Born Yesterday (17 page)

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. 

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

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:

‘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.