Authors: Gordon Burn
Standing there, the two of us slightly apart from the detective, who is separate from the main group of Mrs Thatcher and her carer companion and his fellow protection officer, in this slightly unreal situation (we know that under their roomy double-breasted navy blue coats both men are armed) Aitch suddenly opens up in a way that has never happened in the years we have been passing the time of day with each other.
I know he has a son, grown up and living in Australia (which may explain his fondness for the slightly ludicrous-looking waxed cotton hat, the kind that has wine corks dangling from it in cartoons). But now he is speaking for the first time of a girlfriend, which makes me adjust my perception of him as a loner, somebody who loves the park, which he has been using since he was a boy (he remembers it in the early post-war years when it was still divided into allotment gardens, his mother coming over to
pull a lettuce, some carrots), and notices the seasons; somebody who vegges out at night with a ready-meal and tins of beer that he collapses with his fist and allows to lie where they fall. (Somebody like James, in fact, who I know takes a drink, but whose midden of a flat mysteriously didn’t seem to contain any tell-tale cans or bottles when it was ransacked by Kim and Aggie.)
‘I took my girlfriend for a meal in the West End on Friday night,’ Aitch says. ‘And it was deserted, like a walk in a country lane.’
I had passed the precise spot where the bomb was, the piece of pavement where they had parked the car packed with petrol and liquid propane or butane and nails, dozens, probably hundreds of times, without noticing. ‘Tiger Tiger’. It meant nothing.
There’s a club in Shaftesbury Avenue, close to Piccadilly, part of the soaked concrete Trocadero development, where there’s always a queue along the pavement at a certain time of night with the black bouncers with their zephyr earpieces and padded satin bomber jackets and stylish kids with their pants hanging off and the white iPod wires like in the bus-stop posters against their black skin, whose eyes you sometimes lock with and feel old, going home on the bus, take the dog around the block, get the pillows set right for the asthma.
But ‘Tiger Tiger’? Nothing. London’s Tiger Tiger is one of a national chain of nine late-night venues owned by Novus Leisure, I read in the paper. Tiger Tigers, the report continued, are particularly popular with women and also
appeal to older partygoers because of a policy of allowing customers to pre-book booths, removing any chance of having to queue in the cold.
In future of course it will be impossible to sit on the top on the number 19, gazing out of the tagged, hazed window, catching the effervescent blue of the digitised sign on the side of the bus occasionally bubbling up against shop-window displays and stretches of marble curtain-walling, or interacting interestingly with the vivid orange of the Tiger Tiger illuminated sign, tone-on-tone volumetric illusions, a heightened surface complexity, the new optical solids, and not think: 60 litres of petrol found on the back seat and in the boot with a mobile phone trigger; nails strewn around. The first explosion would rupture the gas canisters and produce a fine cloud of gas, petrol and air; a second explosion would then detonate the vapour. That would give you an explosion of the sort the Americans used to flatten the trees in Vietnam, said Sidney Alford, an explosives expert.
Difficult in future to swing right off the Haymarket along Jermyn Street in the direction of St James’s, within a few feet of where the metallic green Mercedes was parked, and see the smokers who now throng the pavement outside Tiger Tiger, hugging themselves with their pale bare arms, corralled behind velvet ropes, shifting from foot to foot (the bombers beat the smoking ban by two days), and not think: carnage and deep-body laceration and major head trauma; bodies ruined by nails and glass, torn up. Hard not to gauge how many of them are wearing glasses
and recall that the sight of many of the survivors of the London suicide bombings on 7/7 was saved by the glasses they were wearing.
‘The new wars’ is how they are coming to be referred to in academic circles. Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, but also the wars here. (Although the new prime minister has committed himself to desist from using the Blair–Bush all-purpose rallying-cry, ‘the war against terror’.) ‘New-Wars Theory and Sources of Insecurity’ is a course that has been made available at some British universities. ‘Risk Sociology’ and ‘Terrorism Studies’ have also been proving popular in the years since 9/11, particularly with students from overseas.
Khaled Meshaal. Ismail Haniyeh. Fawzi Barhoum. Abdul Rashid Gazi. Jaish al-Islam. The Tawhid and Jihad Brigades. Mumtaz Dogmush. The Popular Resistance Committees … Are these among the names and organisations Mrs Thatcher has highlighted or put exclamation marks against over breakfast this morning? They all appear in a single piece in a single paper, an article about the BBC journalist taken hostage in the Gaza Strip on the 12 March. Already it is day 113. (Day 61 for Madeleine. Day 06 for the new administration of Gordon Brown. In four days it will be 07.07.07 – ‘Triple Seven’ – an apparently propitious date for Western culture: many thousands of marriages have been planned for that date. There will be a mass wedding ceremony at 7 p.m. on Triple Seven Saturday at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Catholics and Charismatic Evangelicals in the US are holding mass rallies.)
A video released to Al Jazeera television two Sundays ago showed the captured BBC correspondent wearing what he said was an explosives vest; the kind of vest that one of the Islamist terrorists in the burning jeep that rammed Glasgow airport apparently had strapped to him. But, even as I stand batting the breeze with Aitch, and Mrs T makes her slow approach along the railing by the lake towards us, Palestinian militias are preparing to liberate Alan Johnston from the rival al-Qaida-inspired faction who have been holding him: dozens of Hamas gunmen in black masks are occupying the rooftops of high-rise apartment blocks that overlook the stronghold of the Dogmush family in the Sabra district of Gaza City. There has been sporadic shooting throughout the morning, with one passer-by shot dead in crossfire. People are burning tyres to drive away mosquitoes and flies. Does she know this?
The ‘country lane’ effect, as Aitch has described the unusual quiet that took hold in the West End in the wake of the attempted car-bomb attacks on the Haymarket – restaurants deserted, pubs slack, cinemas and theatres closed, only the voices of the military and yellow-reflector-vested members of the emergency services occasionally ripping through the silence – reminded me of something I had read about the new wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere: that the landmines strewn around were difficult to see because they were green and disappeared in the grass.
There has been speculation that the latest bombers are probably British-born but working under the instruction
of key al-Qaida figures located in camps in North Waziristan, the tribal land on the Afghan-Pakistan border, high and cold and exposed to flailing wind. The roads there, it is reported, are given over to highwaymen who demand tolls and sometimes abduct children when money is insufficient. Drug gangs and transport mafia dominate the barren economy. The cities have been pounded so hard they are disaggregated into piles of bricks and stones. This is the landscape of the broadcast news, and the novels of the new medieval future:
everything paling away into
the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop.
Along the shore a burden of dead reeds
. Terminal landscapes. Wasted terrain. Osama – the Lion – called the place Maasada, the Lion’s Den.
When Mrs Thatcher and her companions eventually got to where Aitch and I were standing – she cast a curious purse-lipped look Aitch’s way, gave a half-nod and blinked rapidly several times – they opted for the path that leads away from the lake and follows the curve of the D-shape that defines the sub-tropical garden. Usually at this time of the year the garden would be filled with people in shorts and bikinis: the looped metal fence which surrounds it is useful for families with young children, while the dense shelter belt of shrubs and trees, planted in raised beds to create the mild micro-climate in which yucca and banana plants thrive, provides the sunbathers with natural screens that they use to protect their privacy.
But the garden is dripping and deserted. During the winter months the more vulnerable species are shrouded
in fleece and straw and protective white plastic whose twine ties, spaced at head, waist and feet levels, inevitably suggest a trussed-up body shape, or body bags. (Although it has never occurred to me before, I am reminded now of the television pictures of Mrs Tebbit, wife of Margaret Thatcher’s trusted Rottweiler figure, Norman, being lowered down the face of the Grand Hotel in Brighton after the IRA bomb went off during the Conservative conference of 1984. The entire front of the building had been blown out by the force of the blast. Mrs Tebbit was strapped to a stretcher and being lowered vertically past gouts of water erupting from ruptured pipes and rooms whose furnishings and personal belongings – flower-patterned quilts, wall lamps hanging by the wires but somehow still burning – were clearly visible. Mrs Thatcher, it would later emerge, was at that very moment letting it be known she wanted Marks and Spencer to open immediately so that delegates, many of them forced to flee wearing only carpet slippers and dressing-gowns, could replace clothes lost in the explosion.)
As she proceeds around the perimeter of the garden, Mrs T stops every so often to reach up to a drooping branch or out to a flabby rosette of leaves to apparently express her concern about how they are being affected by the weather. And it is only now I notice something that should have been obvious from the beginning: no handbag. She is without the item which came to symbolise her legendary bossiness and indomitability and which she turned into a verb: to handbag, or (more commonly) to be
handbagged. She isn’t carrying one of the bucket-sized handbags which became part of her armoury. ‘Margaret Thatcher carried the authority of her office always with her. It was in her handbag,’ Douglas Hurd, her Northern Ireland, Home and Foreign Secretary at various times, once said. ‘She was asserting it the whole time’.
Even in the famous picture of her standing in the gun turret of a Saracen tank, taken after the Falklands, kitted out in hooded headscarf and fly-eye desert goggles, she has a handbag over her arm.
What is remembered in the body is well remembered. The presence of learned culture in the body, wrote Elaine Scarry, must at least in part be seen as originating in the body, attributed to the refusal of the body to disown its own early circumstances, its mute and often beautiful insistence on absorbing into its rhythms and postures the signs that it inhabits a particular space at a particular time.
It is said that within a few months of life British infants have learned to hold their eyebrows in a raised position. And a muscle memory keeps sending Mrs Thatcher’s pale, manicured right hand with its prominent wrist-bone and thin blue veins travelling along her other arm in an attempt to push the slipping strap – which of course isn’t there – back towards the clamp of her elbow.
In a similarly reflexive action, her carer’s hand constantly reaches out and hovers around the small of Mrs Thatcher’s back. It is noticeable, though, that, no matter how many times this happens, her fingers never make actual contact with the nap of the camel-hair coat nearly
identical to her own. The women are of similar height, build and general demeanour. But for this business with the hands, anybody watching from a distance, through a hair-trigger zoom or with the naked eye, would find it difficult telling the two of them apart.
*
It is often said that today’s abundance of media images creates a screen between the individual and the world, and that this is the source of the feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing. The media gives us images of everything – but only images.
He had only realised Kate Middleton lived a street away, and had been living there for two or three years, when some houses that came up on the TV news looked naggingly familiar. The houses were the backdrop to pictures of the paparazzi climbing over each other to squeeze off shots of Prince William’s girlfriend as she left home for work in the morning.
Kate Middleton had started 2007, according to Princess Diana’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, writing in the
Spectator
, with the year ‘stretching ahead of her like an enchanted garden’. Prince William was going to announce their engagement and she therefore would be in line to become Queen. But after a series of highly publicised paparazzi chases ominously like the one which resulted in the death of his mother, the prince announced that he and Miss Middleton had agreed, after several years as a couple, to go their separate ways. Nevertheless rumours persisted in the press about them ‘spending secret nights together’
out of the media spotlight. And on Monday all the papers had run pictures of Kate Middleton sitting in the row behind Prince William at the concert held to mark the tenth anniversary of his mother’s death, singing along (so they said, and the event had been televised) to Take That’s ‘I Want You Back (For Good)’.
After registering where she lived, he had sometimes noticed the snappers lurking in their cars in the street, which was very ‘old Chelsea’ and narrow and popular with motorbike couriers and taxis as a rat-run to the river (and treacherous because of that). They sometimes rested their coffee cartons on the roofs of each other’s cars as they stood around chatting; the cartons lay in the gutter after they had gone: the observers observed. He had never seen the girl, though. And then that Tuesday – the same Tuesday he had once more spotted Mrs Thatcher turning about the park – he had almost charged into Kate Middleton in the nearest Tesco Local on the King’s Road. It had been both their faults and they had mumbled apologies to each other: he had been going the wrong way, backtracking, against the after-work traffic, and she had been going too fast with her eyes fixed on the floor.