Mimi (23 page)

I woke to the smell of air freshener used in accusatory quantities. And on every surface, frantic laminated signs:

TURN OFF THE LIGHTS

BEFORE YOU LEAVE

TURN OFF THE TV

TURN OFF THE HEATING

DON'T TOUCH

VERY HOT!

ARE YOU SURE YOU

NEED A FRESH TOWEL?

DO NOT OPEN THE WINDOW

TEMPERATURE AND PRESSURE

MAY CHANGE

PLEASE BE CAREFUL

PHONE CHARGERS ONLY

There were guilt trips everywhere you looked, telling you everything you could and couldn’t do in that impossible room. All this attention to
safety
, in a city where people get gunned down willy-nilly! And still the toilet wouldn’t flush.

I assumed I was too late for the hotel breakfast, and would get my ass kicked for
that
as well (or my bottom belabored). But no, a whole sorry bunch of breakfasters were there, squeezed into what seemed to be the
hallway
, munching cold toast while being lectured by the hotel manager who claimed Conrad had lived in Canterbury at some point. I was hungry, but not this hungry. As I left, I heard one of the guests remark, “You never see pictures of Joseph Conrad smiling.”

I glimpsed the top of the cathedral. Assuming it to be in the center of town, I headed that way, trusting some bearable breakfast might eventually be found. Illogically or not, I wished Bee was there to show me around. The sidewalk was narrow, and ran right beside a busy two-way street full of assholes speeding by in cars, blasting me with their ignoramus pop music and calling out “Cunt!” as they passed. I may be a cunt, man, but you’re the one who has to be
sung to
all day by sissies on the radio.

As soon as possible, I took a quieter path beside a shallow river, and had to squeeze past a student with her parents. They were all looking down at the water and she was telling them, “It’s really clear. You can see all the traffic bollards and supermarket trolleys.”

What a dump. I got to the main street, but the only forms of food offered were “chips,” “burgers,” and something called “bacon butties.” I walked into some kind of café, but the frail girl sweeping the floor sent me away, on the grounds that it was “too oily” (which I could well believe). I found a small grocery store instead, and bought a load of English newspapers, all of which were bursting with gun massacre stats and stories: I felt I owed it to Bee to check what they were saying about her in there.

Canterbury really
stank
, whether it was from the oniony food outlets or the digestive gases farted out by the people who ate at them. The local populace certainly
looked
abdominally uncomfortable. As a plastic surgeon who thought he’d seen it all, I was left aghast by the medieval physiognomies of the townsfolk, a pasty race, vicious, gnarled, gnawed, and bloodthirsty. They liked a good massacre. There they were, milling around the main street to stare at spots where people had been murdered a few days before. These had been helpfully designated by police tape: “SCENE CRIME SCENE CRIME”—as if a crime had been committed against the
picturesque
, not people. Canterbury’s about as picturesque as my ass, unless you care about cathedrals. But this one’s a hell of a thing, a monstrosity.

How does a place like Canterbury recover from a tragedy? By shopping! Everybody there seemed to get a big bang out of carrying a big bag. But what was in those bags? Guns? Ammo? Souvenir mugs of the massacre?

Everything I saw confirmed the necessity of the American Revolution. How could Bee have lived here for a
day
, much less a
year
, a nice New York gal like her? But she’d never
wanted
to come. She hated the place! How she wailed about the weather, the water, the weariness and wariness. All that trouble with her stingy patrons. Jerks! The English are not a friendly people. She’d come all this way just to make a little money, and they let her down. And when that wasn’t enough, they obliterated her!

I found a little café called Saint something or other. Everything in Canterbury’s called Saint something. But this place was at least trying to be French in the manner to which I’m accustomed (coffee and croissants, though minus the Gauloises and Gallic charm). There I sat, reading the paper like I was some normal man, but the more I read, the more furious I got—with
Bee
, for getting herself into this! Couldn’t she have ducked? no. Just a few minutes either way, and it might never have happened. Why’d she have to go out on her bike that particular day, why
that field
?

The facts were these: Gareth Lode, a British soldier, had returned from Afghanistan to find that his ex-wife was refusing him access to their joint progeny, because of his violent outbursts in the past. Old girlfriends confirmed that he was violent—they’d reported him to the police years before. Lode was in trouble with the Army as well: he’d tortured too many prisoners, even by their standards, and his superiors considered him volatile and unpredictable. They’d warned the Canterbury police about him, saying that he was “nervy” and might do something weird. The police did nothing (of course).

Everybody was tiring of this asshole, in other words, but
he
wasn’t tired of
being
an asshole. So he stabbed and strangled his ex-wife in front of their children. The kids were next—neighbors heard them screaming and begging for mercy as he smothered them. Then he armed himself with a gun and went over to his mother’s house, somewhere in Canterbury, and shot
her
. A murderous tour around town followed, with Lode randomly shooting dozens of women in the street, mostly middle-aged women, always aiming for the face.

I knew from gun rampages in America that if a guy wants to do this, there’s no stopping him: you pretty much hand him the keys to the city and the Colonel Gaddafi Certificate of Permission to Wreak Mayhem. But it was still hard to believe that one guy had gotten away with this much death—“three years’ worth of murder in a single day,” as one paper put it. Afterwards, Lode hid in the woods, where he demonstrated several survival skills he’d learned in the Army before blowing his own brains out, surrounded by trigger-happy cops.

His last stand in the woods, along with his apparent hatred of women, had earned him his own little fan club, many of whom had raced to place garish bouquets and controversial condolence messages outside Lode’s Canterbury barracks, saying, “RIP Gareth,” and, “Gareth, you wuz wronged.” One guy traveled down from the North of England somewhere with his three sons to lay a wreath at the Lode shrine. He described it as a good day out for the kids, and educational! In his opinion, Lode had done what any man would do when pushed too far:
explode
.

But it was the newspapers’ exultation in the story that really got me. I wasn’t used to it: in America, this kind of crime gets one day of front-page coverage,
tops
, then it’s as if it never happened. It was now two days since the Canterbury event, and the papers were still slobbering over every detail, tracking the guy’s every move from birth to death, offering blow-by-blow, bullet-by-bullet chronologies of his progress, maps charting his route, “interactive graphics” (whatever
they
were), diagrams, satellite photos, and full-color pull-out sections to keep for posterity. Now and then, an editorial in which some lone fool asserted that there was no reason to tighten England’s already tight gun laws. No, of course not. Why deprive everybody of another massacre? The Queen’s beleaguered subjects need their entertainment.

The papers were thrilled with the death rate: they could barely contain their glee. “Savage” Lode had outdone many mass murderers of the past. By killing twenty people, twenty-one if you counted Lode himself, he “beat” all their previous gun massacres, “leaving the charming streets of Canterbury stained with blood.” The what? And the death rate might rise yet, they cheerily warned, given all the injured now screaming for their lives in a variety of charming hospitals.

They made a killing spree sound like a shopping spree! In fact, Lode himself had paused to pick up a new pair of trainers in the middle of it, while sales staff cowered in a corner.

Now came the tales of lucky escapes—people who’d sensibly hidden as Lode passed them on the street, people who’d been perilously close to the areas he covered, people who’d merely
thought
of going to Canterbury that day, and various characters who’d known Lode at some earlier point in his life. There were pictures of him as a baby, as a boy, and talk of his fixed stare, his many grievances, his money worries. What about
my
grief,
my
grievances,
my
fixed stare?

Lode’s brother had been unearthed and interviewed: he insisted Lode was one of the nicest “blokes” you could ever meet, who’d fought for his country while the divorce lawyers were giving away his visiting rights. It was all their mother’s fault, the brother said, for being severely depressed when they were young. He didn’t like Lode being described as “violent and controlling” either—to him Lode had been “sweet.” But isn’t beating up all your girlfriends, stabbing your wife, smothering your children, and shooting dozens of women in the face about as violent and controlling as a man can get?

With espresso-fueled nausea, I waded through these outlandish documents, not even sure what I was looking for. There was hardly a single reference to Bee individually. Compared to their exhaustive treatment of Lode, the description of his victims was perfunctory. They were defined by their ages and occupations: barmaid, housewife, hairdresser, Health Visitor, university lecturer, receptionist, waitress, sculptress. . . A treatment that seemed to reduce them to almost
nothing
—when they were people for godsake, people on whom other people counted! It really doesn’t matter if they were bookish or banal. They meant something to somebody, and to
themselves.
(Maybe even to a few pets, who’d now have to be rehomed or put down.)

everybody means something.

But at least we were spared all the claptrap American gun outrages inspire, with the candlelight vigils, extremist defenses of gun ownership (as if owning lethal weapons were a
good
thing, rather than an incontrovertible sign of barbarism), and mawkish talk of god. After the Tucson murders, Obama had to lay it on thick, with “Scripture tells us this” and “Scripture tells us that.” Everybody said it was his best speech ever! Come to think of it, there probably
was
some dumb religious rigmarole going on in that hokey cathedral of theirs—but I wouldn’t be going.

A young guy with long black hair and a face like the Mona Lisa sat down at an upright piano, in the corner of the café, that I hadn’t even noticed, and started playing 1960s tunes with some panache. The joint was jumpin’, in an English kind of way. Customers became more animated, clapping politely between numbers. . . and I felt myself relax for the first time since I heard of Bee’s death. Not because music is some goddam
relaxant
, but because it gave me another metaphysical plane to be on. I needed that more than coffee.

Any music was a help, but what I really wanted was Bach. So I struggled to my feet, went over and put a bit of money in the guy’s tips teacup on top of the piano. All I said was, “Bach,” and then sat down. But he didn’t play me any Bach. Maybe he didn’t do classical music, or he hadn’t heard me, or he never played requests. Whether I’d blundered into another faux pas was of little concern to me anymore, since I’d now spotted on the front of one of the papers a reference to an obituary of Bee. I turned to the appropriate page, trembling.

The American sculptor, Bridget Hanafan, who has died age 53 as a result of the mass killing in Canterbury on 23 May, produced some of the most appealing public sculptures of recent years.

Born in the American Midwest in 1958, Hanafan studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she gained a reputation early on as one of the foremost sculptors of her generation.

After a hiatus caused by an unhappy marriage, Hanafan started producing works in clay, culminating in her first one-woman show in 1994. Commissions for installations and public projects soon followed, along with a number of prestigious awards and fellowships.

Recently, Hanafan had relocated to Canterbury, in order to take up a post of artist-in-residence. There she enlarged on a series of assemblages begun in New York, which she dubbed Coziness Sculptures, life-size re-creations of domestic and rural scenes intended as “a glimpse of something good”. Hanafan was exploring sculpture as a means of contributing to a sense of well-being in the spectator.

By including lighting and audio elements as well as family heirlooms and other found materials, Hanafan combined an awareness of personal struggle with a delight in the textures of everyday life. In touching works that are autobiographical in nature, she promoted the pleasure principle, revealing a newly humane approach in contemporary art.