by Gordon Burn
with her family where she should be
if youve got her give her back im beggin you please
stop putting her family through all this grief
its her birthday tomorrow what better present could there be
than setting her free
just let her be
The voice sounded like the voice of a child. Clicking on the singer’s Profile, though, brought up the picture of a balding man in his late twenties sitting in what looked like a bedsit with a cheap boxwood guitar.
Given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the wayward imagination, wrote J. G. Ballard, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim.
There is a view of photography as being something ‘that seizes a moment in life and is its death’, and the photo gallery on the Madeleine site could be offered as proof of that. Some took the view that the sheer volume of pictures in existence showed that the parents hadn’t wanted to experience their daughter as a person so much as record her having the experiences they were fortunate enough to be able to buy.
But could it be that the McCanns wanted their daughter to become as familiar to strangers through her image as she was to them, so that they, too, would wake in the morning and – before they could locate it – might feel that there was now a tragic absence in their own lives; something catastrophic that in their first moments of waking they were having trouble remembering?
The media of real life. The murder leisure industry.
Privacy is so last century, the headline read, but we need help to adjust.
Chapter Three
Myrobella, the Blairs’ constituency home at Trimdon Colliery, was once the big house of the village, occupied by the doctor’s family, solid and detached among all the encroaching narrow terraces of pitmen’s houses. It stands in full view, but it isn’t easy to find.
From near the top of the hill that leads from one of the Trimdons to another – Trimdon Colliery up to Trimdon Grange, which eventually connects to a third Trimdon, the Village where the church that provided the setting for Blair’s coming-of-age ‘people’s princess’ speech can be found and, only a little way up the hill from there, Trimdon Labour Club, the place where he launched his campaign to become leader of the Party in 1994 and announced his intention of standing down as prime minister thirteen years later, a modest, modern building he thinks of as his ‘spiritual home’ – gazing back across the scrub meadows with their punctuation points of brown shaggy-backed horses indolently cropping, and irregular grassed-over depressions where the coal seams once ran, is a dense copse with a mossy Victorian slate roof poking out of the top of it. This is Myrobella, the house the Blairs bought in 1984, the year after he was elected MP for Sedgefield in County Durham.
But the closer you get to it, coming down the hill past the miners’ welfare cottages with their barbered lawns and recently constructed cubistic, architecturally adventurous hard-edged glass porches, past the terraces with their uniform vertical swivel-blinds and elderly men gardening in their vests, hard muscle turned soft, the harder the Blair house is to see.
When the pits were working, Trimdon Colliery, like all the neighbouring colliery villages, would have been a dirty place. The original owners of Myrobella (stove-hatted Myron, pin-curled and pinafored Bella?) would have looked out over a landscape of pit-heads and winding gear permanently slaked with the heavy industrial fallout of soot and ferrous pollutants and dust. The bricks of the original terraces are still nearly as black as muck.
The modern world – the post-Thatcher world – has announced its arrival with a lot of white. The timber of the old front doors has been stripped out and replaced with waxy white PVC; the windows are white plastic and the ‘nets’ put up at them are also white with occasional lime-green or bubblegum pink detailing.
The front of Guappo’s barber’s shop which stands in a sort of fork in the road shortly before the main rundown shopping street in Trimdon Colliery – the sign outside says ‘Hair design for men’ – is jazzily black-and-white and has nothing about it to indicate that it is the near-neighbour of the big house where, until recently, the prime minister lived.
Myrobella is approached along an uneven narrow track with a terrace of half a dozen miners’ houses running down one side. The police have taken over the house nearest the Blairs. There is a heavy round-the-clock police presence and a series of barriers ringing Myrobella. There is a wooden barrier with an urgent caution notice on it and then a brick gate-house where evidence of some of the duty officers’ home comforts – a radio, some washing-up liquid, an electric kettle – can be glimpsed through a window. Police armed with sniper rifles patrol the perimeter. The house itself has been screened from the public with close-planted perennials and tall box hedges, creating a dark and rather oppressive atmosphere. This is amplified by the dank patch of municipal playground full of nursery-coloured rides and brimming with deadly negative potential – the inch-thick subaudible rubber tiling squelches underfoot – that has been carved out of quarter of an acre of what was originally Myrobella’s either front or back garden.
The uncertainty arises from the fact that none of the house’s doors, certainly none of its windows, is visible. The process of concealment has been so well achieved that all Myrobella’s particulars – homeliness, openness, availability of natural light, original features, true wear and tear, stability, renovations, orientation, everything about the house – is subject to speculation, and has to be guessed at rather than known. Many people would argue that in these respects, Myrobella is emblematic of Blair himself, ‘the man with no shadow’: a formidable building that appears, no matter how many times you circle it, to have no doors.
In the early years, before the era of ‘celebrity government’ had been inaugurated under Tony Blair as prime minister, he used to hold his regular Saturday-morning surgeries at the house. There would be complaints towards the end that it was impossible to get in to see him; that the nearest you ever got was his Sedgefield agent, John Burton, and that Blair himself didn’t know the full name of anybody in the village. Even in his years as a fledgling MP, though, from 1983 on, for somebody committed to simple Christian principles of charity, equality and good intentions as Blair was, his receiving of constituents at Myrobella on Saturdays must have had something uncomfortably Thomas Hardy-like about it: a tableau of the halt and the poor huddled against the rain and the biting wind, carrying their problems to the grand house.
(No telling of the tale of Gordon Brown can be complete without reference to his standing as a ‘son of the manse’ and the effect it had on him as a boy growing up in a house which was often the place of last resort for many of his father’s hard-up Kirkcaldy parishioners. Dr Brown, who was considered a saintly man, believed it was his duty to help feed, clothe and encourage those at the bottom of the heap. ‘Living in a manse,’ Gordon Brown later said, ‘you find out quickly about life and death and the meaning of poverty, injustice and unemployment.’)
Just before the barber shop on the road that leads down into Trimdon Village, visitors are given a subtle clue that they could be within striking distance of the former prime minister’s house. ‘Premier Court’, a sign announces at the entrance to a new cul-de-sac development of what the brochures generally describe as ‘executive homes’. The cul-de-sac of double-fronted, pale brick houses where Kate and Gerry McCann live with their children a few miles north of Leicester looks similar in the pictures. The difference is that Orchard House in the commuter village of Rothley is a close neighbour of The Ridgeway, singled out as one of the ten most expensive places to live in Britain by the Sunday Times at around the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.
Five miles to the north of Trimdon are the former mining communities of Haswell and Haswell Plough where the (at that stage still anonymous) Labour donor David Abrahams made a killing in 2001, when he put together parcels of land occupied by disused buildings and obtained planning permission so that the sites coul
d be sold on for residential development.
Trimdon and Kelloe pit at Haswell were once linked underground. Pairs of hewers drove roadways into the coal, fifteen feet wide, and the subterranean road between Trimdon and Kelloe stretched for mile after mile, with new roadways struck off to the left and right at intervals of twenty yards. The two pits are connected in local folklore by the Trimdon Disaster of 1882 in which seventy-four people were killed. But, whereas Haswell has become a popular commuter village built by Miller Homes, Trimdon itself remains a property black spot, stubbornly unarbitrageable and apparently ignored in the rush to coalfield regeneration.
North Moor Avenue contains only a handful of closed or failing businesses. The Grey Horse is closed down and slowly collapsing. Inside the Royal, Blair’s local if he had one, it is like a permanent rainy Tuesday in late autumn. An overfed Staffie waddles up to the bar, sniffs each arriving customer’s shins, waddles back to his place in front of the fire trailing a thread of shining drool and a pungent body odour. Portrait of an English summer.
And now Myrobella, whose comings and goings were some of the few signs of life in Trimdon Colliery, is starting to give the appearance of being uninhabited, maybe even abandoned in spite of the outgoing PM’s expressions of deep sentimental attachment and pledges of lifelong fealty. A van came and collected many of the Blairs’ personal belongings a few days after his valedictory address to the House of Commons. Already the uniformed officers who have been assigned to the house for ten years seem listless, even apprehensive. They are standing watch over an absence. They are guarding nothing. They are bearing witness to a kind of voluntary self-erasure.
A week after Blair left office, the viewers of Richard and Judy voted as their YouTube clip of the week a little girl Madeleine’s age – a little girl very like Madeleine – refusing to eat her breakfast and sobbing over the void left in her life by the disappearance of Tony Blair. I love Tony Bair! she wails. I want Tony Bair! Doesn’t she like the new prime minister? her mother asks from behind the camera, knowing the answer, pushing her daughter’s buttons, prompting her bleatings for the benefit of the YouTube audience. Noooooo! Wheeeere is he? She bangs the table with her spoon and screams even louder. I love Tony Bair! (‘Thousands of little girls want him to be president so they can have him on the TV screen and run their fingers through the image of his hair.’ This from a political commentator in the Sixties, on the subject of Bobby Kennedy. ‘Nonchalance is the key word,’ the writer added. ‘Carefully studied nonchalance. The harder a man tries, the better he must hide it. Style becomes substance.’)
Blair’s vanishing act when it happened, happened quickly. There were big attention-grabbing events: back-to-back, piled-up catastrophes and near-catastrophes – the terrorist attacks, the floods, foot-and-mouth – and somebody else taking charge of them, doing the reassuring. One minute Blair was part of the national static, and the next he was gone. The fact it had been a long time coming didn’t make any difference. The little girl (and, here, it is difficult not to hear David Beckham’s voice on his television appeal for information about Madeleine: Anybody who may have seen this littoo gel …, holding up a picture captioned with the single word DESAPARECIDA, the broad diamond-encrusted ring, the buffed pearl-cuticled nails, the big fuck-off watch), the little girl was right. His disappearance from public life was eerie, its stage management both calculated and, in its eventual effects, its tiny but tangible tipping of the world (that trailing sleeve gathering up the dirt of King’s Cross station, Cherie’s parting shot of ‘We won’t miss you!’ to the world’s press gathered outside Number 10, the look that said ‘Zip it!’ that he shot her) unexpectedly unsettling.
Blair had announced his departure from public life at Trimdon Labour Club on 10 May. It was a full-scale media event, with satellite trucks crowding the village and reporters doing pieces to camera all along the edge of the green. The New Labour anthems – ‘Search for the Hero Inside Yourself’ and ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ – were sprayed around, and people appeared with placards, some (as observers noted) in suspiciously similar styles: ‘10 Years, 3 Elections, 1 Great Britain’; ‘Britain Says Thanks’, ‘Tony Rocks’.
His bowing-out coincided with another, more subliminal subtraction: it was the last weekend of the football season, with the switching of rhythms in all English towns and cities, the adjusting of habits and routines, of traffic-flow systems and shop opening hours that the close-season always means. The football grounds falling silent is experienced, even by people who have never set foot in them and maybe resent the disruption that match days bring, not so much as an absence as a lack of presence: the very traces of life extinguished, of death stalking through the centre of life.
Before their final game of the season against Chelsea in London on 13 May, Everton players wore Madeleine T-shirts during the warm-up. Brian Healy, her grandfather, was a lifelong supporter of the team that is traditionally followed by Catholics in Liverpool, and soon the family would release a picture of Madeleine wearing her blue ‘Toffees’ shirt. It was piercingly reminiscent of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman photographed in their red-and-white Beckham tops just hours before they were murdered by Ian Huntley in Soham. And just two games into the 2007–8 football season in mid-August, an eleven-year-old, Rhys Jones, died when he was hit in the head by a bullet fired by a hooded figure on a mountain bike while he was on his way home from football practice in the Croxteth area of Liverpool. Rhys Jones too was an Evertonian. And three days after his murder, pictures of Rhys in his Everton jersey were being flashed onto the big screens at Goodison Park alongside the continuing appeals for information about the disappearance of Madeleine showing close-ups of the defect in her eye and the photograph of her in her Everton top.
The observance of a minute’s silence had become a regular feature of match days at Goodison over the previous twelve months, as Evertonians in the armed forces continued to be casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the first Sunday after his murder, there was a minute’s applause for Rhys Jones before Everton v. Blackburn, and his favourite tune, ‘Johnny Todd’, the Z-Cars theme and Everton anthem, was played. The following morning the Everton coach stopped on the way to training so that the players could add signed football boots and jerseys and a signed ball to the shrine that had been made in the pub car park where Rhys died.
Within forty-eight hours of his murder, Steve and Melanie Jones, Rhys’s parents, had submitted to the harrowing ordeal of a televised interview with Richard Bilton, the soft-spoken BBC reporter who had been covering the McCann case from Portugal and had interviewed Kate and Gerry McCann in their apartment in Praia da Luz. And the Joneses, along with their older son, Owen, all wearing scarves and the Everton colours, were standing at the side of the pitch to join in the minute’s applause on 25 August, weeping, of course, their faces reddened and smeared, their hair and clothes dishevelled, looking wrung-out with exhaustion and grief. Looking how people are expected to look when the comfortable facade of life has been torn away as a result of the unimaginable happening. The Joneses looked, in other words, the way Kate and Gerry McCann – controlled, collected, articulate, focused – had stubbornly refused to in all their appearances in public since Madeleine had gone missing.
Gerry McCann was a heart specialist at the Glenfield Hospital in Leicester. But it was his background in sports medicine which had opened doors to the likes of David Beckham and Alex Ferguson and Manchester United’s Portuguese winger, Cristiano Ronaldo. Both teams at Celtic’s home game against Aberdeen on the last day of the Scottish season had worn yellow armbands to mark Madeleine’s fourth birthday. Four days later, on 16 May, Gerry’s brother John, accompanied by the former England rugby captain Martin Johnson, had launched the official fundraising website dedicated to Madeleine, and the same day his sister Philomena – ‘Auntie Phil’ – had travelled from her home in Glasgow to meet the prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, in his office at the House of Commons; the ‘Iron Chancellor’ had apparently
shed a tear as he held her hand.
Gerry McCann and Kate Healy were clever children from working-class backgrounds, in Glasgow and Liverpool respectively. Both their fathers earned their livings manually, as joiners, and they had both aspired to become, and after the long slog of study had eventually qualified as, doctors. Much of the hostility directed towards them from the early days of the search for their daughter seemed to stem from the fact that they had been educated out of their class. Their accents – Gerry’s in particular, which was heard most often – connected them to the backgrounds they had grown away from, while their profession was an unmistakeable sign of where they were heading.
In the meantime, in midlife – they were both thirty-nine – they were unrooted; they fitted nowhere. The sports-leisure wear that they wore for photo opportunities in Praia – Kate’s ghetto-style trainers, Gerry’s cropped trousers – seemed too up-to-the-minute for people who called themselves doctors; the names they had given their daughters – ‘Madeleine’, with its Proustian resonance; ‘Amelie’ rather than plain Emily – appeared pretentiously Frenchified and ‘European’ to people of their parents’ generation.
That was one difference between the McCanns and Steve and Melanie Jones: the Joneses were part of a community that they knew and that knew them; they belonged. And their belonging, given vivid expression in the way they were embraced by, first, the Goodison and then the wider Merseyside tribes – the hated ‘Johnny Todd’, for example, was played at a Liverpool game for the first time in living memory, a few days after their son’s murder; the red of Liverpool became as common as the blue of Everton bunted across his shrine – was seen to represent a kind of authenticity that in the McCanns was lacking. By August Kate and Gerry had already emigrated to the new territory established by the likes of Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey and Richard Branson, where networking, influence and giving are inextricably intertwined.