by Gordon Burn
*
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the title of a Philip K. Dick 1968 science-fiction novel, is something I have been reminded of by both this coverage of the floods and reports from Praia da Luz on the Madeleine McCann kidnapping, which have been taking turns in leading the news, and informing each other in unexpected ways.
Dick’s novel was loosely adapted by Ridley Scott for his film Blade Runner, and the distinction between the human and the android, the organic and the artificially simulated, lies at the heart of both film and book.
The androids of the novel are made entirely of organic components and are physically indistinguishable from humans. But humans have authentic memories, and androids don’t. It is by the presence of memories, and their attendant emotions, that humans are distinguished from replicants, or simulated humans. Rachel Rosen is saved at the end of Blade Runner by the bounty hunter Deckard acquiescing to her passionate conviction that the family photographs she possesses are indeed the source of authentic memories; she crosses over and is accepted as human.
The conviction, given wide expression in the press and across the blogosphere, that Kate McCann was ‘hardly human’ in the cool and controlled way she behaved in the televised appeals for information about Madeleine and in the attention she gave to her clothes and hair and other aspects of her appearance in the face of catastrophe, clearly implied that she must be implicated in some way in the disappearance of her daughter. The chief characteristic of androids is their lack of empathy. Because androids cannot feel empathy, their responses are either missing or, when faked, measurably slower than those of ‘genuine’ human beings.
*
I didn’t expect to see Mrs Thatcher in the park today. For one thing, there is the weather: thunder, hail, rain, floods, occasional humid sunny periods. ‘July monsoon – Amazing pictures’ will be the page-one flash in tomorrow’s Evening Standard. In late afternoon this part of London – and so the All-England Championships at Wimbledon, where the organisers are reportedly planning a third week – will be plunged into purple apocalyptic gloom and battered with a blizzard of ice-balls as big as marbles. Hail will blanket the rooftops and streets and blow into banks and drifts against garden walls and in the lee of every tree trunk.
Far more relevant than the weather, though, in determining whether the former prime minister takes her turn in the park is the fact that the terrorist threat level has been raised to ‘critical’, the highest degree possible, following attempted car-bomb attacks on the West End and Glasgow airport, a tactic for inflicting mass murder – propane gas and common nails, flooring nails and roofing nails – imported, as the intelligence services had for some time been dreading, from the streets of Baghdad.
It is exactly the sort of national crisis Mrs Thatcher, who came close to being killed by the IRA at Brighton in 1984, was famous for grabbing by the throat – ‘I must govern!’ – and everybody is waiting now to see how Gordon Brown shapes up. (‘Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once,’ the IRA said in a statement at the time of the Brighton bombing. ‘You will have to be lucky always.’)
In office, Mrs Thatcher never read newspapers. She only read what her press secretary Bernard Ingham told her was in them. Out of office, though, the rumour mill insists she has all the papers brought to her every morning, when she sets about them with a marker pen, highlighting idiocies, striking through inaccuracies, furiously scribbling comments and corrections in the margins. (What happens to the marked-up articles then? Does somebody clip them and have them couriered to the relevant minister or senior civil servant? Are they indexed and annotated and transferred to a Thatcher research resource or archive, to await posthumous decoding? Or does she have her own A. J. Weberman figure, famous for picking through Bob Dylan’s garbage in the hope of unearthing secret information, coiner of the term ‘garbology’, sniffing round the dustbins of Belgravia?)
As it is, I recognise the cars as soon as I see them sweep in off the roundabout and through the gates – a bottle-green Jaguar slung low through the weight of its own bulletproof glass and protective steel-plating, tailed by a silver Land Rover whose occupants (I know this from Irina at the tea kiosk) stay behind to keep an eye on things when Mrs T’s morning constitutional is in progress.
It is the first time I have been around for this arrival part of the operation. But it is instantly familiar – Jaguar moving like a bullet through water, support vehicle bringing up the rear – from the overhead shots that tracked first Blair, and then Brown, as they made their separate ways to and from the Palace last Wednesday. (In a few weeks’ time I will recognise it again, at closer quarters, when the taxi that’s taking me to an appointment at the House of Commons is halted by police out-riders at the MI5 building opposite Lambeth Bridge to give the prime minister’s Jag a clear run along Millbank.) Very quickly the cars are a few hundred yards away at the western end of the car park, where they stay in formation, parked parallel to the kerb, rather than poked into the bays like the smattering of other cars that are already there.
Towards the end of the long countdown to his retirement as prime minister, Tony Blair’s personal detectives, some of them with him from the beginning, were given two choices: stay with him in his new role as ordinary citizen, or opt to be deployed elsewhere in the protection service. Anticipating a future based on that of his friend Bill Clinton, who he was already occasionally meeting for dinner at Claridge’s, or drinks in his suite at the Ritz, or at the Mondrian in Los Angeles or the Marriott in Palm Springs or the Sherry Netherland in New York for one of Clinton’s starry ‘social entrepreneurship’ events, based on the idea that business and philosophy can form a seamless whole (motto: ‘Using entrepreneurial methods and market mechanisms to solve social problems’) – looking forward to an easy life on the international charity and lecture circuits, Tony’s detectives (motto: ‘I’ll have what he’s having’) had all signed up to stay with Tony. Only to have it announced on the day of his last appearance in Parliament that, far from chasing the high life, Blair had angled for and been given the job of special peace envoy to the Middle East. So it was goodbye candle-lit cosy-ups with Brangelina and Bono (the heavies know probably better than anybody that among the most visible benefits of celebrity is access to fellow celebrities; also that their own darkling presence is one of the most potent modern signifiers of status). It was goodbye to that, and hello street skirmishes and local militias and a future of dodging bombs and ducking bullets at checkpoints and sandbagged shit-holes in the occupied territories. There was a rush to jump ship as soon as Blair’s peace envoy role was announced. But his detectives were told they had signed up and were committed; they were there for the duration and to please collect their body armour on the way out.
Mrs Thatcher of course knows this. Even in this period of her senescence, she gives the impression of still knowing everything. A fortnight ago she had taken Tony Blair’s arm at a memorial service to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Falklands war, one of his last showpiece appearances as prime minister. (She had caused a kerfuffle by turning up in a lavender hat-dress-and-coat outfit virtually identical to the one worn by her old adversary, the Queen.) In a few days, waiting for the start of the Wimbledon semifinal between X and Y, I will glance up from the paper to see her easing past Terry Wogan in the royal box at Wimbledon, inclining her head to take the applause, raising her hand in a small regal wave once she is seated.
Where does she go in between all the times she is not being ‘Margaret Thatcher’? The answer, sometimes it seems, is here, where the short, purposeful steps of her performance self are allowed to dwindle into the short, tentative steps of pensionerdom and widowhood and she is allowed time away from the big, emphatic colours she uses to identify herself for the cameras – her blazons.
I watch them form up into the usual group – the two women in the middle, dressed virtually identically, a protection officer front and rear, narrow diamond formation – and move slowly from the c
ar park, across the carriage-drive with its steep camber and submerged gutters, in the direction of the lake.
The detectives assigned to her have grown old in her service. With their mottled cheeks and serge overcoats and tightly rolled umbrellas, they could be middle-ranking civil servants or (the slightly younger, slightly more dashing ones, the type she has always had an eye for – the type Mark Thatcher has always tried to emulate, shirts from Turnbull & Asser, shoes from Lobb, hoping for his mother’s approval) denizens of the secret world of intelligence.
A shelter squats between the Thatcher party and the lake, largely blocking the path, making the path fork around it. Open to the weather on four sides, with a metal hasp-anchored timber bench in each, it has been graffitied over and had names gouged out of it of course, and attracts what are known among the more respectable users of the park as ‘elements’ – hoodies, neets (a new New Labour acronym: ‘not in employment, education or training’) and others who wear their piercings and anti-social behaviour orders with intimidatory swagger. It is the sort of park shelter that suggests something untoward is going on in one of its compartments even when there isn’t (although there usually is).
At the shelter they can go one of two ways along the perimeter path around the lake. Turning right will immediately bring them to the cantonment of anglers with their maggot banks and igloo tents and support group of recreational distance-spitters and Stella-swiggers. One of the reasons Mrs Thatcher’s love affair with the gated community in Dulwich was so short-lived was that the route to and from it took her through Brixton. They take the narrow path to the left of the shelter – I can see the rim of a bicycle wheel and the toe of a brand-new, fat-laced white trainer poking out of the shadowy alcove closest to where they are walking – without drawing a flicker of interest from the ‘elements’, who are either shut off with their fishing rods behind their big umbrellas or too locked into their own deals and interests to notice. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.
And so we go along, the five of us, not twenty feet apart. And then, a further twenty feet beyond Mrs Thatcher and her minders, I see Aitch in his broad-brimmed Australian Driza-Bone hat, dog leads cabled round his neck, waiting to pick up after a miniature Schnauzer that is squatting on a greasy, churned-up square of grass.
Aitch seems enviably unfazed by his encounters with Mrs T. ‘Saw ole Maggie yesterday,’ he might volunteer. ‘Looks more like her Spittin’ Image every day.’ (Or, ‘Saw that idiot Geldof’: the two of them have been evil-eyeing each other in a feud that dates back many years and involves Geldof accusing Aitch of not keeping his dogs under control around his small daughters, Peaches and the other one, who these days are never out of the papers.)
Aitch touches the brim of his hat in acknowledgement to the advance detective, who assumes a surveillance position, waiting for the others to catch up. He knows Aitch, knows he can be trusted to maintain a neither hostile nor over-chummy neutrality. He doesn’t know me. His expression seems to invite an explanation. I tell him I’m waiting for my dog who has found some interesting smells a little way back, to find me. (‘Reading his wee-mails,’ I think of saying, parroting a woman with a wire-hair Parson Jack Russell, but don’t.)
Standing there, the two of us slightly apart from the detective, who is separate from the main group of Mrs Thatcher and her carer companion and his fellow protection officer, in this slightly unreal situation (we know that under their roomy double-breasted navy blue coats both men are armed) Aitch suddenly opens up in a way that has never happened in the years we have been passing the time of day with each other.
I know he has a son, grown up and living in Australia (which may explain his fondness for the slightly ludicrous-looking waxed cotton hat, the kind that has wine corks dangling from it in cartoons). But now he is speaking for the first time of a girlfriend, which makes me adjust my perception of him as a loner, somebody who loves the park, which he has been using since he was a boy (he remembers it in the early post-war years when it was still divided into allotment gardens, his mother coming over to pull a lettuce, some carrots), and notices the seasons; somebody who vegges out at night with a ready-meal and tins of beer that he collapses with his fist and allows to lie where they fall. (Somebody like James, in fact, who I know takes a drink, but whose midden of a flat mysteriously didn’t seem to contain any tell-tale cans or bottles when it was ransacked by Kim and Aggie.)
‘I took my girlfriend for a meal in the West End on Friday night,’ Aitch says. ‘And it was deserted, like a walk in a country lane.’
I had passed the precise spot where the bomb was, the piece of pavement where they had parked the car packed with petrol and liquid propane or butane and nails, dozens, probably hundreds of times, without noticing. ‘Tiger Tiger’. It meant nothing.
There’s a club in Shaftesbury Avenue, close to Piccadilly, part of the soaked concrete Trocadero development, where there’s always a queue along the pavement at a certain time of night with the black bouncers with their zephyr earpieces and padded satin bomber jackets and stylish kids with their pants hanging off and the white iPod wires like in the bus-stop posters against their black skin, whose eyes you sometimes lock with and feel old, going home on the bus, take the dog around the block, get the pillows set right for the asthma.
But ‘Tiger Tiger’? Nothing. London’s Tiger Tiger is one of a national chain of nine late-night venues owned by Novus Leisure, I read in the paper. Tiger Tigers, the report continued, are particularly popular with women and also appeal to older partygoers because of a policy of allowing customers to pre-book booths, removing any chance of having to queue in the cold.
In future of course it will be impossible to sit on the top on the number 19, gazing out of the tagged, hazed window, catching the effervescent blue of the digitised sign on the side of the bus occasionally bubbling up against shop-window displays and stretches of marble curtain-walling, or interacting interestingly with the vivid orange of the Tiger Tiger illuminated sign, tone-on-tone volumetric illusions, a heightened surface complexity, the new optical solids, and not think: 60 litres of petrol found on the back seat and in the boot with a mobile phone trigger; nails strewn around. The first explosion would rupture the gas canisters and produce a fine cloud of gas, petrol and air; a second explosion would then detonate the vapour. That would give you an explosion of the sort the Americans used to flatten the trees in Vietnam, said Sidney Alford, an explosives expert.
Difficult in future to swing right off the Haymarket along Jermyn Street in the direction of St James’s, within a few feet of where the metallic green Mercedes was parked, and see the smokers who now throng the pavement outside Tiger Tiger, hugging themselves with their pale bare arms, corralled behind velvet ropes, shifting from foot to foot (the bombers beat the smoking ban by two days), and not think: carnage and deep-body laceration and major head trauma; bodies ruined by nails and glass, torn up. Hard not to gauge how many of them are wearing glasses and recall that the sight of many of the survivors of the London suicide bombings on 7/7 was saved by the glasses they were wearing.
‘The new wars’ is how they are coming to be referred to in academic circles. Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, but also the wars here. (Although the new prime minister has committed himself to desist from using the Blair–Bush all-purpose rallying-cry, ‘the war against terror’.) ‘New-Wars Theory and Sources of Insecurity’ is a course that has been made available at some British universities. ‘Risk Sociology’ and ‘Terrorism Studies’ have also been proving popular in the years since 9/11, particularly with students from overseas.
Khaled Meshaal. Ismail Haniyeh. Fawzi Barhoum. Abdul Rashid Gazi. Jaish al-Islam. The Tawhid and Jihad Brigades. Mumtaz Dogmush. The Popular Resistance Committees … Are these among the names and organisations Mrs Thatcher has highlighted or put exclamation marks against over breakfast this morning? They all appear in a single piece in a single paper, an article about the BBC jour
nalist taken hostage in the Gaza Strip on the 12 March. Already it is day 113. (Day 61 for Madeleine. Day 06 for the new administration of Gordon Brown. In four days it will be 07.07.07 – ‘Triple Seven’ – an apparently propitious date for Western culture: many thousands of marriages have been planned for that date. There will be a mass wedding ceremony at 7 p.m. on Triple Seven Saturday at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Catholics and Charismatic Evangelicals in the US are holding mass rallies.)
A video released to Al Jazeera television two Sundays ago showed the captured BBC correspondent wearing what he said was an explosives vest; the kind of vest that one of the Islamist terrorists in the burning jeep that rammed Glasgow airport apparently had strapped to him. But, even as I stand batting the breeze with Aitch, and Mrs T makes her slow approach along the railing by the lake towards us, Palestinian militias are preparing to liberate Alan Johnston from the rival al-Qaida-inspired faction who have been holding him: dozens of Hamas gunmen in black masks are occupying the rooftops of high-rise apartment blocks that overlook the stronghold of the Dogmush family in the Sabra district of Gaza City. There has been sporadic shooting throughout the morning, with one passer-by shot dead in crossfire. People are burning tyres to drive away mosquitoes and flies. Does she know this?
The ‘country lane’ effect, as Aitch has described the unusual quiet that took hold in the West End in the wake of the attempted car-bomb attacks on the Haymarket – restaurants deserted, pubs slack, cinemas and theatres closed, only the voices of the military and yellow-reflector-vested members of the emergency services occasionally ripping through the silence – reminded me of something I had read about the new wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere: that the landmines strewn around were difficult to see because they were green and disappeared in the grass.