by Sam Baker
The lifts weren’t my friends either. One was stuck on six, the other had flat-lined. So I ducked into the stairwell, taking concrete steps two at a time. An unpleasant cold sweat had broken out under my shirt. There’s no convincing excuse for arriving twenty minutes late on your first day. No excuse other than cutting it too fine, a tube breaking down, the heard-it-all-before usual that gets you an eye-roll, if you’re really lucky, and first dibs on the next crap job to cross the picture editor’s desk if you aren’t. Bursting out of the stairwell, I bent gasping in the atrium by the lifts.
‘Late?’
I jumped, cursing myself for not looking before collapsing in a heap.
The bloke at the coffee machine didn’t even bother to take his cigarette out of his mouth when he looked me up and down. I don’t know what he saw, because I didn’t give him more than a cursory glance, but I doubt it was impressive. ‘Don’t sweat it,’ he said, before turning his back on me and heading for the newsroom. ‘They’re still in conference.’
The picture desk was in a corner of the newsroom, some bollocks about light that anyone who knew anything about photography knew was going to make not the slightest bit of difference by the end of the coming year. Digital, you see. I’d dropped my rucksack and camera bag and just finished arranging myself nonchalantly on the corner of the picture editor’s desk when conference emptied out. Thank God, it didn’t take any longer, because I’d have started to snoop. A sleeping computer without a password is a terrible thing.
‘Lawrence. You made it then.’ The picture editor, top of his voice. All eyes turned to me, decided I was ‘not interesting’ and turned away. In less than a second, I was dismissed. Or maybe I imagined it. Either way, my new boss was clearly a twat.
‘Get yourself a coffee,’ he said. ‘Machine’s out by the lift. Get me one too. Milk, sugar. Then open that lot over there. Make yourself useful.’ He indicated a small desk, half a desk really, hidden under an enormous pile of brown envelopes.
I opened my mouth to protest, I’d done the assisting thing, setting up lights, taping down wires, endless form-filling and filing … Then I caught the dare in his eyes, thought better of it and surprised myself. Already, I was learning you don’t have to say every single thing that enters your head and I’d only been there ten minutes.
Slow news day. The phrase was invented for ones like this. Saturdays bracketed by Easter and bank holidays when nothing happens except football and the paper starts filling up with comment and analysis of the non-events of the week. Busy for picture research, sod all to do if you’re the not quite staff, not quite photographer.
The morning was painfully quiet, made worse by the huge pile of collects – pictures that needed to be returned to their rightful owners. Family shots from the seventies and eighties. Weddings, funerals, christenings, summer holidays, graduations, you name it. The kind of pictures that mean absolutely nothing to anyone but their owners. Dump them in the bin instead of carefully addressing an envelope and sending them back and you’d rip a tear in someone’s life. A small one, maybe. A tiny tear in a life that was insignificant in news terms; one with no public voice, but still a life.
‘Lawrence! Job for you!’
I leapt up, bag in hand – keen keen keen. I don’t know where I thought he was going to send me. Somewhere big! Somewhere important! Ten minutes later I was on a bus to Lewisham to photograph some woman for a triumph-over-tragedy filler that wouldn’t even run if any real news happened between now and deadline. I didn’t care. I had a commission. And, I told myself, even the legendary war photographer Margaret Bourke-White had to start somewhere. Although I very much doubt it was on the 89 to Lewisham.
As first jobs went, it was underwhelming. I only remember it because of what came next. It was just after half six, and everyone had pretty much given up on the day except for the poor sods who had to put the paper to bed. Dullest Saturday in the history of dull Saturdays. I was loading my cameras into my rucksack, one staff photographer was out, one was on holiday, one had sloped off early.
Then the news desk phone rang and all hell broke loose.
Phones began ringing off their hooks and suddenly everyone was moving and yelling, grabbing coats, Dictaphones, swearing about remaking pages. In amongst the furore I caught the words Soho and bomb. Nail bomb. Fuck! Nail bomb. Also, somewhere in there, bloodbath.
‘Lawrence! Scrap that, whatever you were planning to do tonight, cancel it. Huntingdon! Ridley! Take her with you.’
‘But, guv …’ I didn’t know which of them protested, but it was clear they didn’t fancy taking a woman, and certainly not a newbie.
‘You need a photographer. Lawrence is it.’
Well, fuck you too, I thought, when I saw the look on their faces.
The news editor turned to me. ‘Get everything. Everything. I mean it. If in doubt, cover it. And don’t come back ’til you have.’
I got the rest: Or don’t come back at all.
‘Come on!’ The guy from the coffee machine – Ridley – was wedging the lift door open with his foot, an expression on his face that said he’d shut it on me, given half a chance. The other one was already in the lift ranting into his mobile phone. ‘Get a fucking move on!’
Once in a cab they discussed strategy and swore at the traffic. Walk, I wanted to say. Better still, run, it’d be quicker. I forced myself to stay quiet. It was pretty clear they thought I was the weak link. As far as they were concerned they’d be better off with no photographer at all. A small voice in the back of my head was a bit too hasty to agree with them.
‘Admiral Duncan’s near Dean Street. Drop us on Shaftesbury as near to Dean as you can get,’ Huntingdon told the driver.
‘No chance, mate.’ The driver shrugged. ‘Gridlock up ahead, look. Locked solid. Bloody chaos. Police everywhere. Something going on?’
Listen to it, I wanted to say. Instead, I yanked down the window and the shriek of approaching sirens rolled in, swamping the cab. Huntingdon ignored me, scowled at the back of the cab driver’s head. He looked like he wanted to pull it off.
‘We could always get out and walk?’ I said. Sick of being ignored, I directed the comment to Ridley, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. ‘Or, better still, run?’
Huntingdon looked like it was now my head he wanted, but he threw a tenner at the driver, leapt out and sprinted off. Point making, much.
‘He’s starting at Wardour, working back,’ Ridley said, only the faintest hint of patronising in his tone. ‘I’m starting this end, we’ll meet in the middle. You stay with me. Photograph everyone I talk to and anything I tell you. We need colour and lots of it. Road blocks, ambulances, fire engines, stretchers, crowds. Cover the lot. And the injured. Plenty of injured. If we get back without them we might as well not go back at all.’
‘How injured …?’ I started to ask.
‘How injured?’ He gave me a look, one I was already coming to think of as a very news desk look. ‘As injured as you can get.’
Old Compton Street was rammed. The noise was overwhelming, sirens wailing, voices screaming directions and orders. ‘Stand back! Move! You can’t come in here, sir! Over here! Move!’ And in amongst it, music still flooding from neighbouring bars. Howls of pain and grief undercut by the Backstreet Boys. Beneath it, more unnerving than any howl, was a silence I would come to recognise in the years that followed.
The silence of utter shock.
There was a smell too. I’ve always been sensitive to smell, but this … I’d never smelled anything like it, although I’d come to recognise that too. The flat, metallic smell of blood. Exhaust fumes fused with singed hair, burning flesh overlaid with Italian food, Chinese food, burgers … Flesh, both human and animal. Beneath that, the stench of alcohol where the opticals had exploded. All that, and vomit.
Bile rose in my throat and I made myself swallow it down. Ridley glanced over and rolled his eyes. That was what did it. I swallowed again, and turned away. Fuck you, I thought, fuck you
.
It was almost too easy to lose him. So easy, I’m pretty certain he’d been hoping to shake me off. While he waved his press card in the face of the officer guarding the tape, I walked straight past with an ambulance crew. I should have felt bad about it, but I was too angry. Angry, and horrified.
‘How injured? As injured as you can get.’
It played over and over in my head.
Almost an hour had passed since the bomb went off. Long enough for everyone to have convened on the scene; not long enough for anyone to have started doing anything other than the most urgent clearing up. There were photographers and journalists everywhere; all taking the same pictures, all asking the same questions, of the same people. What was the point of another shot of the blown-out pub? The first stretcher carried out? The policewoman with her hand over her mouth? The upturned bar stool in the middle of the street? I took those shots anyway. If The Times had them and we didn’t, I’d be out of a job as quickly as I’d found one.
Weaving my way up Old Compton Street, avoiding eye contact with anyone looking remotely official, I realised the smell of fear and alcohol was overpowered by something else, something acrid enough to make me swallow down more bile. The scent of burnt coffee coated the inside of my nostrils. I’d never feel the same about percolator coffee again.
‘There were people running out covered in blood, dust and bruises,’ a dazed-looking man was telling an ITN camera crew, outside the coffee shop next door to what remained of the pub. I doubt he had a clue where he was, let alone who he was talking to. The only people running now were ambulance crews, shuttling stretchers to and from the Duncan. Those from inside still able to run had done that long ago. On the pavement opposite, a row of the injured, red and blue blankets draped over their shoulders, dressings held to their heads, sat on the pavement awaiting treatment. Their number was slowly growing as police ushered walking wounded from the ruins. Their expressions hollow, eyes dead with shock, T-shirts covered with blood or dust or both. If they noticed me raise the camera Dad bought me to celebrate my new job, their expressions didn’t register it. Mine wasn’t the first to capture them and it wouldn’t be the last.
Soon, all that was left inside was the debris. The front of the Admiral Duncan was ripped away, shattered bar stools clogged the gutter, the shop windows opposite looked as if they’d been machine-gunned. The sheer devastation said more about what whoever did this intended than the occasional scream from someone being moved ever could. The emergency teams worked on: quietly, competently, moving through the rest of us as if we didn’t exist. As I slipped past, trying not to get in the way of the rescue services, side-swerving other journalists, staying as inconspicuous as I could, rumours swilled round me that the dead had reached double figures. A paramedic muttered, strictly off the record, that the injured were into the hundreds. Far more people than could possibly have been packed into the small Soho pub, more than could have been passing by or drinking on the pavement outside. Once I thought I saw Huntingdon, but never Ridley. I kept my head down and made sure neither saw me.
At the far end of Old Compton Street, I slipped under a tape, past a police car locking off Wardour Street, and leaned against the window of the chemist at the corner, trying to catch my breath. When I looked up, I found myself staring into the open rear doors of an ambulance. Inside, blood was already soaking the bright white of freshly applied bandages. The man was shirtless, grime-splattered. The nurse looked up from her charge, saw my camera and her face changed; concern turned to loathing in less than a second.
‘I wouldn’t,’ I wanted to say, ‘I’d never …’
Before I had a chance to, she shut the doors on me. All that stared back at me from the blacked-out windows in those doors was my own lie.
I already had.
Adrenalin had carried me from London Bridge across Soho, through hundreds of torn-up lives. When I let down my guard, it deserted me, courage draining my body like air from a leaky balloon. It was almost eight o’clock and the light was failing fast. My eyes were sore, my neck ached, my hands gripped my camera so hard my knuckles hurt. I couldn’t bear to see one more victim covered in blood, tread across another beach gravelled with broken glass. That empty expression, which I’d never seen before but already recognised, spoke of lives unutterably changed. I knew I’d never again shut my eyes without seeing it.
To my left I saw an open gate in the wall and stumbled through into what seemed to be a deserted playground. Except it wasn’t a playground – no playthings, no children – it was a churchyard. And it wasn’t deserted. It was one of those other-worldly pockets you can stumble across in every city; not particularly enclosed, but somehow eerily silent. Groups were scattered in twos and threes across the grass, some muttering to each other in a dazed blur, others staring silently into space, oblivious to the used syringes and cans left by its usual inhabitants. Every so often a siren would wail and someone would look up, confusion across their face, as if its sound was unexpected. In the far corner, where railings gave way to church wall, a row of benches stood concealed by trees. Concentrating on picking my way through cans and syringes, I didn’t notice they were already occupied until I was almost upon him. On the furthest bench a man sat in shadows, the lightness of what remained of his white T-shirt contrasting with the gloom. His head was in his hands. Blood soaked through his fingers. I knew I should turn away, leave him to his misery, but I couldn’t.
When my office mobile rang I killed the call without even looking.
Blood ran down his face from an open gash in his skull. Before today I’d never seen a wound beyond broken arms or grazed knees, but he wore an embedded nail like a stud beside one eye. His once-white T-shirt was bruising into grey and red.
His eyes looked right through me.
Not looking. Not seeing. Already dead.
‘You should …?’ I said. Should what? Get help? Get that seen to? I sounded as if I was talking to someone who’d cut his knee. He shook his head imperceptibly. Or maybe he didn’t, maybe the movement was mine. Then his eyes dropped, staring into nothing, at a spot somewhere between where I stood and his feet. I lifted my camera and quietly stole his picture. Then I left the churchyard, unintentionally kicking a discarded syringe ahead of me.
The picture made the front page. Of course it did. That one shot, the last of three hundred and ninety-eight.
‘Thank God for digital,’ the picture editor said when he saw how many I’d taken. ‘Cost me a bloody fortune in film, that would.’
And I’d taken it almost as an afterthought. It was a lesson that shaped my career; never disregard the afterthought.
My one unintended, unsought picture; taken at the point when I was beginning to realise what I’d just done. Walk through a battlefield like a recording angel, leaving others to dispense care or charity. The man’s name was Michael. Five years later we met for a drink when he was writing about his experiences and I wondered then if he wished he’d died. His lover did. The only person he’d loved in his entire life, before or since.
Huntingdon was furious. Ridley, only slightly less so. It was Huntingdon’s call I’d killed.
Not furious because I got the front page. No, they were perversely proud of that … Suddenly I was their little protégée. My success was down to them. I owed them, for letting me go with them. Patronising arseholes. They were cross because their piece would have been ‘even better’ if we’d got a quote from Michael. If I’d answered the call they’d have known where I was and could have got one.
Thousands of words they recorded that evening, and not one from the man who made the splash. The only excuse for that, usually, was that the subject was dead. Why hadn’t I stayed with them? Why didn’t I call them? I didn’t answer. I could have said he wasn’t capable of speech. That would have been true. I could have lied about crowds. But I wasn’t scared of them any more, and I wasn’t much interested in their questions. I had one of my own. Why, when a man sat badly wounded in front of me, hadn’t I
gone for help?
Why had I simply taken his photograph and left?
21
An uncomfortable silence fell. It felt like several minutes but was probably only a matter of seconds. Gil finally broke it. ‘And you and Art Huntingdon have been together ever since?’ he asked. ‘Since the Admiral Duncan, I mean.’
‘God no,’ said Helen, then stopped, realising how that must sound. How heartless he must already think her. There was a place for gallows humour and this wasn’t it.
‘That didn’t happen ’til much later. Not ’til Iraq. Although, to hear Art tell it, I’d been pining for him the whole time. The man who gave me my big break.’
She noticed Gil glance down at her hands, and forced herself to stop endlessly twisting her fingers.
‘But your paths must have crossed?’
‘You’d think so. But no, not really. Art is, was, nearly ten years older than me. We hung with different crowds. You have to remember, I’m “just” a photographer.’ She looked at him to see if he understood. If he didn’t, he didn’t show it.
‘And then 9/11 happened and Art headed off on his path to glory. I don’t even remember seeing him again until Iraq. I say “again”. To be honest, I didn’t recall him from the first time. There was a bloke, I thought he was an arrogant arsehole, that was the extent of it. Like I said, that memory, the one I’ve just told you, most of that – or at least Art’s part in it – was Art’s memory.
‘It was another picture that got us together. Not the one on my laptop. Another one. Its twin, I suppose you’d call it.’
Iraq 2007
The small boy lay curled up in the shade of a peeling wall, his hair flopped across his eyes. In his hand was a Power Ranger, the red one. He was lovely, for all his striped T-shirt was filthy and his jeans frayed and his plimsolls two sizes too big. He must be, what …?
I leaned in towards the screen to study the picture more closely.