Authors: Gordon Burn
The images that arrive in their mind without invitation are so clear that they seem almost as if they were happening again. They are pursued by their memories; their memories harass them, and they cannot get rid of them. A part of them came to a standstill and they are drawn back to the people they were with a frequency that is punishing.
He had been thinking about trauma, reading some things about trauma. Their experience of trauma was what the McCanns, Gordon Brown, and Brown’s new friend John Smeaton, the Queen’s Gallantry Medal added to his long list of trophies and citations, had in common.
Life-changing moments. Calamitous events.
For Kate McCann it was the moment of walking in and finding the bed empty, Madeleine missing, Cuddle Cat, which she had left her holding, high on a shelf where Madeleine could never have reached.
Gordon Brown lost the sight in his left eye and was almost blinded by a clash of heads in a game of rugby, that trauma leading to the trauma of his eye operations, the
months in the blacked-out room listening to books for the blind, the possibility of perhaps never being able to see again.
John Smeaton saw two men in a burning car intent on killing and maiming dozens, maybe hundreds, of men, women and children; a man with his skin on fire screaming something about Allah, throwing punches at a policeman, Smeato’s pal coming up to him afterwards and going, ‘What did you do that for, you maddie?’
Candid news photographs are structured to reveal how people react when the comfortable facade of daily life is torn away. Facing experiences of great joy or tragic loss, people expose themselves, and photographs of such moments are thought to reveal truths of human nature.
The news. Always something – usually unpleasant – happening far away to a stranger; to somebody else, somewhere that we’re lucky not to be.
The best of life is lived quietly, wrote John McGahern, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.
They did not give Portuguese police the satisfaction of crying.
Dan Weir was an apprentice paparazzo. £500 can set you up in business in these days of digitisation, and that’s what he’d done. On the night the butane-and-nail-filled Mercedes saloon failed to detonate on the pavement outside Tiger Tiger in the Haymarket, Weir had been night papping. He was on his way home from patrolling the nightclub circuit when he got the snap – the green car abandoned on the pavement, boot open, gas canisters scattered around the rear wheels – that appeared in most of the following day’s papers and on all the rolling-news channels. ‘It’s a dream shot,’ he said of the picture, which was expected to make him upwards of £25,000.
*
On that same night, at roughly the time the emergency services were being called to Tiger Tiger and the West End was being cleared, in a Mayfair gallery little more than a hundred yards away, a standing man was spraying Windolene onto his penis and masturbating into a carrier bag.
By 28 June, Damien Hirst’s piece
For the Love of God
–
the platinum impression of a skull set with thousands of small diamonds for which the artist was famously asking £50 million – had been on display at the White Cube gallery in Mason’s Yard for just under a month and the show still had ten days to run.
The skull was shown in a bullet-proof, cube-shaped vitrine mounted on a metal plinth in a totally black environment – black ceiling and walls; black floor – in conditions of intense security. It was reported to be the most expensive object assembled in Britain since the Crown Jewels, and security was to Tower of London standards, and beyond.
The skull was attended by armed guards at all times.
At night it retracted into the plinth, which was also a safe, bolted to the floor. The floor had been reinforced.
There was a secret camera in the room that the men patrolling it weren’t aware was there. They also didn’t know that the skull was, in fact, in the room overnight with them: due to an elaborate security procedure, arrived at in collaboration with the insurers, they thought they were standing watch over an absence; that they were guarding nothing.
An armour-plated truck would arrive every evening and remove a box containing the skull for safekeeping to a vault. Every morning, the same procedure in reverse.
In fact the box was always empty. The skull never left the building.
In the small upper gallery where it was shown, an unsuspected presence – a man in black, lurking in the
shadows – would step forward occasionally and request that a visitor turn off their mobile phone or, Windolene in hand, rub a cloth over the glass where the grease-marks of people’s noses had started to show up. The Windolene was a typical example of Hirst’s attention to detail, as well as a clue to the often-overlooked performative aspect of his work.
Two night-guards were caught sleeping by the secret camera and sacked. A third was caught masturbating into a carrier bag as the West End was being evacuated under threat of terrorist attack, within the force field of the skull, cold glass and a black pedestal, put to rest for the night in its velvet-lined, coffinated home, a glittering effigy of death, a deathly treasure moulded from the head of the insignificant man.
*
‘The insignificant man’. This is Mark Evans’s phrase.
He is managing director of Bentley & Skinner, Bond Street jewellers by appointment to the Queen and HRH the Prince of Wales. He uses it – ‘the skull of the insignificant man’ – to distinguish it from both the precious object to which it lends its volume – the diamond skull – and a third skull which also had a part to play in the diamond skull’s journey to completion.
On the night before Hirst’s both sublime and monetised invention was going to be unveiled to the world – among many things, it was the apotheosis of the recent inundation of liquidity into the art market, and art’s transformation from luxury to fungible asset – Mark Evans
hosted a small drinks party in his drawing-room-sized, Dickensian (‘Buying and selling the loveliest jewellery for over 180 years’, it was there in Dickens’ day), just-this-side-of-lugubrious office over the shop.
As a rule, Mr Mark never waits upon a customer unless they ask for him. Then it is a pleasure to do so and often a privilege when a personage, for example, consults him about the resetting of family jewels or – finding themselves, ahem, in Short Street – engages him to sell them ‘discreetly’.
It had been Mr Mark’s pleasure to welcome the successful artist Damien Hirst into his private office on a number of occasions in the past. Though certainly different, they were comfortable with each other. ‘“I feel comfortable with
you guys
”, I seem to remember is how he put it,’ Mr Mark says of the day he asked Hirst why, of all the jewellers in London, he had chosen to ask Bentley & Skinner to carry out the commission of realising the skull, a task which involved the patient harvesting of ‘conflict free’ diamonds from all corners of the world.
Visitors to Mr Mark’s private room are admitted via a velvet rope at the foot of a narrow winding staircase and it was a convivial atmosphere that greeted the artist and other invited guests on that evening in early June. The drinks were served in lead-crystal glasses on silver trays, and there were nibbles and inconsequential cocktail chatter, and the press of bodies for a long time obscured the little arrangement Mr Mark had organised on a fine, bow-fronted mahogany desk of the three skulls.
On a small plinth draped in burgundy velvet in the centre was the diamond skull; to its left stood the skull of the insignificant man; and on the right was a third skull sculpted from gleaming, transparent rock-crystal, a replicant of or companion-piece to the notorious Aztec rock-crystal skull that attracts a devoted audience of mumblers and rune-readers and interplanetary travellers warbling zombie-speak to the moonbeams to its room in the British Museum. Mark Evans had acquired his own version of this object of philosophical contemplation – the former ‘property of a gentleman’ – a matter of days before Damien Hirst came to him with his momentous commission. A premonition perhaps! An omen! What stranger than another skull!
A number of people present on the drinks evening only became aware of the tableau of the three skulls when the dowsers – two ladies in old-fashioned evening gowns, relics of a war-time concert party, and a gentleman – started dowsing, a process that consisted of much rolling of the eyes and low chanting, whites of the eyes showing, eyes rolled back up into the head, and then the metal dowsing rods going to work receiving the energy of the skulls, the enormous, almost overwhelming energies they said they felt emanating from the rock-crystal specimen, harnessing that energy and rechannelling it, the dowser rods reacting really violently, an enormous field of energy, almost jerking themselves out of their hands, redistributing the energy from the crystal skull into the dead skull of the insignificant man, whose soul had found release, they
believed, a soul which until then had been agonised in some way but had finally found a passage with the advent of the diamond creation.
The diamond skull set with the teeth they had extracted from the skull of the insignificant man, a young adult male complete with dentition and mandible.
Hypoplastic defects were noted on the enamel of canines and first molars, with no other teeth displaying this change, suggesting the individual was exposed to stress between the ages of three and five years, based on banding at the root of the molars.
The skull was of excellent preservation with an even ivory colour. There were no root traces or soil residue associated with the skull, suggesting that it had either been cleaned after exhumation or had never been interred.
There were two doors that opened inwards on the bed of the pedestal underneath the skull. Every night the skull descended and the doors closed above it. All night the halogen spots continued to illuminate the space where the skull rested during daylight hours, the shape made by its base, residues of diamond dust on the dark lining like human trace.
It’s there, then turn around and it’s gone.
What does a mother look like when her child has been wrenched from her?
When the twins grew up and were old enough to leave home they both went far away.
They were saturated with the news. The news ate into their faces, bit into their every pore, came into the house on the clothes of their mother and father, hung in the static around the television and the telephone, clustered round the dust motes, rising, falling, clung to the grease on the dishes in the sink. Newsnewsnews.
More news.
The girl had a restless existence. She never settled down. Zimbabwe. California. Chamonix (the ski instructor). A small moment of clarity and triumph in a dirt pit in Australia with filthy water soaking into her clothing, rats and other rodents running over her face. She had to place a bull’s eyeball between her teeth and bite into it and swallow and she did it, she didn’t blanch.
Attagirl! she could hear her father say. Her father was dead. And the greatest triumph: ‘I don’t have a number for her’ – her reply when asked how her mother, the former great leader, now vulnerable and frail, was taking the ritual
humiliations being meted out to her daughter nightly on prime-time TV.
The boy was always an accident waiting to happen. The boy was never much good. Poor Mark. (PODWAS – a text that went around cock-a-hoop Labour MPs in the first weeks of the Brown government, the weeks of the Brown Bounce: ‘Poor Old Dave What A Shame’).
KGOY. A problem for the toy industry worldwide. Kids Getting Older Younger. Blame the parents.
‘They never talked about [their father and mother] … There was no need to,’ wrote E. L. Doctorow in
The Book
of Daniel
. ‘They had shared an experience so evenly that to have spoken about it would have diminished what they knew and understood. Share and share alike, the cardinal point of justice for children driven home to them with vicious exactitude … So at the beginning at least, there was no need to talk about it. When the brother and the sister went somewhere, or did something together; when he tightened her skate or helped her with her homework, or took her to the movies; the way they moved, physically moved, in a convalescence of suffering, spoke about it. The way he would hold her arm as they ran across the street in front of traffic spoke about it. The way his muscles tensed when she wasn’t where she was supposed to be at any given time of the day, that spoke of it as well.’
*
What then of Sean? What of Amelie?
When the twins were carried into the silver Renault Scenic rental car outside Vista do Mar on the morning
that they flew home to England from Praia da Luz, they were seen to be fleshlike, pink and normal.
On emerging at the other end, however, Sean in the arms of his mother, Amelie in the arms of her father, their features had been electronically scrambled, turned into a moving mosaic. They were each wearing a mask like a tiny cathedral window fixed to their face.
What did the world look like seen through the lens of such a thing? What did they see looking back at a world gazing so hungrily and yet casually at them? A kaleidoscope. Luridly tinted, for sure. Distorted, always shape-shifting. A phantasmagoria.
‘Celebrity victims’. A horrible expression. So let’s not use it.
Let’s leave them in the nursery in the safekeeping of Patty the Panda and Mortimer the Moose and Cuddle Cat.
Polly Pocket and Pupsqueak.
Say night-night, Sean. Say night-night, Amelie. Say night-night to Madeleine and pray God to bring her home.
*
Bye-bye, everybody. Bye-bye.
Like all novels, this one derives from a broad range of materials and sources. Books that proved particularly useful were:
Blair
, by Anthony Seldon;
The Rivals: The Intimate Story of a Political
Marriage
, by James Naughtie;
Common Fame
, by Richard Schickel;
Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
, by Mike Davis; and, in a more oblique way,
Imagined Cities: Urban
Experience and the Language of the Novel
, by Robert Alter.
‘Literature is news that stays news,’ Ezra Pound once said. In order for yesterday’s news to become a novel while the events and characters it depicted were still fresh in people’s memories, it had to be written and produced to a punishingly tight schedule. It couldn’t have happened without the encouragement and total commitment of everybody at Faber from the outset. I particularly want to thank Stephen Page, Lee Brackstone, Angus Cargill, Hannah Griffiths, Dave Watkins, Donna Payne, Kate Burton, John Grindrod, Patrick Keogh and Anna Pallai. I would also like to thank everybody at the British School at Rome, where I completed the book.
G.B., February 2008