Authors: Gordon Burn
And meanwhile the reason for Doohan’s mercy dash loomed between us, heavy-handed, unalluded to, mute. Doohan had deposited the dog on the bed without saying anything. I watched him concentrate on not looking at it the way you consciously try to stop your eye straying to somebody’s facial tic or intriguing stain or unusual physical deformity. A single smut had penetrated the factory wrap and lodged itself on the velvety muzzle. Otherwise it had made it this far unscarred and unblemished; it was a clean slate, an empty vessel.
I looked at Doohan: winded; shot; his future behind him. I thought of the pair of us: the bad-news bears, the bathos junkies. We had started out so well. But something in our lives had brought us to this pass: two middle-aged men in a cheapjack hotel doing a ten-minute fandango around the cuddly creature one of them has become convinced possesses the magic necessary to deliver some tragically mislaid part of himself back to himself. I wasn’t ready to take up my bed and walk out of the room and at the same time was convinced I couldn’t spend another hour there without this primitive contrivance.
Doohan offered me a hit on his joint. I declined. He inhaled it down to the filter, flushed the roach down the toilet, then shambled about gathering together his sodden bits and pieces. ‘I’ve seen rough, but you look dog rough,’ he offered as a parting shot. ‘Thanks, Myc,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the same for you one day.’ He made the peace sign when all that remained visible of him was one hand extended through a gap in the door.
The condolence card with the swallows and Rachel Stires’s lines of doggerel on it had unstuck itself somewhere along the line and gone missing. The glue of the crimp-seal around the dog gave way easily with a soft hiss, a small aromatic explosion of polypropylenes and carbides, moth-proofers, flame-retardants, bonding agents, synthetic fur and filling. The facial features were folkloric, uniform, idealised, designed to punch all the age-old buttons. They didn’t ask anything specific, or say anything specific; they encouraged the owner – and I acknowledged that that was me now – to bring them to life by projecting the specific onto
them. They were full of empty content, waiting to be filled.
The chemical aromas diffused quickly. This was never a toy that was going to be invested with the warm milky smell of a child. It had evaded the wet earth and keening laments of its intended destination. Now as my life’s companion it was going to be filled with my smell: the smell of sour nightsweats, flopsweat, piney Karvol, gaseous emissions, and the mulchy, bubbling-under sub-odours of disgust, disappointment, fatigue and panic.
I was timid at first about any overt display of affection. What a snooper lens couldn’t do with a snoutful of this. A frame-by-frame account of my slow-motion private smash-up. A gift for somebody with an eye for the grotesque and gamey. A Weegee, a Louis Liotta, an Arbus, a Heath Hawkins. (Caption: ‘His/Her central concern remained unwavering – it focused on the nature of being alone and our pitiful range of attempted defences against it.’) I glanced at the window. The blind remained lowered. Tentatively at first, I let my nose graze in the semi-lush, machine-cropped fabric. I was covered all over in a thin film of perspiration. I made myself familiar with the bunched legs, investigated the raggedy outsize ears. Then I tucked the little dog under my chin and drifted into the sweetest sleep with my arms clamped close around it.
When I woke up I was irrationally (childishly) upset not to find it where I had left it. It took a minute or two to locate it under the bedclothes, snug in the hollow made by my drawn-up, foetal knees. It took me back to the days when a Townsend terrier called Ali used to burrow his way into the bed in the mornings and make a space for himself between me and Even. And further back to when I was a child, when my mother would wrap a hot water bottle up in an old cardigan before slipping it into the arctic sheets, a cooling core of heat encrypted in the leaden blankets.
It was only when I retrieved it that I noticed the maker’s label sewn into a body-seam:
Fullalove.
And on the reverse: ‘Eternitoys (Div. of Jaykay Group), Vallance House, Vallance By-Way, Sleaford. Upkeep: minimal. Shelf-life: eternal.’
Day
24.
I ask Heath Hawkins a question, one I have long wanted to ask him.
We are in what Hawkins usually refers to as his ‘hooch’ (a hangover from the Vietnam days) – actually the bottom half of a battered/bijou property in an SW postal district popular with dumbed-down, cokehead trustafarians, and older BMW-bohemians like himself. (I make it that Heath must be fifty-seven now.)
The air is incense-rich, the lighting strained through flimsy pieces of ikat and paisley and tie-dye fabric that have been weighted with glass beads and cowries and draped over the shades of the lamps. There is a low table with the figure of Ganesh, the elephant Buddha, on it, along with a row of lard-like ecclesiastical candles. The candles illuminate a Tibetan mandala whose circular pattern turns out, when you get close to it, to consist of ingeniously interlocked copulating figures. One third of the room has an icy, Insectocutor-blue caste as a result of the light falling into it from the adjacent room whose walls are lined with tanks containing puffers, tangs, blue-face angels, moray eels and other slyly darting tropical fish.
None of this, though, is what visitors to Heath Hawkins’s house tend primarily to remember. In an act of contamination or, the images they take away with them when they leave are the sepulchral, transfixing, bottom-of-life images that Heath’s shutter has opened up over the years to let in. This gallery of the dead and dying, the bestial and the grotesque – a few of the pictures framed, most enlarged and then simply taped or pinned to the walls; all of them in black-and-white – doesn’t appear to have been assembled so much as to have self-spawned organically, like a bacterial invasion, or a flocky pattern of cumulus damp.
Before me where I am standing is an image from his notorious
(unpublished) post-mortem portfolio. The corpse is that of a middle-aged woman whose head is turned to one side and buried in shadow. The incision that has been made from the throat to the pubic bone is in the process of being stitched up, with coarse dragging stitches. Clearly visible in the open stomach cavity is the cigarette Hawkins had been smoking a couple of seconds before he took the picture. Seeing him looking around for an ashtray, he has told me, the mortuary assistant, the only other person present, had taken the cigarette from him and casually stuffed it into the woman’s belly.
Above this picture is the picture of a spliff-toting GI, his face painted up for night walking, around his neck a necklace of eleven human tongues. Below it, the picture of Walter Brand that Heath snatched in The Cherry and Fair Star three or four nights ago, and next to this an equally unforgiving studio portrait, a posed picture of Walter, his old
cojones
hanging low in, his arthritically ballooned knees exploding out of, a pair of his late wife’s precious silk knickers.
Proceeding in a clockwise direction around the room we find blowups of:
– an amputee in Yemen having the pulp of his shoulder wound cauterised with red-hot irons
– a girl holding a doll giving birth to another doll
– a naked Heath Hawkins photographed by himself, the fat-lipped black lesions articulating the surface of his body like leeches
– a group of children hideously impaled on a column of concertina razor wire in a public square in Saigon; the razor wire encircles their father, a formally dressed man, who is facing execution
– a young black revolutionary being necklaced with a blazing rubber tyre in one of the townships in South Africa
– Linzie’s, Hawkins’s first wife’s, sutured and fisted mastectomy scar
– one of the ninety-five Liverpool football fans who died at Hills-borough, the grid-pattern of the boundary fence against which the life was crushed out of him branded on his face. (Hawkins had had to flip the body with his foot where it was lying on the pitch, something he had done many times in combat situations. Here, though, it had almost sparked a mini-riot, a small turbulence inside the greater turbulence)
– two men, the uncle and grandfather, gazing at the four fingers of a small girl which have just been chopped off by her mother
– a black vulture with human fat coursing down its feathers and tatters of knobby flesh hanging loose from its mouth, snapped in a border village during the Indo-Pakistan War
Life with the crusts on, as Heath has a fondness for saying. Life with the crispyfuckincrusts on, man.
‘Tell me,’ I say to him. ‘I’ve always wanted to know. Do you ever get, you know … the horn on, taking pictures of this stuff?’
I’m drinking Belikin (‘Belize’s #1 beer’ according to the label) out of the bottle. Hawkins is crouched over a table, engrossed in his crack paraphernalia. ‘Yeah, man,’ he says. ‘You shitting me?’ He has a jerried-together ‘works’ consisting of a plastic Pepsi bottle, some perforated tin foil and an empty biro casing. He makes some final, fiddling adjustments: grouting, tapping, tamping. Then there is a big druggy moment – a hallowed hiatus – while he takes the smoke deep down into his lungs. A sooty deposit blooms inside the bottle; his face is obscured momentarily by a duster of dirty grey smoke. There is a loud exhale. ‘Mmmmm,’ he says, before this thickens into a cough. ‘Oh yeah! Major chubbies. But
major
chubbies.’
Heath is wearing a pair of tiger-stripe fatigues with soft-soled Gucci moccasins and a white T-shirt with a small NASA emblem on it. He’ll
put on a caramel-coloured cashmere jacket before we leave.
‘Don’t be such a chickenshit, Normsky, try some,’ he says,
already preparing more ‘rock’ in the microwave. I hold up the beer bottle, indicating that I’m happy with what I’ve got. ‘Okay, once a juicer, always a juicer. I know. But here’s a medicament which allows you to seize control of your pilot light. I’m depending on you not to punk out on me tonight. You’re not going to punk out on me, are you? Here. Have a hit. Just to be sure. Put the glide back in your stride. Feel what it’s like to burn with a hard gem-like flame for once, instead of guttering like an old smudgepot. Guaranteed orbit. Blow your head off.’
Heath is in business in this area in a modest way, scoring cocaine, crack, ecstasy, ganja for friends, and (surprisingly thoroughly) checked-out friends of friends. The revenue is useful, but he says (and I believe him) that it is the ‘conspiratorial ambience’ he is hooked on and that he looks to to keep an edge. There have already been a couple of inept coded telephone conversations in the brief time I’ve been here about ‘aunty’ coming for ‘tea’ and the time that tea will be poured. Hawkins happily admits that he is paranoid, and sleeps with a loaded M-2 carbine and a machete under his bed.
The patterns on the well-worn rugs scattered around and on the loose covers on the furniture suggest the inscribed façades of mosques and Mayan temples; Berber tattoos. ‘
X
’ (I mention the name of another blood-and-guts photographer we both know) ‘puts his pictures away under lock and key every night so their souls can’t get at him.’
Surprisingly, this fails to raise the expected derisory rasp. ‘They are the denizens of the other world. They seem to be looking back at us from some other place, as though to tell us something. The dark seamy corners, the neglected populations. You have to get close enough to get the picture, but get too close and you die.’
Heath has started strapping his hands with green gaffer tape, having first prepared twelve-inch strips of tape which he has stuck all along the edge of the table, like a seasoned corner man. Before embarking on this, he distributed lens caps, rolls of film, light metres and other pieces of necessary equipment around the
cargo pockets of his fatigue pants. This has given him an awkward, padded-out look, but inside it he still looks limber, kick-box thin. He shrugs into his jacket; takes a last deep inhale of the joint he has had going to even out the buzz of the crack cocaine. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Time to move this gig east.’
We are halfway to the door when he remembers he has forgotten something. He retrieves the small velvet drawstring bag which has been hanging around the neck of the elephant Buddha, and loops it over his own head, a gesture he has perfected so that there is not a chance of him disturbing his hair. ‘Benign senescent forgetfulness. Long-term brain fade,’ he groans. ‘Jeezus Godhelpus. Okay. Dead-body detail time, this time. Let’s make some frames.’
*
We are in the golden valley – the valley of goods and services, lights and signs, two undifferentiated, pin-hole lights ourselves in the sequined belt of lights as monitored by the Met’s traffic blimp or helicopter hovering overhead. The only easy route to where we are going is through the business ghetto, with its simple planar geometry, its hard-landscaping and bold international symbols; its developing security presence – uniformed men at desks keep coming up like pictures in a flicker book as the lights go on and a hazy summer dusk deepens. I see us reflected side by side in the curtain walls, woozily distorted by the mirage ripples and subtle dents, Heath Hawkins driving. The surge, and the dawdle, a country song (another country song) – ‘By day I make the cars, by night I make the bars’ is how this one goes – on the tape.
As proof that we are moving, department-store windows begin to offer blazing clement weathers, the inevitable colourful abundance: nipples pushing against sheer fabric as if exposed to a cross-draught, skirts pinned and petrified to look as if they are being lifted on the wind; the almost familiar faces, the nearly convincing wigs. And in the doorways, the collateral damage of advanced urban life, preparing a bed for the night: the hingeless and the homeless, with their harmonicas and bongos and layered
filth, their community spirit and scurf-necked patient dogs.
Buoyed on the sounds of Memphis and Nashville, we glide by rape sites and murder sites, scenes of hit-and-runs, child snatches, vendetta assassinations, carjackings, care-in-the-community neck stabbings, and their commemorative shrines in varying conditions of completion – the full gamut, from newly layed and composting flowers, to cinderblock bunkers with decorative ironwork grilles and creosoted roofs, plastic bouquets in Third World vases, flickering candles, Christmas lights, bottles and mirrors to deflect the remaining malignant spirits, and pictures of the deceased hologramically –
hyperdelically
– rendered or cheaply photocopied and sheathed in plastic.
And then the angle of elevation changes and we soar into an aerial shot – up onto the ribboned flyover, forced all at once up close against cluttered bedsits (collapsed suitcases, string-tied boxes forced into the spaces between ceilings and wardrobes; thin partitions bisecting windows, interposed between sinks and beds, quarantining weary soul from weary soul); then the italic signs and steamy sculleries and rookeries, the staff kennels of chain hotels; the stepped terraces, industrial clerestories and diagonal zoots of the eighties economic miracle; the decorative Arab fascia and stylised Native American motifs. ‘London,’ Heath exults, nose pointed roofwards, both hands off the wheel. ‘The planet’s heart chakra.’
The press pen opposite St Saviour’s is only sparsely populated – it’s pub time; several pairs of aluminium ladders lean against the barriers, labelled as to newspaper, padlocked and chained. Opposite, under the vertebra’d white canopy of the hospital, Scott McGovern’s fan base is holding up. After three weeks, you could reasonably expect some evidence of erosion or attrition, some bowing to the demands of hearth and home. Instead, the women resonate with a sense of power and purpose, daily reinforced by repetitive chant and prayer, rhythmic ceremony and song – the raisers of megaliths, the builders of henges.
At the rear of the hospital, a pair of tall metal gates swing open, permitting us entry to a loading and delivery area. The
gates grind shut behind us, and a light on a security camera mounted above a row of industrial dumpsters blinks from amber to red. The bulky silhouette of a man appears briefly in a lighted doorway at the end of the yard, and then the door clicks closed again. There are diamond-shaped reflector signs saying ‘Hazchem’ and ‘Bio-hazard’. Vehicular weight has ploughed ruts into the bricks of recently laid York stone. Bluish puddles have collected in the depressions. We wait in silence.
‘Time-lapse recorders maintain up to 749 hours of images on a two-hour cassette,’ Heath eventually says. He has begun chopping lines of coke on a flat mirror compact he has fished out of a coat pocket, using the edge of a credit card. ‘It’s obvious – isn’t it? – that the purpose of surveillance devices is to
create
suspicious behaviour, rather than detect it. We are witnessing the development of an environment almost wholly owned and managed by a corporate hegemony. Machine eyes are objects gathering information.’ There are four lines, two apiece. When we have finished, he collects stray particles from the mirror and the edge of the Optima card with his middle finger and rubs them along the line of his gums. He runs a check on his nostrils in the rear-view mirror, then unrolls and pockets the twenty note I have given him, the second time this has happened tonight, but I say nothing.
We listen to the traffic noise; the lilting music of a distant hymn being sung by the women. There is a deep-down, basso profundo thunderous sound, and we vector away from each other and – after all these years – crane our heads sideways to catch a glimpse of Concorde going over. It is a commonly observed part of the London day: people stopping in parks and on streets and bridges to stare at the sky and watch Concorde’s trajectory of takeoff or descent, some transported by the clean lines, the sense of technological can-do; most alert for signs of wobble or falter, practising how to describe the way it just turned into a plummeting ball of flame. ‘How d’you always know a guy coming towards you is wearing his hair in a ponytail?’ Heath says in the reverberating silence. ‘You can’t
see
anything. But you always know, right?’