Born Yesterday

by Gordon Burn

  It was as if the high-visibility representatives of his heightened security were policing the perimeter of the prime minister’s psyche rather than merely the boundary of the ‘dream home’ with the dream view – his old books from his student days still lined up on the living-room mantelpiece as if he was still in a student let; the armchairs comfortably shabby – to which he still retreats at every possible opportunity.

  *

  The grid of fifty million and the grid of intimacy.

  There is a national life, and intimate life. The distance between these two grids is very great. There is one method, one brutal and shocking method – Oswald used it, Sirhan-Sirhan, the Chapman who killed John Lennon – of connecting the two.

  Today, in late August, he remained vulnerable to sinister Fiats and Toyota Corollas, the roadblocks, the pre-bomb cordons, the panoptical surveillance not yet in place.

  These musings were interrupted by a burly polis who had materialised at the left-hand side of the house and was beckoning to him from the slope of the prime minister’s front garden, indicating for him to step across the road and meet him at the gate.

  ‘D’you mind me asking what your business is here today, sir?’

  ‘I’m a writer.’

  ‘Oh aye, a writer? What kind of writing?’

  ‘Fiction. Non-fiction. Some journalism.’

  ‘S’at right? The papers. You won’t mind my asking where you stopped last night?’

  ‘In a hotel. In Edinburgh. Not very pleasant. I can’t remember the name.’

  ‘Oh, you cannae? Can you show me some ID?’

  This was the third time in under an hour he had been asked to prove his identity. The first two officers who had asked him about his business and seemed satisfied with his answers had in fact soon followed him in a police Range Rover and pulled him over to the side of the road so that further particulars – address, phone number, date of birth – could be taken.

  Now the burly polisman was wanting to take his picture. He had produced a little hand-held device (he knew it was called a Web’n’Walk, his wife had the same model) from out of one of his many pockets – he was a walking trade fair of rifles, pistols, handcuffs, body armour and so on – and was tapping at it with the stylus provided which looked incongruously dainty, like a splinter in his big hands.

  He positioned him in front of the unpruned box hedge at Dramcarling but then experienced a non-connection or a malfunction because nothing happened, the screen remained blank. He made some suggestions and the polis got his picture.

  ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘Too much sky.’

  ‘D’you want to have another go? Shall I take my sunglasses off?’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Can I have a look? … Oh, best picture I’ve had taken in a long time.’

  *

  He had a relation working as a body-protection officer with the police in the north-east that one of the clean-cut pair of younger constables had reminded him of. He had received a group email from Michael a few days earlier – joky, he imagined, and in dubious taste, as they usually were – called ‘The International Rules of Manhood’, which he had saved unopened.

  But he had a while to wait for the train – he had located the station on the other side of the hill from Brown’s house and had decided to return by train to Edinburgh instead of the slow trip back on the bus – so he opened ‘The International Rules of Manhood’ and began scrolling through it.

  THE INTERNATIONAL RULES OF MANHOOD

  1: Under no circumstances may two men share an umbrella.

  2: It is OK for a man to cry ONLY under the following circumstances:

  (a) When a heroic dog dies to save its master

  (b) The moment Angelina Jolie starts unbuttoning her blouse

  (c) After wrecking your boss’s car

  (d) One hour, 12 minutes, 37 seconds into The Crying Game

  (e) When she is using her teeth …

  7: No man shall ever be required to buy a birthday present for another man. In fact, even remembering your buddy’s birthday is strictly optional. At that point, you must celebrate at a strip bar of the birthday boy’s choice …

  9: When stumbling upon other guys watching a sporting event, you may ask the score of the game in progress, but you may never ask who’s playing.

  10: You may flatulate in front of a woman only after you have brought her to climax. If you trap her head under the covers for the purpose of flatulent entertainment, she’s officially your girlfriend …

  14: Friends don’t let friends wear Speedos. Ever. Issue closed …

  17: A man in the company of a hot, suggestively dressed woman must remain sober enough to fight.

  In his cover note Michael had written, ‘Pay particular attention to rules 23, 24 and 27’:

  23: Never allow a telephone conversation with a woman to go on longer than you are able to have sex with her. Keep a stopwatch by the phone. Hang up if necessary.

  24: The morning after you and a girl who was formerly ‘just a friend’ have carnal, drunken monkey sex, the fact that you’re feeling weird and guilty is no reason for you not to nail each other again before the discussion about what a big mistake it was occurs.

  27: The girl who replies to the question ‘What do you want for Christmas?’ with ‘If you loved me, you’d know what I want!’ gets an Xbox. End of story.

  The International Council of Manhood Ltd

  Early in the morning following his trip to North Queensferry, his wife was woken by a man who said he was from the power company. When she opened the door she was confronted by two T-shirted men who looked like bouncers or SAS and who, after stepping briefly into the flat, and failing to produce any identification, hurriedly made their excuses and left.

  She was concerned enough to phone EDF Energy who said they had no knowledge of anybody being sent. A further call to an emergency number also drew a blank.

  *

  On the morning of his first full day in office, Gordon Brown rose to the news that three more British soldiers had been killed in Iraq, with several more seriously injured. Among the dead were two twenty-year-olds: privates Jamie Kerr from Cowdenbeath, and Scott Kennedy, known to all as ‘Casper’, from Dunfermline. They were serving with the Black Watch, they were ‘Fifers’ like himself, they and their families were his constituents.

  They died with a third soldier when a roadside bomb exploded near Basra.

  They were returning from a re-supply mission to Basra Palace around 1 a.m. and had stepped from their Warrior armoured vehicle when insurgent members of a ‘rogue militia’ set off an improvised explosive device.

  Jamie Kerr’s page on Bebo was inundated with tributes from devastated friends who had just heard of his death. One said, ‘RIP Jamie Kerr. I can’t believe you’re gone, hunnie. Sleep tight. Night night.’

  Another said, ‘Love you mate. You were a great guy. Never forget your happy face’.

  Jamie regularly updated his page on the Bebo website, keeping in touch with the people he had left back home. Shortly before he died, he wrote: ‘You may ask why I am writing this [at 5 a.m. in Basra]. Well … canny get any … sleep and a want to go hame!’

  John Stonham (screen name ‘stonebollocks’), serving with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders overseas, was lucky enough to get home, but only just. Blown up in a car-bomb attack in the Iraqi town of Shibah in 2004, he was in a coma for nineteen days and given little chance of surviving the flight from Iraq to Britain.

  But, twenty-seven operations later, in 2007 he was still living and ‘back up on ma feet an walking wae a crutch’, he emailed his chatroom friends.

  Stonebollocks’s Bebo profile in part reads:

  Sports: none am a cripple, according to the sun.

  Scared Of: iraqi petrol tanker drivers, size 18 catheter’s.

  Happiest When: on ma morphine patches, when the m.o.d admitted liabilty, its set me up for life.

  Hate: … the blue dress thats does up at the back, u need to we
ar b4 an op (how vulnerable do u feel in that).

  Hometown: erskine hospital

  ‘Its all good,’ John Stonham writes, ‘take it fae me lifes to short to dwell on things. Share the luv.’

  *

  Erskine is on the outskirts of Glasgow. It is where John Smeaton lives with Mum, Catherine, and Dad, Iain, and from where he makes the easy commute to Glasgow airport to work. It is to ‘stonebollocks’ and the other residents of Erskine Hospital, formerly the Princess Louise Hospital for Limbless Soldiers and Sailors – there are in fact a number of ‘Erskines’ in various locations in Scotland, dedicated to the care of older servicemen and servicewomen, as well as the casualties of the new wars of Iraq and Afghanistan – it was to ‘the real heroes’ back from Iraq that Smeato passed on the thousands of pints put behind the counter for him by people using their credit cards and PayPal.

  Erskine Hospital was opened in 1916 to help treat the tens of thousands of British veterans who were disabled during the carnage of the First World War. A desperate shortage of artificial limbs was the great pressing problem of those years. It was ingeniously resolved by harnessing the skills of the workers of the nearby Clyde shipyards and soon the Erskine limb had been devised.

  No one then could have envisaged that there would still be a need for ‘Erskine care’ nearly a century later or that it would be required to extend it to the treatment of soldiers traumatised by being targets of suicide bombers graduated from Quran study groups in gritty neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and south London, or madrasas in Wakefield; or from having to scrape the brains of a best friend off their combat jacket or watching children shot dead as human shields or living for six months in constant fear of their lives.

  By July 2006, according to the New York Times, there were an estimated 6,000 checkpoints in Baghdad, manned by 51,000 soldiers and police, yet car bombers were still setting off deadly explosions on an almost daily basis; the city was rocked by several kamikaze or remote-detonated bombs virtually every day. By June 2005, it was estimated that some 500 car bombs had killed or wounded more than 9,000 people in Iraq, with 143 car-bomb attacks in May 2005 alone.

  The modern car bomb: the use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target. Known as ‘the poor man’s air force’. A creative atrocity, and something those airlifted home from Basra and Shibah and Helmand Province and other points of planet Jihad had good reason to think they had left far behind.

  And then in summer 2007 it followed them home. All that remained of the suicide bomber was a charred forearm handcuffed to a steering wheel. Burning fuel instantly engulfed the market and nearby homes. A white Mitsu-bishi sedan exploded in a huge fireball. The fire chased the people down and ate them alive.

  Some of the suicide attacks were beyond horrific. The car bomb that rammed the gate and exploded at the steps of the lobby, the flocks of hungry crows hovering over a rubble composed of car parts, shredded clothing, and dismembered bodies. Suicide bombers cruising the streets in search of targets of opportunity. A sports utility vehicle registered in Texas. A foot taped to the accelerator. The eagerness of foreign volunteers, especially large numbers of Saudis and Jordanians, to martyr themselves in flame and molten metal, seeking to use car bombs as stairways to paradise.

  The national threat level had been raised to ‘critical’, the highest degree possible, which confirmed another attack was expected imminently.

  Al-Qaidist ‘replicants’, al-Qaida affiliates or clones, the whole horror show outside their own front door. Forty or fifty people can be massacred with a stolen car and £150-worth of bootlegged electronics.

  And the people arrested were doctors. Mind-blowing, man. A total freakin mind-fuck, that one. A junior doctor, Bilal Abdulla, had worked at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, near Glasgow, after graduating from Baghdad University three years ago.

  His alleged accomplice still lay in the hospital, seriously injured and receiving treatment from the staff who had previously worked alongside the young Iraqi being questioned by police in connection with the attacks. Terror plot hatched in British hospitals. Aam in a British hawsptl, ken wha am sayin. It’s knocked me back, like. Right enough, so it has. Its fukd ma heed.

  The kind of people treating them turned out to be terrorists. Double fkn whammy, or what? Protégés at who-knew-how-many removes of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed mystic who founded the Taliban in 1992 and essentially ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until the invasion by allied forces in 2001. ‘Taliban’, meaning ‘to teach’.

  Eight of the nine people arrested for the attempted car-bomb attacks on Glasgow and London were doctors or National Health Service workers.

  Ayman al-Zawahiri, the ideological leader of al-Qaida, was a doctor, one of a family of thirty-one doctors, chemists or pharmacists, and Osama bin Laden’s personal physician, dug into a trench between two mountain positions.

  Six of the ‘Tapas 7’ were doctors or had connections with the NHS. That made eight of the ‘Tapas 9’, when you counted Kate and Gerry McCann.

  Gerry was the youngest of five children of Irish immigrants. He went on to study medicine at the University of Glasgow. Kate studied medicine at the University of Dundee. They met when they were both junior doctors at Western Infirmary in Glasgow. When she left to work in New Zealand for a year, he followed and won her heart.

  *

  Erskine Hospital. The Royal Alexandra, Paisley. Western Infirmary.

  All hospitals hold a secret. According to the plan displayed in the entrance hall, the windowless ground floor of the main building contains the emergency department, operating theatres, and intensive care wards. This leaves about a third of the floor area unaccounted for, a blank on the chart where you will in fact find the morgue and the post-mortem room, a sluice room, a furnace room, a number of side rooms filled with clamps, scalpels, kidney-shaped bowls, hydraulic corpse technology: a terra incognita marked ‘Histopathology’; the place where the bodies come.

  The kinds of change worked by severe trauma in the minds of those who suffer its effects are beyond the ability of psychoanalysis or psychiatry or any other form of psychotherapy to repair. The number of troops who have committed suicide after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan is equivalent to 10 per cent of deaths suffered in operations. The Ministry of Defence has disclosed that seventeen serving personnel have to date killed themselves after witnessing the horrors of conflict.

  The images that arrive in their mind without invitation are so clear that they seem almost as if they were happening again. They are pursued by their memories; their memories harass them, and they cannot get rid of them. A part of them came to a standstill and they are drawn back to the people they were with a frequency that is punishing.

  He had been thinking about trauma, reading some things about trauma. Their experience of trauma was what the McCanns, Gordon Brown, and Brown’s new friend John Smeaton, the Queen’s Gallantry Medal added to his long list of trophies and citations, had in common.

  Life-changing moments. Calamitous events.

  For Kate McCann it was the moment of walking in and finding the bed empty, Madeleine missing, Cuddle Cat, which she had left her holding, high on a shelf where Madeleine could never have reached.

  Gordon Brown lost the sight in his left eye and was almost blinded by a clash of heads in a game of rugby, that trauma leading to the trauma of his eye operations, the months in the blacked-out room listening to books for the blind, the possibility of perhaps never being able to see again.

  John Smeaton saw two men in a burning car intent on killing and maiming dozens, maybe hundreds, of men, women and children; a man with his skin on fire screaming something about Allah, throwing punches at a policeman, Smeato’s pal coming up to him afterwards and going, ‘What did you do that for, you maddie?’

  Candid news photographs are structured to reveal how people react when the comfortable facade of daily life is torn away. F
acing experiences of great joy or tragic loss, people expose themselves, and photographs of such moments are thought to reveal truths of human nature.

  The news. Always something – usually unpleasant – happening far away to a stranger; to somebody else, somewhere that we’re lucky not to be.

  The best of life is lived quietly, wrote John McGahern, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.

  They did not give Portuguese police the satisfaction of crying.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dan Weir was an apprentice paparazzo. £500 can set you up in business in these days of digitisation, and that’s what he’d done. On the night the butane-and-nail-filled Mercedes saloon failed to detonate on the pavement outside Tiger Tiger in the Haymarket, Weir had been night papping. He was on his way home from patrolling the nightclub circuit when he got the snap – the green car abandoned on the pavement, boot open, gas canisters scattered around the rear wheels – that appeared in most of the following day’s papers and on all the rolling-news channels. ‘It’s a dream shot,’ he said of the picture, which was expected to make him upwards of £25,000.

  *

  On that same night, at roughly the time the emergency services were being called to Tiger Tiger and the West End was being cleared, in a Mayfair gallery little more than a hundred yards away, a standing man was spraying Windolene onto his penis and masturbating into a carrier bag.

  By 28 June, Damien Hirst’s piece For the Love of God – the platinum impression of a skull set with thousands of small diamonds for which the artist was famously asking £50 million – had been on display at the White Cube gallery in Mason’s Yard for just under a month and the show still had ten days to run.

  The skull was shown in a bullet-proof, cube-shaped vitrine mounted on a metal plinth in a totally black environment – black ceiling and walls; black floor – in conditions of intense security. It was reported to be the most expensive object assembled in Britain since the Crown Jewels, and security was to Tower of London standards, and beyond.