having completed our prenatal classes in Sydney. Here, I resisted the temptation to attend the ‘Beer and Bub’ course, where advice comes with a few ice-cold libations, and relied instead on a delightful Melbournian woman who plied us with home-made fruitcake and called us ‘possums’ and ‘darls’ throughout. Her 40-minute simulation of the second stage of labour will live long in the memory both as an object lesson in natural birthing and as a journey into the lesser-known reaches of the Antipodean vernacular that would make an Australian slip fielder blush. Certainly, we will never look upon the frill-neck lizard in the same light again.
There were times when waiting for the start of labour felt a little like waiting for the start of the Gulf War. Shock and awe was imminent, but we did not quite know when. Here, you will have to forgive me for lapsing again into foreign-correspondent speak, but it exposes the occupational hazard of equating everything that happens to a news event, large or small.
Still, as we were soon to discover, the wonder of the birthing suite defies comparison. Taking more than 50 hours from first contraction to first breath, it was a long, agonising labour, complicated by the fact that our baby had assumed the proportions of his father and decided to spend the final hours of gestation luxuriating on his back in the posterior position. It meant that the contractions, rather than being metronomic and building to a rousing crescendo, had more of a syncopated rhythm, like improvisational jazz. Because backbone was grating against backbone, they were also unbearably painful.
In the face of this pain, however, my Australian wife was resolutely Amazonian – she resisted the temptation of numbing drugs – and a labour that started in the early hours of Wednesday morning finally came to happy fruition late on Friday afternoon. From the periphery of news, I could report back to Britain the most consequential story of our lives, and one that Fleur and I will never tire in telling and updating: the birth of a 10.9 lb boy. Bonny and smiling, Billy Bryant seemed the perfect name.
With the family over from Britain, our first Christmas could not have been happier, and so was the run-up to the New Year. Truly, the present was golden and the future brighter still. But on Christmas Day, I had made the mistake of listening to the early-morning news bulletin – a rookie error – and heard that a monsoonal trough had crossed the coast from the Coral Sea and was threatening widespread flooding in Queensland.
Immediately, I turned down the volume and made sure not to pick up a paper or turn on the television news for the rest of the week. But from that moment on, I had that unsettling feeling that my holiday would eventually be interrupted by a trip north of the border to the sunshine state.
All foreign correspondents reach the point, I suspect, when the very thing that once made the job so exciting and fun, which is to say its unpredictability, becomes its biggest drawback. Mine had actually come midway through the year of the disasters in South Asia, when a bomb went off in the pilgrimage town of Varanasi on the night before I was due to go on a holiday planned as a respite from bloodshed and suffering. Now, I felt the sensation more powerfully than ever before, as I took the inevitable call from London asking me to get on the next flight to Queensland and to leave my family behind.
The plane left in only a few hours, and the usual mad drop-everything-and-go scramble to the airport was followed by the usual mad scramble to get a piece to air before our competitors not long after we had landed. Then came the 21-hour work days – on major stories, we tend to work double days: the Australian day, followed, without rest, by the British day – the never-ending demands of our continuous-news channels, the usual pinched deadlines, and the familiar logistical challenges of severed roads, hotels without power, and in this instance a satellite that freakishly caught on fire in the middle of a live cross to the Ten O’Clock News, our flagship program.
In Rockhampton and Brisbane, we witnessed the slow inundation of properties and businesses, a ruination of homes and livelihoods that is always sad to witness. But it was the small towns of the Lockyer Valley, such as Grantham, that were clearly the epicentre of this disaster. When phrases came to be used such as ‘walls of water’ and ‘inland tsunamis’, I thought they had the ring of journalistic hyperbole. Then I flew into Grantham and saw the devastation myself.
Though on a smaller scale than the wreckage I had seen in Galle, Nagapattinam and Mullaitivu, the waters had nonetheless left behind a tsunami-like wake of destruction. Entire homes had been lifted from their foundations. Cars had been tossed miles further down the valley. This kind of destruction is always hard to look at, and the testimony of survivors and rescuers is even harder to listen to.
All of us retold the story of young Jordan Rice, the selfless 13-year-old who had the chance of being rescued from the floodwaters of Toowoomba but insisted that his 10-year-old brother, Blake, go first. Jordan could not swim, and the rope he was clinging to snapped.
Just as agonising was the testimony of Stacey Keep, a pregnant young mother whose house in Grantham was smashed in by the floodwaters, and who was swept a kilometre down the railway line that runs through the centre of the town, clutching her 23-month-old baby, Jessica. Her foot became trapped under one of the railway sleepers, and the force of the water swept Jessica from her arms. Like poor Sarita in Velankanni, who had lost two children this way in the tsunami, she simply did not have the strength to hang on. Always harrowing, these stories were even harder to bear as a new father.
Along with the instant reordering of priorities, parenthood had also made me much more risk averse. It was not as if we were in any great danger in the flood zone, but I was far more hesitant about wading through muddy waters that had venomous snakes zigzagging on the surface, and even felt slight foreboding when zipping over the tops of hill ranges in helicopters to reach the stranded communities – something I have done on countless occasions in far more hostile environments. We did what we had to do, and London was pleased with the coverage, but throughout the month-long crisis I just wanted to go
home.
Christchurch was harder still, since major earthquakes are always more brutal to cover than floods or cyclones. Aside from the logistics and occasional aftershocks, the hardest tests were confronting death and ruin on such a large scale. Not since 9/11 had I witnessed such destruction in a First World city. Nor so much bereavement.
Cathedrals with wrecked facades and toppled steeples stood as landmarks to the destruction. So, too, did the parish churches, many of Victorian gothic splendour, with fallen roofs and wrecked naves. Some destroyed office blocks looked like concrete houses of cards, while at others, like the CTV Building, which had once housed a community-television station, the devastation was almost complete. Had our pictures been broadcast in black and white, viewers could easily have mistaken them as wreckage from the Blitz.
Just as South Asia had experienced a year of disasters, the Antipodes were living through a summer of calamities. And, as with Queensland, I got out as quickly as London would let me. Here, I suspect another threshold had been crossed: the moment of return and reunion was a far more exhilarating prospect than the point of departure – another massive sea change from the early days of my career.
One of the more affecting sights in Christchurch had come at the airport, outside the perimeter of the downtown disaster cordon, where we had gone to film the arrival of a British urban search-and-rescue team. Greeting it at the gate was a welcome party that included the British High Commissioner, her press man, a couple of relief workers and local journalists. As we walked into the terminal to join them, I noticed off to the side a sad-faced Japanese man dressed in a slate-grey suit who had arrived from Tokyo and been greeted by no one. The bodies of more than a dozen Japanese students were buried still in the wreckage of the CTV Building – along with the television station, it also housed a foreign-language school – and he had come to retrieve the remains of his son or daughter, a horrendous journey that he had undertaken with enormous dignity and a minimum of fuss.
Even in the biggest disasters, often it is the small acts of humanity, courage and kindness that set me off, and this poor old man moved me to tears partly because he seemed so determined not to break down himself. The incongruity of the scene made it all the more tragic: a Japanese man landing in a country he probably thought he would never set foot in, who by now had doubtless seen the pictures of the flattened CTV Building and knew his child could not have survived.
Hours earlier, we had filmed a Japanese search-and-rescue team sifting through the colourless rubble of the CTV Building in their bright-orange overalls. These teams remained in the city to help find and repatriate the dead students. Then, just two weeks later, they hurried back to their homeland, after a quake 8000 times as powerful as the seismic shock that devastated Christchurch struck off the north-east coast of Japan.
As soon as the first aerial pictures came through of the tsunami wave, which were broadcast almost in real-time, it was obvious that Japan was confronting its worst crisis since the war. Again, had the pictures of the worst-affected coastal communities been rendered in black and white, we could have been looking at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
As ever in these situations, the first death toll was virtually meaningless, for it registered that just five people had been killed. Given the ‘end of days’ feel to this disaster, footage that resembled the latest in three-dimensional computer animation and the added horror of nuclear reactors overheating to the point of partial meltdown, it was clear early on that the dead would be counted in the tens of thousands.
That Friday night, I had finished up work and was getting ready to join Fleur on a business trip to New York, where I planned to play Mr Mom for a week. Then the call from London came through, asking me to head to Japan. This time, I said no, and I explained my reasons to an old hand in the newsroom who had sent me on countless assignments in the past. ‘Don’t worry, it’s only your first wife,’ he deadpanned – a joke I had heard him deliver so many times down various crackly mobile-phone lines that it had become his catchphrase.
Just as I could not have let down Fleur, I would honestly have struggled to cope with such a massive disaster – not that I told him that. In response to a major tragedy, I had said no only once before, when an earthquake struck off the coast of Chile in 2010 just as Fleur and I were in the midst of an IVF round. Under the drop-everything-and-go laws of Correspondentland, it is not a word that comes to be uttered that often. Another threshold had been crossed.
Walking the streets of New York with a four-month-old strapped to my chest was enormous fun, and I found that the city took on an entirely different character when confronted by a newborn. Passers-by smiled. People stopped to stay hello in the street. Weirder still, they allowed me to grab the next available cab.
While I was waiting to meet a former colleague in the lobby of a downtown radio station, a man who seemed vaguely familiar came up to us cooing and aaahing with great Big Apple aplomb. No wonder, it was Kiefer Sutherland, taking a break from planetary-protection duties, who happily chatted away while we waited to be taken upstairs. Impressed by the dimensions of our baby boy, he assumed that my wife must have ingested a tranche of drugs to deliver him. So when I explained that she had let nature run its course, he was ashen-faced. ‘Christ, I need a cigarette,’ he said, and with that he was off.
For all our fun, as the city prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, there were regular reminders of that more fretful period in the aftermath of the attacks when New York was nowhere near as welcoming: the National Guardsmen at Penn Station; the bronze memorials on the walls of every firehouse downtown; the ongoing construction work at Ground Zero; a skyline unrepaired.
Still it was impossible to hear the wailing doppler of a passing police car, or the burps and belches of a fire truck responding to an emergency call – a 911 call in America, remember – without wondering, however fleetingly, if New York had come under renewed assault.
Then there was the unfinished business from the founding mission of the Bush administration’s war on terror: the hunt for the man who had masterminded the attacks. The anniversary loomed as an emotional deadline for his capture, when no doubt he would taunt America with another videotaped message.
My preoccupation on returning from New York was completing the final edit of this book. In fact, I had just started on the last read-through when a stream of Twitter chat, more high-pitched by the second, started coming out from Washington. The talk was of an unusual late Sunday-night speech from the president. In the ceremonial East Room, no less. White House correspondents, who only the night before had seen Barack Obama mercilessly lampoon Donald Trump at their annual black-tie dinner, were told this was not an event they would want to miss. Former colleagues received cryptic messages from their contacts within the Obama administration, simply noting, ‘Go to work.’
Needless to say, presidents rarely address the nation at such short notice, and never at such a late hour on a Sunday night. When word leaked from the West Wing that the statement concerned national security but had nothing to do with Libya or Muammar Gaddafi– America’s latest target – it could mean but one thing.
As on election night in 2000, Fox News raced out of the traps. By strange coincidence, Geraldo Rivera, who had purchased that gun in the hope of killing Osama bin Laden himself, was on anchoring duties. ‘Can it be, ladies and gentlemen?’ he asked, after receiving word from a Fox News producer working his contacts on Capitol Hill. ‘Could it be?’ Then he looked down at his computer terminal. ‘Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it,’ he said, as he stared, transfixed, at the one-line message on the screen. ‘Bin Laden is dead. Bin Laden is dead. Confirmed. Urgent. Confirmed. Bin Laden is dead.’ With that, he gripped the hand of the white-haired general seated alongside him on set in celebration. ‘Happy days. Happy days, everybody. This is the greatest night of my career. The bum is dead.’
Even before President Obama addressed the nation, a huge crowd had amassed outside the White House, similar in magnitud
e and mood to the one that gathered on the night of his election in 2008 – one that mixed celebration with vengeance. In New York, too, chants of ‘USA, USA’ were soon ringing out at Ground Zero and Times Square, which tapped the same groundswell of ulta-patriotism we had witnessed in the emotional wake of the attacks. The scenes of unabashed celebration also produced one of the ringing images of the night: firemen from Ladder 4 sitting atop their rig watching a news ticker announce the death of bin Laden and punching the air with muscly delight – a blue-collar rendering almost of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic portrait from V-J Day in 1945 of an American sailor kissing a swooning nurse.
In Washington, the White House started to weave a narrative that did not always marry with the facts – something correspondents had become familiar with during the post-9/11 years. The incriminating claim that bin Laden’s wife had been used a human shield, with all the insinuations of unmanliness that flowed from it, turned out to be false. So, too, the suggestion that the al-Qaeda leader had been armed. Still, Barack Obama was at pains to eschew the triumphalism of a ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment, even if the crowds pressing up against the railings of the North Lawn were not in the mood for circumspection.
In any case, it was hardly as if the president needed a victory banner, because the bumper sticker was already in the works: ‘Osama got Obama’ – although anchors and reporters would repeatedly fluff their lines that week as they tried to differentiate between the two.
That the al-Qaeda leader had been hunted down in the cantonment city of Abbottabad came as a genuine surprise, but not the notion that his compound fell within the gaze of the Pakistani military and, by extension, the ISI. This time, however, the Pakistan leadership, which had been kept in the dark about the mission, was not given the chance to play its double game. In the days after, Pakistan’s political and military leadership claimed repeatedly that they had no knowledge of bin Laden’s presence on their soil – another staple. They also expressed outrage at the violation of their sovereignty. But was it confected rage? Part of the Pakistani Government’s double game with its own people?