by Gordon Burn
There has been speculation that the latest bombers are probably British-born but working under the instruction of key al-Qaida figures located in camps in North Waziristan, the tribal land on the Afghan-Pakistan border, high and cold and exposed to flailing wind. The roads there, it is reported, are given over to highwaymen who demand tolls and sometimes abduct children when money is insufficient. Drug gangs and transport mafia dominate the barren economy. The cities have been pounded so hard they are disaggregated into piles of bricks and stones. This is the landscape of the broadcast news, and the novels of the new medieval future: everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Terminal landscapes. Wasted terrain. Osama – the Lion – called the place Maasada, the Lion’s Den.
When Mrs Thatcher and her companions eventually got to where Aitch and I were standing – she cast a curious purse-lipped look Aitch’s way, gave a half-nod and blinked rapidly several times – they opted for the path that leads away from the lake and follows the curve of the D-shape that defines the sub-tropical garden. Usually at this time of the year the garden would be filled with people in shorts and bikinis: the looped metal fence which surrounds it is useful for families with young children, while the dense shelter belt of shrubs and trees, planted in raised beds to create the mild micro-climate in which yucca and banana plants thrive, provides the sunbathers with natural screens that they use to protect their privacy.
But the garden is dripping and deserted. During the winter months the more vulnerable species are shrouded in fleece and straw and protective white plastic whose twine ties, spaced at head, waist and feet levels, inevitably suggest a trussed-up body shape, or body bags. (Although it has never occurred to me before, I am reminded now of the television pictures of Mrs Tebbit, wife of Margaret Thatcher’s trusted Rottweiler figure, Norman, being lowered down the face of the Grand Hotel in Brighton after the IRA bomb went off during the Conservative conference of 1984. The entire front of the building had been blown out by the force of the blast. Mrs Tebbit was strapped to a stretcher and being lowered vertically past gouts of water erupting from ruptured pipes and rooms whose furnishings and personal belongings – flower-patterned quilts, wall lamps hanging by the wires but somehow still burning – were clearly visible. Mrs Thatcher, it would later emerge, was at that very moment letting it be known she wanted Marks and Spencer to open immediately so that delegates, many of them forced to flee wearing only carpet slippers and dressing-gowns, could replace clothes lost in the explosion.)
As she proceeds around the perimeter of the garden, Mrs T stops every so often to reach up to a drooping branch or out to a flabby rosette of leaves to apparently express her concern about how they are being affected by the weather. And it is only now I notice something that should have been obvious from the beginning: no handbag. She is without the item which came to symbolise her legendary bossiness and indomitability and which she turned into a verb: to handbag, or (more commonly) to be handbagged. She isn’t carrying one of the bucket-sized handbags which became part of her armoury. ‘Margaret Thatcher carried the authority of her office always with her. It was in her handbag,’ Douglas Hurd, her Northern Ireland, Home and Foreign Secretary at various times, once said. ‘She was asserting it the whole time’.
Even in the famous picture of her standing in the gun turret of a Saracen tank, taken after the Falklands, kitted out in hooded headscarf and fly-eye desert goggles, she has a handbag over her arm.
What is remembered in the body is well remembered. The presence of learned culture in the body, wrote Elaine Scarry, must at least in part be seen as originating in the body, attributed to the refusal of the body to disown its own early circumstances, its mute and often beautiful insistence on absorbing into its rhythms and postures the signs that it inhabits a particular space at a particular time.
It is said that within a few months of life British infants have learned to hold their eyebrows in a raised position. And a muscle memory keeps sending Mrs Thatcher’s pale, manicured right hand with its prominent wrist-bone and thin blue veins travelling along her other arm in an attempt to push the slipping strap – which of course isn’t there – back towards the clamp of her elbow.
In a similarly reflexive action, her carer’s hand constantly reaches out and hovers around the small of Mrs Thatcher’s back. It is noticeable, though, that, no matter how many times this happens, her fingers never make actual contact with the nap of the camel-hair coat nearly identical to her own. The women are of similar height, build and general demeanour. But for this business with the hands, anybody watching from a distance, through a hair-trigger zoom or with the naked eye, would find it difficult telling the two of them apart.
*
It is often said that today’s abundance of media images creates a screen between the individual and the world, and that this is the source of the feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing. The media gives us images of everything – but only images.
He had only realised Kate Middleton lived a street away, and had been living there for two or three years, when some houses that came up on the TV news looked naggingly familiar. The houses were the backdrop to pictures of the paparazzi climbing over each other to squeeze off shots of Prince William’s girlfriend as she left home for work in the morning.
Kate Middleton had started 2007, according to Princess Diana’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, writing in the Spectator, with the year ‘stretching ahead of her like an enchanted garden’. Prince William was going to announce their engagement and she therefore would be in line to become Queen. But after a series of highly publicised paparazzi chases ominously like the one which resulted in the death of his mother, the prince announced that he and Miss Middleton had agreed, after several years as a couple, to go their separate ways. Nevertheless rumours persisted in the press about them ‘spending secret nights together’ out of the media spotlight. And on Monday all the papers had run pictures of Kate Middleton sitting in the row behind Prince William at the concert held to mark the tenth anniversary of his mother’s death, singing along (so they said, and the event had been televised) to Take That’s ‘I Want You Back (For Good)’.
After registering where she lived, he had sometimes noticed the snappers lurking in their cars in the street, which was very ‘old Chelsea’ and narrow and popular with motorbike couriers and taxis as a rat-run to the river (and treacherous because of that). They sometimes rested their coffee cartons on the roofs of each other’s cars as they stood around chatting; the cartons lay in the gutter after they had gone: the observers observed. He had never seen the girl, though. And then that Tuesday – the same Tuesday he had once more spotted Mrs Thatcher turning about the park – he had almost charged into Kate Middleton in the nearest Tesco Local on the King’s Road. It had been both their faults and they had mumbled apologies to each other: he had been going the wrong way, backtracking, against the after-work traffic, and she had been going too fast with her eyes fixed on the floor.
She was tall; he only came up to her chin; and she had her hair scraped back in a pony-tail instead of the usual loose way she wore it in public, so he hadn’t been one hundred per cent sure at first. But there were pictures of her taken at Wembley at the weekend – Wills’ Kate, as she was described – on the covers of one or two of the freshly delivered gossip weeklies on display in the small periodicals section in the ‘Household Cleaners and Detergents’ aisle, and a quick check against them confirmed that he was right.
What he hadn’t expected was to come face to face with her again while he was doing this. But if she had any recollection of ever seeing him before in her life, she didn’t let on. She was wearing tight white jeans of the type routinely referred to as ‘spray-on’ in these very magazines, and the tightness meant she had to lower herself, bending from the knees, to pick up a copy of the evening paper which was stacked on the lowest shelf. She added it to a bas
ket which already contained breakfast cereal and a two-pack of kitchen rolls.
As she no doubt already knew, there was a colour snap of her on page fifteen, taken at the previous day’s Wimbledon. Her mouth was open in a squeal, cheering on the Spaniard, Rafael Nadal, in his third-round match on the Centre Court. But the couple in the row behind were sharing a tartan blanket draped over their knees, emulating her future in-laws who insist on a rug in the state Bentley when they are out performing royal duties in weather only slightly less than ideal. It gave a doleful aspect to the picture – a blanket in July – but also by suggesting that codgerdom, the only end of stultifying protocol, could only be a matter of a state wedding away.
There was a woman at the next till – early twenties, blonde, bad skin, high colour in her face – who he was starting to suspect was probably bulimic. (He was hoping for a glimpse of her teeth. Doesn’t the acid in the vomit start to strip the enamel away after a while?) At first she had just the two items: a small sliced white batch loaf and a family-size packet of Minstrels, plus a slippery stack of New!, Now, Star and other junk magazines. But then she had reached down to the display below the counter, put there to encourage impulse buys except that hers were clearly well-rehearsed and premeditated, and picked out two Turkish Delights, one milk, one plain, and then a third. And then – this as if as an afterthought, when the other items had already been scanned and bagged by the assistant – a Ripple, a box of Maltesers and two tubes of After Eight. A single-queue system was in operation for the multiple check-outs. And she glanced anxiously behind her before sliding a Galaxy, a chocolate-orange bar and a fourth Turkish Delight across the counter, covered by her hand.
So immersed was he in the details of this innocent but potentially sordid transaction – the basement living room, the gorging, the trips to the bathroom, back to New! and EastEnders; a woman scoring her drug of choice at the local Tesco – that he failed to react when the man who had been serving him – he was a handsome African called ‘Tevo’, according to his ID badge – raised his hand and impatiently beckoned the next customer.
By the time he bent to pick up his second bag – it was the one with the bottles – he found it trapped behind the legs with the white spray-on jeans, bunched at the ankles and pleated behind the knees. With a smile which in the years ahead she would no doubt come to bestow on Aids patients and cheering crowds lining the streets of Papua, New Guinea and good souls who have offered retired guide dogs a final home, she reached down and swung the bag over at him (she knew very well by now he had clocked her) with a clink.
A couple of minutes later she followed him through the automatic doors, and that’s when the fun really started.
What had been an ordinary evening street scene of shoppers and buses, the alkie with his dog squatted by the cashpoint, the phoners and texters, the smokers loitering outside the Louisiana rib-shack, the Lebanese juice-bar, the traditional pub recently turned into a branch of Babushka, all Tesco’s near-neighbours, became all at once a phantasmagoria.
It was like Kate Middleton’s appearance on the street was the cue for special effects to turn the rain machine on, for the music to be brought up high and the smokers, taciturn and sullen to that point, to become animated into a jostling crowd scene.
The big glass door slid open, and she emerged, and it was like the opening sequence of a high-end video with the tracking shots and the overhead cranes, or a musicalised play by Dennis Potter where the heroine opens her mouth and sings in the rumbling Negro baritone of the Deep River Boys, and the beggar throws off his tattered blanket and stumblebum drunkenness and hoofs it through one of the more challenging routines of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly.
The skies opened and the hail hammered down. There was a soundtrack, and it was provided by some kids in a car pumping out the hit of the summer which, as luck would have it, was called ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna (feat. Jay-Z), which had apparently started a craze around the clubs for smuggling in collapsible umbrellas that were suddenly raised and whirled around the dance floor, Gene Kelly fashion, whenever the song by Rihanna (feat. Jay-Z) came on.
So it was July and it was like Singin’ in the Rain and it was also like the scene at the end of White Christmas when Bing and Danny Kaye and all the cast gather round the tree to sing the title song while snow softly gusts in from the street at the back of the stage.
Except the hailstones hurt. They were big and saw-edged and could cause minor abrasions to bald heads.
The man petting the dog belonging to the guy bedded down beside the money hole-in-the-wall turned out to be a pap, who leapt into action the minute his target appeared. And then a second snapper emerged from the door to the cinema, and a third and fourth from the entrance to the pizza restaurant, while others kerb-crawled alongside her in cars and on motorbikes, the ice-balls ricocheting crazily off the Zuni-beetle shells of their big phallic Leicas and the semi-spherical peaks of their truckers’ caps and their windscreens, and seemed oblivious to members of the public yelling at them to leave the girl alone!
There are really two kinds of life, notes the American writer James Salter. There is the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.
Chapter Two
Click to create a shrine. Unlike a gravestone, these tributes will not weather over the years.
Abukar Mohammed 1991 to 2007
Aged: 16
From: Stockwell
* + * JUST * + .
+ . . * + . + * . * +
* . + *SPRINKLIN.* + .
+ .. * + . + * . * + .
+ , *YOUR. + * PAGE+ *
+ .. * + . + * . * + .*
. * * + . * WITH.* .
+ . SOME. * + * * . + * .
. * + * * + . *+ *
+ ..LOVE.. * + . +GOD BLESS XXX
Micki (Mummy of Kylie Whyte-Reynolds, daughter of Terry Embra) 26th Jul 2007 RIP teen angel – When will this all stop? My thoughts are with your devastated family. May you have eternal peace xx
Josh R.I.P. 27th Jul 2007
Another young life taken off da streets … XXXXXR.I.P Abuka babes, lyf aint guna b da same wivout uXXXXX Another young life gone just like that another family in bits
Gone but definitely not 4gotten.
Raegz from Gipsy Hill. Relation: Friend. 28th Jul 2007 I hadn’t seen u 4 long brudda but wen i heard wat went down i used mind ova matter 2 stop myself sheddin’ tears. aint even known u 4 dat long only since i started Stockwell Park in yr11. U woz kul doe fam and itza 100% guarantee i wont 4get man. Dun NO!!. Inshallah Allah will open up the gates of paradise for u brudda …
Abukar Mohammed was murdered in Stockwell in south London on the night of 26 July. His family was originally from Somalia, and he was shot dead at point-blank range in a random ‘execution’ after he was chased across the Stockwell Gardens estate by a gang of teenagers on bikes, wearing clothes with ‘SW9’ written on the front, and ‘Hot Spot’, their name for the estate, a favourite with drug dealers, on the back.
Abukar was sixteen and he was the tenth young victim of gun and knife crime in London in six months. In common with all the others, from Michael Dosunmu, age fifteen, shot dead at home in Peckham in early February, to Mark Dinnegan, age fourteen, stabbed in Islington after being chased by a gang of youths at the end of June, Abukar had had a virtual shrine set up in his memory on gonetoosoon. co. uk within just a few hours of word of his murder getting round.
*
In the early hours of 4 May, with police and volunteers searching the beach and the narrow streets of Praia da Luz, the McCanns’ friends and family back in England started to circulate a text message urging everyone ‘2 light a candle 4 madeleine who was abducted from portugal. we r trying 2 make it a worldwide thing so if u cn plz join in by textin or emailin as many people as u cn’.
Twelve days later the official findmadeleine website was launched. It drew on the expertise of some of Kate and Gerry’s friends in broadcasti
ng and the New Media. It featured many pictures of Madeleine taken over the six days of her holiday; the earliest showed her climbing the steps of the EasyJet at East Midlands airport just before she tripped and cut her knee. Also included were casual, intimate snapshots from the family album, innocent and ordinary.
Madeleine’s eyes had been stylised into media emblems, the defect in her right eye simplified into an easily recognisable logo.
findmadeleine.com recorded more than 70 million visits in the first three days, and 7,500 messages of support, the last folk ritual of social gathering. That volume of traffic was irresistible to typosquatters who, simply by launching near-name sites with only a single letter difference, could send Madeleine well-wishers and the surfers of second-hand non-experience to porn sites and other sites hastily set up by conmen.
Only eight days after her disappearance, an appeal in the form of a rap entitled ‘For The Safe Return Of The Little Toddler To Her Family’, appeared on YouTube:
8 days gone since this lil girl was snatched
people praying all over just bring her back
can you imagine how it feels to be her mum and dad
or her little brother and sister who wont understand
3 years old i ask my self why the world is so cold
but we must keep the faith and not let this go
together we will find maddie dont give up hope
its times like these we hold our family near
the public is there only hope to make her reappear
i see this on the news and i want to shed a tear
this is the truth this is a fuked up world
who could do that to a precious little girl
its just not right madeleine mccann deserves to have a life