Writer-in-residence

Pimlott Essay on Nationhood

2006-06-12T14:46:00.000Z

The Race for Identity

Picture this. The Piazza Del Campo in Sienna on a summer’s evening in 1981. Television’s moguls from around the world, encircled by medieval buildings, have gathered to dine al fresco in the place where, the ‘guilds’ of the Sienese districts, the Contradas, have competed in the Palio horse race each year since 1281. Between any two Contradas exist relationships, based on four choices: friendship, alliance, enmity or indifference. Pride in their colours and belief in their historic traditions supports the integrity of each ‘guild’.

A giant projection screen has been erected in the square. The winning London Weekend Television Prix Italia entry in the arts documentary category is to be shown, a film by Tony Palmer on the work of Sir William Walton. One executive lights an expensive cigar. Around the tables on this celebratory night, the various British contingents find friendship enough to suspend old rivalry and exchange jokes or pleasantries over aged bottles of Chianti. But a moment comes when voices are stilled and dampening eyes turn to view one particular scene. Even the non-cognoscenti among the locals recognise the emotion of history when they see it and applaud. It is a segment of the 1944 film of Henry V, and the moment when Olivier cries ‘Harry for England and St George’. The chords of Walton’s score for the film build as horsemen ride at Agincourt. The English bowmen take aim. Arrows home to the target. It is St Crispin’s Day again.

Used as a morale raiser during the last days of the World War II, Churchill had all criticism of Henry’s behaviour following the battle excised from the rushes. History and its art have frequently been plundered to cement nations at a time of crisis. Stalin had Eisenstein work to similar purpose with Ivan IV and Alexander Nevsky.

We might ask, what is worse, a nation defining itself by enmity or by something more passionless and cold? Between 1938 and 1945, the Jews of Europe were condemned as much by indifference as by hatred. History is full of sin. But the historic vat of symbolic imagery can always be scoured for peak moments of pageantry. Who does not recall Mrs Thatcher, a wodeless Boadicaea, driven upright through the desert during the Gulf War, a post-imperial symbol of nationhood, wearing a chiffon helmet and a pale cream evocation of a militarised Marks and Spencer suit?

Defining Britishness at time of war is one thing. A different modus operandi is needed in times of peace. While on the hustings, during the 1945 election, Churchill was filmed in lord of the manor style making an appeal for votes to “the workers in their cottages”, conjuring up some rose-bowered idyll instead of a Britain scarred by slums, and blitzed cities. Demobbed soldiers could not believe Churchill was the man to make Britain in peacetime, a land fit for heroes. In 1945 returning heroes already embodied a definition of the best of Britishness and had no need to seek communion with it.
In peacetime there is a tendency to put nationalistic icons into storage. But the current threat of terror changes concepts of what peace and war mean, as well as the rules of engagement. Tactics become even more urgent when new challenges to social cohesion surface as London bombers are identified as British-born. Existing divisions deepen inside nations. We become more watchful of one another rather than watching out for one another. Our symbolic props are unwrapped and found wanting.
Some politicians have identified a need for a new definition of Britishness that sifts old allegiances and meaningful symbolism within a diverse society riven across lines of ethnic and economic division. At one level, the objective is greater cohesion, and this is laudable. It also fits with the concept of ‘community’ that has become a predominant political theme within Government. What is it they ask that our populace can buy in to that would place friendship and alliance, mutuality and respect in implacable opposition to rising enmity or indifference?

The sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman has called the period in which we live now, ‘liquid modernity’, because he believes Capitalist society is mutable. His hopes rest on an idea of the human capacity to change. Bauman is, to a degree, an optimist. There is a prospect of progress but it lays not so much in scientific determinism as in a determination to reach for the good as expressed in ideals and values. Hope for social cohesion, security, healthier human relationships similarly lies beneath the current search for renewal of national identity. Such ideas can motivate and engage people. They can be sold as a goal for the individual and society like futures are sold on bond markets. But it is the gap between the idea of the potential that exists for the individual and the experience of daily lives that causes instability, and this is particularly the case for those people whose personal sense of identification and value is fragile.

The archetypes of cultural symbolism in British history reflect peaks of glory that are mired in blood. The two World Wars were the outcomes of previous failures of alliance and friendship in Europe. Peace can be seen as simply an interruption between them. Sacrifice, bravery, looking out for our brother-in-arms, may be values we admire, but they are symptoms of the failure of leaders to keep the peace. They also deflect the focus away from underlying causes and the reverberating consequences of conflict.

Strong allegiances to ideologies, particular cultures, faiths and origins that isolate, or set peoples apart, also have the potential to undermine that sense of security and order that Hobbes promulgated as the first duty of the political class. Indeed, political power is not possible without it.

The elemental Hobbesian precept that politicians keep power only to the extent that they offer refuge to the people they govern, is a pre-occupation of New Labour. In Britain, crime, jobs, the threat of bird flu, pensions, all play a part in how secure people feel. But, the enmity unleashed amongst the fundamentalist forces of the Middle East, which although never completely under lock and key prior to the war in Iraq, has created an even greater sense of insecurity.

Effective politicians work on many levels at once. Risks are great, so tactics demand multiple attempts at hostage taking. But, while there is something eminently British about the brinkmanship of our leaders as they jostle for position, it is also disturbing, particularly when it is anxiety rather than allegiance and friendship that could drive men and women to seek strength from national identity. In the end, it may be delusional to believe an appeal for renewal of the kind of values that can shape a new definition of Britishness, has any possibility of success when it is being sought by a government which has so tragically misread international history.

Political battles, particularly ones conducted in tight corners, as now, are won and lost upon random perceptions of personality or themes that resonate. Cynical politicians when cornered, will attempt to revive the patriot within the body politic. They know how such appeals can deliver an emotional punch and capture higher ground in the struggle for political ascendancy.

But why did Gordon Brown, of all the New Labour champions, select the theme of Britishness in his Fabian speech earlier this year and add patriotism to his progressive cause? His job would indicate he is a man who knows the price of many things. Can he prove he also knows their value?

The grapeshot approach to political positioning usually guarantees a strike, despite the view that flag-waving is counter-intuitive to public mood. Above the line, the message is easily interpreted as gimmickry or oily sentimentalism. Below the line, it can put distance between the Chancellor and a perception of him as an ideologue with a linear connection to a bunch of old socialists long past their sell-by-date. In a carefully chosen remark, Brown suggested this himself when, in his speech, he pointed out how the old left ‘recoiled’ at the word patriotism. The language of disassociation strikes home, like the arrows at Agincourt.

Command of territory previously held by the Conservatives, which has underpinned New Labour’s hegemony for eight years, has, up to now, required no ceremonial ritual of Union Jacks run up flagpoles in front gardens to pierce the permafrost of British phlegm. Stuff happened of course. The death of a princess, cricket, London for the Olympics one day, the London bombings the next. It was principally this latter horror that raised the stakes, chose the time and elected the theme of national identity, to unify and increase feelings of belonging.

The current vogue for tracing genealogy through Census databases also tells us about something deeper than the mere capacity we have to dig up ancestors with a few clicks of the mouse. Connectedness is defined first by our own sense of belonging. In the modern world, the proliferation of the means for connectedness cannot substitute for the depth of connection.

Traditional British values are rooted in ancient laws of behaviour and in old monotheistic religions. Most people seek continuity in a world that is both unpredictable and unreliable, hence an interest in our ancestors. But linear ties of Britishness are alien to many people in multicultural Britain whose forebears lie elsewhere. Alliances and friendships therefore have to be forged around consensus and values common to all. Old allegiances need to be transferred to the nation state through an exchange of unwritten ‘contracts’ and rituals that guarantee basic rights of belonging in exchange for responsibilities of citizenship.
Humans are also prey to yearnings for union and peace. In that sense, the past is always another country and usually resembles a pastoral idyll, whether caliphate or empire, Paradise or Eden. The politician’s art seeks to distill the essence of this human impulse to return to a golden age, and convince people that harmonious existence can be regained, an existence that never was. Nationhood itself is a convenient fiction. It’s the way we define the dimensions of the ground upon which we feel free to walk, and the extent to which others may walk with us.
Writing in 731 AD, the Venerable Bede who is sometimes credited with giving the English a national identity, on parchment at least and only for those who could read, reflected on the failure of a generation of temporal and spiritual leaders to do their duty following a period of ‘heinous’ civil war among the Angles, Picts and Britons.
“ …the kings, priests, private men, and the nobility, still remembering the late calamities and slaughters, in some measure kept within bounds…. but when another generation succeeded, all the bonds of sincerity and justice were so entirely broken, that there was not only no trace of them remaining, but few persons seemed to be aware that such virtues had ever existed.”

It seems that for more than a millennium we have been looking to the
past to offer us a sense of continuous virtue.

In an ‘atomised’ society where terror lurks at our peripheral vision, identity means more about the State knowing who we are. In these circumstances we more easily offer up our iris for biometric scrutiny. The majority are more concerned about the cost of identity cards than about curtailment of liberty. Those who remain unconvinced, may sign an application to join ‘Liberty’ anxious that some bureaucrat in the Ministry of Fear may enter their name onto a database of the unsound, or that the shadow of the watchful state may see them arrested for standing at the Cenotaph to read a list of British war dead. Power may be exercised and enhanced by laws, but ultimately, the strength of a nation cannot be sustained by such measures.

An ordered, compliant, less self-interested people offers a vision of citizenry making sacrifices, eased by a sense of duty to a higher cause that can make ‘soldiers’ of whole populations either in the service of community or in the service of the State at time of war. But there is a problem. Patriotism that can strengthen the unity of the State thrives best when citizens believe in the integrity of the State. The grasping attitude of some politicians as well as the strategy that is unravelling in Iraq has injured that belief.

Despite the imperatives of the moment, there is nothing particularly new in identity politics. But the collapse of Communism has meant that alliance and friendship, indifference and enmity are choices to be made against the backdrop of global markets. We could trace a course on a world map to show what choices have been made in recent history; of how foreign policy in the West has shaped indifference to the struggles of people in the Third World or fashioned a policy of enmity against those theocratic states that threaten the West. The symbols and language of democracy are deployed to capture definitions of the ‘right’ nation. In these circumstances, ‘freedom’ takes precedence over fraternity and those additional virtues of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ which are deemed so hopelessly utopian.

In Britain’s case, for eight years of New Labour dominance, the movement on foreign policy has been largely one-sided, leaning heavily towards the embrace of the USA. There was a more natural bond of friendship during Clinton’s second term, than during Bush’s first, nevertheless, one segued into the other. Any perception of influence with America helps shape the nation’s sense of identity, however fair-weather the friendship may be. Who you know helps give voice to what you know. And the links that were forged during the early 90s between New Labour and Democrat campaign teams should not be underestimated.

The composers of New Labour’s modernist theme were also wide open to learning lessons from the Thatcher years. They understood the Thatcher-Reagan axis had brought benefit to Britain’s sense of itself as a serious player in global politics.

Thatcherism had been cut short and fallen in its third term, and, by 1994, what was required was for Labour to square the circle. To the relief of many who lived in it, New Labour proclaimed society did exist and society’s people need no longer vote along strictly polarised lines of ideological enmity. Triangulation was born as an idea before it had been given a name. Alliance was to be reformed as a pact with ‘ordinary’ people, those ‘hard-working families’ that politicians speak about so effortlessly, who wanted to shop for all their policies and politicians at the superstore. Freedom balanced with responsibility, a tough stance on crime and the causes of crime, an argument in favour of opportunities for all. This was a strategy built on a vision of a bridge stretching across traditional political division.

Seventeen years in the wilderness induces a mirage of hope, blinds followers to the limitations of Government in a global economy, and leads them to overlook the laws of expediency. In that sense, few who cheered the victory of 1997 could have predicted how the world would turn.

But turn it did. In the years after 9/11, New Labour basked in the temporary patronage of the USA. How distant the memory became of Neil Kinnock shamed by the indifference of the American political elite back in 1986.

In July 2003, as the first Labour Prime Minister to be invited to speak to the American Congress, Tony Blair called on Americans to never be ashamed of their values. "Tell the world why you are proud of America," he said. "Tell them when the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ starts, Americans get to their feet, not because some state official told them to but because, whatever race, colour, class or creed they are, being American means being free."

When Blair spoke, there was a sense of hubris already building back in his homeland. Could he ever have made that speech tailored for an audience of his own countrymen and women?

Political positioning requires a dexterity that allows for alliances between nations to be built at many different levels. In Europe, this activity boils down to engagement with areas of common cause, through concession and negotiation. But, how Europe plays at home has long been a concern for politicians on all sides. And this is because of history. Britain has only ever been invaded by European races and the Roman Empire. Surging beneath all efforts at strong alliance between European partners is a latent nationalism that fears national identity will be subsumed by social and economic integration under a European brand.

Nationalism at the extreme end breeds protectionism. Some latter - day Marxists believe that globalisation’s outcome will lead to barbarism and that true progress demands a compromise between markets and democracy.

Extremism itself believes the end justifies the means. For governments who manage the State, it is sometimes important to create a heightened sense of insecurity in order to be allowed the power to deal with it.

But the price can be harsh. Democracy echoes to its own silences when hollowed out by meaningless exercises in ‘big conversations’, when a ring of steel laws surrounds the mother of parliaments, when not a protest against the polity may be heard along whole reaches of the Thames at Westminter.

Alliance and friendship, enmity or indifference, these are the choices we have always made. The point of the Palio is about one Contrada winning.
Capitalism condemns us to a race, but we must shed enmity and indifference and only run the race on the basis of alliance and friendship. We need to share our victories and make far greater sacrifices when half the world’s population lives below the poverty line. Who we are as nations can only then be defined as ‘good enough’ in an imperfect world full of contradictions. If we fail, it is possible that no history will be left to record how ambition for human kind was reduced to futile exercises in political shamanism.

2,996
ends

Fat Chance

2004-12-19T13:35:00.000Z

What was your last job?
You seem quite skilled.

He was looking at her fingers
Like pork sausages, grilled.

We are keen here on a policy
Of equal opportunity
Do you have any views?

My word, she's huge!

T-line, Pitmans, shorthand speedy?

Yes? Oh my. But she is greedy.

You have a double first degree.
Can drive, do books, accountancy.

We don't need someone to do that.
We're looking for someone thin, not fat.

(C) RJ Brocklehurst 1996

Blinding Pain by Bella Tope Prologue and Chapter One

2004-12-19T06:52:00.000Z

I suppose it all began for me with Arnold, the victim of a country publicly shorn of those virtues for which he symbolised the very best.

He was a placid protestor. “Oh I don’t know. I’d rather just do what I can than simply remain angry. What good does that do?” he had told me once.

The day after the people had spoken, and the City could not hear itself. It might have been London after a particularly forceful hurricane. I had walked the route that Arnold took. Surveyed the scene.

The BBC reported the Prime Minister had been whisked away with his advisers and army protectors at 4.00 pm the afternoon before and had been monitoring proceedings from a secret location.

A helicopter purred high above the heart of the metropolis. From this position, a fixed camera in the cockpit surveyed a littered landscape. Thousands upon thousands of placards lay in piles along the pavements and streets.

Westminster Bridge and Parliament Square remained closed to traffic, but the ubiquitous red buses were moving slowly up the Strand towards Holborn Circus, carrying sightseers come to bear witness to the event that shamed them. Some carried flowers bought at station florists, or torn hurriedly from their gardens and wrapped in tinfoil.

The tumult of the previous day and night had left behind in the air tinny reverberations as if sound remained, quite common after been caught within the radius of a detonated bomb. Armoured vehicles surrounded the Houses of Parliament, not to keep people out but to keep the occupants safe from harm. A leather-cheeked General two weeks from retirement, checked his watch.

Hundreds of people had spent the night sleeping on the floor of the Abbey. They would shortly need feeding along with those who had entered the House, and those who had slept, or tried to sleep on the coaches that lined both sides of the embankment as far back as Chelsea Bridge. Groups of reporters and television cameramen, roamed behind the makeshift cordon set up where Parliament Square met Victoria Street while the blockade set up at St James still stood.

Within the ancient Hall of Westminster, one thousand people, most of them marchers, some of them Police, had stayed awake all night, helping to nurse the wounded, carrying the dead, sharing mobile phones to reach family members to let them know who was safe, who had been injured and who had died.

I think Britain, my Britain, has always been the Britain of my dreams, with moments of reality breaking through, like a rough hand ripping through the silk of my vision. My mind has a tendency to shut down when confronted with too much that is unpleasant. But, like much in history, reality has a habit of hitting one between the eyes after it is all over. I replay the image of what happened again and again.

Three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in June. A double-decker bus, of the variety that conveys tourists down aisles of processed London history, swerves a ferocious path through Admiralty arch and down Whitehall, breaking through one barrier and chased by two visored police officers on motorbikes. The bus might have been participating in one of Japanese television’s most popular game shows, the kind where daredevil buffoonery triggers edge-of-the-seat mirth among those with the stomach to watch. But this was not the case.

Imagine. The man who had commandeered the bus, is a sound engineer not a bus driver. He is part of a small production crew caught up in the demonstration. Hari, the producer, so he told the world’s media after the event, had been on his knees on the upper deck, whispering fervent prayers to his ancestors. Kami-sama, notoke-sama, gosensô-sama. All this because a harassed senior Police Inspector had said they would not be allowed to access Parliament Square to follow the protest.

Hari, determined to record it all, had, so he said, murmured a respectful prayer to the spirit of his own much-loved deceased grandfather who, so he explained would never have allowed himself to be seen waving a placard in public nor marching among millions. In Japan, of course, he may not have been given reason to do so.

As the bus careered through a barrier at the bottom of Whitehall, another man, someone else’s grandfather still living, was at that moment, staggering blindly, his arms outstretched toward a row of shield-protected riot police. Elderly, reduced, unkempt, he had lost his teeth and his glasses and was now trying to find his way back to the silver army of protest from which he had become detached somewhere near Great Smith Street. A gauzed image of people and activity greeted him. Baton-extended arms waving, banners oscillating. They could have been one and the same.

Arnold I can suggest, because I have seen the film, and knew his dear face of old, was in a panic and in pain.

The excitement of the day, the multitude, the feeling that gripped everyone, a mixture of disbelief, determination and power had mutated into fear as fighting had broken out near the Abbey.

No one could say for certain what happened next. Perhaps someone had recognised him, for as Arnold shuffled unknowingly towards him or her, one of the officers jerked forward into the road. Perhaps it was because, at that moment, the double-decker bus careered into view as if heading straight for the line. Whatever domino effect tipped the sequence; the ranks broke, and enveloped him.

It was still hard to tell, even with hours of replay, just how the baton came down. A nudge from behind, an automatic reflex, or an answer to the question in the old man’s eyes?

But, a young officer, no more than 21, had taken a swing at his colleague; then another in turn, like some old western saloon fighter, punched out at the adjacent officer, while the bus turned on two wheels and came to a stop just a few feet from the police line. Perhaps he, the officer, had seen an old man’s head breaking open under the baton. Perhaps.

Now, they say, Arnold’s swollen knees had buckled as he gripped the edge of a riot shield to steady himself, then disappeared from the sight of the camera lens which had been trained upon him from a building situated at the back of the square, just behind the bronze statue of Winston Churchill. While on the ground, they say his head collided, quite accidentally with the toe of a policeman’s boot, as the ranks broke. It is hard to prove or disprove. We await the coroners report.

But from film, we do know that when the double-decker bus came to a stop,
thousands more demonstrators began to appear in the Parliament square, having broken down the cordon at Victoria Street. Behind them came many more. Some said two million had assembled in Hyde Park, another, three million. Many had walked or been pushed in wheelchairs, while others, quietly waiting their time were still waiting, even as the head of the column moved past the Abbey, in the Park, ready to be given their marching orders.

And the sound of the grandfather of all grandfather clocks striking three. The fact that the great clock juddered as if making a monumental effort to take charge of the hours and return the world to normality. If its hands had indeed been able to turn anti-clockwise, to say, just an hour before, oh how I would wish they may have rested there suspending time, to prevent the moment when wisdom was martyred, a country was debased in the full view of nations who had once held it in high regard

But the sight I shall not forget was the moment when hundreds of young policemen reaching across the divide of generations and duty, defied their superiors and by doing so, threatened the state, in order to join hands with their grandparents.

.

Chapter One:

“ What we see is not precisely what the viewer sees. Here we have a studio, a television studio. Nine people, a boom, four cameras, a minimalist set.”

This is the opening paragraph of Blinding Pain by Bella Tope, a woman who has been writing the same novel for more than 20 years. This is the first of her creations to break away from authorial restraints of solipsistic sludge aimed at the mass market which characterise her previous efforts, and the first to be published. In a while it will become the subject of critical review.

Four people have been sitting around a table for twenty minutes while Late Night Analysis draws to a close. LNA presented by that jaguar of broadcast
journalists Roger Parchment, is the last of a dying breed of current affairs programmes which survives because of a conservation order placed upon it by the regulatory authorities. The pensions crisis has been the focus of tonight’s report, and the programme which follows is a weighty weekly sister strand called Arts Review.

The heat from the studio is already having an effect on the Arts presenter, a well-built man in his late thirties, with a large head and striking jaw, who lifts his right hand to his throat several times as if he wishes to loosen his tie, but at the last moment, he remembers where he is and returns his hand to fiddle with a cigarette packet placed on his lap.

Behind the presenter hovers a back projection of a blue square on a white background. A signature in white paint, Anthony Lasalla, stands out as it would on such a contrasting background, a flourish of curlicues and lavish cross strokes on the upper characters.

“Coming to you in 50 seconds Hunter,” a voice from the gallery cuts in to his earpiece. Hunter Wallis clears his throat softly.

Two of the regular critics sitting to one side of Hunter whisper to each other. They are poet and essayist Redmond ‘Red’ O’Leary and French Canadian author, and feminist Claudette Reiss. Another, a woman whom Hunter knew very well many years before sits further away at the far end of the table. She is Jane Harvest, seasoned Fleet Street columnist, who is filling in. It has not been Hunter’s idea to invite Jane on to the show. Although they have met from time to time over the years it has always been in the company of others. Hunter wonders what they might have said to each other differently if they had been left alone together.

“Thirty seconds,” says the voice from the gallery.

The whispering pair are pondering just how to measure the value to their celebrity of their recent spat on air. “You can’t overdo these things,” the woman is saying, as she leans across to the man. The sleeve of her grey cashmere sweater brushes against his hand.

Jane is nervous and generally prefers the written word to public speaking. But recent experiences on celebrity quiz shows have conspired to toughen her up and she now feels infinitely more confident. She realises that to get on further in her career she now needs exposure of the right kind. She hopes Arts Review will be just a beginning.

Tensions are high all round, and if he could have picked up the vibrations, Redmond O’Leary’s bank manager might have been a happier man. O’Leary has a touchingly other-worldly way with money. But now, his epic poem The Modern Pilgrim is outselling any of his previous efforts. His publisher believes this is the result of a steady build up of publicity surrounding his unpredictability and outspoken remarks on art, novels, films, plays and poetry, personalised attacks on authors, people in public life, presidents, dictators and whole nation states. No one can be certain who or what will provoke his anger next.

Jane expects the worst. In her business, blood spilling is common. She has witnessed many an effusion, and even donated droplets of her own deeply ordinary rhesus negative on the escalator of career progression. On the encoded scoreboard of Fleet Street Jane has form. She is also a peacemaker by nature, a sensible type and the tone of her tabloid newspaper column more of the ‘brogue’ than the ‘spiky stiletto’. Her understanding is that these two, Claudette and Red O’Leary loathe each other, but obviously not enough to prevent intimate whispering. She can not hear what they are saying and is mildly surprised by their friendly body language.

Tonight, O’Leary is seesawing between two moods. This is not because of any suspected schizophrenic tendencies, although his uncertain temperament might make this a reasonable conjecture, but because two genuine feelings, sadness and eagerness are jostling in his system for pole position. Sadness because Ron Enright, songwriter and lead guitarist of rock band, DNA, had been found dead in the swimming pool of a Las Vegas motel. O’Leary had heard the news about the rock legend’s demise in the late afternoon. Although some of Enright’s lyrics were to his mind complete tripe - Ron you have gone. I will remember your song - was about the level of Enright’s lyrical gift, O’Leary nevertheless has a sentimental attachment to the musical demi-gods of his youth, who include or rather, included Ron. More pertinent however is the fact that Ron and Red had been mates at school in North London before O’Leary went off to University, and had been through some hormone-fuelled experiences together that no amount of fatuous rhyming couplets could erase.

Eager, because he has set himself an amusing challenge and prepared earlier two provocative phrases that he aims to introduce into tonight’s discussions. O’Leary enjoys setting himself pointless challenges because they give him a sense of detachment, thus helping to curb his tendency to freefall into formless critical rant. As in the construction of his poetry, phrases which O’Leary creates hover in the ether like planes circling the sky at Heathrow to await landing instructions. The phrases he has chosen this week are: ‘The enclave of evil ’ and ‘in - breeding among the Welsh’. He is fast becoming a master of the sensational soundbite. His erudition allows him licence to reach beyond the bounds of acceptability and mostly to get away with it. The evil enclave of America will be conjoined with Israel. The Welsh will be this week’s winners of the ‘vilest national characteristics award’ if only because he already laid into the Scots the week before. O’Leary tells himself these sentiments are genuine, semi-conscious and part of a stream he willingly fails to control rather than a conscious desire to stir things up.

If there is one thing O’Leary can admit to loathing completely and without qualification, it is complacency. As a boy he spent whole days rippling the smooth waters of a Dublin reservoir with small pieces of flint. He is not afraid to state the obvious and he hates a wasted opportunity to redress the balance of rational sensibility, albeit to a minority audience at near midnight. He is eager to weave these phrases into his commentary and succour flaming ire.

He tells himself others depend on his ability to be sensational. Hunter counts on it. Even Claudette no stranger to controversy has benefited from his outrage. The stand-up-row they had one month before had received at least forty column inches in various newspapers and journals, and fuelled the advance sales of his epic poem and of her biographical sketch of five female philosophers. If Claudette doesn’t bite, Hunter is sure too. Hunter is a game player with five children to support. But O’Leary unsettled, feels an ominous stirring in his abdomen, a damp sponge of pain and regret. Perhaps this is because a small part of himself drowned in a swimming pool in the early hours of a California morning.

“Five, four, three, two, one, cue Hunter”.

Hunter obliges. “Tonight we will be looking at ‘Shaping the World’, a new exhibition at the Panter Gallery from the blind American painter Anthony Lasalla, two-time winner of the Enron Memorial Prize, a new film by the ageing French enfant terrible Xavier Falcone, the title of which ‘Ma vie est gris’ carries forward our theme of fuliginous paralysis in an increasingly autonomous and complex world, and finally, Blinding Pain by late-to-the-game author Bella Tope who has published her first novel at the age of 49.”

“Sharing their insights tonight are the poet Redmond O’Leary, feminist author Claudette Reiss, and Fleet Street columnist Jane Harvest.”

Hunter writes most of his own intros. Tonight he has written a few opening words on the top and sides of someone else’s cigarette packet (in an attempt to reduce smoking Hunter will not buy his own cigarettes, but borrows half finished packets). There has been no time to transfer the words to autocue. Hunter is the busiest of men.

“Is fuliginous a real word Hunter?” asks O’Leary.

“I have only occasionally been known to use unreal words Red,” Hunter replies. “And the nature of reality is another interesting way to introduce our theme for tonight”, he adds, fox-trotting neatly into the opening par of the next bit of the autocue and a brief retrospective on Lasalla, this one written by Simone, the promising programme researcher.

“What is reality for the visually challenged? The three works under the microscope to be examined by our fortunately sighted critics are by people who each express or explore different aspects of blindness. Hunter keeps his gaze steady on camera. Massive, articulate, solid, genial, there is something reassuringly stable and English about him. He looks like a man who ought to be running a successful organic farm in Somerset and if he were inclined, might walk two boisterous Springer spaniels through the early dew, across a once fallow field, now re-cycled as a wild flower meadow before returning to the farmhouse to eat home-baked bread and freshly picked mushrooms. This is in fact not far from Hunter’s projected idyll. But dewy meadows are, for the moment, out of reach while he is engaged in the current and necessary struggle to make a name for himself within the pressured urban setting while supporting a wife and demanding young family in their large Victorian house in Hammersmith.

“Lasalla has a following in this country having trained and taught here in his twenties before returning to America where in 1989, glaucoma devastated his life,” explains Hunter. “He uses structures built on canvas by his long-time and equally eminent partner, the sculptor Rosario Pynchon, within which to paint. This latest exhibition has received high-octane praise:

“ ‘Bold statements in red, white and blue…. a condemnation of the dangerous vacuity of the American way,’ said one critic.

“ ‘A revolutionary who uses the colours of his memory like warning flares in an empty night sky, and his brush strokes like silent Exocets to direct our attention to the emptiness of western capitalism,’ another.”

Hunter turns to look at O’Leary. “Red? Did the exhibition strike you as meaningful commentary on the State of the Union, or simply American colours in angular formation?”

“Well. I. Think. The whole thing is ridiculous,” O’Leary begins.

Every word seems to be wrenched from his body, as if the Well, and the I, and the Think, have spent several uncomfortable days meandering about in some primeval soup in a corner of his brain where words are first created, huddled in terror waiting to be born. The word whole has the most painful transition, uttering forth in constipated birthing but, once completed, gives free passage to a string of rapidly delivered siblings.

“I read one review, before I went, perhaps unwisely, but there it is. The reviewer said the squares reminded him of the American Army barracks at West Point!” He spits his words, hardly allowing pause for breath. “The naïve fool was trying to get over the idea that these flat blocks of paint are all about war and the concept that the planning of war is not far behind all thinking that drives the way this superpower uses patriotism and blind allegiance to the stars and stripes to manipulate the American public.” O’Leary’s voice reaches a quavering pitch of bruised sensibility. “They”, he quotes, “ the Americans,
‘ have colours to hide behind, a cloak which services them well as a disguise for aggression while allowing them to renege on their ultimate social responsibility to the world!’ I have never read such a load of drivelling nonsense. Never! If you really want to know what I think?” O’Leary pauses just momentarily, but enough to up the danger levels, and continues. “ Lasalla is the one who is in hiding, sneaking behind the whole flummery of art world nonsense, aggressive hype and marketing and manipulation of a supremely high order, some of the very values his fawning reviewers believe he is condemning.”

Claudette Reiss shifts in her chair. She has been given her opening for counter attack, but not quite yet. O’Leary continues rattling off his vituperative opinion at high speed.

“He might as well have cut up bits of the American flag and stuck them within the wooden triangle of a snooker frame for all the sense it made. The man’s a complete charlatan. Just look at the prices? Although you must know they hate to talk money in exposed places. While I was there I heard of £5,000 for a four by four centimetre solid cube coated with red paint that looked like it had been stolen from a child’s plastic trolley of multi-coloured bricks. Complete rubbish. ”
Hunter taps the manicured fingers of his left hand on the table in front of him.
“ Unequivocal views from Red here. Claudette, any advance on that blinder from Red who is obviously in fighting mood himself tonight?” asks Hunter, pleased with the promising start. Claudette wears a pained expression at Hunter’s use of the word blinder. But she is itching for a fight.

“I don’t agree. Basically that is the point, Lasalla’s point. War is indeed the motivator of change - change for the worse or better depends on your world view - but there is no getting away from the fact that war shapes our lives and always has done from the time the Neanderthals wiped each other out through to the battle of Rorke’s Drift.”

“Neanderthals?” snorts O’Leary from his corner. Neanderthals did not wipe each other out. Neanderthals were not human!” Claudette ignores him.

“This is however not an original concept in the sense that others have recently visited this theme and with less opaque references; Herman Rivers’ secular history ‘The Permanent State’ springs to mind. Rivers claims war is the prime driver of change. After all, America is the global High Command and hence the colours used by Lasalla.”

“The same colours as the Union Jack however,” Hunter pipes up, “is there
any lesson for us here?” O’Leary jumps back in.

“Rorke’s Drift?” he explodes. His hands are poised in cathedral spire formation and pointed towards Jane Harvest. This mannerism helps his brain to think. It is also a pose that year on year inspires adoration in the hearts of the generations of nubile young women to whom he teaches poetry. They come to him at the age when older men, particularly gaunt and hungry looking older men, appeal to an undiluted impulse to nurture.

“What has Rorke’s Drift got to do with it? Have you forgotten the First World War? Is reductionism to be applied to history so that the 20th century becomes a mere blip in the passage of time? Pure unadulterated balderdash,” Claudette is wearing schoolmarmish half-spectacles, and looks down at him with a frosty gaze, while O’Leary waves a hand from his slouched position, as if to say ‘carry-on, I genuflect to you’.

“The analogy Redmond was about our historic impulses within an earlier environment. I am sorry you missed the point,” says Claudette her voice modulated yet dripping with venom.

Up in the gallery, Simone can’t help but be thrilled by Claudette’s power. In her teens her mother had given her a copy of The Redundant Penis and she had slept with it wrapped in her furry rabbit pyjama bag, but she has never been as close to her idol until now. It had been Simone’s idea to gather together the theme pegged to the Lasalla exhibition, at the editorial meeting a month before, and she who was responsible for suggesting a review of Falcone’s new film and the novel Blinding Pain. But Simone has been less than open to the producer and Hunter about her own connections with two of the three topics under review. Simone is feeling sad and edgy. The news about Ron Enright’s death has affected her deeply and she does not think she will go to the Green Room to meet Claudette. After the programme ends, she is taking a taxi to Heathrow to catch the first outward plane to LA.

“Looks as if things are hotting up,” says the darkly handsome Jonathon Charlton the producer. He is leaving before the end credits, as his wife is about to give birth to their first child. He had explained this to Natasha from News with whom he has been having an affair for the past three months. Their date will have to be postponed. She seemed to take it in her stride, although he is not certain. Natasha has a feral quality signalling that spitting and scratching are well within her tactical arsenal for dealing with men.

“Industrialism. New technology. These are relatively new environments,” Claudette continues. “I was making a deliberate reference to the past when man, or pre-human, because we still do not know who the missing link was,” Claudette is saying, pausing purposefully and giving O’Leary the kind of look
that might have made a more vulnerable man renounce the will to live. “The time when beings were pitched against their environment in battle as much as being pitched against other beings. After all, they were fighting without the modern weapons or paraphernalia of war.”

In her formative years Claudette had spent time analysing how men managed to hold the floor without being interrupted. She had observed how women gave way too easily, unless they poured forth at high speed when the meaning was easily lost, or else shouted above the rest so they were then accused of being strident. She determined when quite young never to be so abused. She is now able to perform a rhythmic balanced delivery, which allows little pause for others to cut her off mid-stream.

“The idea here is that humans have, mankind has always waged war. War shapes history, and whatever we might want to do in our hearts and minds to change that, this is the common thread that existed long before gunpowder and bullets; the evolutionary model, the archetype of the unconscious which makes progress via war inevitable, and in a technologically advanced, interconnected world to a permanent war economy. So Lasalla is presenting us with an object, a coloured canvas on which to write our own names – we are being called to sign up, like in the recruitment ads, to the idea that he is trying to express. We are being asked to join the army of the enlightened. This is why his signature is there, prominent, bold, brave.” Claudette keeps her face impassive. O’Leary contorts his narrow features in disgust. Jane Harvest, waits for real blood to spill.

“Jane? Any thoughts?” Asks Hunter, hugely enjoying the opening moments of his show. This is his show. It is the show that is the staple of his life. He manages it well. Hunter is the anchor, enormously clever, but cheerfully unassuming, someone with whom anyone could share a stimulating conversation over a bottle of Montrachet and avoid being browbeaten. Always on the run, writing an article here, changing nappies there. Commentators who comment upon his rise in print ask, ‘How does he do it?’ When he took the family to Corsica on holiday, his female stand-in had let it get out of control. Hunter believes viewers like to be galvanised, perched on the edge of their sofas, but they also like to feel safe in their own sitting rooms. Hunter Wallis gives them that security. Of course, ratings tended to be rather low at midnight, but the show’s reputation and his own were rising. There was however a present danger. He had discussed it with Jonathon Charlton. Controversy and the expectancy of an on-screen row were making the show predictable, such is the inherent contradiction within the laws of engagement and surprise which make for live television. “Think the impossible Hunter, and you might even be disappointed,” Jonathon had said. “We raise the stakes, and deliver a highly charged catfight among the intelligentsia week on week, and eventually the beastliness will reduce in impact. Last week’s vile commentary will not be matched by this week’s combat. Let’s get somebody nice for a change.” And then Jane appeared.

Jane had been invited to the Lasalla viewing the previous Friday, which is where the producer had met her and subsequently asked her to step in for the journalist, Martin Balcombe who had flu. She had compressed everything else she was supposed to review into the last twenty-four hours. She had only been able to see the film the night before, not at the beginning of the week as the others had done. As for the book, she had read it in a rush, finishing it only a few minutes before the taxi arrived to take her to the studio.

“I think you read too much into all this, both of you, and the reviews I agree have not helped,” says Jane. Calm descends as the chocolate covered cadences of her voice soothe the atmospheric sparks. “The work has to be taken at face value. A man who once painted detailed works of depth and resonance, where light played such a part, is reduced by his lack of sight to depend on his wife to hold his hand, like a child being led to the canvas with brush and paint. Instead of numbers, he is given shapes. A wooden frame within which to work. His idea, her engineering. I read he calls up old friends with whom he grew up, or other painters he has known, to describe the colours he wishes to use, relying on trust in others to mix the correct shade. The red on the canvas of a sailing dinghy he played on as a child with his cousin at Coff Harbour, the whiteness of what can be seen as cotton robes in the dazzling light on a pilgrimage. The oblong block of white paint against a red background after all, was called Mecca.” Jane does not look at Hunter or bring him into the frame of this question but she senses his full-on presence. “Did you both fail to notice?”

She is feeling light-headed, and knows she wants to impress, less the audience, not even her fellow critics, but Hunter himself. She recognises the feeling of longing and wishes it would go away. She had hoped it had all dissipated years ago.

“ I noticed,” says O’Leary definitely, his arched fingertips waving at her. “Like I noticed there was no dazzling light, just brilliant white emulsion that anyone could pick up at, umm?” He searches helplessly for the name of a store where household paint could be obtained, a place he has never willingly frequented. “At, er?”

“Homeplace?” queries Claudette whose eclectic mind incorporates a surprising amount of detail on subjects that range from the relative merits of steel wool over sandpaper to an intimate knowledge of the rules of ice hockey.

“Homeplace” repeats O’Leary. “ Like I also noticed the isosceles of blues and reds called respectively ‘Sodom and Tomorrow’. Childish. Obvious, but still, that was the only thing I liked, which seemed to me to represent the real enclave of evil in the world represented by Israel and America.”

Hunter stiffens. By morning, the producer could expect a couple of dozen e-mails of protest from the highly organised machine that was the monitoring wing of the Friends of Israel.

“I think you have to separate the process and execution from the stated intentions of the painter or even from the title of the exhibition,” Jane interjects.

“I shall leave aside the fact that Red has contradicted himself,” says Claudette, not leaving aside the fact at all. “ I think Jane is right. The exhibition can be viewed on two levels. The efforts of a painter reduced to dependency on others to shape his world, and the simplicity of the shapes and colours themselves to comment on how we humans have shaped our world.”

Hunter stops it there. He turns to talk directly to the handful of viewers still awake at this time on a Wednesday night.

“Thank you. ‘Shaping the World’, Anthony Lasalla’s latest exhibition runs until March 22nd. We will be back after the news at midnight.” Hunter wonders if during the break he has time to get out of the studio and visit the gents.

***

The picture on the television monitor changes from the leonine head of Hunter Wallis to reveal a heart-shaped face of fragile beauty. This is Natasha Lamb, a young woman with dark smoky eyes and raven-hair, two days short of her 28th birthday. When this six-month run on this late-shift finishes she has been promised a chance to co-present Breakfast News during the month of August. She is into her fourth month of late nights, and is already finding the price of being asleep when other people are awake a sacrifice worth making.
Natasha finds her work easy and has also recently struck up a manageable post-transmission arrangement with the duty security guard to substitute for Jonathon’s recent reticence. Covert sex before bed and no emotional attachment is she feels, so much better than cocoa. It is also helps her to suspend her thoughts about Jonathon, thoughts which have caused her to make three mile detours in the opposite direction to her flat past his Chelsea home in the small hours.

The midnight news bulletin is edited down to the barest bones.

“Two schoolchildren from Gloswoldshire have been killed and forty more injured in a coach accident in Austria,” she begins, her tone suitably sombre.
The quantity and quality of death measured in the crucible of the journalists’ lexicon, copy-tasted and honed by the editors, has flattened a story which had broken at mid-day and caused a hubbub of calls to stringers and film crews, door-stepping in the Chilterns, and various satellite links to be made between European broadcasters.

Ten seconds of film follows from the crash site showing emergency services carrying children still alive to a queue of ambulances, as Natasha continues the narrative. “The school party from Airedale School were on their way to an alpine skiing holiday when their coach collided with a lorry and caught fire.” There is just the right amount of sympathy and dramatic moment in her presentation.

Natasha has been practicing for a long time. She has known since the age of fifteen she wanted to be a news presenter, although back then she had had no real understanding of what it might involve. She has been trained, worked as a junior reporter, been behind the camera, slept with key people. She has been on the front line, and perhaps because of this, she no longer lets herself think about the parents of the numerous children who have been reported dead on air by her and others over the years. She is no longer haunted by the tormented wails of the mother who moments previously has been told the news, usually by a police officer, that her only child has been accidentally wiped out, caught in crossfire, raped, mutilated or burned. She has stopped thinking about the morning after the day before, and the mornings after that. She has met families whose sons and daughters have been ripped out of their lives a few hours earlier. She has interviewed them face-to-face. She has asked them for anecdotes, been shown into children’s bedrooms, seen the framed certificates, the school prize day cups. She has been through that process of thinking deeply about what it must be like to wake up from a sedative induced dreamless sleep to a waking nightmare of loss. Natasha finds that as the numbers of reported deaths, grows so her ability to comprehend the enormity of the event lessens, and she assumes this must be the reaction of the average viewer. There would perhaps be a sigh from someone slumped in an armchair in front of a television set, a sympathetic shake of the head followed by a quick refocus to absorb the next item, which was more likely than not to be something about the downturn in the economy, or a strike by air traffic control, something anyway that eases the moment and redirects attention to the bigger picture. Natasha’s own solution to the dangers of unpredictable emotion is to divert all such thoughts to a box inside her brain labelled “messy feelings. Do not open.”

But Natasha has not been successful in keeping two ‘messy feelings’ firmly in the box. She recognises disturbing obsessions emerging as the reality of Jonathan’s imminent fatherhood approaches. She has also been in touch with an adoption agency in Finchley. The urge to find out who had abandoned her as a baby and why, has played on her mind ever since she watched a documentary about the risks of genetic inheritance in breast cancer. It is an issue she has discussed with her parents. Despite her adoptive mother’s tears, Natasha sees no harm in trying to get at the truth about her birth now. But she is nervous about it nevertheless.

The second news item is about the death of a celebrity.

“The ‘Rock’ world is in mourning tonight as news came of the death of Ron Enright, lead guitarist of 60s rock band DNA, whose body was found earlier today in a Los Angeles hotel,” announces Natasha. O’Leary who is watching the news from the desk monitor sighs. He has noticed there was no mention of a swimming pool in this report. An image of a lanky white-faced Ron aged about thirteen diving into the chlorinated waters of a municipal bath merges along with the portrait of a girl he once knew.

“Enright, the writer of such seminal classics as ‘Battery Park’ and ‘No Resistance’ was born in the UK but had lived for the last twenty years on the west coast of America, moving there with the band after a court battle with the Inland Revenue over £10 million in taxes.” Natasha informs O’Leary about what he all ready knows. Why did they always have to hark back to that business with the taxman?

This is the first death of a friend of his own age that O’Leary has experienced. His abdominal sponge lurches unsteadily making him feel queasy. Somewhere in the deep recesses of his ears he can hear the thrumming bass vibrations of the opening bars of ‘Battery Park’.

Natasha moves on to economic issues. “The Bank of England today announced it was raising interest rates by half a per cent to slow down consumer spending. The move was criticised by the CBI who issued a statement condemning the Bank’s intervention as a slap in the face to manufacturing industry struggling to recover in the face of an increase in international trade tariffs.”

“The pensions crisis has been brought to the gates of parliament,” says Natasha next. She doesn’t write this stuff, although sometimes she thinks she could do better than her colleagues who did. “ Demonstrators who lost their final salary scheme pensions because the companies they worked went unto liquidation, took their case to MPs today.”

A picture of demonstrators appears, mild people with placards politely raising their voices to articulate a slogan. A few anxious but moderate voices can be heard calling ‘ pensioners are people’ and ‘pay us our pensions now’.

“ The Minister for Pensions did not, as expected, greet the demonstrators. He was unavoidably delayed in Brussels according to a Ministry spokesman.”

Then comes the cuddly report, an item designed to send the viewer off to bed feeling warm and hopeful. It has been retained because the Duty Office reported a huge influx of calls moments after it had been shown earlier in the day.

“A pregnant Orang-Utan,” she says as a picture of said Orang-Utan appears.

“Escaped from a specialist zoo in Surrey,”

(picture of several Orang-Utans behind bars)

“and hidden in the boiler room of a nearby hospital.”

(picture of a hospital)

“and given birth to twins.”

(picture of twin Orang-Utans in incubator)

“Mother and both babies are doing well.”

Natasha signs off, simultaneously activating the twinkle button in the depths of her asphalt eyes.

Blinding Pain by Bella Tope, Chapter Six

2004-12-19T06:40:00.000Z

Chapter Six

A man wearing a cream linen suit threaded his way through a group of middle-aged and elderly ladies standing one side of the crowd barrier, some of them holding fluffy bunnies and teddy bears. He was heading towards a group of listless snappers who had been waiting since midnight for the arrival into the world of a junior ranking member of the Royal Family. In his left hand he carried an enormous bunch of pink roses, under his right arm he carried a box of take-away teas and a selection of bacon and fried egg sandwiches. In his back pocket he had a cheque for £45,000 given to him late last night by Frank Blower, Editor of that miscarriage of accurate journalism, the Globe.

“They’re nice, they for me?” said a frail laughing voice from the small crowd.
The man turned toward the speaker and saw a crumpled face, dusted with powder and two circles of rouge planted with abandon on each high cheekbone, like misplaced kisses. Blue eyes, dulled by the opaque viscous of cataracts, returned his gaze.

He paused, put down his box, carefully extracted a small pink rose from the bouquet, and before she could protest, presented the old woman with the bud.

“A rose for a rose” he said. He liked to make old people visible.

“Oh no. Now you’ve spoiled the bunch. Are they for the Duchess?”

“I am sure the Duchess can spare a bloom for you,” said Rex, retrieving his box. He could hear the group of women chattering as he moved on.

“Restores your faith in human nature,” and “Royal occasions bring out the best in everyone.”

Rex wondered if that were any truth in these words. Royal occasions certainly brought out the pond life, he could see the bottom feeders stirring up ahead.

It was 7 a.m. and Rex Freeman, public relations guru and procurer of meat for hungry reptiles, had arrived at the private maternity wing of the St Mark’s Hospital Trust in a buoyant and expectant mood. He had enjoyed just three hours sleep and been up since 4.am in order to get up to New Covent Garden to purchase flowers. He had stopped off on his journey to northwest London to collect the sandwiches from a favoured greasy spoon, situated off Baker Street.

Bread and roses, bread and meat, gifts to appease and gifts to throw the brood off the scent.

Rex, had prepared for his vocation in the early eighties by learning how to flatter and charm. He had been a pioneer in his trade. He weaved stories, coordinated colourful ensembles from fact and fiction, and provided the mechanisms necessary to wash dirty linen in public. Rex was the best. He knew how to cultivate ties and he knew how to bind people to him with secrets and lies.

He had left school at 16, betrayed by circumstance, class and secondary modern schooling. He had obtained work for an embryonic news agency by offering his services free of charge for a year. During the day he wet his nose in the insignificant puddles of suburban journalism, and worked in a mini-cab firm at night, running errands and learning the switchboard. He fetched and retrieved for other scavengers who dined on leftover bones and small pickings from stories scattered among the wastelands of outer London. But Rex was not stupid. He learned how to extract the marrow from stories, flesh out the bones with imagination, and hunt down his supper.

His mother now 76, her bones crumbling with osteoporosis, had supported him, taking in washing and ironing, when his father, who had worked on the Ford production line at Dagenham, had been taken ill and was laid off. As a 12 year-old, Rex had watched his once robust father slowly turn to rust, his bodywork riveted with cancerous nodules, his mind already burned out at 38 from the stresses of changing shifts.

He began to get noticed, working as a stringer for a downmarket Sunday. He observed at first hand how some of ‘Fleet Street’s’ finest operated and made himself useful. He was never averse to taking on some of the more distasteful legwork.

Later on, Rex began to build up contacts in showbiz. He gate -crashed launch parties and publicity junkets on television soaps. He frequented the wine bars and other social haunts of press officers, cultivating those who whipped up publicity in the fluffy meringue that was television light entertainment. Where they puffed he probed, drawing out the human-interest stories behind the screen personas of the stars. The day my beloved dog (or cat or parrot) died,” was an early favourite.

In such ways did Rex lull his subjects into trusting him with less salubrious revelations, ‘off the record Rex of course,’ which Rex then sold to the papers. The marvellous thing was, as Rex would tell those trainee journalists he sometimes lectured to on ‘media’ courses, despite threatening to have his bollocks fried or his capacity for walking curtailed at both kneecaps, the artistes kept coming back for more, especially when their careers were beginning to wane. Anyway, he told the students, “ they both serve each other, television and the Press. It is like a marriage of convenience, rivals who kiss in public while scheming against each other behind closed doors.”

Rex had kept his overheads low when he started out on his own, sub-letting a run-down but cheap basement office in Soho from an independent production company. By then, he had married and had two young sons. His mother, Violet, moved in to the modest house he had bought in Croydon. Rex loathed the modern tendency to treat elderly people like devalued currency. Even now, Rex liked to make every day an occasion for his mother, and every day he set himself the challenge of finding something, however small, that would make her smile and take her mind away from the pain.

The backbone of his business was the young. He acted as broker for the one-night wonders; the scarily ambitious, on the first rung of their career - male models who wanted to become a Chippendale, or the numerous young actresses and cruise ship entertainers who wanted to break into the big time. They would come to him wide-eyed and hungry, sometimes literally, not having had a square meal for days.

Rex had known he only needed half a dozen really big stories to make his name, and in between finding those, he gained a reputation for reliability among middle ranking features editors on the tabloids, through providing a regular flow of weird and salacious stories which kept the subs amused and the inside pages filled.

The young came with portfolios, moody publicity stills, pathetic press cuttings carefully pressed between the leaves of albums bought at Woolworth’s and reams of tedious biographical detail. He would listen, quietly nodding, as they chronicled a history, the provincial talent contests, the first repertory auditions, the bit parts and movie extra hirings, as if such quantities of low level graft was of itself, a kitemark of quality. More often than not, Rex would buy them a meal, and when they had finished their coffee and after eight mint, he always told them the same thing. He told them about stories. He told them to read the papers and see what stories made it into print, and he told them to come back to his office when they had had time to rummage through the dustbin of their lives with something that would intrigue the nostrils of the tabloid buying public.

Rex Freeman had rarely needed to guide and embellish the stories he was subsequently given when the some of the more dedicated returned to see him. Indeed, quite often he had needed to tone down the material for legal reasons. He dealt with redtops, not top shelf magazines, and nowadays, his work being a more open affair between client and press agent, he felt himself to be a shade more moral than those journalists of his acquaintance who plied their vocation in secret.

Rex was at St Mark’s Maternity hospital to find out about the safety or otherwise of Britain’s first cloned sextuplets who were not due to be born for six weeks. The babes-to-be were already suspects in a criminal test case if they survived. A cheque from the Globe was a deposit which would, he hoped, clinch the deal for a world-wide exclusive with Sandra Parfitt, a physical training instructor from Basingstoke and the embryo clones’ mother-to-be. The story would be huge, if it was true. Sandra had had her embryos planted in Rome, so she claimed, but she wanted her offspring to have British passports.

“Alright Rex?” called out one of the snappers. The man was Eddie Frome, the ‘Magnet’s’ Royal photographer, a professional admired and envied among his immediate peers - the man who always got the picture. Eddie was garlanded with an expensive assortment of straps, cameras and lenses. He wore a belt like a gunslinger around his waist, replete with film cartridges. Hidden in this belt was a miniature infrared camera that had been disguised to look exactly like all the other little film cartridges. He used the infrared for certain less straightforward projects where light was a problem and also on those few occasions when his normal cameras were either smashed or confiscated by his victims.

“Brought you lot some breakfast,” said Rex, putting down his box of sandwiches and teas on the low wall where five other snappers waited in a variety of poses denoting extremes of boredom, fatigue and resignation. They had been hanging around the hospital entrance since midnight when the story had first come in from the Press Association.

“ Cheers Rex. Not here for Royal sprog surely?” said Eddie. “Not your territory I would have thought.”

“Visiting a friend actually,” Rex pointed at the flowers. “Visiting hours don’t start until 10,” said Eddie. “Special dispensation,” said Rex, giving Eddie a knowing wink.

Rex had heard about Sandra Parfitt being whisked into hospital with labour pains under an assumed name at 10.30 pm the previous night, when that excuse for a hack Gordon Bennet, whose job it was to follow Sandra wherever she went, had called him. Rex had been hired by Blower to secure Sandra’s cooperation. “No man better” Rex had said. But his overtures to Sandra had been spurned. This one was biding her time to auction to the highest bidder. Blower was now keen that Rex played ‘guess the weight of the cake’ and go over the best offer so far, as long as it was kept within the range of an extra £50,000 or so.

All would have been fine, except Bennet in his excitement, had lost the trail because the battery on his mobile had gone flat, and he’d had to ‘pop’ home to change it. Freeman with his usual equanimity, suggested Bennet spent the rest of the night visiting every maternity hospital within a radius of ten miles until he had found out which hospital she had been taken to and under what name. At 4 am, a weary Bennet had located the hospital and informed Rex Freeman the place was besieged by media, as the expectant Duchess was also there having gone into labour.

“Any news?” Rex asked Eddie.

“Bells should be chiming at Windsor any minute. The Duke arrived about an hour ago,” Eddie replied. That ponce Renwick has gone to do the Duke for the pool.”

Eddie meant Ruan Renwick, photographer for the Tablet – “ the newspaper you can swallow whole” . It had been running on three wheels and a prayer until it decided to copy the tabloids and get small, and it had now added few thousands to its circulation figures. Rex Freeman was disappointed. Unlike the papers he dealt with which never claimed to be better than they were, the Tablet filled its pages with half-baked fact that pretended to be solidly researched, from a thinning complement of journalists who really would be overworked if they weren’t all taking time off to deal with their ‘issues’. As it was, even in smaller helpings, the paper was filled with endless crap about dependency - dependency on alcohol, dependency on drugs, dependency on sex, endless depressing dross about ‘my struggle with bulimia’ or ‘ how I became a model and dropped to four stone.’ Rex believed they made it all up – that none of the addicts they wrote about actually existed. “All names have been changed” was the usual sign off on these articles. Rex believed the journalists wrote about themselves. They were all coke addicts anyway in Rex’s view. Had to be to fill the pages with a staff of skeletons. The paper was an excuse, a paper that somehow in the strange way that things that go around, come around, had developed a weird co-dependency on itself.

Rex ‘s thoughts were interrupted by a hand tapping him on his shoulder and turned to see the wan and querulous features of Gordon Bennet, his eyebrows twitching up and down in a peculiar dance as if being pulled by invisible strings.

“ Got a minute Rex?” Bennet asked in an attempt at nonchalance that would have alerted the most inert reptile.

“Sure,” said Rex. “Excuse me Eddie, bit of Royal business.”

“Don’t mind me old son,” said the Royal photographer. He knew Rex was lying as ever. But he had already spotted the Magnet’s Royal correspondent coming out of the hospital entrance, followed by a cameraman and sound recordist from the Independent Television Network. It looked like an announcement was just about to be made.

Rex Freeman followed Bennet past the hospital entrance, behind the crowd cordon and the two duty police officers, to the back of the hospital and stopped at the entrance to the multi-storey car park.

“ Found a way in yet?” asked Freeman. “ I want to reach Sandra first before those fly droppings at the Magnet get moving.”

“That’s what I mean to tell you Rex. Miss Parfitt’s gone.”

“Gone. What do you mean gone. Did you see her?”

“No, but it was a false alarm. She’s OK, the sextuplets are OK. She saw the gyno and was sent back home with her minder. Great beefy bloke. She signed herself in under the name of Mrs Hubbard. “

“ Nice,” said Rex. “ Brilliant, wonderful. Why in the name of Larry didn’t you call me? I’ve been up nearly all night and driven across half of London to get these flowers for Sandra Parfitt and these sandwiches for that crew of Royal trainspotters.” Rex looked witheringly at the bunch of roses he still held in his hand and gave them to Bennet.

“Thanks, Rex. I’ll give these to my contact,” said Bennet taking the flowers and sniffing them. They smelt of nothing at all.

“Well?” asked Rex.

“I’m sorry Rex, but I was trying to get through to you. I tried for hours,” he said. “But you must have turned your phone off.”

Rex reached into the pocket of his silk shirt and pulled out a small silver tablet that looked like a snuff box and peered at it,

“You’re right Gordon. Very unlike me not to check my phone. Sorry. My fault. No one else snuffling about in the trough yet?”

“Not yet, I’m pretty sure. I found a contact, a leaky midwife, said it had been pretty quiet on the Parfitt front and all hands on deck for the Royal landing, “ Bennet, smiled, relieved to have escaped a verbal mastication.

Bennet looked remarkably pleased with himself, thought Rex.

“There is something else though, ” Gordon added. But Rex Freeman was telling him something about Miss Parfitt.

“ I think she’ll go with us in the end, she wants someone who can take the pressure off. Anyway, we’re probably offering the most. ” He paused and looked at Bennet.

“What else?” asked Freeman.

“ It’s about that the TV newsreader I saw hanging about in the car park.”

“ Yeah, which one?” asked Rex.

“ Natasha Lamb, you know, the new one. Gorgeous, with the black eyes and a voice like molasses.”

Rex grinned. “ Saw her did you Gordon?” his voice soft. “I’ve met her.
“Nice looking. Hard as granite. Come for the Royal baby story I expect. I saw the IBN crew coming out of the entrance. “

“No Rex, she wasn’t,” said Gordon, but Rex had gone wandering off down another trail.

“They like to test out new people sometimes – maybe they’re training her up as a Royal watcher”

“ I doubt she’ll be doing a Royal baby story today after what’s happened,” said Bennet.

“What do you mean?” asked Freeman.

“ Natasha Lamb was in the car park, walking about, smoking a cigarette. She was there at 4 a.m. when I arrived, and did not move all the time I was trying to get hold of you.”

“Really?” Rex Freeman was beginning to get interested now.

“She’s been arrested along with some bloke.”

“What!” said Rex, “Why didn’t you say so. What for?”

“ Lewd behaviour in a public place. It was me who saw what was going on. I just sort of nudged two of the coppers on Royal duty that something funny was happening in the multi-storey. You know what they’re like on security. They got over there and found Natasha Lamb and this bloke going hell for leather on the back seat of her Audi ”

“Bloody hell. That’s what I call a story,” said Rex a huge grin spreading over his sallow face. He was beginning to see Gordon Bennet in a new light.
“Gordon, you’re a genius, “ said Rex Freeman. “Any idea who the bloke was?”

“Not really. I was just going to see if my contact inside the hospital knew anything when you arrived. They’ve both been taken to the Kilburn nick.”

“You rung the Globe newsdesk yet?”

“Not yet. Wanted to see what you’d say.”

“You’re a man with considerable presence of mind Gordon,” said Rex, patting him on the shoulder. “I am glad you waited. They don’t pay you reporters anywhere near what you’re worth.”

"Blinding Pain by Bella Tope" Chapter 5

2004-11-27T09:53:00.000Z

Chapter Five

Hunter Wallis is in some discomfort as he tries to focus on his delivery. He can sense his bladder communicating with his prostate while he is mid-way through an introduction to the latest work of the celebrated French Film Director Xavier Falcone.

“Falcone has been in retreat for some years, inhabiting his childhood, living along the Brittany coast, but he has not retired. He has long been called an enfant terrible, a witticism, even though he is now in his early 70s, principally because he was only 24 when he made his first film – Ma vie est orange–which won plaudits at the Eventail Film Festival in 1954.”

Claudette, her throat suddenly dry, unwittingly makes the pressure on Hunter’s bladder worse as she pours herself a glass of water. During the news break, she has opened the letter she had picked up at home and slipped between the pages of the Tope novel. She can scarcely absorb what she has read.

“But Falcone pre-dated the nouvelle vague, and his roots were with his mentor Berry, and his friendship with many of the older writers and filmmakers who were linked with Cocteau,” says Hunter. “ His later films – Un histoire de Mlle H,” (Hunter speaks in bad school French, getting the title wrong) “The Baker and Violette in April, all starred his muse, his wife, the actress Yvette Racine who died in a car crash with her lover in 1992 aged 45.”

Hunter crosses his legs under the table. A sweat breaks out on his formidable brow.

“ Following her death, the oeuvre stopped abruptly as Falcone went into mourning and he disappeared from the scene, but for one article he wrote about is wife in 1993, which, caused a sensation. For a man who had been publicly cuckolded in his later years and who was notable for reticence, this was a love letter to Racine, an excruciating self-exposure, that revealed a tragic and vulnerable man-possessed.”

As she listens, Claudette feels a sense of being divided in two by history, a history grounded not in detached theory and anecdote, but one in which she played an active part. She is unsettled by the surreal shape of present events – the fact they are discussing Falcone of all people, now. The letter she has just opened, written in a familiar spidery blue ink, is from Falcone. She knows only too well how possessed Falcone had been, but cuckolded? She knew at first hand how his humiliation at the hands of Racine, had been predated by his own betrayals.

Claudette possesses the strength of someone who entered the battlefield of sexual politics in her teens and wore the scars of battle on the surface of every vein. She has been vilified, castigated, hounded and excommunicated and survived. She has made mistakes yes, but she knows with the confident satisfaction of a warrior, that her tribulations have paid off. She has carved a lasting place for herself in modern society. Above all, she has been driven by certainty and a willingness never to compromise. Now, she feels an unfamiliar panic. The letter has brought her news about an event in her life she has long suppressed and she has been presented with a dilemma which, if exposed, could undermine the solid reputation she has built up over three decades.

Hunter is ploughing on helplessly, longing for the film clip to be shown, but
having to time his introduction to the inordinately wordy and achingly slow pace of the autocue.

“Ma vie est gris, is the story of that love affair and her death and its original material is shot in black and white, with the cinematic conceit, original when first employed, by Spielberg for one, that is, to use selective colour against the monochrome to contrast and heighten emotion, an effect which became overplayed and anachronistic as soon as it was copied by the advertising industry.

“Set principally on the Brittany coast, and interspersed with scenes from his previous works, there are moments in the film where he lingers at length on physical aspects of his wife - her pelvic region, the way she walks, her cheekbones. There is no dialogue from Racine. She is here purely as a physical reminder – a ghost. ”

At last, the television screen cuts to a sequence from Falcone’s film.
Hunter leans back in his chair and surreptitiously squeezes his groin hoping this will help. He feels dampness. The water decanter is half full on the table and with a deftness born of desperation, he grabs the decanter, pushes it under the table, unzips his fly and pees into the bottle. Claudette grimaces and covers her mouth as she realises what Hunter is doing. Redmond grins, while Jane raises one eyebrow and winks at Hunter. “If any of you ever breathe a word,” whispers Hunter, relief restoring his equilibrium. Carefully, he places the overflowing bottle on the studio floor.

In the gallery Simone and her boyfriend Lucas, the vision mixer, have observed the pantomime. Jonathon Charlton has not. He is leaving the studio even earlier than expected. The baby is on its way.

Jonathon has not fully grasped the whole birth concept and his connection with it, but yet... a moment of scenario planning flashes in his brain, his visual memory tapping an archive of numerous birth scenes from past film and television dramas. He wishes to do the whole bit – the gown, the mask, the bedside manner of the modern expectant husband. The scene needs an accompanying score. He picks up the rhythm of a song in his head. DNA’s classic ‘No Way out’ has come to mind. The base notes pump the complex beat of the breathing exercises his wife has been taught. ‘Breathe in darling, no that’s too fast. That’s it, that’s better. Look at me. I’ll sing to you.’ He has a history of being queasy around blood. He wishes to face up to his responsibilities, steel himself and get over it. This is real life, for real, he tells himself.

Simone whispers into Hunter’s ear mike. “Jonathon’s off. Baby coming.” Excerpts from Falcone’s film are still playing, so Hunter glances up at the gallery and gives a thumbs up sign to Jonathon who looks down and waves.

“Coming to you in ten seconds” says Lucas. Hunter straightens his back and begins to read off autocue.

“ In this reflective piece Falcone has returned to the widescreen of his 1954 film – My life is orange– the invention of Henri Chrétien, who had developed the technique some 25 years before. But widescreen formats, cinerama, cinemascope and others, used in Hollywood for such movies as The Robe, while attempting grand scale, was felt to reduce the level of intimacy at the interface between audience and screen. By using old 35 mm techniques in My life is grey where the images are bleak and haunting, Falcone seems to be attempting to use the presentation of the medium to take in the viewers peripheral vision, while simultaneously ensuring intimacy is enhanced by the use of monochrome.

“ Red, your views?” asks Hunter.

“It has always interested meeee,” says O’Leary with unguent emphasis, “to note the insularity of some French auteurs, from the new wave of the 50s and 60s. They are self-referential to the point of indulgence.” Jane wonders if O’Leary recognises in himself the sin of self-promotional artifice, but decides she will not make a personal attack. She feels she is sliding comfortably into her new screen role as temperate ballast between two polarised agendas.

O’Leary’s voice has sunk to a register of contrived ennui. “ It is a documentary of an old man’s reminiscences about youth, complaining about his loss of power. Love is blind, he says. What’s new in this? It is all so infinitely depressing - the ponderous tone of the voice-overs, the sluggish way the camera traces the endless panoramas of sea and sky,” he says, “ It is so, so, so. What, what, what? ” he stumbles, searching with his eyes for assistance. No one comes to his rescue. O’Leary ploughs on alone.

“So, so, déja vue!”

He finishes on a triumphant note.

Hunter makes his move. “ Falcone of course was on the edge of the nouvelle vague and he should not perhaps be criticised for using memory at this stage in his life. That, surely is why he made the film?”

“Hmm. Perhaps not,” concedes Red. “But it is full of symbols that are nothing more than visual platitudes for the warped vision one presumes is the result of a life he seems to regret,” says O’Leary. “Falcone heralds from Brittany, half this film is shot there. It is peopled with grotesques - real people, but as far as I can tell, selected for a particular deformity - the postman with his withered arm, for example, or other peculiar characteristics. There is something awfully passé, awfully indulgent about it, and not a little incestuous. The people he employs all look as if they are related. Perhaps there is a palette of Breton features –the flat noses, the button brown eyes.”

Hunter’s antennae are alert for he is certain O’Leary is leading up to something dramatic. And he is right.

“It reminds me of some of those British pre-war movies set in the welsh valleys, and as you know, I have long suspected in-breeding among the Welsh,” O’Leary pauses.

Hunter had known no such thing. He raises an eyebrow and the moment is caught on screen.

“There is an historic correlation of course,” O’Leary continues. “The Welsh came to Brittany in droves in the 5th century. “

Claudette is not biting. She wants Redmond to hang himself first. She is also far too distracted.

Hunter feels he may be obliged to defend the Welsh, but Jane gets in first.
“ It’s all about history isn’t it? The film that is? “ says Jane, addressing her remarks to Red. “History and how it makes us, and finally saves us?”
Red stares at Jane uncomprehendingly.
“But, you will know,” she continues, “Bretons are not only close cousins of the Welsh but of the Cornish peoples. The Welsh and the Cornish, having emigrated to Brittany from Britain during the 4th through to the 7th centuries. Would you include the Cornish people in your remarks?”
O’Leary recalls he has a book signing for the Modern Pilgrim in St Ives the following Monday.
Jane is pursuing her historical trail. “ Why not also include the rest of Britain and southern Ireland? In their movement to the far western peninsula of what is today France, the Bretons brought back a Celtic heritage which had stretched across the European continent before Roman and Germanic expansions.”
O’Leary is stunned and a little sheepish. He does not know Jane. He has not read her column. He has assumed the middle market tabloid she works for might produce female columnists whose knowledge of history would just about stretch to a grasp of the chronology of the popular romantic novel or fashion trends through the ages, but not anthropology.
Jane is not finished. “You cannot make idle remarks about the possible incestuous nature of any community, without embracing the whole of mankind and our history. If you and I compared genetic codes for example although we are not knowingly related, we may find a common ancestral gene. The man with a withered arm is related, perhaps, to the bearded woman who sells aubergines in the marketplace at Nantes. As you will no doubt know, Falcone also uses metaphor with the visually challenged. We are all blinded to our common bonds. We are all related, one to another as far back as the mud worm in the primordial ooze.”
Hunter is gripped by a sense of his own history as Jane speaks, a time when his own genes co-mingled with hers, in a single bed, in a college hall of residence.
“The point is, Falcone sees the only solution to his loneliness if you like, is to connect everything up – in order to return to a past where the story of his own life is set in the context of time passing and meeting in the place he knows best. These are the reflections not of a man overcome with sadness and loss, regretting his obsession with Racine, but who seeks to make sense of it all by using symbolic and historical references – the painting of the drownings at Nantes in 1793, in the Musée des beaux arts, newsreels of the Torrey Canyon, disaster of 1967 which contaminated the Brittany beaches, the Pleistocene ice cap over which a figure, dressed in an orange coloured coat deceives his eye, as the sun rises and sets over a blurred landscape. For all we know, a woolly mammoth with a withered trunk walked the ice channels between Wales, and the Brittany coastline. We are all connected, and somehow, knowing that brings some sort of resolution for him in contextual reflections of his relatively brief life.”
Redmond is itching to get back in. “ It is less about celebrating the imperfect in man’s evolution, than the diary of a man trying to work out in public his own imperfections and mistakes.”
“ Like DH Lawrence,” says Jane, “ he seems to be saying everything changes, and what was once deemed perfect in taste and culture and human development, ceases to be measurable, is in fact meaningless, in the general scheme of things, in the mutable flow of life.”
“ Well, if you’re going to drag him in. There was no one, no one more self - indulgent than DH Lawrence. His craft if one can call it that, was subservient to his reckless personalised sentimentality, “ says Redmond dismissively.
“What has been called his demon of personal outburst?” says Jane, neatly deflecting Redmond’s own goal.
“Claudette?” asks Hunter. “ Do you feel that Falcone is coming to terms with life through historical reference?”
But Claudette does not respond. Her lips have turned white, and her hands are shaking.
Hunter realises he has a problem.

Blinding Pain by Bella Tope, Chapter Three

2004-11-10T17:50:00.000Z

Chapter Three (How they met)

Boom! Susan heard the demolition of the twenty storey tower block on the other side of the highway and put down her pen. She had been thirteen years old in the year of its construction and she felt little nostalgia for the building itself, for it was beyond rescue. Architecturally still-born from its inception, unsound in its foundations according to the local paper, Glebe House had been a tower of outstanding anonymity and a monumental betrayal of expectations for the several hundred families it had fleetingly housed.

The noise from its crumbling structure triggered a fall of debris in her mind. Number 48 Glebe House, tenth floor, was where Ron had lived with Ernest, his unemployed father after his mother, an Avon lady, had, with her gentleman friend, abandoned her son, her husband, the concrete tower and arterial road that crossed this part of north London, for a manicured lawn and cul-de-sac in Welwyn Garden City. Susan imagined the disappointment on the faces of ageing rockers come to pay homage at the asbestos-layered shrine where Ron Enright had first made tentative plucks on his Fender stratocaster, only to find it gone.

But Ron had departed long before the demolition, first to a mansion in Buckinghamshire, then to California, as a tax exile, but not before he had settled his father in his dream setting - a freehouse, situated in a tranquil Kentish hamlet named the Fiddlers. In 1981, Susan had paid a visit to Ernest Enright and his pub. By then, Mr Enright had replaced the hops and brass with merchandise and other memorabilia from Ron’s early career. He also provided entertainment from abstract memories about Ron’s childhood, stored and mellowed in the barrel of confabulation and folkelore that such settings can promote. The consequence was, the Fiddlers, had begun to attract a different kind of clientele, curious weekenders, principally made up of DNA enthusiasts, much to the resentment of the locals who boycotted the pub. The last Susan had heard was that the pub had fallen on hard times, and Ernest was considering selling up.

Tragedy and Frank Wainwright had brought Ron, Redmond and Susan together. Two eight-year olds from a local primary school had drowned one summer in the man-made duck pond in Victoria Park. They had jumped in together holding hands. In response, Mr Wainwright, who at that time worked in the Sports and Recreation Department of the Council had been put in charge of promoting the two municipal baths and developed a programme of swimming lessons for the community’s children. Only three kids turned up for the Friday evening class. Redmond, aged thirteen and newly arrived in England from Ireland had been sent along by his Aunt Deidra. Ron, who was the same age, came along because it was free, and he had nothing else to do. Susan who had already passed her intermediate diving certificate and could swim 100 metres, went along because of her father, who supervised the Friday evening sessions.

Redmond, thin and compact, had been seriously determined to advance beyond the humiliating doggy paddle of his existing knowledge at the first lesson. “Watch Susan,” Mr Wainwright had instructed the two boys. And they had. Susan had ploughed up and down the pool in the navy school costume she hated, which was too large and sagged at the back, self-consciously aware of two pairs of boys eyes watching from the poolside as her body slid froglike through the heavily chlorinated water. Her father then required that Susan show Ron and Redmond how to rescue a brick from the shallow end and later, insisted she practice her life-saving technique by rescuing each of the boys. Susan at this stage in her life was a girl who soaked up romantic stories, from the serials published in her mother’s Woman’s Weekly to the dangerous exploits of ‘Sir Percy Blakeney’ and his ‘Marguerite’. Her mindset was not attuned to rescuing boys. But she did as her father expected.

The rescue of course, had signified touch and an unavoidable requirement to breathe in the strange and strong odours of adolescent maleness that easily penetrated through the chlorine. Under the watchful eye of her father, Susan had shown no emotion as she hooked her right arm around Ron’s bobbing head. She pressed his limp form against hers where she knew he could feel through the thin wool of her swimsuit, the tender mounds of her developing chest.

The experience of being shown how to swim by a girl had failed to put off either boy from returning each Friday for their lesson and their dedication had produced an offer from Susan’s father. The Friday classes were now getting crowded with others eager to learn. Mr Wainwright kept a set of keys for the municipal indoor pool, and suggested he should take Susan and her two new friends for further practice each Sunday afternoon, when it was closed to the general public. This replaced the Friday evening swims. After supervising the session Mr Wainwright would go off to finish some paperwork in the council offices next door, and the kids spent the rest of the afternoon playing pontoon or monopoly in the empty staff canteen.

During this time, Susan learned that Redmond’s parents were dead. Both teachers, they had died on Redmond’s eleventh birthday, drowning after a boating accident off Limone on a holiday to Lake Garda while pursuing the trail DH Lawrence set out in ‘Twilight in Italy. Redmond had been staying with his grandmother in Galway at the time. She had struggled to care for the questioning, demanding boy, but had found it too much, and eventually, Redmond’s extended family had come together with a plan to send him to his mother’s sister Deidra, who had no children of her own, and to support Deidra financially in raising the child in her small house in north London.

The loss of both parents seemed to Susan to be fate’s ultimate betrayal but she learned quickly not to show her sympathies to Redmond, for his anger, not far below the surface, would bubble up without warning, and he would speak sharply. “What do you know? A soft girl with soft words that can have no understanding.” But, when on occasions, he did talk about the death of his parents, he did so shockingly and easily, as if his imagination had stepped into the rowing boat with them, and followed their every movement, even their final struggles for breath, as he looked on, a helpless orphan in waiting, unable to save them. Susan felt it might have helped if he had someone to blame, other than his parents for losing themselves.

Ron’s mother had constantly nagged her husband about the lack of money throughout his childhood, and Ron talked a great deal about getting rich and leaving the deprivation of his life in Glebe House behind as soon as he could. But he had no idea how he was going to do this. Susan found such talk conflicted with her own ideals which upheld material goods to be no substitute for the sustenance of true love. Ron was reticent at first about the reasons for the departure of his mother, mumbling explanations about absence being a temporary matter of no importance. But as the months progressed, Ron began to refer to his mother in the language his father used, bitterly and hideously as ‘the whore’ or the ‘selfish bitch’, and then later, more softly and detached, as under Redmond’s amused tutelage she became simply ‘the Avon lady’.

If the municipal waters provided the element in which all three learned about the rituals of teenage bonding, it was within the rigid structures of the boys Grammar school that Redmond and Ron joined forces as mates. Defunct Friday evening swims with Susan were now translated into ventures that excluded her, but she knew, involved messing about with other girls.

Ron and Susan turned fifteen within a week of each other. Susan tried writing short romantic stories for Woman’s Weekly, stories that always seemed to centre on rescue and redemption. She had moved on from Percy Blakeney to Jane Eyre, and wild men tamed by the love of a good woman. Redmond, older by six months, became increasingly detached and studious as he approached the sixth form, and then, Ron discovered music.

Blinding Pain by Bella Tope, Chapter Four

2004-11-10T17:47:00.000Z

Chapter Four

“Who is Xavier Falcone?” Hunter asks the partially alert viewer sitting in front of his television screen in Primrose Hill and still watching the Arts Review at 12.20 am.

The viewer is Mark Feinstein, an arts diarist for a broadsheet who has arrived home rather drunk and late from a dull book launch where not even the author had turned up. The event which the PR person had promised would be graced by interesting luminaries including Anthony Lasalla and his wife and Ron Enright, had produced neither them nor any gossip worthy of the column he would have to write the next day, apart that is, from the genuinely shocking news about Ron’s death.

Feinstein is reduced to hoping for a few inspirational sparks from that reliable source of conflict, Red O’Leary and Claudette Reiss. But heh! this is interesting - Jane Harvest on the box and in an arts slot too. The only television incarnation of the columnist that Feinstein had previously witnessed had been Jane as a media quiz show panellist. This more arty change of direction might make a column inch of comment.

Significance: the ambitions of journalists breaking out of the confines of their newspaper personas. He jots down words to trigger his memory for the 11 a.m. editorial meeting. One point of interest for the diary, he thought, might be the way envy is fuelled among fellow scribes by the ambitious. Jane could be assured she would benefit. Someone somewhere in that society of mutual backscratchers who contribute to keeping individual ambition on the trajectory of public celebrity, will jot down a par or two about her looks, about her wit, about her husband, about her children, about any little thing and her fame increases and her capacity to reciprocate expands. I write about you today, thinks Feinstein, and you write about me tomorrow and together we will rise like so much froth on a cappuccino.

He notes how her embonpoint is disguised. Jane is known for her ample upper shelf but here she is covered up, demure. Her bluestocking image is far sexier.

Another point to research. Did she not wear a plunging neckline in every appearance on “Who, What, When? (otherwise known as www) the popular news quiz?” Feinstein wonders if he will have time tomorrow to research the fortunes of other female print journalists who had made similar career detours, by tracking the level of exposure on air of their décolletage.

Why Who, What, When? and no Why he asks himself? Isn’t Why the most important question? But he already knows the answer. Television journalism like his diary column, made ‘news’ a compressed and relatively effortless exercise of fact collation, reducing illuminating explanation and thought to the skimmed back pages of broadsheets, specialist magazines and late night reviews. Mainstream television news is the worst culprit, he thinks, although he has never worked there. Despite posturings of independence and news editors screaming for more ‘government topplers’ when, thinks Feinstein, had the Independent Broadcasting Network ever come near to bringing down down a government?

His head swims from the effects of more wine consumption than shrivelled canapés could absorb. Maybe he could speak to the editor- break out of his diary rut. Maybe he could write a column about mainstream television news and how bloody awful it was. They could create a war of words between the broadsheets and the broadcast media –it might even help raise standards, get his career soaring again. But then he remembers. The proprietor of Feinstein’s newspaper also owns a 35% stake in Independent Broadcast News. It is just a thought. He returns to his diary notes.

He would write about Ron Enright of course. An anecdote drawn from the archives perhaps. The women, the comeback in the UK, that dreadful role he played in that French film – Mlle H or somesuch – something nice.

Ron Enright. Guitarist. Dead at 52. Such is the price of fame.

In the morning, after he has left for work, Feinsteins’ wife Lucy, stumbles into the front room to find a scrap of paper on the coffee table that reads:

Meet 11 am.
Jane Capuccino,
Track ample bosom
Why?
Backscratching
Nice.

Blinding Pain by Bella Tope. Chapter Two

2004-10-27T06:02:00.000Z

(Los Angeles 2003)

A woman, reed thin with silvery blond hair stretched back across her scalp in an elegant chignon, feet tucked into comfortable pink Manolo flatties, walked with authority through the lobby of the hotel. She passed purposefully through a crowd of shiny, busy people, to a mirrored elevator where she could survey her profile from several angles as she was lifted silently upward, her face a blank like a sheet of vellum from which history had been erased.

She smoothed an eyebrow unnecessarily, before stepping out at the fourteenth floor, and made her way to the suite at the end of the corridor, and tapped impatiently on the door. Immediately the door opened. She was greeted by a young man she disliked and with whom she had little in common other than a shared orthodontist. He smiled, deflecting her poorly disguised disdain with a spectacular range of sparkling front teeth.

“Hello Barry” she said, sizing up the room taking in the hand-painted drapes, reclaimed Indonesian wood furniture, empty bottles of bourbon, and handed him her gloves. She wore gloves out these days, to prevent light from reaching the indelible brown liver spots on the backs of her hands.

“Photographer arrived?” she asked. “Not yet, but don’t let that stop you Connie. Go in,” said Barry walking ahead, guiding her through to another room.

He stopped at another door, then lifted his hand to his mouth and cocked his head. “Ronnie won’t have me in there,” he whispered. Connie could smell the oral freshener on his breath.

“Says he can look after himself. I think it’s a mistake myself. Watch out for him. That Sloane woman is like a stealth bomber in skirts. “

“ I said it wasn’t a good idea. Not her. Not now. But you know Ron,” said Connie.

Barry gave her a sympathetic glance before knocking on the door.

“Ronnie?”

“Yep?” a voice replied from the depths of the next room.

“Your mother’s here.”

Ronnie Enright was in the middle of an interview with Barbara Sloane for News on Sunday Magazine, the British broadsheet colour supplement. Sloane, a journalist who had cut her teeth on the NME before carving a name as a celebrity profile interviewer, had been waiting six months for this interview. She was known for her skill at paring away the skin of her live subjects to get at the tender flesh beneath. Many celebrities refused to be interviewed by her, preferring love-ins with Hello, and all the controlled chemistries of a sterile biography formulated in the petrie dish of public relations. But papers sold records, the three original members of DNA were making a comeback, and Barry de Bono had lined up a squad of journalists to work up a head of steam for promoting the new Album. Barbara Sloane had not been enlisted. That addition had been a Ronnie decision.

Barbara Sloane had been a fan of Ronnie’s music herself when much younger, and the archive of DNA reviews from the 70s included her famous scoop at the Cow Palace, San Francisco in 1974 when the tape synch came in too slow and Mark Raiment, lead singer of the band had demolished the mixing desk and physically assaulted the road manager on stage. Barbara Sloane had sent the cutting with her request for an interview.

It had been the defining moment in Ron’s career, as Raiment had been hauled off stage by security guards.

Back in 1974, Sloane had written:

“ …….Raiment flipped, causing a sensation and exacerbating the heated mood in a crowd sweltering in San Francisco’s hottest night for a decade. While Raiment was dragged off stage and medics were called to see to the roadie, Wayne Baize, the biggest sensation was yet to come. Ronnie Enright, DNA’s laid- back bass guitarist, who’d watched the massacre on stage, took over, his voice rippling through the auditorium, rich and throaty like the Havana cigars he occasionally smokes, and making the crowd wild with delight with his rendition of No Way Out as Raiment was being cooled off under a shower before being arrested by the SFPD….. I predict if Raiment, who has been the bands’ poltergeist for far too long- comes back, it will not be for good.”

Barbara Sloane had been proved right and the resurrected article had been Sloane’s passport to interview Ronnie nearly 30 years later.

“Hi Connie,” said her son, as his mother entered the room.

Barbara stood up to greet Mrs. Enright reaching out to grasp her hand and feeling skin as dry and thin as rice paper. ‘Forty-something body. Eyes, one hundred and five’, thought Barbara. Ron suppressed a cough.

“You remember Barbara Sloane Mum?” said Ron, taking a sip of iced bourbon to cool his throat.

Connie Enright did not remember at all, in fact she had never met the woman.
“Barbara wrote that great review of the San Francisco gig when Mark Raiment did that thing, you know.”

Connie had not a clue what he was talking about. She was divorcing his father at the time and living with ‘the Major’ as she had called her second husband. But she did not demur.

“Of course,” she said. “How nice to meet you again."

“I am very grateful to you for coming along. We feel we need a sort of catch-up on the past, and a family piece. A photo of you and Ronnie together will be perfect.” Sloane knew how to be gracious.

“No problem at all,” said Connie her red lips, slashing a starched rictus across the pale vellum.

“We were just talking about some of my early musical influences,” said Ron reaching for a cigar in a box on the low-slung table in front of him. His mother raised her over-plucked eyebrows, and grimaced. The look of disapproval was not lost on Barbara Sloane.

“Ronnie” said his mother, “maybe Miss Sloane does not like smoke.” Ronnie looked at his mother with a sharp glance, and put the cigar back in its box.

“Really. Please. Don’t mind me” said Barbara Sloane, who had given up a two-pack-a -day cigarette habit on her fortieth birthday.

“And don’t let me interrupt,” said Connie, “ lowering herself into an armchair beside her son.

Barbara Sloane was sorry Mrs. Enright had arrived earlier than expected. She had wanted to ask Ronnie about his early home life and she did not want to lose the opportunity to open ancient wounds, however personal, to a new generation of DNA fans back in the UK, particularly as the new album, a mix of old hits and original songs was beginning to do well in the UK charts.
She was particularly interested in exploring the source of a Ronnie number from the album that was currently receiving a lot of airplay, and called ‘Stolen Childhood’.

“You were saying Ronnie, you first became turned on to music by the blues and jazz greats from LPs you were introduced to by a school friend in North London. You lived there between 1959 and 1968 right? “ she asked.

“That’s right,” said Ron, “We were living, me and Dad, in this new council block, one of the first to be built in the 60s. It’s been pulled down now. My mate Red, had a load of old vinyl LPs and EPs which he’d inherited from his Dad, and we played them in his garden shed. He had a pre-historic gramophone. I was about 14, I was listening to all this old stuff, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Johnny St Cyr the banjo-guitar player. Those New Orleans sound opened up a whole new world. Then, when I was 15 I got an acoustic, a battered second hand flat top from a place off the Finchley High Road. I taught myself. A lot of us did back then.”

All this material he was giving out was regurgitated from past interviews. Barbara was looking for ripples in the well-rehearsed harmonies of Ron’s life.

“Then Dad came home one day with a Fender. I don’t know how, ‘cause he wasn’t in a job, and we didn’t have any money, “

“You and your Dad?” Sloane focused on her target. “Connie wasn’t with you then?” she queried. Sloane already knew the answer. Connie had left the family council flat somewhere in Gloswoldshire when Ron was young, eight or nine, then returned briefly when they settled in London, only to go off again to live with a military man with a moustache who drove a self-built Morgan. Sloane had a cutting about her, from a 1975 biog, when DNA had really hit the big time, and the reptiles had been all over the place sniffing for meat. She said it matter-of-factly, not looking at Connie.

“Yeah,” Ronnie replied slowly, “but you know, these things happen. Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about that, it’s personal.”

“ Did you ever keep in touch with friends from those days?” she asked, changing tack.

“ Some,” said Ron. “ You know, it’s not easy. I was young, excited, on the move. But, you know, I do have a bit of nostalgia for that time.”

“ This friend of yours, Red for example?”

“ Yeah, Red,” said Ron. “ He had a brain. Not musical, although he liked our stuff I think. Went off to university – not Oxford or Cambridge, although he could have done. He’s a poet.”

“ Red? Not Redmond O’Leary by any chance?” asked Barbara.

“Yeah, that’s him. “ This was new information. Barbara was already making plans to call up O’Leary to get his take on the new album. Perhaps he would enlighten her about ‘Stolen Childhood.’ It was always best to get the view from someone who had been around at the time.

“How interesting. He’s made quite a name for himself. Did you know he’s published a new book - 'The Modern Pilgrim'. It’s doing well- putting the wind up the establishment, a call to arms against complacency, a secular manifesto for how we should all change our ways.”

“That’s Redmond,” replied Ron. “I’m glad he’s doing well. I haven’t read it. Sounds good. Sounds like something we need.”

“Do you have a faith Ron? “ said Sloane earnestly. She didn’t do earnest very well.

Ron looked quizzical, a half smile crossing his face. Sloane noticed a tick pulsating at the corner of his mouth.

This was not the usual run of questioning. Ron wondered for a moment if somehow Barbara Sloane had heard something no one else knew yet, apart that was, from Connie and Barry.

“ Faith?” he repeated. “Well, not exactly. I’ve never been particularly religious. But you know, as you get older, I suppose everyone begins to think about what it’s all been about. Life. I think, you know, I think well, music, the 60s, the 70s, was all a time of throwing off the starchiness of deference, the cap in hand, master and servant stuff that characterised everything before the Second World War and stayed well into the 50s. Musically there were a few breakouts, Little Richard, Buddy Holly. Music I suppose has always been an expression of social change, and some would say, has actually helped make change possible, taken a lead.”

Barbara was surprised to hear Ron so articulate. This was a Ron she knew little about. She wanted more.

“So what do you think of the kind of music that we hear now? Is it in the vanguard, is it interpreting the kind of age we are living in or changing it?”

“Sure, in a way it’s interpreting. I don’t like most of it, and most won’t last – not like the really deep down good stuff, the classics of rock, blues, jazz.”

Barbara let him talk on.

“There’s room for everything, but it’s all getting so fragmented now. You know, I suppose, there’s this idea now that everyone can become a pop star for a millisecond, make enough to buy a house and a car. The music itself has become less important than the means to affluence.”

Barbara Sloane had her cue. “ A means to making money, yeees. I see. There was that time of course when you left the UK for tax reasons.”

Ron was ready for this. It came up in every interview he had done since the early 80s.

“ I felt, at the time, 10 million quid was not a sum I particularly wanted to hand out to the government. They’d have only spent it on WMDs. Trident or something. I know in the US its worse, but at least you get to keep more of your money. “

“Your fans felt betrayed. There was a lot of flak.”

“Yeah,” said Ron. “ There was. To be honest. I suppose I was motivated by insecurity. I had always been afraid of going broke, and the more I had the more I wanted to keep. Things have changed now of course. I’ve been back to the UK quite a bit. I’m flying over the day after tomorrow actually.”

“ We could have done this interview in London you mean?” asked Sloane.

“ Oh no Barbara. We like to make you work for your crust. Anyway, a free trip to LA is not to be sniffed at is it?”

“No,” she laughed. Sloane was beginning to warm to her prey. She was already thinking of headlines. ‘ Ron Enright - the haunting fear beneath the music’.

“In your new album, you have several new numbers –there is one, ‘Two Faces’, which I believe you wrote in 1967 but never recorded before now. What was the story behind that?” she asked.

“Ah that,” said Ronnie, breaking into a smile. “That’s all about my first girlfriend, well, we didn’t go out then, exactly. But she was the first girl I fell for. Susan Wainwright.”

The juicy underbelly of the personal was Sloane’s preferred meat. She was becoming more confident she was going to get some of the more spicy material she needed. There was nothing in the public record that she knew about from her advance researches that spoke of an early romantic muse. ‘ Ronnie Enright - Fear and Loving in LA ‘.

“Interesting Ronnie,” she said, “tell me if you would a little about, er, Susan. Our readers do so like a love story.”

Chapter Three (How they met)

Boom! Susan heard the demolition of the twenty-storey tower block on the other side of the highway and put down her pen. She had been thirteen years old in the year of its construction and she felt little nostalgia for the building itself, for it was beyond rescue. Architecturally stillborn from its inception, unsound in its foundations according to the local paper, Glebe House had been a tower of outstanding anonymity and a monumental betrayal of expectations for the several hundred families it had fleetingly housed.

The noise from its crumbling structure triggered a fall of debris in her mind. Number 48 Glebe House, tenth floor, was where Ron had lived with Ernest, his unemployed father after his mother, an Avon lady, had, with her gentleman friend, abandoned her son, her husband, the concrete tower and arterial road that crossed this part of north London, for a manicured lawn and cul-de-sac in Welwyn Garden City. Susan imagined the disappointment on the faces of ageing rockers come to pay homage at the asbestos-layered shrine where Ron Enright had first made tentative plucks on his Fender Stratocaster, only to find it gone.

But Ron had departed long before the demolition, first to a mansion in Buckinghamshire, then to California, as a tax exile, but not before he had settled his father in his dream setting - a free house, situated in a tranquil Kentish hamlet named the Fiddlers. In 1981, Susan had paid a visit to Ernest Enright and his pub. By then, Mr Enright had replaced the hops and brass with merchandise and other memorabilia from Ron’s early career. He also provided entertainment from abstract memories about Ron’s childhood, stored and mellowed in the barrel of confabulation and folklore that such settings can promote. The consequence was, the Fiddlers, had begun to attract a different kind of clientele, curious weekenders, principally made up of DNA enthusiasts, much to the resentment of the locals who boycotted the pub. The last Susan had heard was that the pub had fallen on hard times, and Ernest was considering selling up.

Tragedy and Frank Wainwright had brought Ron, Redmond and Susan together. Two eight-year olds from a local primary school had drowned one summer in the man-made duck pond in Victoria Park. They had jumped in together holding hands. In response, Mr Wainwright, who at that time worked in the Sports and Recreation Department of the Council had been put in charge of promoting the two municipal baths and developed a programme of swimming lessons for the community’s children. Only three kids turned up for the Friday evening class. Redmond, aged thirteen and newly arrived in England from Ireland had been sent along by his Aunt Deidra. Ron, who was the same age, came along because it was free, and he had nothing else to do. Susan who had already passed her intermediate diving certificate and could swim 100 metres, went along because of her father, who supervised the Friday evening sessions.

Redmond, thin and compact, had been seriously determined to advance beyond the humiliating doggy paddle of his existing knowledge at the first lesson. “Watch Susan,” Mr Wainwright had instructed the two boys. And they had. Susan had ploughed up and down the pool in the navy school costume she hated, which was too large and sagged at the back, self-consciously aware of two pairs of boys eyes watching from the poolside as her body slid froglike through the heavily chlorinated water. Her father then required that Susan show Ron and Redmond how to rescue a brick from the shallow end and later, insisted she practice her life-saving technique by rescuing each of the boys. Susan at this stage in her life was a girl who soaked up romantic stories, from the serials published in her mother’s Woman’s Weekly to the dangerous exploits of ‘Sir Percy Blakeney’ and his ‘Marguerite’. Her mindset was not attuned to rescuing boys. But she did as her father expected.

The rescue of course, had signified touch and an unavoidable requirement to breathe in the strange and strong odours of adolescent maleness that easily penetrated through the chlorine. Under the watchful eye of her father, Susan had shown no emotion as she hooked her right arm around Ron’s bobbing head. She pressed his limp form against hers where she knew he could feel through the thin wool of her swimsuit, the tender mounds of her developing chest.

The experience of being shown how to swim by a girl had failed to put off either boy from returning each Friday for their lesson and their dedication had produced an offer from Susan’s father. The Friday classes were now getting crowded with others eager to learn. Mr Wainwright kept a set of keys for the municipal indoor pool, and suggested he should take Susan and her two new friends for further practice each Sunday afternoon, when it was closed to the general public. This replaced the Friday evening swims. After supervising the session Mr Wainwright would go off to finish some paperwork in the council offices next door, and the kids spent the rest of the afternoon playing pontoon or monopoly in the empty staff canteen.

During this time, Susan learned that Redmond’s parents were dead. Both teachers, they had died on Redmond’s eleventh birthday, drowning after a boating accident off Limone on a holiday to Lake Garda while pursuing the trail DH Lawrence set out in ‘Twilight in Italy. Redmond had been staying with his grandmother in Galway at the time. She had struggled to care for the questioning, demanding boy, but had found it too much, and eventually, Redmond’s extended family had come together with a plan to send him to his mother’s sister Deidra, who had no children of her own, and to support Deidra financially in raising the child in her small house in north London.

The loss of both parents seemed to Susan to be fate’s ultimate betrayal but she learned quickly not to show her sympathies to Redmond, for his anger, not far below the surface, would bubble up without warning, and he would speak sharply. “What do you know? A soft girl with soft words that can have no understanding.” But, when on occasions, he did talk about the death of his parents, he did so shockingly and easily, as if his imagination had stepped into the rowing boat with them, and followed their every movement, even their final struggles for breath, as he looked on, a helpless orphan in waiting, unable to save them. Susan felt it might have helped if he had someone to blame, other than his parents for losing themselves.

Ron’s mother had constantly nagged her husband about the lack of money throughout his childhood, and Ron talked a great deal about getting rich and leaving the deprivation of his life in Glebe House behind as soon as he could. But he had no idea how he was going to do this. Susan found such talk conflicted with her own ideals that upheld material goods to be no substitute for the sustenance of true love. Ron was reticent at first about the reasons for the departure of his mother, mumbling explanations about absence being a temporary matter of no importance. But as the months progressed, Ron began to refer to his mother in the language his father used, bitterly and hideously as ‘the whore’ or the ‘selfish bitch’, and then later, more softly and detached, as under Redmond’s amused tutelage she became simply ‘the Avon lady’.

If the municipal waters provided the element in which all three learned about the rituals of teenage bonding, it was within the rigid structures of the boys Grammar school that Redmond and Ron joined forces as mates. Defunct Friday evening swims with Susan were now translated into ventures that excluded her, but she knew, involved messing about with other girls.

Ron and Susan turned fifteen within a week of each other. Susan tried writing short romantic stories for Woman’s Weekly, stories that always seemed to centre on rescue and redemption. She had moved on from Percy Blakeney to Jane Eyre, and wild men tamed by the love of a good woman. Redmond, older by six months, became increasingly detached and studious as he approached the sixth form, and then, Ron discovered music.

Ultimate Answers to drug addiction and dependency

2004-10-23T10:26:00.000Z

I fear simplicity in the ‘what to do about drugs?’ argument, fails miserably to achieve wider understanding of truths, and that without challenge, old saws become embedded in the vocabulary of those with real influence in the political sphere.

Some say a solution to drug related crime is as simple as supplying heroin and cocaine via the State thus removing the illicit supply chain. Some say the medical and psychiatric attempts to treat addiction must rank among the greatest medical failures of contemporary medicine. This is such a dangerous and one-sided argument. Half-truths can be devastatingly damaging.

Methadone medicine is a part of treatment. It has its uses, but is nowhere near the whole picture of what treatment is.

On drug-related crime: the idea from libertarians goes - if the State was seen to respond to drugs use and misuse entirely as a health issue, the supply chain would dissolve and the drugs barons would disappear from Britain. There is logic in the idea that if many users, who are also low-level dealers, could get their heroin supplies from the State, they would not deal; if all drugs use were decriminalised, crime would fall. Of course, remove the criminality of the drug itself and crime for possession would fall, crime for dealing would fall, and drug-related acquisitive crime would fall. But it would not stop heroin crack and cocaine addiction and dependency. It would not stop the suppliers trying to reach new customers. It would not stop other behavioural crime such as crack-cocaine related violence. It would not stop the crimes that precede drug use as related in the case histories of many users.

History throws some light on the subject.

When doctors in the 1950s and 1960s, had a licence to prescribe heroin, illicit supplies of various drugs were still available- principally to the better off. But licensed doctors supplied so much to registered heroin users, that there was a huge growth in the numbers using, as users sold heroin tablets on to others. There were of course other cultural and environmental factors which contributed to a rise in use.

No one really knows how many heroin and crack cocaine users there now are in this country. Estimates say 500,000. Fifty years ago nobody knew how many opiate users existed, but estimates put it at about 1000 users. The lesson? Dependency and addiction will spread without controls, over time. The market, grown by drugs cartels is a phenomenon of Capitalism.

Another lesson learned from history is that methadone maintenance, the pharmaceutical response to heroin addiction, was not the ultimate answer. The failure to respond with integrated treatment that worked was a failure of medicine and of the State. But until 1996, and the NTORS study from the Maudsley, there was no proven base for what worked in treatment, just unproven theory. Despite this, for more than thirty years prior to NTORS, with a little statutory funding, and private funds raised by the voluntary charitable sector, along with some committed, concerned and visionary members of the medical profession, work continued to find treatment solutions.

Ultimately, we now know, one sure but certain way to reduce supply is to remove the customer base through treatment that works, while working through enforcement and other measures to disrupt and reduce the supply chain. Of course much more needs to be done, but it won’t be done very well as it needs to be, if we don’t fund it properly. It won’t be funded properly if half-truths abound, and stigma continues at high levels, and governments aren’t persuaded of drugs treatment as a priority,

On the subject of health, dependency on heroin is a terrible way to live. Loss of health, loss of job, loss of the capacity to develop emotionally, result. Some people believe that people addicted to heroin should be free to choose how they live as long as they don’t cause pain to others. But many people began use experimentally when too young to choose in a mature way. Should they be abandoned? Additionally, many dependent users have not been able to understand that it is possible to lead a rewarding life away from addiction and dependency.
Should we avoid telling them? Treatment responses engagement and encouragement must be made available always, because it is a matter of human rights. We see too many tragedies, too many people living for drugs rather than living, too many children of drug using parents, affected by parental drug use.

NHS prescribing of pure heroin might seem to be a healthier response than methadone. The methadone chemical is a cheap liquid cosh, is very habit forming, but is useful in early stages of stabilisation. Other drugs are now being introduced such as Subutex and Naltrexone, but even there, some users find they can use heroin and get effects on top.

NHS heroin prescribing would also present its own risks and would not address designer drug supply. I would like to see a stronger emphasis on health routes to treatment, but not delivered entirely in current mainstream services, because they are not responsive enough, and not specialist enough to deal with the whole life issues of the clients.

The nature of heroin use and addiction is not as straightforward as journalists such as yourself and the excellent investigative journalist, Nick Davies of the Guardian would have us believe. Yes prescribing pure heroin would reduce the levels of risk with skin and blood infection, and probably reduce levels of overdose if managed well. But, what would be the cut off point for pure heroin supplied by the State? If at too low levels, you would still find there is a market for adulterated ‘brown’ which would increase the risk of overdose resulting from pure heroin prescribing.

Heroin use not only affects life chances, but also the brain, and the natural tendency is to use at ever increasing levels. There is probably some value in controlled use for those users who are unwilling to take the abstinence route. Some say injection centres would help. These are not new. There was one operating in Camberwell in the 1970s. But do we really want to encourage the intravenous using with all its concomitant medical problems?

Treatment as delivered under the drug strategy is much more rounded than methadone prescribing. To condemn one part of it, it as you have, as a failure of medicine and psychiatry, is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and exclude a whole other universe of treatment including treatment that works that is now offered by professional drug workers in treatment centres, open access and residential rehabilitation

Positing partial views, also risks Government washing its hands of all treatment solutions. It is after all an area of policy that wins few votes.

This is an area of government policy weighted down by stigma. Ill-informed and narrow commentary supported by media, which talks about a war on drugs, by implication is perceived among the populace as a war on drug users, not simply on the suppliers. A war on drugs is also a polemical phrase, which polarises debate between war won and war lost.

Without an understanding of the numbers of people who are being helped to come off drugs, who are being helped to reduce harm to themselves and others, we are in serious danger of failing to raise the hopes and motivations of those who are dependent, and know of no one in their own drug-using sphere who has come off drugs. Such narrow arguments that ignore the success stories and the numbers who come off drugs and change their lives, also seriously risks Government abandoning drug treatment altogether. That is why it so important to deliver understanding of incremental stages of treatment outcomes and case histories to the media, and to continue to deliver increasingly strong data on progress to Government. A person who is dependent on heroin needs to be encouraged by saying that just knocking on the door of a drug treatment agency for help, is making a big step towards change. Such a person needs to know about the stories of others who have changed and moved away from drugs- that it is possible, that life can be lived well without drugs.

So what is treatment if it is not simply about prescribing medication?

When someone has been dependent on heroin for many years, they will have lost a great deal, and to live reasonably well, will often need to have their life chances restored. Treatment that works is about change. It involves talk therapies for psychological problems and extends to restoring education and job training, welfare and housing. Treatment is about removing the triggers and the environmental pressures to use, so people can come to understand it is possible to live without drugs. It is also fair to say that drug addiction and dependency destroys lives at younger ages, and also that people need to be offered treatment as individuals in various forms from early intervention to the intensive therapeutic responses that may be required later on in use. After residential rehabilitation we need on-going care through aftercare support, to plug the gaps in the continuum of care. Relapse is part of treatment. More relapse will occur if there are gaps in care, and this can undermine the value of intensive treatment responses.

Everyone is different, either biologically, in terms of their emotional and mental history, or life circumstances, and so on. That is why a number of different treatment responses based on individual assessment are so important. There are also issues of dual diagnosis to consider in mental health responses.

But this also is not the whole picture. In the UK, unlike the US, we bravely chose to provide the harm reduction support so important to individuals and society. This involves health advice and also stabilisation on methadone to reduce the spread of blood borne disease via intravenous injection. This gives choice to the user who is not and does not want to be engaged in a programme leading to abstinence, or feels unready. It is also one of the reasons why in the UK in the 80s we were able to reduce the spread of HIV. We may be facing a huge rise in Hepatitis C of course, because the chaotic lives of many users means that many people have infected themselves through shared needles as harm reduction centres were developed, or despite their availability. That is why we call it harm reduction, not harm eradication. Again it is about the nature of drug use and its effects which can lead to increasing cycles of chaotic lifestyle.

There is currently no proven pharmacological intervention for crack cocaine use.
You recommend cocaine supply. Would you also really recommend crack cocaine supply on the NHS because crack use has increased also? Its effects are very different to cocaine and presents greater risk. Also, many users combine heroin use with crack use for the different effects. We are also have in the UK a complex picture with polydrug use, with many new designer drugs being used along with alcohol to make the treatment response more complicated.

Complexity should be no reason for failure of response. Complexity should be no reason for failure to comprehend and articulate in journalistic commentary either. By battering at the doors of politicians on this issue as the media does, the complexity is often avoided and replaced with polarised argument, negativity, sensationalism and soundbite. Those in the media with more knowledge, may also think they are talking to people who understand the complexity of addiction. Politicians, with some remarkable exceptions, on the whole do not understand the complexity of addiction and don’t particularly want to. They do understand trends, costs, data and balance sheets and what plays with the electorate. Some also understand that legalisation arguments sell a message to young people reaching the age of experimental use, that drug dependency and addiction is OK.

There is also absolutely no guarantee that even through pure heroin supplies at controlled levels the illicit supply would stop, or to think the drug market would not seek new customers. Of course it will. We would then be faced with the State supplying a fixed amount of pure heroin, at an unknown but undoubtedly high cost to the NHS, to hundreds of thousands of people, with no end in sight. I presume you would agree at this point that other treatment should be offered for those who wanted to get off the drug?

The principal argument posited by libertarians is mainly concerned with drug-related crime levels- and what entering the criminal justice system does to individuals. Remove drug use as a crime, the argument goes, and you remove the criminals, including the supply chain. I wish it were as simple.

Firstly, criminal behaviour often precedes drug use while drug dependency and addiction exacerbates acquisitive crime. Coercive treatment can work well to encourage people to look at what drug use is doing to their lives. But none of this, neither treatment, nor criminal justice responses offer all the solutions. This is because drug use, particularly heroin use, while no respecter of social status, affects one group of people more than any other – those whose lives have been rooted in deprivation and poverty, made worse by neglect, unequal life chances, and often, abuse – who begin experimenting with drugs, often when too young to be mature enough to make informed choices, at aged 13 or 14. Some will then become addicted or dependent on harder drugs at the age of 17 or 18. Many will use drugs and alcohol to avoid feeling pain. This is the context, the big picture. Without massive social change, ultimately we are not going to reduce large numbers of people from becoming dependent or addicted in the future. Ultimately, the solution to drug addiction and dependency is excellent well-funded treatment, supported by wider and deeper understanding of what it can do to change lives.

1. The State of the world :the theft of democracy and the permanent war economy

2004-10-18T14:12:00.000Z

Is the world basically divided into three powerful bands of religious fundamentalists?

Is democracy in Britain and the USA increasingly meaningless while democratisation is a manipulated phrase, no more than a euphemism for American hegemony to hide behind in the efforts to win support?

Is European unity the only way to curb America's transcendant powers?

Is opposition stifled beyond sound in the spun State; within a UK Parliament and the American House of Representatives and Senate, because back bench politicians want to keep their jobs?

Are the forces of the right out of control in America, and was this not the case even under Clinton?

In late September 2002, at the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool, the Rt. Hon Geoff Hoon, Britain’s Secretary of State for Defence, and Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, BBC Governor and former member of the Joint Intelligence Committee, were the VIP speakers at an ill-attended fringe meeting at an out-of-the-way venue. Iraq was on the agenda. The fact that a BBC Governor and a Secretary of State for Defence were there should have been recognised for what it was - the beginning of the PR strategy for war in the UK. Pauline Neville-Jones was instrumental in the sacking of Greg Dyke as BBC DG some 12 months later. Geoff Hoon would have already known that the decision for War had been taken, again some 12 months earlier, and probably before 9/11.

The case was being made for pre-emptive attack and War in the USA and in Britain. This was prior to the published report on WMD and the 45-minute claim.

This was the first time I had thought in any depth about the issue of war with Iraq. I was probably not alone. I asked a muddled question about War in Afghanistan and the opium fields, and the link between production of certain crops upon which Afghanistan depended as an economy. I asked if it was the serious intent of the West to remove the heroin supply chain in the region, or if instead, the priority in terms of international strategy was really going to be preserving oil supply in the Middle East. The essence of the question was:

“Given your comments about Saddam Hussein, Secretary of State, is not the real reason for going to war with Iraq, oil, and would not war destabilise an already unstable middle east?”

Geoff Hoon denied that the War was anything to do with oil and said we had enough oil in the West and other sources for it. Pauline Neville-Jones hedged her bets, but said War could possibly destabilise the Middle East.

It has been clear to me for over a year that there was never just one objective for the Iraq war, but several. The case for War was made on the basis of prime objectives and supplementary objectives.

Two supplementary objectives, which would come to form the basis of public announcements about the reasons for going to War, formed the nub of principal arguments made by the Blair Government. These were the removal of Saddam on the basis of his human rights record and the continued danger posed by WMD to the West.

The ideology behind bot the Blair and Bush positions are personal. They have to believe they are right and fighting a religious war, in order to justify to themselves the consequences of this war. They and their PR advisors are careful not to play this card to strongly at the public interface, but this conviction that they are doing God's work serves as a psychological survival mechanism for both men.

There are others who do not need religion. These are the self serving neo-cons, whose prime motivation for going to War with Iraq was oil for America. Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a threat not only over oil supplies from Iraq itself, but from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The USA’s economic strength and therefore most of its power, is dependent on constant supplies of oil. There are not enough alternative sources of oil to support the economies of the West. What other sources there are, exist in countries such as Venezuela and in Nigeria. It is not enough.

But, even if it were enough, the idea that a strong fundamentalist State might come into being that controls most of the Middle east oil supplies, has long been America's greatest fear.
To have a country, like Iraq, become powerful, and to have a fundamentalist Islamic state in the Middle East, owning most of the oil, in direct opposition to the culture and perceived corruption of the West, was and has long been an unconscionable alternative for the USA. This is one of the reasons why if the people rid themselves of the House of Saud, and of the Government of Kuwait, it could put these countries in a position of unprecedented power. This power would be exercised in direct opposition to the West. It would be used to build nucelar capability.
It is about who controls the oil.

Saddam Hussein’s human rights record, and the murder of many thousands of his own people and of large numbers of vulnerable and innocent Kurds, many of them women and children, would have been a good reason for a UN supported intervention. This intervention might have led to War, it is true, but it would have been in the context of world condemnation, with multiple forces on the basis of human rights, not oil. But human rights was never the main reason for
this war.

The UN is weak, and has been rendered weak by the USA.

Sanctions in Iraq were the accepted response of the UN until 9/11 and until Bush came to power. Sanctions of course, principally affected the poor and the vulnerable civilians of Iraq, not Saddam and his regime. This was the humanitarian argument of people such as Tony Benn and George Galloway to end sanctions and build relationships.

Human Rights issues have rarely if ever been a reason of themselves for the USA to pursue a pre-emptive strike elsewhere in the world, except in Bosnia, where of course, pre-emptive strikes did not occur soon enough. Normally, more selfish reasons are required for the USA to go to War. But all strategy moved from finishing the task in Afghanistan over 9/11 , to Iraq. The argument used was that Saddam harboured terrorists, WMD and expansionist aims. Prevention was not the goal of the USA, but oil was. There was no other principal reason for War.

The Gulf War, under Bush Snr had left unfinished business – most notably, suspicions about Hussein’s weapons programme, which intimated plans were underway to develop a nuclear capability. Saddam Hussein was in this sense, the 'unfinished business', when Bush Jnr came to power. There was a personal reason for Bush Jnr to complete his father’s work if concessions were not won though the sanctions route.

The world is an ever-changing place. The objectives of War change when a nation has a nuclear capability. Pre-emptive strikes could risk nuclear warfare. Iran has nuclear capability, so does North Korea. Negotiation is considered wise in these cases. Israel has long had an unacknowledged nuclear capability.

Jihad, and the history of oppression in Saudi Arabia and its long association with the USA, were the catalyst for a strike on 9/11 by Al Quaida against the USA. Striking at the ‘heart’ of America, was always going to be responded to with determined force. But Terrorism is not easily eradicated by War. Terror is best fought with the three prongs of undercover operations, negotiation with influential Governments and Arab leaders, and by persuasion of powers within the UN. Ultimately, the long-term investment by the West in the Third World, poverty eradication and education to build genuine hope and credibility, are the ways forward. America has been appallingly self-centred in this regard, even under Clinton. So has Britain under Blair, but we have long been a weaker power, subject to a special relationship that emasculates us.

It is a cliche, but worth repeating here, that the principal reason Roosevelt was able to persuade the people of the USA, to enter the Second World War, was the strike by Japan on Pearl Harbour. The USA were the only Power then with a nuclear capacity, and it was used, to grim effect.

Terror can’t be nuclear bombed out of existence without destroying nation states and neighbours, and risking nuclear annihilation around the Globe.

Much of the emotional drive of the neo-conservative War is founded on two historical factors- the insular foreign policy of America and many Americans, and its leaders, and a deep seated traditional fear of the ‘other’ ; in this case, Islamic Fundamentalism. The appalling attack on America by Al Quaida shocked America out of a self-satisfied dream state. The Hawks were let off the leash.

The refusal by the neo-cons to balance their foreign policy with serious efforts to
develop a Middle East peace plan in Palestine, and their mostly unequivocal support for Israel, has resulted in further destabilisation in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Jordan Iran, and among Moslems in Indonesia and in Pakistan.

Enforced regime change in Iraq has meant the murder and maiming of thousands of innocent civilians. Al Quaida cells now operate in Iraq where they hardly existed before.

Islamic Fundamentalism is undoubtedly a huge threat to world stability, and now, it is inevitable that its power and circle of influence will escalate. American foreign policy is also fundamentalist, allowing for little reason, and less mercy. It is supported by massed ranks of the population who have narrow, blinkered, fundamentalist so-called 'christian' views, who are not Christian in their behaviours and who will vote for Bush again.

The USA and Britain and its allies have increased the escalation of War for the future. Power to negotiate and put pressure on America by ‘allies’ and others in the West, can only come from a united Europe. Power respects power as Timothy Garton Ash has so cogently argued.

Future Al Quaida members prepared to kidnap, behead, bomb, and go to Paradise, are being created by mass conditioning of young Arabs in schools that only teach the Koran and nothing else.

No one country can go it alone against American hegemony. We are seeing a manifestation of the permanent war economy. The permanent war economy is an automaton that under capitalism, preserves Power to those that show the greatest fighting strength. It’s effects will be multiple – include human devastation on a massive scale from bombardment, hunger, poverty, barbarism, recession in the West, and the escalation of Terror on both sides. One side will fight in disguise, having stolen the name of 'Democracy' to falsely claim a just and democratic War, the other will reveal itself intermittently via video, a visceral, hideous and delusional Jihad of the Terrorists, which is not 'Holy' at all but is born of history, vengeful hatred, suffering, poverty, ignorance and a gross misinterpretation of the Koran. Terror knows this, and terror will exploit ignorance for its own ends.

The current state of the world shows Capitalism in decline – the descent into barbarism is happening now.

So what is to be done with Blair, with America and the few European allies who support Bush?

Bush will be re-elected. Kerry would not have made very much difference. Blair will be ousted by Spring 2005. America will be isolated. Britain will not have strong leadership. Terror will increase. Fundamentalists will gain supremacy in Iraq. Iran will make a compact with other middle eastern countries. There will be nuclear war in the middle east, beginning in Israel.

Then the remaining world will assess the damage and the UN will become a more powerful world force. Europe will unite to force America to change its foreign policy. Britain will be a small player, having tainted itself with its involvement. In between many millions will die and die terribly.

Ends 18/10/04

Slag Woman of Salford

2004-10-14T13:30:00.000Z

The fossilised form of slag woman
found
embedded in the stone,
flesh substance gone.
Remains:
the contours of her pressured bones,
where, two rough diamonds rested
for her eyes
once melted,
in furnaced sockets.

An atom storm
and coal dust settled
eventually,
on a terraced back street
near the coal tip.
Here, house-proud, weekly polishing
the red step.
In her bed
when all others had flown.
Gone
from the factories and shops
and burned
into sulphur, ash.
A woman traced.
Blown into a universe
this ferried muck -
the ultimate in waste disposal.

The fact that she was the only sign
of life
remains
a mystery to deconstruct
by those who seek the past.
The question was,
what had she been doing in bed
while others practiced
defenstration
Through incalculable blasts?
Was she ill?
Hibernation was not the habit
of humans then.
Or was it?
I know.
Lain in her bed so long
the metal coils of her mattress
welded to her in the blast
as if she willed it.

And the round-ribbed bones, cased.
A curvaceous cephalopod.

No one heard her words
on the night in question,
following the isolation of a fortnight.
Taking to her bed because
she could not bear the pain of the day
or the loss of the man
who went off with another.

Her thoughts, that if she stayed
long enough, she would, could, become
part of the bed, the mattress, the house, the street
the town, the country, the world, the sky.
Ultimately she might be ONE with all of this.

She was right,
in a sense.

Your eyes are like stars
he had told her.
Desire fused
with oblivion.

Would she approve
her surroundings
If she had eyes,
and not transmuted carbon?

Now on display in the life form academy
on the planet Cephalus ,
in the orbit of an unseen star,
she has become, is becoming,
the object of fascination for
countless generations
of young cephalonites eager to learn.

We, who know, know
they will learn nothing.

Edited April 25 2003 and again Aug 3rd 2004

RJ Brocklehurst ©

EYAM

2004-10-14T13:26:00.000Z

It plagued my mind for all that went
three hundred graves and monuments.
No sign but one in churchyard lay,
the rector’s wife he made to stay,
and wrote a letter to his young
in praise of her whom death had won,
some say, to ease his punishment.

Rosie Brocklehurst
Sparrowpit May 2003

The Revisionist Poet Leaves Gravesham

2004-10-14T13:22:00.000Z

I think it must have all started
When they caged up the priest in our town
And outside the Crown, by the bus stop
The Peasants Revolt was put down.

A bizarre and provincial museum
We had not the budget for sense
Malfraggen, Finch-Hale and Chiffenham rooms
Spared logic, and further expense.

All stuffed to the gills with imperial spoil
Great families they drive hard bequests
So we may admire the fine emblems
Of cultures that feathered their nests.

I think of dried birds in our attic
Rare plumage displayed in the dust
No space for a theme, bar historical seams
Of empire fulfilling its lust.

(Poem still in creation by JP Franczak (2004)(C)

Yabbit

2004-10-10T15:14:00.000Z

A soft ball

A toy to play

Velvet at three weeks

Ears pinned back in terror

And me, at three

Old enough to be its mother.

'Yabbit', I cry

As kids will

Getting it wrong.

Adults looking on.

I chase it down the lane

My pet.

Grey fur and heart's pleasure,

legs going like the clappers

And cornered, by the

Oak tree stump

I fell

Down upon the yabbit.

Big girl. Clumsy.

Bad girl.

Can we mend it

Like the one-eyed doll,

With cow gum and sticky plaster?

My bobtailed bunny.

Bad for ever now.

Swoosh,swipe, red cheek burning,

Eyes wet.

Into the pillow -down I cried.

Yabbit!

Swoosh, swipe, again. Tossing me against

the wall.

Upside down 'til my knickers showed.

I said no daddy. No. I am not the Yabbit.

When Daddy carrying sister Sue

down steep stairs

Trod on the kitten and broke its back,

they put it into the gas over to

end its misery

Small things break easy.

I am not dead from Carthage

2004-10-10T14:51:00.000Z

I am not dead from Carthage
That Rome erased.
I shall not slump below deck,
Tired beyond reason from trireme oaring
Along a foreign shore,
Be stolen from a Cornish village,
Or forced to understand what’s meant
By plundering and pillage.

But I still know their method,
While I have skirted death each year,
Each fraction of an hour.

My death did not come before I learned to breathe,
Or a few gasps beyond.
A smothered firstborn puny bag of bones.
How have I learned to live my long time,
Seeing, through great gulps of air.

I was not piked upon a hill.
Gut-hung upon a tree trunk, pared fine like a pencil,
Or separated brain from pretty figurine,
The executioner blading his finger
That I might feel the breath of oblivion
before sliced meat.

See this new image. A monster-soldier.
Wraps the grey blindfold around her eyes.
Tenderly? So he could not watch her standing
Before the open grave?

Like me, do you watch for signs of death,
Hoping to pass away unknown in the night?

(C)RJ Brocklehurst 2004

Nature notes and queries

2004-10-10T14:45:00.000Z

Could I tell of nature's burgeoning
Her mindless will, her appetite,
If all I feel is nature's spite?
Or speak of crystal waters falling
As rivulets to deltas calling
If, in the flow, I am not drowning?
And spring a coloured word to white,
Imagine Summer's soul in flight,
When all my seasons pass in night?

(c) RJ Brocklehurst 2003

Destiny (From: Poems of violence and abuse 1992)

2004-10-10T12:54:00.000Z

We met on the day of your last mourning
Your love had gone where there is no returning
You, blinded by your lost possession.
Me talking endlessly about obsession.
You felt the quality of my grief,
Sizing up flaws, the neediness beneath.
Your heart, unseeing, plundering my eyes,
My eyes, opaque with unresolved desires,
We looked for common ground, not difference.
While I mistook the tone of brogued mellifluence.

We failed to sleep. Talked until dawn instead,
While I painted your portrait inside my head.
The rightness of this meeting, so I claimed,
Was Gods reward for the deserving maimed.

The next stage was to live together.
You packed your bags. Came South of the River.
I timid to your judgement, and your history
Constructed idyllic domesticity,
My weaknesses concealed and thirst abating
In the seductive waters of first mating.

How little time it took for tides to turn
That moment, when my needs were not returned.
The first withdrawal of your affections store
Doled out, like sweets. So much and then, no more.
Is love supposed to feel as dark as this?
Behaviour auctioned, bartered for a kiss?
Not knowing when to smile, hold back my tears,
Interpreted as weapons by your fears.

Followed the day, all women you had loved were named
Schemers and whores. When all your sorrows, blamed,
On sorcery and witches.
I yearned to prove you wrong, as women-wise,
Know witches are just victims in disguise.

The Second Act played to a house half-filled
When you left. I had failed to keep you thrilled
But, at the moment I prepared to latch the door
You called, and begged to try again once more.
And wooed me with the love songs you had sung
To another.

I thought I could change you with my will, that power.
But it was me it possessed. Me it devoured.

In bed, lying tense to sleeping rhythm's verse,
You dreamed alone. I dreamed for both of us.
Together, like curtains shutting out the light
When the sun rose on a less than perfect night
My body bruised by your untouching hands
Skin merged with sheet upon a wasted land

Then you fell. Placed between cotton, cool as ice.
Bleeding from the cut of a surgeon's knife.
The purple scar of your wound. The threat of death.
Whose name would you call with your last breath?

Would fate allow one phrase to be engraved.
Must the world end once destiny's betrayed?
And we write for journeys lovers make, a guide,
Warning - ' we love best, those for whom we'd die'.

(C) RJ Brocklehurst 1992

Romance (From poems of violence and abuse 1992)

2004-10-10T12:45:00.000Z

In the rat patch
Where the bull-headed
Serpents weave
I crouch on haunches
Behind the lily flower,
Not to be seen

The monster-headed idol
Sucks me out.
Into the wooded shack I go
Pulled by ropes around
My clock.

After the fall I float
Ceilingward
Size-conscious,as the Hindenburg.
Unedged.
Feeling God-touched.

Buried in the sandgrit mounds
I dream green snakes and
Witness frogs.
Sea-worms bore black holes
down under.
Spaces too small to follow.

In the secret pinked-hollow
Where I lie, a blooded Princess,
Reach down warps to call
On King's whores.
Affirm myself.

In the dusk of a brutal day,
I find the night owl-mother
Crumbling me
With her dumb malevolence.

Against the bramble tree
I cleave, shaken and stirred
By touching hands.
Snakes bite my Ark.

By the flystream I wait.
Wind slithers the hot coil from its lair.
He comes. Clock ticking. Feet bound,
To the witch-novice.

(C)RJ Brocklehurst 1992

Orang-u-tang

2004-10-10T12:08:00.000Z

I had a boyfriend I recall.
He had a picture on his wall
of the biggest woman in the world.
It reached from the front room
to the hall.

The belly flop, the jellied thighs,
the sagging breasts. he liked her size.
Art's flesh no doubt had stirred desires.
In-situ flesh put out his fires.

Her wayward hormones, buttock mounds,
they please him. But with me he's found
no pleasure in the plump or round.
"You're looking awfully fat" he frowned.

"That picture there. That woman's huge.
She turns you on. I know it's true."

"You like the orang-u-tangs in the zoo,
but you'd not take one to bed with you."

(c) RJ Brocklehurst 1996

Old Cars

2004-10-10T11:52:00.000Z

A white Ford van goes speeding by
Today, I've spotted twenty-five
And still, the feeling is the same
Of hope, and sadness then of pain.
I'll never learn.
Old lovers don't drive back again.

I see them all, from day to day
On busy streeets
And motorways,
around the bend,
on dim highways.
Like landmarks in a life replayed.
Unlike their love
Old cars don't fade

A Morris Minor has the power
To make me stop.
I always scour the driver's side.
Unlikely though it could be him,
You never know.
And just in case, old friend,
I look.
But no.

A sixties model, renovated,
Bumper bright and silver-plated.
Might you yet open your door?
Take me for a ride, like you did before?
I believed you old man.
Not any more.

When my body failed it's MOT
They all chose someone else.
Not me.
I've yet to fail my driving test,
so rev my engine.
For at best, there's a few miles yet
old girl,
A few miles left.

Mechanic wanted.
Visonary.
To smooth my rusted underbelly.
Fix my parts,
Rough hands inspire,
Ignition sparks.
And don't forget to pump my tyres.
Spare me the breakers young man -
Solder my wires.

(C) RJ Brocklehurst 1992

Unlucky

2004-10-10T11:47:00.000Z

You thought you were unlucky
But then you did not see
After you turned the corner
The bus ran into me

(c)RJ Brocklehurst 2003

If He Rings

2004-10-10T11:30:00.000Z

If he rings
I will be out
Having a good time
A fine old time

If he rings
I might be in
Unable to come to the phone
Right now

If ever he should ring
Should I ask
Why he stood me up
And never called

He might ring
If I hold my breath
And count to ten

Or call,
If I pray, and say
I will never sin again
Or ask for anything

Just one more time

Will you ever ring again?

(c) RJ Brocklehurst April, 1996

Elasticated Wastelands

2004-10-10T11:18:00.002Z

Where go big knickers cast aside
By bottoms now no longer wide?
And woollen navy knickers hide
Once school ends.
To a landfill site?
Or to a refuge above ground
Where loyal waistbands may be found
To end their days beside spare tyres,
worn treads and fabric long expired.

(c)RJ Brocklehurst 2003

PLUM

2004-10-10T10:48:00.000Z

The damson, jealous of the plum
More popular by far
Should be aware that some plums end
As prunes within a jar.

(c) RJ Brocklehurst 2003