Fullalove (23 page)

‘What’s up, Myc?’ Doohan is looking glum, sitting nursing a tepid diet-Pepsi. ‘You look like you’ve just been to a funeral. You’ve got a face like a toilet seat.’

‘What it is,’ Myc says, ‘is I know there’s a reason, but I can’t remember why I won’t talk to that cunt over there.’

Ashley laughs, but he is still off rummaging in the document folder he has accessed in his brain. ‘Did either of you two ever know Ian Mackay, the
News
Chronicle
columnist who spurned all efforts to lure him away from the paper he loved?’ We avoid each other’s glances, shuffle, shake our heads. ‘Ian had asked for his ashes to be scattered in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. So, after his funeral a party of his closest friends adjourned to the King and Keys with the ashes in a shoe box to talk it over. They then moved to the Punch, the Falstaff, and finally the Press Club, still in possession of the box. Over drinks they decided to scatter the ashes on the Thames near Cleopatra’s Needle. But when they got to the Embankment the box was empty – it had a hole in it. They returned to the Club and consoled themselves with the thought that they had left a little of him in all the places he loved best. Boom-boom.’

What do we look like? Three white shirts, three black ties. The Guise on a remember-when seaside reunion tour with an erratic young pick-up drummer who would rather be with the Beastie Boys. ‘Did you hear the one about the Murdoch henchman in Australia‚’ Myc says, still on the subject of death stories, ‘whose wife slipped his American Express platinum card into his pocket as she bent over the coffin to kiss him goodbye,
just
in
case
. I
should be so lucky. I’m struggling to hang on to my VAT rating as it is. It’s a status requirement these days, like
von
-something used to be. Baronial. If you’re not registered, they’ll grind you down.’

‘Is it enough to earn your age? You know what I’m saying‚’ Ashley says. ‘
£
27‚000 a year at twenty-seven.’

‘Your
age
.
I tell you, I’m lucky to earn my shoe size. You can laugh‚’ Myc says, ‘but I’m not joking … Anyway, what’s the score with you and Annie Jeffers? The barnet and the whole bit.’

Ashley colours, then presses his hands against his face, slowly squeegeeing the blood up into the sooty roots of his two-tone hair.

All around us in the Bell are apothegms, injunctions and motivating slogans that hung in the newsrooms of the Street, ancient and modern. ‘Impact! Get it in your first paragraph! Get it in your pictures! Above all get it in your headlines!’ ‘Explain, simplify clarify!’ ‘The public is habitual and needs the same news in the same place day after day.’ ‘The public is interested in just three things: blood, money, and the female organ of sexual intercourse.’ ‘Everybody feeds off everybody.’ ‘Never lose your sense of the superficial.’ ‘Make it first, make it fast, make it accurate. Then’ (this scribbled across the bottom of the original, but retained in the interest of period resonance) ‘go and make it up.’

Ashley, as usual, is wearing a lithoed or rubber-appliquéd T-shirt under his shirt, which has the effect of making his body look as though it has been imprinted with furtive, barely decipherable messages and logos – ‘Metallica’, ‘Kick Butt’, ‘Youthanasia’, ‘Zodiac Mindwarp’, ‘Back the fuck up’. Subtexts. Undercodes. The fetish tattoos of a Japanese yakuza, a junior mafioso from the Roppongi club scene. All public spaces resounding with the perpetual bull-session, slogan to slogan, in which ordinary, across-the-table conversation can seem like a banal interruption of the one-worders, the one-liners, the corporate zingers. ‘Phalcon’. ‘Skism’. ‘Gno-mist’. ‘Nike Jordan’. ‘The beautiful game’. ‘You’re just a wave, babe, you’re not the water.’

‘The individual is overwhelmed by an incomprehensible flood
of signs, surfaces and space‚’ Ashley says in a time-to-hit-the-hay-old-timer sort of way when I blurt some of this out. Happy-trails. ‘The sensuality of information takes over, grainy, hydra-like, pimply, pocky, ramified, seaweedy, strange, tangled, tortuous, wiggly, wispy, wrinkled. We live in an inebriated state of consciousness. Which is why we need the murderers. Murder, rape, natural disaster, atrocity stories on a daily basis.’ The opening bars of the theme to
Match
of
the
Day
play on a video football game. Another game, occasionally overlapping, jangles a snatch of the
EastEnders
theme.

‘There is a community need‚’ Ashley continues. ‘We need perpetrators. We need victims. These people
create
community.
Communitas.
By giving us stories that we can run with, that penetrate the din. The patterns and structures of stories work towards cultural cohesion. Community is in part built on members sharing the same stories. Which is where the reporters of the stories, the venerable tradition of journalism, the spinners of folk tales, come in. You, Myc, you … Hey‚’ Ashley breaks off suddenly. ‘Heath Hawkins – come on down!’

‘Oh wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful!’ Heath says, flinging himself across a bench seat. ‘And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!’ He peels off the black V-neck sweater he has on. There is a colour reproduction of the stars and stripes on
his
T-shirt. Above it, the semi-washed-out slogan: ‘Try burning this one …’, and below it, the single word: ‘
ASSHOLE’
. He has a Smiley patch over a hole in the knee of his jeans.

‘Living large, man. Living
very
large‚’ Heath says, replying to a question that none of us has asked. ‘Did you see those ill fuckers out there? Was that bad news at the wax museum, or what? Forget Rwanda, man. Namibia, Angola, Israel, Palestine. The Hashemites, the hereditary guardians of the holy places for over a thousand years, given the order of the boot by the Saudis. These shitehawks in suits, old Tosser and his cohorts. These are the uprooted, the lost peoples, the dispossessed. Scuttling back to their glass eyries, the dickless work stations, the sealed airless
rooms, the gorgon at the desk. The deterritorialised workforce. Dead white males.’

Curtis Preece ex-ed himself off-peak at Blackfriars station, about two hundred yards from where we are sitting, which is nowhere he should have been. ‘You run fast, you smell bad‚’ Hawkins says. ‘End of story. That should be carved in granite on that guy’s grave. Tell you what, he certainly smells bad now, boy. Had to scrape him up, according to sources in the necropolitan underworld. One double bacon-cheeseburger,
very
rare, hold the mayonnaise.’

‘The Dutch have a new word for it. The Dutch always have a new word for it‚’ Ashley says. ‘“Zelf-doding”. Which means “self-deathing”, as opposed to “self-killing”, which is what suicide translates as.’ He has knotted the black tie around his upper arm, Comanche-fashion, using his teeth to secure the knot like a smack-head in an art-house underground movie of the sixties, school of Andy Warhol, Andy’s children, street trash apotheosised.

‘Did you hear about the death’s head?’ Ashley says. ‘Curtis claimed that a shrieking death’s head had started to appear occasionally at the top of his screen. And he wasn’t alone. Quite a few people think they’ve seen the same thing. Hold down the option key, hit the shift key three times, your computer makes this funny trilling sound and an object appears at the corner of the screen that could, if you were sufficiently paranoid, look like a death’s head. It’s not a virus or a worm or anything to get hot and sweaty about. It’s just a weird software thing. I tried to convince Curtis of this more than once. I even demonstrated it to him. But he was sufficiently paranoid. He was beyond convincing.’

Persistent eye, nose and throat irritation; skin rashes, nausea, lassitude, breathing discomfort, dull but unrelenting pain in the hands and arms … Panic attacks, morbidity claustrophobia, a whole shitstorm of anxiety neuroses and phobic states … This just about covers the spectrum of complaints in the year since we have been taken off the tit and shunted out to the place none of
us has yet got used to calling Merry Hill Newsplex Plaza. (Packages will reach us if addressed simply to ‘Merry Heir’.)

The cabling and ducting, the heating, cooling, lighting, plumbing and sewage systems all came on-site factory-fresh, and went in clean and true and apparently uninfected. How do I know? I know because, almost from day one, I was there, in hard-hat and gumboots, shadowing Owen Allen of Boyd Allen and Partners up ladders and down into the thin black slurry of the foundations of the fast-food, design-and-build khazi whose progress it was my penance to cover for the benefit of shareholders, in the annual company report.

Owen Allen is a hack who believes that cricket boots and strident striped cricket blazers teamed with designer face furniture all year round disguises the fact. The simplest description of the development he came up with would probably be ‘Disnoid’ – a bit of mirror-Gothic here, some imitation palazzo there, a Renaissance portico somewhere else; interior cobblestone walks, five-storey sheet fountains, ‘period’ carriage lamps. Standard, off-the-peg decorated shed.

But in the course of regular visits, over a period of about two years, I had to listen to his horse manure about ‘the symbolic interpenetration of nature and culture’ and ‘the grammar of layered planes’; references to Mayan temples of sacrifice, the raked pebble garden of Ryoanji, and English eighteenth-century crinkle-crankle walls. I had to look interested while he bored on about circumstantial distortions, expedient devices, eventful exceptions, exceptional diagonals, superadjacency, equivalence, and pretend I was getting it all down. We were witnessing the rise of a building which made the workplace an aesthetically charged location. Under the polished surfaces, meanwhile, filth accrued.

Fungal spores and pathogenic bacteria incubating in the air intakes, filter traps and water tanks. The building as a lumbering, limping animal, a failing organism, with which none of us needed any encouragement to identify. Tubular organs obstructed, metabolic processes inhibited, blood vessels eroded, vital centres destroyed, biochemical balances deranged …

I can quote Sir Arthur Palgrave here with no fear of it being blue-pencilled, as it was in my final report: ‘Coeval with the first pulsation, when the fibres quiver, and the organs quicken into vitality, is the germ of death. Before our members are fashioned, is the narrow grave dug in which they are to be entombed.’ Bioslime, bioviruses, mould-spores, baffle-jelly infesting the building even as it was going up. When it was up, one of the nifty touches of the architects (that glass counterpart of the crinkle-crankle wall, a serpentine curve) meant that you risked being blinded or fried alive at your desk.

The site was a former swimming bath, public baths and washhouse, separated by a red route road from one of the toughest council estates in London. Fact: homes produce far more sewage than office buildings of roughly the same size – mountains of mucilage, cataracts of cack. And it is this, the contents of the storm drains, sewers and soil pipes, that seems to get drawn up into the building in a way nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain yet, making it smell sometimes like a tannery or slaughterhouse; a public lavatory in Madrid or the suburbs of Moscow. Uninvited bilge inching through the pipes; scum from the plunge baths and slipper baths of pre-history, a broth of matted hair and sloughed-off cells seeping into the system.

Still in the Ding-Dong, it is Myc who is speaking. ‘Did you know that one in three of all old women living on their own are found to have cat food down their knickers when they’re brought into hospital?’

‘Is it in tins?’ Ashley says.

‘Klit-E-Kat.’ Heath raises the biggest laugh.

‘Hang on a minute‚’ Myc says. ‘No, bag your faces. Is that my coat ringing?’ His mobile is in his jacket, hanging near the door. ‘How would I have heard, I’m in a meeting‚’ he says into the deviant-looking buckled-down black plastic sheath. ‘When did this happen?’ Indicating for us to keep the noise down with his hand. ‘Got it … Got it … Okay … I’ll get flying. I’m already there … A snap story‚’ he says, dipping the instrument of torture
in his inside pocket, aiming himself at the door. ‘Some dipshit maniac has gone on the rampage among the McGovern faithful at the hospital. They’re saying two stuffed so far, a cutter job, loads of claret … Further misfortunes unfold.’

Ashley has gone into his computer, which has responded with a soft but insistent
bong
-ing sound, and a citron pulse which is projected with the rest of the contents of the screen across the contours of his face.

A couple of days after Curtis Preece killed himself, his girlfriend came into the office to enact a private ritual which involved sitting in his chair, handling his things, hugging everything which might have come into contact with him. She asked to have the last words keyed into it brought up onto his screen, and she leaned in close, bathing her face in the area of ozone emission, the text and graphic display suffusing her upturned face, the field around the screen taking her long, fine hair and drawing it to itself.

She laid a single rose along the upper edge of the portrait of Curtis that is hanging by the cash dispenser at the entrance to the men’s toilets. On her way out, she threw a coin into the fountain in the main reception. The basin of the fountain is always scaled with coins, but it was the first time I had ever seen anybody do this.

I was hoping to beg a lift to St Saviour’s from Heath Hawkins, but he has gone, legged it.

‘Life’s a bitch, and then they freeze your head‚’ Mick says.

‘Life’s a bitch, and then you turn into one‚’ Ashley says.

The magnetic field of my animal instincts.

In the post this morning, a letter from Veorah Batcheller. (I had given her my home address, which is something I have hardly ever done. The phone here is ex-directory.)

The piece I did on Veorah Batcheller hasn’t yet made it into the paper, for a variety of reasons. The rapist seems to have peaked at four – there have been no further attacks in the vicinity of the police memorials for about two months, and so interest has cooled. Then the butchering of the fans camped outside St Saviour’s (a former boyfriend of one of the women, armed to the teeth with cleavers and kitchen knives, was arrested at the scene) has been getting maximum play. Crucially, though, the editor decided my piece on Veorah sucked.

‘If this is a story, my cock’s a bloater‚’ is what he actually said as he slung the galley-proof across his desk at me, adding that he wanted it whammed up.
‘Well
whammed up. The kiss of fuckin’ life. Like: get off the bed and walk. We’re talking Lazarus. Where’s all the stuff about … I don’t know … her secret life as a stripper. Dressing up in policebint gear as a stripogram … Is she kinky about the girls in blue? … I don’t know.
You
tell
me.
You’re the one who went on the fishing expedition.’

And in the meantime Veorah, partly (my guess) as a reaction to these developments, has put her life out on the street. Two, perhaps three weeks ago, taking as her starting point the memorial to Yvonne Fletcher in St James’s, she set out to walk the route which connects all the London police memorials, travelling alone, responding to whatever turns up, sleeping rough.

Her motives for doing this seem complex and perhaps unknowable, even to herself: she has talked about a sense of compulsion and ‘inner necessity’ driving her to complete this ‘therapeutic itinerary’; of stepping away from the safe and familiar pattern of the everyday in an attempt to find some meaning in the broken pieces of her life; of performing a ritual of cleansing and reclaiming, of
undoing
harm.

She recognised before she started that she was putting herself physically at risk, but believes the potential of harm has to exist if the aim is to live life at a deeper level than it is lived every day; it explains why she has been prepared to give up comfort and safety, accept cold and hunger, and eat whatever comes her way.

After years of feeling she was a sitting target anyway, vulnerable to whatever darkness her husband might choose to bring down on her, she felt strengthened by acting in the world, stepping into the blankness of motorways, loopways and roundabouts, the modern equivalent of the cave or the hermitage in the mountains; walking straight and alone; insignificant, forgotten, metaphorically dead.

This is paraphrasure and, to some extent, supposition. Veorah has a tendency to clam up when you ask her to explain herself head-on. I have been getting it in bits and pieces on tourist
postcards (three so far – one of the plump, pink Lady Diana Spencer, one of a punk, one of the spot in the north transept of Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas à Becket was murdered in 1170); also on the backs of menus for tandoori take-aways and bagel boutiques; flyers for failing hairdressers, sandwich bars, tarot readers, minicab firms, the International House of Pancakes, whatever comes to hand. As if the high-toned content of the one side was somehow anchored or counterweighted by the prosaic nature of the information printed on the reverse.

I wasn’t able to be there when she kicked off her travels at the Yvonne Fletcher memorial, but I caught up with her four or five days later, when she had got as far as Acton in west London. We had arranged a rendezvous at Wormwood Scrubs – the Scrubs – and when I got there she was standing in front of the security barrier at the main entrance to the prison. She was wearing sweat pants and a hooded top, both the Arctic white – the Arctic
blue,
really – of the soap-powder commercial. It would emerge that she had spent the night before dossing in the cashpoint hall of a Lloyds bank in Hammersmith, but there was no clue to this in her appearance. A sleeping roll was attached to the bottom of her backpack. She was wearing a white baseball cap with her hair pulled through the ‘D’ above the plastic adjuster and tied in a ponytail.

It was a look – a popular variation was extra-outsize T-shirts that extended to and were knotted at the knee – shared by a number of the women trying to exercise parental control over shoulder-rolling hit squads of grey-faced children and herd them into the visitors’ centre. This was a box-shaped temporary building with board walls which were already being drilled from the inside by tiny Nike-and Reebok-shod feet and tiny impatient fists.

‘Are you a lifer?’ a poster asked. ‘Is any member of your family serving a life sentence?’ ‘Mental illness‚’ another said. ‘What does it mean?’ There were posters offering solvent abuse counselling, posters for the Wallasey Wives of Lifers and the Lifers’ Support Group; another warning ‘Don’t let drugs trap you.’

‘Chelsea‚’ a woman bawled as Veorah and I (who were we supposed to be visiting? What were we, nick sniffers?) slunk in. ‘Come back over here! What did I tell you, I’ll murder you!’ Aiming open forehands at the backs of Chelsea’s chubby bare legs, Chelsea bent nearly double, so that only one in four slaps connected, arched backwards, skipping forward in a circle, tethered by the hair. Scenes from the dark recesses of urban life, the flyblown cleats and areas, the blowdown estates, the swarming margins.

A short while earlier an old codger had got on the train a few stops before East Acton and with great concentration started to redistribute cigarettes from a ten-pack of Superkings into the twenty-packet he was halfway through. He had a prize strawberry hooter, a prison-set sovereign ring knuckle-dusting every finger, and was sporting a rope-banded battered trilby. I remembered when it used to be fives – slim flat packets of five (the corner shops where I lived ‘broke’ packets and sold the cigarettes as singles) – being transferred to packets of ten. Everybody, for some reason, always took all five cigarettes in one hand at once and then had difficulty (as the old man had had) manoeuvring them into the host packet without mashing them. The tipless white tubes uncoordinated and recalcitrant, prefiguring the joints exploded by arthritis, the knobby arthritic fingers.

Mission eventually accomplished, the old boy shook his wrist a few times, adjusted the expanding metal bracelet, and then put it to his ear to see if he could hear anything. Disappearing gestures, virtually extinct. Blowdown: controlled explosive demolition.

In charge of the visitors’ centre was a woman who, even without seeing the gnawed nails and the raised tracks up the inner arms, you’d have had down as a Society girl – a Society beauty probably; early-fifties vintage, the Princess Margaret set – gone seriously off the rails. She had a lonely pensiveness among the anarchy and chaos; something about the way she batted away the fly that was skidding around the smeary wrapper of a sandwich whose filling was ruled faint against the slices of super-
white. She handed us a pair of metal tongs to retrieve the tea bags from the plastic cups of brown-blooming tea.

The only table that was unoccupied was the one nearest the children’s corner, something out of a tower block bedroom or women’s refuge; a pacifier for the sons and daughters of murderers and stick-up artists, the sprogs of villains.

The main – virtually the only – amenity was a low-walled plastic enclosure bearing the evidence of successive onslaughts of sticky fingers. Covering all of the floor area inside it was a duvet with a Flintstones cartoon cover, and plunked down on this several hand-knitted stuffed toys – a Postman Pat, a brown cat with a pink bow-tie, a Dalmatian-type puppy, a kangaroo and, separated from the kangaroo, eyeless and more or less flattened into two-dimensionality, the baby it once carried tucked into its pouch. The use of dolls as explanatory notes in advance of life-threatening operations. Also as adult-substitutes in cases of sexual abuse of children. ‘Just point to where Daddy touched you. Did Daddy touch you there?’

All of them bearing the marks of promiscuous affection. All of them – toys and duvet alike – tending towards the same shade of dishwater grey. Clumps of unwashed fabric. Refugees from Salvation Army bins. A black boombox chained to a radiator pipe. Picture-books and story-books, face-outwards on a shelf:
The
Elves
and
the
Shoemaker
;
Marcus
the
Mole
;
Frog
,
Duck
and
Rabbit;
The
Pirate
Twins
by William Nicholson;
The
Velveteen
Rabbit
by Margery Williams.

‘Strange to think of hundreds of men locked in cells just a few yards away. Spitting on their hands, flattening their hair, trying to think of things they can talk about, getting themselves up for the visit. Something about them’ – I indicated the dirty toys in their dingy enclosure – ‘reminds me of them. When you see a dirty toy you think of a fouled child. And so you think of a dysfunctional family. Dirt equals weakness and failure. Perhaps that’s why usually when they become torn and dirty the parents take them and throw them away. They become too real. Exhibits in an autopsy room.’