Born Yesterday (4 page)

She was tall; he only came up to her chin; and she had her hair scraped back in a pony-tail instead of the usual loose way she wore it in public, so he hadn’t been one hundred per cent sure at first. But there were pictures of her taken at Wembley at the weekend –
Wills’ Kate
, as she was described – on the covers of one or two of the freshly delivered gossip weeklies on display in the small periodicals
section in the ‘Household Cleaners and Detergents’ aisle, and a quick check against them confirmed that he was right.

What he hadn’t expected was to come face to face with her again while he was doing this. But if she had any recollection of ever seeing him before in her life, she didn’t let on. She was wearing tight white jeans of the type routinely referred to as ‘spray-on’ in these very magazines, and the tightness meant she had to lower herself, bending from the knees, to pick up a copy of the evening paper which was stacked on the lowest shelf. She added it to a basket which already contained breakfast cereal and a two-pack of kitchen rolls.

As she no doubt already knew, there was a colour snap of her on page fifteen, taken at the previous day’s Wimbledon. Her mouth was open in a squeal, cheering on the Spaniard, Rafael Nadal, in his third-round match on the Centre Court. But the couple in the row behind were sharing a tartan blanket draped over their knees, emulating her future in-laws who insist on a rug in the state Bentley when they are out performing royal duties in weather only slightly less than ideal. It gave a doleful aspect to the picture – a blanket in July – but also by suggesting that codgerdom, the only end of stultifying protocol, could only be a matter of a state wedding away.

There was a woman at the next till – early twenties, blonde, bad skin, high colour in her face – who he was starting to suspect was probably bulimic. (He was hoping for a glimpse of her teeth. Doesn’t the acid in the vomit
start to strip the enamel away after a while?) At first she had just the two items: a small sliced white batch loaf and a family-size packet of Minstrels, plus a slippery stack of
New!, Now, Star
and other junk magazines. But then she had reached down to the display below the counter, put there to encourage impulse buys except that hers were clearly well-rehearsed and premeditated, and picked out two Turkish Delights, one milk, one plain, and then a third. And then – this as if as an afterthought, when the other items had already been scanned and bagged by the assistant – a Ripple, a box of Maltesers and two tubes of After Eight. A single-queue system was in operation for the multiple check-outs. And she glanced anxiously behind her before sliding a Galaxy, a chocolate-orange bar and a fourth Turkish Delight across the counter, covered by her hand.

So immersed was he in the details of this innocent but potentially sordid transaction – the basement living room, the gorging, the trips to the bathroom, back to
New!
and
EastEnders
; a woman scoring her drug of choice at the local Tesco – that he failed to react when the man who had been serving him – he was a handsome African called ‘Tevo’, according to his ID badge – raised his hand and impatiently beckoned the next customer.

By the time he bent to pick up his second bag – it was the one with the bottles – he found it trapped behind the legs with the white spray-on jeans, bunched at the ankles and pleated behind the knees. With a smile which in the years ahead she would no doubt come to bestow on Aids
patients and cheering crowds lining the streets of Papua, New Guinea and good souls who have offered retired guide dogs a final home, she reached down and swung the bag over at him (she knew very well by now he had clocked her) with a clink.

A couple of minutes later she followed him through the automatic doors, and that’s when the fun really started.

What had been an ordinary evening street scene of shoppers and buses, the alkie with his dog squatted by the cashpoint, the phoners and texters, the smokers loitering outside the Louisiana rib-shack, the Lebanese juice-bar, the traditional pub recently turned into a branch of Babushka, all Tesco’s near-neighbours, became all at once a phantasmagoria.

It was like Kate Middleton’s appearance on the street was the cue for special effects to turn the rain machine on, for the music to be brought up high and the smokers, taciturn and sullen to that point, to become animated into a jostling crowd scene.

The big glass door slid open, and she emerged, and it was like the opening sequence of a high-end video with the tracking shots and the overhead cranes, or a musicalised play by Dennis Potter where the heroine opens her mouth and sings in the rumbling Negro baritone of the Deep River Boys, and the beggar throws off his tattered blanket and stumblebum drunkenness and hoofs it through one of the more challenging routines of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly.

The skies opened and the hail hammered down. There
was a soundtrack, and it was provided by some kids in a car pumping out the hit of the summer which, as luck would have it, was called ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna (feat. Jay-Z), which had apparently started a craze around the clubs for smuggling in collapsible umbrellas that were suddenly raised and whirled around the dance floor, Gene Kelly fashion, whenever the song by Rihanna (feat. Jay-Z) came on.

So it was July and it was like
Singin’ in the Rain
and it was also like the scene at the end of
White Christmas
when Bing and Danny Kaye and all the cast gather round the tree to sing the title song while snow softly gusts in from the street at the back of the stage.

Except the hailstones hurt. They were big and saw-edged and could cause minor abrasions to bald heads.

The man petting the dog belonging to the guy bedded down beside the money hole-in-the-wall turned out to be a pap, who leapt into action the minute his target appeared. And then a second snapper emerged from the door to the cinema, and a third and fourth from the entrance to the pizza restaurant, while others kerb-crawled alongside her in cars and on motorbikes, the ice-balls ricocheting crazily off the Zuni-beetle shells of their big phallic Leicas and the semi-spherical peaks of their truckers’ caps and their windscreens, and seemed oblivious to members of the public yelling at them to
leave the girl alone!

There are really two kinds of life, notes the American writer James Salter. There is the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

Click to create a shrine. Unlike a gravestone, these tributes
will not weather over the years.

Abukar Mohammed was murdered in Stockwell in south London on the night of 26 July. His family was originally from Somalia, and he was shot dead at point-blank range in a random ‘execution’ after he was chased across the Stockwell Gardens estate by a gang of teenagers on bikes, wearing clothes with ‘SW9’ written on the front, and ‘Hot Spot’, their name for the estate, a favourite with drug dealers, on the back.

Abukar was sixteen and he was the tenth young victim
of gun and knife crime in London in six months. In common with all the others, from Michael Dosunmu, age fifteen, shot dead at home in Peckham in early February, to Mark Dinnegan, age fourteen, stabbed in Islington after being chased by a gang of youths at the end of June, Abukar had had a virtual shrine set up in his memory on gonetoosoon. co. uk within just a few hours of word of his murder getting round.

In the early hours of 4 May, with police and volunteers searching the beach and the narrow streets of Praia da Luz, the McCanns’ friends and family back in England started to circulate a text message urging everyone ‘2 light a candle 4 madeleine who was abducted from portugal. we r trying 2 make it a worldwide thing so if u cn plz join in by textin or emailin as many people as u cn’.

Twelve days later the official findmadeleine website was launched. It drew on the expertise of some of Kate and Gerry’s friends in broadcasting and the New Media. It featured many pictures of Madeleine taken over the six days of her holiday; the earliest showed her climbing the steps of the EasyJet at East Midlands airport just before she tripped and cut her knee. Also included were casual, intimate snapshots from the family album, innocent and ordinary.

Madeleine’s eyes had been stylised into media emblems, the defect in her right eye simplified into an easily recognisable logo.

findmadeleine.com recorded more than 70 million visits
in the first three days, and 7,500 messages of support, the last folk ritual of social gathering. That volume of traffic was irresistible to typosquatters who, simply by launching near-name sites with only a single letter difference, could send Madeleine well-wishers and the surfers of second-hand non-experience to porn sites and other sites hastily set up by conmen.

Only eight days after her disappearance, an appeal in the form of a rap entitled ‘For The Safe Return Of The Little Toddler To Her Family’, appeared on YouTube:

The voice sounded like the voice of a child. Clicking on the singer’s Profile, though, brought up the picture of a balding man in his late twenties sitting in what looked like a bedsit with a cheap boxwood guitar.

Given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the wayward imagination, wrote J. G. Ballard, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim.

There is a view of photography as being something ‘that seizes a moment in life and is its death’, and the photo gallery on the Madeleine site could be offered as proof of that. Some took the view that the sheer volume of pictures in existence showed that the parents hadn’t wanted to experience their daughter as a person so much as record her having the experiences they were fortunate enough to be able to buy.

But could it be that the McCanns wanted their daughter to become as familiar to strangers through her image as she was to them, so that they, too, would wake in the morning and – before they could locate it – might feel that there was now a tragic absence in their own lives; something catastrophic that in their first moments of waking they were having trouble remembering?

The media of real life. The murder leisure industry.

Privacy is so last century, the headline read, but we need help to adjust.

Myrobella, the Blairs’ constituency home at Trimdon Colliery, was once the big house of the village, occupied by the doctor’s family, solid and detached among all the encroaching narrow terraces of pitmen’s houses. It stands in full view, but it isn’t easy to find.

From near the top of the hill that leads from one of the Trimdons to another – Trimdon Colliery up to Trimdon Grange, which eventually connects to a third Trimdon, the Village where the church that provided the setting for Blair’s coming-of-age ‘people’s princess’ speech can be found and, only a little way up the hill from there, Trimdon Labour Club, the place where he launched his campaign to become leader of the Party in 1994 and announced his intention of standing down as prime minister thirteen years later, a modest, modern building he thinks of as his ‘spiritual home’ – gazing back across the scrub meadows with their punctuation points of brown shaggy-backed horses indolently cropping, and irregular grassed-over depressions where the coal seams once ran, is a dense copse with a mossy Victorian slate roof poking out
of the top of it. This is Myrobella, the house the Blairs bought in 1984, the year after he was elected MP for Sedgefield in County Durham.

But the closer you get to it, coming down the hill past the miners’ welfare cottages with their barbered lawns and recently constructed cubistic, architecturally adventurous hard-edged glass porches, past the terraces with their uniform vertical swivel-blinds and elderly men gardening in their vests, hard muscle turned soft, the harder the Blair house is to see.

When the pits were working, Trimdon Colliery, like all the neighbouring colliery villages, would have been a dirty place. The original owners of Myrobella (stove-hatted Myron, pin-curled and pinafored Bella?) would have looked out over a landscape of pit-heads and winding gear permanently slaked with the heavy industrial fallout of soot and ferrous pollutants and dust. The bricks of the original terraces are still nearly as black as muck.

The modern world – the post-Thatcher world – has announced its arrival with a lot of white. The timber of the old front doors has been stripped out and replaced with waxy white PVC; the windows are white plastic and the ‘nets’ put up at them are also white with occasional lime-green or bubblegum pink detailing.

The front of Guappo’s barber’s shop which stands in a sort of fork in the road shortly before the main rundown shopping street in Trimdon Colliery – the sign outside says ‘Hair design for men’ – is jazzily black-and-white and has nothing about it to indicate that it is the near-neighbour
of the big house where, until recently, the prime minister lived.

Myrobella is approached along an uneven narrow track with a terrace of half a dozen miners’ houses running down one side. The police have taken over the house nearest the Blairs. There is a heavy round-the-clock police presence and a series of barriers ringing Myrobella. There is a wooden barrier with an urgent caution notice on it and then a brick gate-house where evidence of some of the duty officers’ home comforts – a radio, some washing-up liquid, an electric kettle – can be glimpsed through a window. Police armed with sniper rifles patrol the perimeter. The house itself has been screened from the public with close-planted perennials and tall box hedges, creating a dark and rather oppressive atmosphere. This is amplified by the dank patch of municipal playground full of nursery-coloured rides and brimming with deadly negative potential – the inch-thick subaudible rubber tiling squelches underfoot – that has been carved out of quarter of an acre of what was originally Myrobella’s either front or back garden.

The uncertainty arises from the fact that none of the house’s doors, certainly none of its windows, is visible. The process of concealment has been so well achieved that all Myrobella’s particulars – homeliness, openness, availability of natural light, original features, true wear and tear, stability, renovations, orientation, everything about the house – is subject to speculation, and has to be guessed at rather than known. Many people would argue that in
these respects, Myrobella is emblematic of Blair himself, ‘the man with no shadow’: a formidable building that appears, no matter how many times you circle it, to have no doors.

In the early years, before the era of ‘celebrity government’ had been inaugurated under Tony Blair as prime minister, he used to hold his regular Saturday-morning surgeries at the house. There would be complaints towards the end that it was impossible to get in to see him; that the nearest you ever got was his Sedgefield agent, John Burton, and that Blair himself didn’t know the full name of anybody in the village. Even in his years as a fledgling MP, though, from 1983 on, for somebody committed to simple Christian principles of charity, equality and good intentions as Blair was, his receiving of constituents at Myrobella on Saturdays must have had something uncomfortably Thomas Hardy-like about it: a tableau of the halt and the poor huddled against the rain and the biting wind, carrying their problems to the grand house.

(No telling of the tale of Gordon Brown can be complete without reference to his standing as a ‘son of the manse’ and the effect it had on him as a boy growing up in a house which was often the place of last resort for many of his father’s hard-up Kirkcaldy parishioners. Dr Brown, who was considered a saintly man, believed it was his duty to help feed, clothe and encourage those at the bottom of the heap. ‘Living in a manse,’ Gordon Brown later said, ‘you find out quickly about life and death and the meaning of poverty, injustice and unemployment.’)

Just before the barber shop on the road that leads down into Trimdon Village, visitors are given a subtle clue that they could be within striking distance of the former prime minister’s house. ‘Premier Court’, a sign announces at the entrance to a new cul-de-sac development of what the brochures generally describe as ‘executive homes’. The cul-de-sac of double-fronted, pale brick houses where Kate and Gerry McCann live with their children a few miles north of Leicester looks similar in the pictures. The difference is that Orchard House in the commuter village of Rothley is a close neighbour of The Ridgeway, singled out as one of the ten most expensive places to live in Britain by the
Sunday
Times
at around the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.

Five miles to the north of Trimdon are the former mining communities of Haswell and Haswell Plough where the (at that stage still anonymous) Labour donor David Abrahams made a killing in 2001, when he put together parcels of land occupied by disused buildings and obtained planning permission so that the sites could be sold on for residential development.

Trimdon and Kelloe pit at Haswell were once linked underground. Pairs of hewers drove roadways into the coal, fifteen feet wide, and the subterranean road between Trimdon and Kelloe stretched for mile after mile, with new roadways struck off to the left and right at intervals of twenty yards. The two pits are connected in local folklore by the Trimdon Disaster of 1882 in which seventy-four people were killed. But, whereas Haswell has become a popular commuter village built by Miller Homes,
Trimdon itself remains a property black spot, stubbornly unarbitrageable and apparently ignored in the rush to coalfield regeneration.

North Moor Avenue contains only a handful of closed or failing businesses. The Grey Horse is closed down and slowly collapsing. Inside the Royal, Blair’s local if he had one, it is like a permanent rainy Tuesday in late autumn. An overfed Staffie waddles up to the bar, sniffs each arriving customer’s shins, waddles back to his place in front of the fire trailing a thread of shining drool and a pungent body odour. Portrait of an English summer.

And now Myrobella, whose comings and goings were some of the few signs of life in Trimdon Colliery, is starting to give the appearance of being uninhabited, maybe even abandoned in spite of the outgoing PM’s expressions of deep sentimental attachment and pledges of lifelong fealty. A van came and collected many of the Blairs’ personal belongings a few days after his valedictory address to the House of Commons. Already the uniformed officers who have been assigned to the house for ten years seem listless, even apprehensive. They are standing watch over an absence. They are guarding nothing. They are bearing witness to a kind of voluntary self-erasure.

A week after Blair left office, the viewers of
Richard and
Judy
voted as their YouTube clip of the week a little girl Madeleine’s age – a little girl very like Madeleine – refusing to eat her breakfast and sobbing over the void left in her life by the disappearance of Tony Blair.
I love Tony
Bair!
she wails.
I want Tony Bair!
Doesn’t she like the new
prime minister? her mother asks from behind the camera, knowing the answer, pushing her daughter’s buttons, prompting her bleatings for the benefit of the YouTube audience.
Noooooo! Wheeeere is he?
She bangs the table with her spoon and screams even louder.
I love Tony Bair!
(‘Thousands of little girls want him to be president so they can have him on the TV screen and run their fingers through the image of his hair.’ This from a political commentator in the Sixties, on the subject of Bobby Kennedy. ‘Nonchalance is the key word,’ the writer added. ‘Carefully studied nonchalance. The harder a man tries, the better he must hide it. Style becomes substance.’)

Blair’s vanishing act when it happened, happened quickly. There were big attention-grabbing events: back-to-back, piled-up catastrophes and near-catastrophes – the terrorist attacks, the floods, foot-and-mouth – and somebody else taking charge of them, doing the reassuring. One minute Blair was part of the national static, and the next he was gone. The fact it had been a long time coming didn’t make any difference. The little girl (and, here, it is difficult not to hear David Beckham’s voice on his television appeal for information about Madeleine:
Anybody
who may have seen this littoo gel
…, holding up a picture captioned with the single word
DESAPARECIDA
, the broad diamond-encrusted ring, the buffed pearl-cuticled nails, the big fuck-off watch), the little girl was right. His disappearance from public life was eerie, its stage management both calculated and, in its eventual effects, its tiny but tangible tipping of the world (that trailing sleeve
gathering up the dirt of King’s Cross station, Cherie’s parting shot of ‘We won’t miss you!’ to the world’s press gathered outside Number 10, the look that said ‘Zip it!’ that he shot her) unexpectedly unsettling.

Blair had announced his departure from public life at Trimdon Labour Club on 10 May. It was a full-scale media event, with satellite trucks crowding the village and reporters doing pieces to camera all along the edge of the green. The New Labour anthems – ‘Search for the Hero Inside Yourself’ and ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ – were sprayed around, and people appeared with placards, some (as observers noted) in suspiciously similar styles: ‘10 Years, 3 Elections, 1 Great Britain’; ‘Britain Says Thanks’, ‘Tony Rocks’.

His bowing-out coincided with another, more subliminal subtraction: it was the last weekend of the football season, with the switching of rhythms in all English towns and cities, the adjusting of habits and routines, of traffic-flow systems and shop opening hours that the close-season always means. The football grounds falling silent is experienced, even by people who have never set foot in them and maybe resent the disruption that match days bring, not so much as an absence as a lack of presence: the very traces of life extinguished, of death stalking through the centre of life.

Before their final game of the season against Chelsea in London on 13 May, Everton players wore Madeleine T-shirts during the warm-up. Brian Healy, her grandfather, was a lifelong supporter of the team that is traditionally
followed by Catholics in Liverpool, and soon the family would release a picture of Madeleine wearing her blue ‘Toffees’ shirt. It was piercingly reminiscent of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman photographed in their red-and-white Beckham tops just hours before they were murdered by Ian Huntley in Soham. And just two games into the 2007–8 football season in mid-August, an eleven-year-old, Rhys Jones, died when he was hit in the head by a bullet fired by a hooded figure on a mountain bike while he was on his way home from football practice in the Croxteth area of Liverpool. Rhys Jones too was an Evertonian. And three days after his murder, pictures of Rhys in his Everton jersey were being flashed onto the big screens at Goodison Park alongside the continuing appeals for information about the disappearance of Madeleine showing close-ups of the defect in her eye and the photograph of her in her Everton top.

The observance of a minute’s silence had become a regular feature of match days at Goodison over the previous twelve months, as Evertonians in the armed forces continued to be casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the first Sunday after his murder, there was a minute’s applause for Rhys Jones before Everton v. Blackburn, and his favourite tune, ‘Johnny Todd’, the
Z-Cars
theme and Everton anthem, was played. The following morning the Everton coach stopped on the way to training so that the players could add signed football boots and jerseys and a signed ball to the shrine that had been made in the pub car park where Rhys died.

Within forty-eight hours of his murder, Steve and Melanie Jones, Rhys’s parents, had submitted to the harrowing ordeal of a televised interview with Richard Bilton, the soft-spoken BBC reporter who had been covering the McCann case from Portugal and had interviewed Kate and Gerry McCann in their apartment in Praia da Luz. And the Joneses, along with their older son, Owen, all wearing scarves and the Everton colours, were standing at the side of the pitch to join in the minute’s applause on 25 August, weeping, of course, their faces reddened and smeared, their hair and clothes dishevelled, looking wrung-out with exhaustion and grief. Looking how people are expected to look when the comfortable facade of life has been torn away as a result of the unimaginable happening. The Joneses looked, in other words, the way Kate and Gerry McCann – controlled, collected, articulate, focused – had stubbornly refused to in all their appearances in public since Madeleine had gone missing.