Born Yesterday (14 page)

He couldn’t say what had brought him there; he didn’t exactly know. And although they were polite and hospitable, it was obvious they didn’t remember him; couldn’t picture his bald head covered in the long dark hair of his earlier visit, his face without the jowls. The piece he had written as a first step to getting a start as a writer (using Cornish then as he was maybe using him again now)
seemed to be missing from their scrapbooks and neatly organised collection of cuttings.

Cornish talked. He seemed to enjoy talking, only bringing Sarah in when he wanted to be reminded of a name or a date. Edward Street, Thomas Street, Bishops Close Street; the Waterloo, the Vane Arms, the Bridge Inn, the Newcastle Bar, the Traveller’s Rest. Spencer’s butcher shop, Brook’s grocer’s shop, Brook’s dress shop, J. G. Teasdale’s milk business, Byer’s joiners and undertakers office. He still lived where he had been born and he spoke of the streets and shops and pubs of his childhood as though they were still there, which for him in a sense they were. They were certainly preserved in the paintings and drawings, which hung around them as they talked.

He was self-educated. He had joined the sketching club at the Spennymoor Settlement at around the same time he had gone down the mine. His father had taken him to his colliery to get him set on. The pit, called the Dean and Chapter, at Ferryhill, was nicknamed ‘The Butcher’s Shop’ owing to the number of accidents there.

Phil Wilson, the new MP’s father, had a similar tale to tell. He worked underground at Fishburn colliery for thirty-eight years, often wearing oilskins because of the wet. Also now in his eighties, he has three inhalers for his emphysema, and can’t move a thumb after a lump of wood fell on it underground. ‘With that background, you can’t be anything but Labour,’ Phil Wilson told the local paper.

Cornish didn’t want to talk Blair or politics. He wouldn’t be drawn. Consider the implications of a telegraph pole,
he said instead. It grows on a hillside in perhaps Scandinavia, is cut down and brought here by sea; people apply creosote, replant it, and it takes on the hum of countless voices. When you come up from the pit your hands are sore. You are tired and when you look up at a telegraph pole it looks like a crucifix. This is the recurring image of his paintings.

His talk was of the past, as the places and people of his pictures were fixed in a world which had largely disappeared. ‘I sometimes wonder whether somebody’s trying to obliterate my life,’ he had said. And yet the room in which they were sitting had a light and modern feel about it, with modern, curvilinear Scandinavian furniture and none of the heavy pieces that people their age normally filled their homes with. The paperback close to his chair was a Penguin Classics edition of Darwin’s
Origin of
Species
that he said his brother-in-law had given him and which he was reading. The surfaces weren’t cluttered with embrocations and elastic bandages and rows of pills. Beds hadn’t had to be brought downstairs.

And yet it slowly emerged that there had been some recent scares. ‘You know why she’s left the room, don’t you?’ Cornish said at one point. ‘It’s because she can’t stand hearing me talk about my health.’

On her return, settled again by the fire, necessary because of the prolonged damp and cold, Sarah too said that just this past year she hadn’t been feeling herself. She shook her head. And he could see then what hadn’t been obvious before; that, youthful-looking though they were,
and though they lived in this big house scoured with light, pictures of the grandchildren in the fire alcove, they were beginning to envisage the end, and they were scared. One didn’t want to be left behind without the other. There were flickers of irritation when either allowed their frailty, and therefore their age, to show, and a moving sense of fear.

After years working as a coal-hewer, bent double in the dark, using pick, shovel and drill, recent talk about soundings and scans had been giving him nightmares in which he was confined in tunnels, unable to move or think.

Before he left, Norman invited him to take a look in the studio. It was on the first floor in a big room over the kitchen, up a broad flight of stairs. The studio was dominated by a large painting-in-progress of one of his favourite subjects: men in a bar. It was a bar of the Fifties or even earlier: all the men wore hats – some trilbies, but mainly flat caps – and were sunk in a deep nicotine fug, refugees from the kingdom of toil.

The ease of association, the unselfconscious physical contact between the men was, as always, a notable feature. Arms were thrown across shoulders, heads leaned into heads, confidentially, all but touching. He was always fascinated by men standing at a bar drinking and talking, or sitting playing dominoes; the shapes they made; the gestures of mutual support.

There was the Irish Nyuk, where the Catholics sat. The Pigeon End for the pigeon men. Spongers’ Corner. People used to take food to the pub on a Sunday – bowls of
whelks, big bull whelks as big as your hand – pigs’ trotters, hard-boiled eggs.

In an early entry in his diaries of the Blair years, Alastair Campbell writes: ‘TB said in the end there are big people and little people. The big people do big things and the little people do little things.’

TB was a big person and he had a big project, changing the course of a country. Now that project was over, and the sense of disturbance that had invariably followed him north like a personal neurosis or a miasma, like a plough behind a tractor, turning over the world in its wake, could be allowed to settle and flatten out; local people could go back to concentrating on the little things that made their lives particular, and the locality could return with some relief to itself.

There was a hole in the landscape that, as in the recent past of the flash and dust and danger and noise of men at work, men at work around the clock, would soon be filled.

For the hole only gaped, wrote Zengotita of a bigger obliteration, in virtue of superimposed memory of a presence in that space, a space which (you couldn’t help but notice) took up so tiny a fraction of the vastness of the wide horizon and the great bowl of the heavens above, so tiny a fraction of that vastness across which you cast your eyes whenever you looked away, a vastness into which that smoke was rising, so tenderly, until it dispersed at last into the brilliant blue.

The real focus of Cornish’s composition was an amber
pint in a straight glass lightly beaded with sweat on the humanly patinated corner-turning of a bar. A pint of beer is a lovely convivial colour, he said. When I see a pint, I can see a man’s hand lifting it.

Small pleasures, a lost world memorialised in the work of Cornish.

That ends this part of the story.

He woke in the night and went to the cabin-like room where he worked; it was book-lined, snug; he liked being there when the rest of the world slept. His wife was sleeping on the other side of the wall in the bed he had just left, the dog, released from its place in the kitchen, already wrapped in and groaning contentedly, foetally, in the space behind her knees.

In 1995 he published a novel called
Fullalove
that he hadn’t opened in years. It took him several minutes – the need to find it suddenly seemed urgent – to locate a copy of the original hardback, stacked in a pile. It had a little dog on the cover, soft and cuddly, a child’s comforter, like ‘Cuddle Cat’. ‘Fullalove’ was the (fictitious) manufacturer’s name, printed on a label sewn into the seam and taken from one of the ‘dirty toy’ pieces by the American artist Mike Kelley he liked very much. Called ‘More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repayed’, the title seemed to be both a reference to the love the child lavishes on the toy, which can be measured in the amount of wear and tear, the food and saliva and goo stains flattening the
plush of the synthetic fibre, and the love the toy returns.

He opened the book and began reading. The narrator is a tabloid journalist, jaded, borderline alcoholic, self-hating, specialising in crime. A soft toy (the little dog), entrusted to him by the wife of the murderer of a young child which he had promised to place on the roadside memorial to the little girl but kept, is his only comfort and companion. Miller, the narrator, has also listened obsessively for some years to an audio-cassette of Meryl Streep reading the children’s story
The Velveteen Rabbit
, and extracts from the story punctuate the narrative.

He started to remember the voice. He started to recall bits of the book he had forgotten: Shane Norwood, the nine-year-old stolen from his bedroom in south London by a stranger; Sean Norwood, his father, who had transformed personal tragedy into something positive by becoming a game-show host on daytime television; the ritual at the end of every show of the contestants waving ‘Goodbye, Shane!’ (he was still missing; no body had ever been found) to a big illuminated picture; the heartlessness and venality of the hacks covering the case.

The reason he had been awake, unable to sleep, was that his mind was racing, making connections. The previous day, Paul McCartney’s wife – ‘Lady Mucca’ as the tabloids had taken to referring to her – had gone live on breakfast television with a tearful outburst against the press, who she said were hounding and relentlessly vilifying her and making her life intolerable. She described herself being in as much pain as Princess Diana ‘and Kate McCann’.

In the 1960s, when it was still a fishing village and many miles off the tourist track, before the tiny harbour had become hemmed in by apartment blocks and resort hotels such as Mark Warner’s Ocean Club – Paul McCartney had spent two weeks on holiday in Praia da Luz. It caused the kind of media scramble not seen again in Praia until May 2007. But, away from the barricades of Paris, Prague and London, 1968 was a simpler, better-natured time and, after McCartney had posed for pictures on the beach on the morning the papers first tracked him down, they kept their promise, went off happy with what they’d got, and left him in peace to enjoy the rest of his holiday. Fans brought gifts of soft toys and other presents and laid them respectfully outside the house where he was staying.

It was the first time Paul and Linda had gone away anywhere on holiday together. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Exercising some of the new-found power that the Beatles money which was just starting to cascade in was giving him, he had chartered a plane and, with Linda and Heather, Linda’s daughter from a previous relationship, had flown down to Faro in the middle of the night.

Hearing pebbles rattling against a window was the first time Hunter Davies and his family, who had rented a converted sardine factory in the village for six months, realised that they had visitors. Hunter had just finished his biography of the Beatles and had held out the offer of the sleepy little village in Portugal as a bolt-hole, not really expecting that any of them would take him up on it.

The Praia da Luz that existed then has been wholly
absorbed into the modern resort that EasyJet has made accessible to holidaymakers from all over Britain and Europe. In those days you saw lots of disabled and disfigured local youths and men in the streets of Praia, hobbling around on crutches. Portugal was fighting a disastrous colonial war in Angola, and these were the ones lucky enough to come back alive.

It was while they were in Praia da Luz that Paul asked Linda to marry him, around the time she first discovered she was pregnant with Mary, now a celebrity photographer like her mother. This was the beginning of the family which, if rumour was to be believed, had tried to talk their father out of marrying Heather Mills and, when the marriage collapsed in a vituperative and very public way, would lend him such conspicuous support against the claims of the woman who went on television to compare her pain to Kate McCann’s (who some in the crackling blogosphere claimed ‘looked like Heather Mills’s twin sister’).

Heather followed Gordon Brown – now saddled with the nickname ‘Bottler Brown’ after failing to call an autumn election, and falling fast in the polls – onto the GMTV sofa. Beforehand, some papers reported, she had cornered him in the Green Room and tried to get him to promise to back her campaign to make any newspaper apology as prominent as the offending article. She wanted him to see how she had been vilely and repeatedly handbagged by getting him to look at the scrapbooks bloated with Lady Mucca stories she was toting, like the bag-lady of media gulch. The McCanns, meanwhile, were said to
be feeling sore that the prime minister, once their close ally, had, in light of their
arguidos
status, apparently dropped them.

After her GMTV performance, Heather’s PR adviser Phil Hall, a former editor of the
News of the World
, announced that he was dropping her. Hall had previously been in discussion with the McCanns about the spokesperson’s role which was eventually filled by Clarence Mitchell. Mitchell’s predecessor in the job in Praia, Justine McGuinness, was currently working as special adviser to the beleaguered Lib Dem leader, Sir Ming Campbell. Another former editor of the
News of the World
, Andy Coulson, was working very effectively as David Cameron’s Alastair Campbell, who was just then working on a lecture in which he would lambast media ‘hysteria’ over the McCann case, calling it ‘the worst example of recent times of some newspapers thinking the word Madeleine sells, and finding literally any old nonsense to keep her name in that selling position on the front’.

With all this in his brain, he couldn’t sleep. Bizarre links. Connections. (Kate McCann’s parents, Sue and Brian, made their trips to Praia da Luz via Faro from John Lennon Liverpool Airport!) And then – propelled out of bed in search of the book he hadn’t opened for many years – he saw at this late stage the glaring correspondence between the little dog fetishised by the tabloid reporter Miller in his novel (it was death-connected; it had been meant for the shrine to the murdered child; Miller had kept it) and Madeleine’s plush pink Cuddle Cat, the talismanic
link with her daughter carried everywhere by Kate McCann in the weeks following Madeleine’s disappearance.

They had left her hugging Cuddle Cat on the night of 3 May when they went to join their friends (soon, like hostages or terrorists, to be known as the ‘Tapas 7’) for dinner. It was finding Cuddle Cat there and Madeleine missing that they said made them sure somebody had taken her. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere on her own without Cuddle Cat. Madeleine and Cuddle Cat were inseparable, the soft pastel nylon pelt, the stuffing of polystyrene pellet mix and low-grade synthetic waste, the chocolate and sunblock and dribble stains, the smell of herself and Cuddle Cat the same, enjoined; the love hours, the expressionless, idealised, machine-made face, full of empty content, waiting to be filled. A tactile object to be sucked, squeezed, humped and drooled on until its last erotic delights had been yielded and it had become literally filthy.

‘It is grubby now, a little battered and undoubtedly tear-stained,’ began a report in the
Telegraph
a week after Madeleine disappeared.

‘Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby,’ the wise old Skin Horse tells the Velveteen Rabbit. ‘But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand … for nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those
playthings that are old and wise and experienced understand all about it.’

‘I was desperately hoping that Madeleine would be back before the Cat got washed,’ her mother told
The
Times
on 8 August. ‘In the end Cuddle Cat smelt of suntan lotion and everything. I forgot what colour it was.’

Mike Kelley has often said that ‘dirt’ is what his installations, consisting only of abject and orphaned cuddly toys picked up from yard sales and thrift-stores, are really about: ‘Because dolls represent such an idealised notion of the child, when you see a dirty one you think of a fouled child. And so you think of a dysfunctional family … The toy begins to take on characteristics of the child itself – it smells like the child and becomes torn and dirty like real things do. It then becomes a frightening object because it starts to represent the human in a real way and that’s when it’s taken from the child and thrown away.’

In a society fuelled by pictures of success, wrote Ralph Rugoff, these images of failure generate the anxiety which surrounds the taboo. Kelley’s creatures are not funny on account of their pitiable appearance, but because they befoul the sublime hygiene of the gallery or museum (or double-fronted executive dream home). Examine them too closely and their lovable personalities dissolve into clumps of unwashed fabric, limp and devoid of architectural structure.

After their flight from Praia da Luz in early September, the helicopter tracking shots at that end, the crate of toys in the driveway of the white adobe Vista do Mar, the helicopter
tracking shots at this end, the paparazzi riding pillion, facing backwards to get the eyes of Gerry and Kate, the figures standing in sun-roofs, Richard Bilson outside apartment 5
A
at the Ocean Club resort, Huw Edwards in the studio, it was repeatedly reported that the Portuguese police wanted to re-examine – ‘seize’ was always the English translation – Madeleine’s Cuddle Cat, on which the sniffer dogs had allegedly picked up ‘the scent of death’ in the summer.

Oh, he would have liked to switch off, crawl quietly back to bed. But his mind kept scratching away.

Their friends are the ‘Tapas 7’.

We are in the auspicious year of ‘Triple Seven’. 07.07.07. ‘Three Sevens’. The phenomenon of the Triple Seven weddings. The best man getting up and saying exactly 777 words in exactly 7 minutes.

Seven is considered a lucky number in Western culture. A common winning line in simple slot machines. 7 Hills of Rome. 7 Wonders of the ancient world. The number of the 7 Virtues – chastity, moderation, liberality, charity, meekness, zeal, and humility – corresponding to the 7 Deadly Sins. The 7 terraces of Mount Purgatory (one per deadly sin). The number of sacraments in the Roman Catholic faith.

The number of colours of the rainbow. The number of spots on a common ladybird.

Nursery images which made him think of Kate McCann. Madeleine’s room was pink. Sometimes she lies on Madeleine’s bed. Sometimes in her own bed at night
she wakes up and is sure Madeleine is there. ‘Tormented Kate McCann is regularly woken up by visions of the 4-year old in her bedroom.’ Copy filed with an implied catch in the voice, a muffled sob in the throat, sentimental as a lollipop.

When the time comes for the twins’ birthday – they will be three – she decides she will send them cards from Madeleine, a lovely present from Madeleine, they still say ‘And one biscuit for Madeleine’ their big sister, invite all their friends, as if she was still there. Her Winnie-the-Pooh pyjamas. The blank-faced man.

The empty desk being saved for Madeleine. The head teacher of the school Madeleine would have gone to setting up an empty desk shrine with candle.

People crowd at the edge of the oddly regular weave of the blankets of flowers, stunned by the scale of what they have made. But soon they turn into just one more example of urban blight; of city sadness. ‘A little angel lost in flight’ is the sort of thing it says on the stray condolence cards they leave in their wake.

Detectives have long questioned why, if it was her last link with Madeleine, Mrs McCann allowed Cuddle Cat to be washed. Mrs McCann said it had simply become too grubby. It was, according to Madeleine’s godfather Jon Corner, ‘reeking with Madeleine’s DNA’.

The sight of Kate McCann appearing for the umpteenth time, clutching a pale pink toy called Cuddles in lieu of her daughter, wrote Germaine Greer, makes me feel a bit sick.

The ghastliness of the animal–human chimera.

Fluffy pink plaything. Upkeep: minimal. Shelf-life: eternal.

He went away and made tea and when he came back the eye was eye-balling him, staring him down. He’d slipped the book onto a shelf instead of back into the pile where he found it, and now the eye on the spine – a design feature, a graphic device that had never really registered until now – was looking back out at him. It was a detail taken from the little dog on the cover. It was Fullalove’s eye. But – nobody was going to believe this – it was also Madeleine’s.

Madeleine’s eyes that had been stylised into media emblems, notably the unusual right eye, where the pupil runs into her blue-green iris in the form of a black radial strip reaching from the pupil out to the edge of the white at the seven o’clock position, about 30 degrees clockwise from the bottom. The radial strip in the glass eye belonging to the
Fullalove
toy – in reality it was just some dark stitches fixing the eye in place in its socket – was at the eight o’clock position, at about 40 degrees. But the closeness between them was striking. Even a stranger would have said so.