Authors: Gordon Burn
Veorah had a new scrubbed, no-make-up look which suited her; skin that was reflective and sappy rather than powdered matte. She had unpicked the badge or slogan from the front of her baseball cap, leaving small holes, like the fascia of a store recently gone out of business, through which you could occasionally see the light. Close to her now, I could see that her track suit wasn’t as pristine as it had first seemed; it was showing signs of its days on the road and was turning grubby at all the contact points. She said it was her intention to go on wearing it until she had completed the circuit and made it back to the Fletcher memorial in several weeks’ time.
‘White represents the colour of death in Japan. It establishes the walking pilgrim as an outsider, apart from society. It was either this or a cap of eagle and owl feathers worn with a cape covered with ribbons and stuffed snakes. This seemed more practical.’
The doors of the visitors’ centre flew open and a tall black youth stormed in. ‘His mum’s dyin’. The man’s mum’s dyin’, you know what I’m sayin’, an’ they won’t let me in to tell ‘im because my name’s not on the VO‚’ he told the room at large. ‘Come in a minicab all the way from Kilburn. Can’
believe
it,’ making little impression in the general hubbub, slamming both palms against the wall. A young girl stood up at a nearby table looking improbably tall. She glided past him on medieval-looking roller-blades.
The toe-rags; the twisters; the fucked-up; the fucked-over; the shat-upon; the shitters; the benefit-dependent; the multiply-deprived. The pudding-club brides from the family picture
EXCLUSIVES
turned into loggy-thighed sofa surfers, one hand on the Malibu, the other on the Maltesers; the remote, the Swans, the Silk Cut neatly stacked. The sailor-suited babies grown into tooled-up scallys, ‘mules’ for the local front-line dealers – suet-skinned, grainy ghostings of the pictures in the paper (the armed robber who gunned the judge down with his fingers as he was led from the dock; the ferret-face who mimicked tonguing the murdered man’s wife as sentence was passed).
‘Funny how you can’t describe people.’ This from a character
at the next table. ‘Betcha couldn’t describe your mum and dad if you were asked. “Take two ashtrays”.’ The Manhattan skyline razored into the sides and back of his narrow head. Black bars and electronic blotting over the faces.
I asked Veorah if she would get the copy of
The
Velveteen
Rab
bit
that was close to where she was sitting. ‘Read me a line‚’ I said when she had brought it over. ‘Any line.’
She looked uncertain. ‘A lot of the pages have been torn out.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Read me something from what’s left.’
She flicked backwards and forwards through the pages for a while, still suspecting some trick. Finally she read: “‘Near the house where they lived there was a wood, and in the long June evenings the Boy liked to go there after tea to play.”’
‘“He took the Velveteen Rabbit with him‚”’ I picked it up, the text by now being as natural as breathing, ‘“and before he wandered off to pick flowers, or play at brigands among the trees, he always made the Rabbit a little nest somewhere among the bracken, where he would be quite cosy, for he was a kind-hearted little boy and he liked Bunny to be comfortable.’”
I saw her nipples stiffen against the snowy track suit top. ‘Try me on another bit‚’ I said.
‘“And so the little Rabbit was put into a sack with the old picture-books and a lot of rubbish, and carried out to the end of the garden behind the old fowl-house.’”
‘“That was a fine place to make a bonfire, only the gardener was too busy just then to attend to it. He had the potatoes to dig and the green peas to gather, but next morning he promised to come quite early and burn the whole lot.’”
‘Learned at Nanny’s knee?’ Veorah said. ‘Still pining for the banked fire and tea in the nursery. I bet you still take your old teddy bear to bed.’
It was time for the visits to begin. Semi-surreptitious arrangements were underway, gobbets of cling-wrapped heroin and ganja being made available for easy mouth-to-mouth transferral, and then concealment in the lifer’s already greased or Nivea’d jacksie.
In one of the streets behind the prison, an ice-cream van’s chimes played the Harry Lime theme.
*
Braybrook Street, site of the fourth memorial on her itinerary, was a five-minute walk from the Scrubs. The back of the prison, its surveillance towers, the continuous concrete goitre that is a recent addition to the perimeter wall, was seventy yards from the carved rose marble. It was unwittingly arriving at the scene of a planned break-out that cost the three policemen their lives – they were gunned down on the edge of the piece of common land that was being lightly drizzled on when Veorah and I shuffled up. She walked around the memorial appraisingly for a minute or so, and then quietly set about doing what she had to do.
In addition to being pink, it differed from the others in being a more or less conventional headstone shape – as if three of the ball-and-stalk memorials had been brought together, the tallest in the middle, the spaces between them smoothed away.
Although it has only recently been erected, it gave the date of the shootings as August 12, 1966. The World Cup summer. Bobby Moore. Mooro. 1941–1993. Who now has a memorial of his own. Death and the cult of dead figures. The ‘very special dead’.
Braybrook Street is a crescent of red-brick, pre-War council semis. For a brief stretch near the prison the houses stare across the street at each other. Mostly though – and this is true of the houses opposite the memorial – the prospect is of the common, and then the wilder Scrubs, still with some signs of the marsh trails existing there before London was built, and then the round-the-clock UFO spotlights of what could be a container terminal or industrial park.
Laid on for the curtain-twitchers that afternoon though – and there were a couple, plus a couple of elderly locals with shoppers on wheels, spectating from a distance – was a piece of living theatre which might have had them rushing to the phone to report an act of blood sacrifice or black satanic ritual.
Veorah had laid a trail of yellow seeds in a wide circle around
the memorial. Now she was in the circle, moving slowly around it, performing various rites involving a lighted candle and a ball of teased-out cotton wool. The ground was muddy and sparsely covered but she dropped to her knees and said what sounded like (she was speaking softly): ‘I am here at last. I am glad to be here.’ After a further few minutes she touched the flame of the candle to the cotton wool which shrivelled instantly to a cinder. The warm rain that was still falling quickly extinguished the slugs of wriggling red flame.
She dispersed the seeds with her foot, then, reaching into her pack for a small camera, clicked off a couple of snaps. These would end up in the journal she was keeping of her journey which even then, just a few days in, already contained many texts, and pictures of the ragpickers, box dwellers, runaways and the assorted loony tunes she had encountered along the way.
She had produced this back at the visitors’ centre, obviously intending to regale me with her traveller’s tales, her on-the-road stories, until I made it clear that my ears were closed. ‘There are twenty thousand stories under the sky and I’ve heard too many of them from the horse’s mouth. I am not involved.’
‘What goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock‚’ she said. She said that, in the Japanese tradition, she planned to have the texts and pictures – pictures of strangers, photographed for the last, perhaps the only time, in their lives; destitutes, indigents – put in her coffin when she was dead.
wabi
– the concept of poverty; exterior poor, interior rich;
angya
– ascetic training though travelling or pilgrimage;
settai
– the custom of giving succour to pilgrims;
chin-kon
– pacification and deepening of the soul
‘The walking ascetic pilgrim remains an outsider, apart from society. Dressing in pilgrim’s clothes and walking the route amidst the symbols of modernity actually intensify the sense of separation between the pilgrim and the mundane world, and the sense of being dead to the world’
‘The omnipresent images of death that permeate the pilgrimage, and that are found in the pilgrim’s clothing’
‘An underlying assumption of pilgrimage has always been that by covering ground physically, one also progresses spiritually’
‘Kneel on wet stones, walk barefoot over sharp scree, wade through icy water … The raw experience of hunger, cold, lack of sleep … Fasting, sleeplessness, suffering and endurance’
‘Pilgrims might climb thousands of feet, sleep in plain board guesthouses, eat rice gruel and a few pickles, and circumambulate set routes burning incense and bowing at site after site’
‘It is through an analysis of space that we grasp what the course we set through the world of the near by has in common with courses through the world of the far away’
‘Traces of a vast network of well-marked trails are still found throughout the land. They were trampled down by musicians, monks, merchants, porters, pilgrims and periodic armies’
‘Though I can plan to make a pilgrimage, which is a rite projected in space, I cannot plan for what the pilgrimage will make of me’
‘Embracing the solitude of squares, the desolation of the streets, the devastation of the buildings’
The street people (Veorah’s new friends) have this in common with the street shrines that materialise overnight on train platforms and suburban street corners and busy city intersections: both used to be regarded as something temporary and aberrant; both are now regarded as semi-permanent, semi-official additions to urban life.
Fifteen minutes ago, I passed bunches of flowers, both faded and fresh, and soft toys tied with ribbons to every reachable part of the vast trunk of a tree close to where a group of children were recently mowed down by a lorry.
Four or five streets further on was a shrine erected in memory of an Asian shopkeeper who was murdered when he refused to hand over the takings of his till. The flowers and plants that were originally laid have been replaced by more permanent materials – breeze block, bitumen, a metal grille over the shallow alcove where a garlanded Hindu deity has been installed. The simple hut structure is surmounted by a pineapple cupola, pointed in lapis, leafed in gold.
After this, the police memorial to Alan King, stabbed four years ago on this busy road in the netherness of E17, can only look impoverished, insignificant. The scar that once disfigured it has been repaired. But the memorial has been kept low – it stands probably no higher than two feet – to conform with the height of the stone wall against which it has been erected. This would make it invisible, for example, to the occupants of the small block of flats in front of which the stabbing took place, which was perhaps the thinking of those responsible for its siting.
Not that these were my first thoughts as I reached the point on Higham Hill Road to clock in with Veorah re her suggestion in her letter. My first thought was how two weeks, perhaps a little longer, could have brought about such a seismic change in her appearance. Perched on the wall, swinging her legs, fitting her camera away among her belongings was Madame Blavatsky, a post-apocalyptic Tina Turner, a Masai warrior wife.
She looked like a poster of the person who had started out, bespattered by traffic and defaced by idling schoolboys at a bus stop. I had had an image of her on her travels, pressing on through the grain of the city, slicked by the lights of cars and emphatic coloured signs. In the image, these washed over her, leaving no trace. Now it was as if every light that had touched her had penetrated the fabric of her clothes and become fixed as a stain.
At some point she had reversed the sweat pants and track suit top and was now wearing the fleecy side out. This had increased the absorbency and potential for garnering dirt, which was distributed about her person in jammy, eggy clumps. The baseball cap wasn’t
as
filthy, but it was smudged and stained. Beneath it,
her face looked like a mis-registered picture reproduced on the lowest-grade newsprint – eyes in the cheekbones, mouth in the neck. This was the effect produced by the stripes of fluorescent sun block – orange, pink, chalk white, magenta – with which she had let rip. She seemed radiant, eyes and teeth gleaming through the mask.
We are drinking sweet milky drinks in a Walthamstow greasy spoon aspiring to franchise status with pictures of beefburgers and plates of spaghetti on wipeable display folders, and I ask the usual question: Where did you sleep last night? ‘In the doorway of a branch of Kookaï not far from here with a boy who has had an incredible life. His grandmother was a singer with the Bavarian State Opera, and …’ Steam hisses out of a copper boiler, forming clouds around the litho-on-canvas picture of a harbour-side village in Larnaka with the swans and the Vespas under the trees and the old men playing checkers at the unshaded tables outside the bar … Cigarette smoke curling between our faces.
Veorah rummages in her pack and passes me a letter she says was left for her at the memorial in Knightsbridge by the mother of one of the victims of the Harrods bombing. ‘The weather reflected the anger of Mother Nature‚’ it reads in part, ‘a howling fitful mournful wind blew, and the atmosphere was loaded with sorrow and anguish. Dismal squalls of rain fell. (A pall of smoke rose hundreds of feet high.) Crowds fled down Knightsbridge, Sloane Street, Brompton Road, and up to Hyde Park Corner.
‘May you be blest. Her Mother’.
And then a postscript: ‘As if it were yesterday.’
*
‘Of all the things I’ve seen‚’ the Noh mask says, ‘the thing I think I will be haunted by are men’s shirts hanging in bedroom windows. Always white. White shirts on wire hangers hanging up to dry. At nights a bare lightbulb glowing through them. I’ve got dozens of pictures. Early on, I started to take a picture of every one I saw.’