by Gordon Burn
It was just over a year since Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans, and images of that catastrophe were still fresh in the memory. Prisoners from the New Orleans jail herded onto a ramp of the collapsed and flooded freeway. The showpiece Superdome flayed by the storm and transformed overnight into an overcrowded and insanitary shanty town. The impoverished and the elderly lined up along a central reservation of a flyover awaiting evacuation eight days after the hurricane hit.
They added to the heightened sense of a loss of control, of being surrounded by menacing and perhaps inscrutable entities.
One teatime a man came on Richard and Judy to offer helpful tips and advice to anybody who might find themselves, like so many thousands had across the country, inundated by floodwater in their homes. Some of his hints were preventative and commonsensical: higher pedestals for cabinets in the kitchen, electric points higher up the walls, a bilge pump in the floor-space. And then, quite without warning, his down-to-earth, bluff, DIY persona darkened and the nightmare vision of death down bottomless pits and premature burial was unleashed into the living room and the Baby Belling world of caravan-land. ‘If you have a manhole cover nearby,’ he suggested, ‘place an old car battery or heavy stone on it. It can blow out and float away and, once it’s underwater, anybody could disappear into the hole.’
On 25 June, parts of Hull were washed away in the most devastating floods in the city’s history. Just before ten that morning the leader of the council declared a ‘major incident’, an emergency planning term requiring special arrangements to be put into place, and quickly. An incident room was set up in the Guildhall and all non-essential council staff deployed across the city to sandbag buildings and close roads. Ennerdale sports centre in the north of Hull was designated an official rest centre (until it was itself flooded) to accommodate people who were beginning to abandon their homes and offices. The emergency services reported that the city was being overwhelmed.
Around ten-thirty, Michael Barnett who was twenty-eight and worked at ‘Kingston Koi’ in Astral Close, Hessle, in Hull, had started trying to clear debris from a storm drain behind the shop when his leg became stuck. Undaunted by water on account of working surrounded by water and the silky, banner-like movements of the nishikigoi, in English champion-grade carp, he had cleared the same drain in a previous flood just the week before. The cover had drifted away and been replaced by lengths of municipal railing bent into an improvised cage shape. It was this his leg had got wedged in up to the thigh and he was held there neck-deep in the fouled flood water as the emergency services struggled for four hours to lever or lift him free.
Michael worked closely with koi, which comes from the Japanese, simply meaning ‘carp’. It includes both the dull grey fish and the brightly coloured varieties. Koi are symbols of love and friendship in Japan. They have been known to live to a great age and come to recognise the person that feeds them; they can be trained to come to the surface to take food from the hand and will gently nibble the tips of the fingers of their regular feeder. Koi and tattoos of koi are traditionally considered lucky in Japan.
Koi are cold-water fish. The water was cold even though it was nominally summer and, despite the best efforts to save him, rescue workers desperately trying to keep his head above water, amputation of the leg a constantly reviewed possibility, acetylene equipment sent for, a surgeon standing by, Michael was held by his leg in the dirty water and was slowly dying of hypothermia.
*
The pond is located far deep among the mountains of Mino Province. The locality is called Oppara, Higashi-Shirakawa Village, Kamo County (writes Dr Komei Koshihara, President of Nagoya Women’s College, radio broadcast to the whole Japanese nation over the NHK radio station, 9.15 p.m., 25 May 1966). Nearby there are rustic hot springs called Oppara-onsen. Facing south towards the Pacific on the top of Mt Ontake, you will look down upon the locality at the foot of the mountain. Through the locality runs the Shirakawa, a tributary of the River Hida which again is the upper reaches of the River Kiso. A stream of limpid water never ceases to flow all the year round. It is this water that flows into the pond in which ‘Hanako’ lives and which was carefully constructed with stones in former days. Besides that, pure water trickled from the foot of the mountain streams close by into the pond, making the favourable conditions still more favourable. The pond cannot be called large, only being about five metres square.
‘Hanako’ is a nishikigoi, a special carp which a scientist, with the use of a light microscope, has found in 1966 to be 215 years old. All six carp that live in the pond of Dr Koshihara’s native house in Gifu are found to be in excess of 140 years old. Dr Koshihara continues:
You can see carp everywhere, but this red carp of ours, ‘Hanako’, you will be surprised to know how precious an existence she is. There did not exist in this world any such country as the United States of America yet at the time when this carp was born. It was 25 years later that America made public the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It is very interesting to think that during the long years that this carp has continued to live, a country by the name of the United States of America came into existence and has built up her present culture of high standard. To speak in Japanese fashion, it was born in the 1st year of Horeki, that is, in the middle of the Tokugawa Era. Please consider how long her life is, surviving the shogunate and later the national advancement of Meiji and Taisho, and still continuing to live to this day of Showa.
This ‘Hanako’ is still in perfect condition and swimming about majestically in a quiet ravine decending Mt Ontake in a short distance. She and I are dearest friends. When I call her saying ‘Hanako! Hanako!’ from the brink of the pond, she unhesitatingly comes swimming to my feet. If I lightly pat her on the head, she looks quite delighted. Sometimes I go so far as to take her out of the water and embrace her. At one time a person watching asked me whether I was performing a trick with the carp. Although a fish, she seems to feel that she is dearly loved, and it appears that there is some communication of feeling between us. At present my greatest pleasure is to go to my native place two or three times a month and keep company with Hanako.
Dr Koshihara concludes:
Our urban life has become, and is increasingly, dreary owing to the soiled atmosphere and noise. What do you say to making your daily life somewhat more enjoyable by constructing a pond for fancy carp? It can be done with only a little spare time and small labour. I call fancy carp ‘Live Jewels’, and I am convinced that they truly deserve the name. Thanks to their owner’s loving care, the carp, male and female, grow larger and larger day by day. If you put your hand into the water they will gather around and suck the finger tips. It is to be sincerely desired that we all should have the spare time and self possession to stroke and pet these ‘live jewels’ on the back from time to time. Thank you for your kind attention.
Michael’s father had gone to the culvert where his son was trapped. The owner of ‘Kingston Koi’ had telephoned him. Michael had worked there for twelve years, from leaving school, a talking textbook on koi. Police officers kept his father back and advised him that he should either stay in a police car or go home. As he watched television, he heard ‘that the young man trapped in the drain had died’. He then waited for a number of hours for police to come and confirm what had happened.
Did Michael imagine he could feel his favourite nishikigoi using its mouth to caress the tips of his fingers as consciousness ebbed? That it was Ghost koi, the modern metallic hybrids, at play around his feet, stirring the substrate, increasing the brown turbidity of the water, rather than contaminating slime and human effluent? I’d like to think so. A stream of limpid water never ceases to flow all the year round. It is this water that flows into the pond in which Hanako lives.
The solidity of the external world dissolved. The feel of life in this new waterlogged reality.
Astral Close.
Some say the drains are heaven’s guts.
Chapter Seven
1
tub, Sudocrem – 1 ‘Taste the Difference’ butter-roasted chicken salad sandwich – 1 tub, ‘Taste the Difference’ coleslaw (was 96p now 50p) – 2 bottles Caledonian sparkling natural mineral water – 1 Madagascan vanilla Jersey milk yogurt (was 59p now 25p) – 1 Fruits and Nuts (‘a luxurious mix of nuts and juicy fruits’)
He didn’t know why he made this list of everything he had just bought from the late shop whose lights he could still see spilling into the village from his upstairs window. The Sudocrem was to draw the heat out of the sunburn he had suffered on his face and scalp. The forecast had been rain, more rain. The forecast was wrong. The afternoon had brought strong sun and he had toiled up the hill between the Trimdons like an old Chinaman, thinking (too late) to use his pocket-size umbrella with the broken spoke as a sun-shade, tilting it to obscure his face every time a car approached on the near side. Maybe he saw the list as a diary – a displacement diary of the depredations of being away from home.
He knew writers had to travel away from home sometimes in order to gather material – it was part of the writer’s life. But he always fell avidly on writers writing about their (preferably fed-up and futile, preferably seedy) on-the-road existences. He often went back, for instance, to Naipaul’s tender description of his eighteen-year-old self, spending his first night in a New York hotel, on his first night away from his island. He has with him half a roasted chicken that his family, at the ritual family farewell, has pressed on him at the airport, thousands of miles away and many hours earlier. ‘I ate over the waste-paper basket, aware as I did so of the smell, the oil, the excess at the end of a long day … like a man reverting to his origins, eating secretively in a dark room, and then wondering how to hide the high-smelling evidence of his meal. I dumped it all in the waste-paper basket. After this I needed a bath, or a shower.’
Of the many descriptions of the erotic possibilities of down-at-heel hotel rooms in Graham Greene, he particularly remembered the one from England Made Me about Minty, the expatriate freelance hack: ‘The room was cold … it was bare. He tore the coloured cover off an old Film Fun and stuck it against the wall with a piece of soap … He tore out a picture of Claudette Colbert in a Roman bath and balanced it on his suitcase. Two girls playing strip poker he put above his head with more soap.’ The older Greene, he knew – the established, mysterious, debonair writer – always stayed at the Ritz on his visits to London. But he preferred to think of the younger man in some bare and shabby rented room, like the character in his novel, arranging his trousers under the mattress before turning in, to press the creases in them.
Only the day before, on the train travelling north from King’s Cross to Darlington en route to Sedgefield where the by-election to pick Tony Blair’s successor was about to take place, he had come across a story which he sensed even before he had read a whole page was going to become one of those pieces of writing he would return to when he wanted to be reminded of the special pleasures as well as the privations of being in a strange place, following a story. ‘A man likes to be alone sometimes. Being alone doesn’t mean being where there are no people. It means being where people are all strangers to you.’
Idly flipping through the pages, at the same time watching the colours of the countryside go by, those words had instantly drawn him in and made him go back to the start of the story.
Looking for an excuse to put aside the various press releases and printouts going over the issues in the Sedgefield campaign (it was a non-campaign – there was no way that Phil Wilson, the Labour candidate and a longtime confrère of Blair’s, wasn’t going to win, and he couldn’t pretend that the state of Newton Ayclffe health centre or the regeneration of Aycliffe town centre held any real interest for him, any more than they had for Tony Blair, who had appeared to do nothing about them in his twenty-four years as MP), he had opened a paperback book of stories by Sherwood Anderson that he had had for several years but had never looked at until then. The lines that trapped his eye were from a story called ‘In a Strange Town’, which he worked out had been written around eighty years earlier by a writer who had always had to live in the shadow of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and his friend William Faulkner. It didn’t seem so old. It still seemed fresh, with romantic unpoetic sentences that rang with an arresting off-note.
‘A morning in a country town in a strange place’, it started. ‘I have come away from home. I am in a strange place’.
Slowly he read on, no longer agitated by the over-amplified customer announcements before and after every ‘station-stop’. No longer anxious that the trip was going to turn out to be a waste of time and money and tell him nothing about Blair he didn’t already know, or apprehensive about where he was going to end up spending the night. Bright colour seen from the train that went to Darlington.
I will sit in this hotel until I am tired of it and then I will walk in strange streets, see strange houses, strange faces. People will see me. Who is he? He is a stranger.
That is nice. I like that. To be a stranger sometimes, going about in a strange place, having no business there, just walking, thinking, bathing myself. To give others, the people here in this strange place, a little jump at the heart too – because I am something strange.
Having made the list of items picked up from the late shop, next he felt he should add a description of the room where he was going to be for several nights (fewer nights than he told the man at the desk he was going to be staying – not hanging around for the count at the leisure centre, not even waiting for by-election day itself, he would bail out on day three) in case at some time in the future he should need to recall the details. It was a pub room of the kind he had stayed in all too often: stencilled dado line of green leaves and orange flowers, brought round slightly higher on one side of the doorframe than the other; small dusty Japanese-made television, missing the remote; cheap boxwood furniture stained coffin-like dark mahogany brown, with rust-mottled shiny gold hinges and handles; a loose-grouted tile on the floor in the bathroom which rocked every time you crossed to the sink. The only unusual feature was the windows which, from the outside, could be seen to be half the height of the traditional sash windows on the two lower floors. The room he had been given was at the top of the building and extended into the pitch. The windows in both bedroom and bathroom came up only as high as his waist and he had to bend like the giant peering into Goldilocks’ house to see through either.
That first night, as he sat on the edge of the bed eating his butter-roasted chicken salad sandwich and ‘Taste the Difference’ coleslaw, he looked up condolence messages and tributes on mydeathspace.com and gonetoosoon.co.uk, impressed as always by the way ordinary keyboard symbols like +’s and ( )’s could be turned into representations of angels’ faces and bouquets of flowers, absorbed by the gap between the obviously genuine sentiments of many messages – ‘still to dis day i fink 2 myself y, y u but ima cum c u soon bruv, nuff love’ – and the texting shorthand they were expressed in; trying to decipher the lyrics of the rap songs that came on as the soundtrack to the details of many violent young deaths connected with petty crime and drugs and run-ins with the police and all the stuff of proletarian outsiderdom – lyrics he had a tin ear for.
*
‘Well, alright!’ is something he knew the young Blair, a Jagger fan, did a lot of during his few appearances as the singer with Ugly Rumours, the band he joined while he was studying law at Oxford in the early Seventies. ‘Well, alright! … I said, Well, alright!’ This – catastrophically – was Neil Kinnock’s attempt to show that he was youthful, modern, dynamic and ‘down with the kids’, leaping onstage at Labour’s famous ‘pre-victory’ election rally at Sheffield Arena in spring 1992, shortly before they were humiliated at the polls by John ‘warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers, old maids bicycling to communion through the morning mist’ Major.
In addition to sending him to Nicki Clarke, hairdresser to the stars, for a style re-think and putting him into ‘softening’ fuchsia ties
in the period leading up to his coronation, part of ‘Project Gordon’ had been to get him to boast in public about being a toe-tapping, hand-jiving Arctic Monkeys fan. In terms of street-credibility this ranked alongside Kinnock’s stadium-rock shout-out and Blair’s ‘So what’s the scene like out there?’ to Damon Albarn the first time they were introduced, and ensured that Project Gordon was swiftly binned in favour of Plan A, the sober, statesmanlike sell.
*
The place he found himself staying was a former coaching inn with traditional lime-washed walls and black pointing and a deep arch that still opened on to a cobbled yard at the back of the building, and then open fields. The pub was part of a terrace running adjacent to the main road which acted as an effective baffle between Sedgefield village and the countryside around it. On one side were the tea-rooms and shops and pubs and the everyday commerce of the village, and on the other the woods and meadows; the Sainsbury’s Local selling ready-meals and magazines until very nearly midnight, and in the darkness just beyond the light from its window, the natural habitats of bats and cinnabar moths and green-winged orchids come into flower two months ahead of time.
Part of the yard of the pub had been turned into a beer garden, with rickety-looking, rustically knocked-together furniture coated in black gloss paint; the arch, whose lower walls still bore the long scars of carriage axles, was used by smokers to stay out of the rain.
Next door to the pub was ‘Minsters’, a restaurant painted in the same traditional black and white colours where the Blairs could sometimes be seen and whose owner had done the catering for ‘their Leo’s’ christening. Minsters was cosy and chintzy with satin-tasselled lamps and tassels dangling from the heavy, faux-leatherbound menus. It was on the main road and gave, local people felt, a good picture of Sedgefield. It was quiet, it was discreet; it was above the average pocket. This was the kind of place Sedgefield saw itself as being. It got their goat that outsiders confused their village, a market town since the fourteenth century that was sometimes described as looking ‘as though it could be in the Cotswolds’, with the larger Sedgefield constituency represented by the prime minister.