BAD IDEA 5 by Jack Roberts

9771751915004

ISSN 1751-9152

Made in the UK

ISSUE 5 // WINTER 07/08 // ÂŁ4.50

Real Life, True Stories: The Little Magazine That Matters

Dea Exte dline n 07/0 ded! 1/08

Credits EDITORIAL Founding Editor Jack Roberts jack@badidea.co.uk Editor Daniel Stacey dan@badidea.co.uk Art Director Steve Sawyer steve@scs76.co.uk Chief Photographer Sebastian Meyer sebastian@sebmeyer.com Front Section Editor Alyssa McDonald alyssa@badidea.co.uk

Confessions Editor Jean Hannah Edelstein jean.edelstein@gmail.com Editorial Interns Daniel Howie no-quarter@hotmail.com Jonathan Aye jonathan.aye@stcatz.ox.ac.uk Thomas Stogdon tdots@hotmail.co.uk Marketing and Advertising Director Jonny Birkett jonny@badideaa.co.uk Events Simone Radclyffe simone@badideaa.co.uk

CONTRIBUTORS Writers Laura Barton www.guardian.co.uk Travis Beard www.argusphotography.com Sachi Cunningham www.reelblue.net Harry Deansway harrydeansway@gmail.com Jean Hannah Edelstein jean.edelstein@gmail.com Lauren Gard info@badidea.co.uk Nikhil Gomes nikhil.gomes@gmail.com Oliver Harris oliharris801@hotmail.com Irena Karpa irenakarpa@gmail.com Catherine Langford info@badidea.co.uk Alyssa McDonald alyssa@badidea.co.uk Sebastian Meyer sebastian@sebmeyer.com Amanda Richards info@badidea.co.uk Jack Roberts jack@badidea.co.uk Mark Seager www.markseager.com Daniel Stacey dan@badidea.co.uk Tat Usher tatsan@clara.co.uk John Williams info@badidea.co.uk

Artists and Illustrators Jussi Brightmore www.bluedotdotdot.com Chris Bianchi www.legun.co.uk Bill Bragg www.legun.co.uk Jenny Bull www.myspace.com/12415698 Tony Easley www.nascentideas.com Robert Greene www.therubbishmen.com Georgia Harrison georgia.harrison@gmail.com Steph von Reiswitz www.legun.co.uk Sam Sparrow info@behindmydoor.com Comics Mendozza y Caramba www.africacomics.net Paddy Malloy imtalkingtopaddy@yahoo.co.uk Photographers Mimi Chakarova www.mclight.com David Foster dpfoster@gmail.com Amy Hall www.amyhallphoto.co.uk Monica Jackiewicz monicajackiewicz@mac.com Sebastian Meyer sebastian@sebmeyer.com Leon Neal www.leonneal.com Lydia Polzer info@badidea.co.uk Mark Seager www.markseager.com Ramin Talaie www.argusphotography.com

Published by Good Publishing Ltd. / www.goodpublishing.co.uk Printed by JimĂŠnez Godoy, Spain / www.jimenezgodoy.com Special Thanks to John Allan, Charlotte Ashworth, James Ashworth, Leona Baker, Polly Barker, Charles Beckett, Lowell Bergman, Chris Bianchi, Namalee Bolle, Natalie Brady, Joe Brewer, Tom Bromley, The Brian Jacket Letdown, Sarah Broom, Melissa Calavan, Stef Calcraft, Charlie Campbell, Grace Campbell, Julian Carrera, Ben Caulfield, Scott Cawley, Bob Ciano, Harry, Richard & Sarah C-T, Lauren Cochrane, Sam Copeland, Emma Cromwell, David Cross, Harry Deansway, Glenn Dennis, Ed deVroome, Henry deVroome, Helen Donohue, Clay Felker, Peter Fraser, Anna Goodall & Penpusher magazine, Paul Gravett, Rebecca Gray, Green Gartside & Scritti Politti, Susan Greenberg, Paul Griffiths, Stephanie Grodin, Mark Gubb, Amy Hall, Nancy Harrison, Sharon Hemans, Chris Houghton, Andy Hounslow, Ben Kay, Pat Kuhn, Christian Lane, Kirsty Lang, Lennie Lee, Aki Lehtinen, Lydia Lewis, Maxine Lister , Chloe Longstaff, Gavin MacFadyen,

Irma Maranon Marika Mauri, James McDonald, Lou McLeod, Madeleine McLeod, Danny Miller, Nick Mills, Iain Mitchell, The Moore Family, Philip Moore, Patrick Neate, David Peace, Lally Pearson, Charlie Phillips, Polly Powell, Heydon Prowse, Dan Radclyffe, Andrea Marchesini Reggiani, Troy Rice, Naomi RichmondSwift, Gwynne Roberts, Tom Roberts, Alex Robinson, Jenni Sato, Francesca Sears, Gail Sheehy, Anushka Sinha, Wesley Stace, The Staceys, Federica Tagliani, Daniel Trilling, GĂźnter Wallraff, Simon Wheatley, Max Wheeler, Zoe Whitley, Dom Williams, Joel Wykeham, Sadie Wykeham

Special Mentions Anova Books www.chrysalisbooks.com Comica @ The ICA www.ica.org.uk The Fix magazine www.thefixonline.com Foto 8 magazine www.foto8.com

FourDocs www.channel4.com/fourdocs Friday Late @ the V&A www.vam.ac.uk/collections/ contemporary Le Book www.lebook.com Little White Lies magazine www.littlewhitelies.co.uk Multilink magazine www.multilinkmagazine.com Penpusher magazine www.penpushermagazine.co.uk Plan B magazine www.planbmag.com Portico Books www.porticobooks.co.uk RW Films www.rwfilms.co.uk Stones Throw Records www.stonesthrow.com Super Super magazine www.thesupersuper.com Team Diageo www.teamdiageo.com V&A Friday Late www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/events/ friday_evenings/ Vertigo magazine www.vertigomagazine.co.uk Warchild www.warchild.org.uk

www.badidea.co.uk GOOD PUBLISHING LTD, Floor 4, Shacklewell Studios, 18-24 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London E8 2EZ. Tel: +00 44 (0) 207 690 0118 The views expressed in BAD IDEA are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the editors or Good Publishing LTD. If you would like to contribute to BAD IDEA, or if you just have a good story to tell, please write to editorial@badidea.co.uk For all advertising and marketing enquiries, please contact Jonny Birkett / +00 44 (0) 1926 633 463 / jonny@badidea.co.uk For any other enquiries about BAD IDEA and its contributors please contact info@badidea.co.uk

Editorial L

ife. So many roads, so many choices… all of them ending in Death. Here it comes, here it comes, the giant, terrifying, noiseless monster. The beast with no face, the silent scream, the black cocoon, Grandpa Juju, the bottomless hole, the unavoidable, interminable nothing. But there’s life after death, after ours, after our friends’, after our family’s: the grievers, the embalmers, the carers, the cemetery managers and the wounded soldiers. In this issue we go to the source to look for contemporary attitudes towards death. At an international funeral directors we find undertakers arranging to have their clients buried at sea on top of the Titanic; at the coroner’s courts personal grief and cold administrative machinery lock arms in a daily dance, as the stories of troubled endings and tortured families are quietly unravelled; and in Staffordshire, a memorial is erected for every soldier who died since the Second World War. Do stress related suicides count? There is always life after death, or, more precisely, there is death in our lives. Our reactions to death, how we memorialise and celebrate it, are modern manifestations of fear, mortality, purpose, belief, faith. All roads end in the Big Nothing, but there are plenty of ways to travel

Story

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CONTENTS BAD IDEA // ISSUE 5 // WINTER 2007-08

OUT OF THE ORDINARY 9

Travis Beard / Harry Deansway Nikhil Gomes / Catherine Langford Alyssa McDonald / Sebastian Meyer Amanda Richards / Jack Roberts Ramin Talaie / Tat Usher

TELL IT LIKE A STORY

118

The Death Files Laura Barton

Death of a Soldier Mark Seager

Remember Me? Oliver Harris

Confessions 1: Igor Mitukov

First Date Mendozza y Caramba

Thinking Inside the Box Jack Roberts

Madeleine Special Report

“Does It Come In Black?” Sebastian Meyer

Confessions 2: Julie Dunk

The Honeytrapper Lauren Gard

Quarter-life Crisis Paddy Malloy

CULTURAL REVELATIONS 106

Arabian Vice Sachi Cunnigham

110

The Paper Curtain Daniel Stacey

114

The Death Of Peter Fechter Mark Gubb interviewed by Jack Roberts

118

In Search of Michael X John Williams

124

I Killed Britney Spears Jean Hannah Edelstein

130

Back Story: Deadly PR Leon Neal

130

Cover Illustration: Chris Bianchi Logotype: Mike Perry Title Pages: Bill Bragg 7

Story

Out Of The Ordinary

Short Struggles With A Malevolent Universe Myths of Burial • Carpathian Mountains • Ann Widdecombe Families of the Deceased • Afghan Skate School • Liquefied Tortoise

Sebastian Meyer

Death, Respawn

By Nikhil Gomes We sat hunched on the sofas, transfixed on the TV. Laser, Winker-with-an-A and me. It was gone one in the morning and we’d been out for a quiet drink in The Champ, which had dice-rolled into a few cocktails in the Maypole. We were drunk. Silent, teeth gritted, eyes focussed on the screen, our thumbs rapidly hammered away at the undersized GameCube pads in our hands. We’d only got a GameCube because Laser loved Zelda, but ever since we discovered Smash Bros. we’d all become addicted. An ultra-fast platform fighter in which classic characters from Nintendo’s past beat each other across and off the screen, it was a game constructed around a gluttony of death, and beat drinking six Red Bulls mixed with a crushed packet’s worth of Pro Plus, chased down with an espresso. “Do you ever wonder whether 10

all this death devalues the real thing?” Winker-with-an-A was losing. He only chatted when he was losing, an attempt to distract us. I didn’t reply – Laser was winning and I always had to be better than him. “No really, it’s just death, respawn, death, respawn, a pointless, endless loop.” Laser laughed. “That’s only because you’re playing so badly that you’re not getting any kills.” That shut Winker-with-anA up, and he unleashed his strongest attack upon Laser’s screen persona, allowing me to nip in and kill them both. My character was alone on screen and so taunted his dead opponents. And in those short seconds where my character belittled death, it struck me that maybe Winkerwith-an-A was right. We’re the generation that has grown up with death as an inconvenience,

an automatic kickback to the last save point from where you could run headlong into death again, the generation for whom ideas of everlasting life through computer coded selves inhabits the gap between science and fiction, the generation whose parents will live long and fairly healthily while we choke our arteries with fat, the generation that killed Captain America but brought back Bucky, the generation who believe Kurt, Tupac, Richie Manic and Biggie are all still alive, the generation for whom suicide bombings are no longer worth putting on the evening news. Death means nothing to us. I opened my mouth but Laser smashed my pixelated body far off the screen and only obscenities coloured the air. As I waited to respawn I remembered that the US army uses first person shooters to entice new recruits

Soapbox Visionaries

Robert Greene

Where to Next? Irena Karpa, 26, Ukrainian blockbuster author and host of MTV Ukraine, says the new offbeat winter destination is a Soviet-style ski trip to the Carpathian Mountains… “I still remember the Soviet era skijump competitions held in Vorohta village, in Ivano-frankivs region. If you really want some cool oldfashioned skiing they’re still open. The brand new Bukovel resort opened a couple of years ago, but for my taste it’s a bit too sterile: too much comme-il-faut. I much prefer Dragobrat: small, nice cottages, good food, lower prices for rentals and lift passes. Take the small town of Yaremcha as a base. At the weekend you can go to discos, and every night in the ‘on’ season you’ll meet a lot of tourists who are mainly from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic. It’s cheaper than Austria and safer than Russia. Otherwise, you can enjoy hot wine, watching the mountains from your window, having short walks or horse riding, visiting old churches and monasteries around Manyava, making snow sculptures or losing yourself in a forest. Get to Yaremcha from Kiev by bus or train, or catch a bus from Lviv.”

Sebastian Meyer

Stop Your Squabbling 70% of the UK’s politicians are men, and the World Economic Forum estimates it will take 200 years to even out. The Fawcett Society’s Equal Power 2028 campaign is lobbying MPs to use allwomen shortlists and get the job done in a tenth of the time. Does hands-on, chilled out politics await? The Society’s director Dr Katherine Rake explains… “I’m just on way to pick up my son, so I’ll have to be quick, is that all right? OK - the reality is that men make most major political decisions. But really it cheats everyone; talented women face difficulties breaking through the glass ceiling, but the lack of diversity of perspective amongst the people in power affects the whole populace. Women politicians tend to spend more time on constituency work and getting things done rather than being confrontational. So more women in parliament will make politics more engaged with individuals, more meaningful in everyday life. You might be feeling stressed because you’re running between your job and childcare – like I am now – or unsafe walking around the streets, and these are issues that women will get onto the agenda. They will bring us closer to social justice.”

Googlevision Between July and September 2007 Google overtook ITV as the UK’s top company for advertising revenues, mainly through selling sponsored search slots. Now it wants to hoover up television ad budgets as well. Advertising expert Niku Banaie from Naked Communications tells us why terrestrial channels have a fight on their hands… “Traditional channels like ITV and Channel 4 face a challenge; people want to watch programmes when they want them, they want to pause live programmes, and they want to store content. TV companies have been slow to adapt to these simple behaviours, but for the online guys it’s second nature. Google are currently developing ‘social and interactive television applications for mass personalisation’, which basically means TV fusing with the Internet, and TV becoming more social, interactive, and centred around personal behaviour. Once they set this up, it’s going to become difficult for traditional TV broadcasters. Sometimes you sit watching ads in a TV commercial break thinking ‘Why the fuck am I watching that? Why is that even being fed to me at this time?’ Google say this won’t happen with their online TV advertising: they’ll know more about user behaviour, the stuff you watch, and about you as a person. With targeted ads like that, it’s a no brainer for advertisers really.” 11

Notes from a BAD Planet

Iran

Afghanistan

Persepolis Clinic in southern Tehran was the first NGO of its kind in Iran, providing free hypodermic needles and blood tests to drug users. Here a medical technician takes blood from a homeless man. Originally funded privately by a local doctor, Persepolis now receives support from UNAIDS and the Iranian Health Ministry. A hit of heroin in Tehran currently costs about £1, and Iran is beginning to face up to the spread of AIDS amongst users, quietly softening its approach to drug addicts. Ramin Talaie

Me and two other expats wanted to start the first Afghan skateboarding school, but couldn’t find a good place in Kabul’s heavily bombed streets. Friends of ours told us about the smooth floor at Ghazi Stadium, used under Taliban rule as a torture/execution arena. The local police chief gave us permission so we set up our school there, and as the boys improved and the spectators grew we needed new places to skate, as you can see. Travis Beard

Ukraine The night of the Ukrainian parliamentary elections this year, I was at Yulia Tymoshenko’s campaign dinner. Exit polls had just been released, showing she was likely to become the new prime minister. Part of her platform is quite a nationalist, anti-Russian outlook. Always up for a publicity stunt, she stopped her victory speech halfway through to receive a congratulatory phone call from the president of Georgia, who five days previous had heavily criticised Russia at the UN. Two days later Russia’s Gazprom demanded Ukraine pay £650 million in gas debts. Sebastian Meyer

Mongolia In 1937 Communist leader General Choibalsam, under the influence of Stalin, ordered the removal of all “enemies of the people.” Buddhism was deemed such a threat; 1500 Buddhist monasteries were decimated and 17,000 monks displaced or killed. In 2007 I travelled the countryside with researchers and senior monks – now well into their seventies – who survived the Purges, to capture the last living memories of this relatively unknown period in Mongolia’s turbulent history. In this picture you can just the stones and foundation furrows of a destroyed monastery. Catherine Langford

Sam Sparrow 00

The Professional Classes

Houses of Cards Mark, our industry insider in the financial sector, fills us in on the subprime crimes of recent months… A subprime mortgage is money lent to someone who can’t pay it back, to buy a house they can’t afford. If you’re a mortgage broker, this is great, as you can legally lend to these people, leading to more customers, and more commissions. These junk mortgages can then be bundled up together and sold as a bond to an investor. If you bundle them in with more legitimate stuff you make a product (CDO) with a higher credit rating: another great business as you can sell cheap, risky debt as expensive looking safe debt. The music only stops when people continuously default on the mortgage they can’t afford and the bonds stop paying a yield. A lot of the people in the sub prime/CDO business chain will then be out of a job, but the salaries they drew out of that pyramid scheme before it tumbled were pretty impressive. The US government cuts interest rates to calm the situation and aid those subprime homeowners who haven’t lost their homes yet. In this fool’s paradise, it’s the conservative investor that loses their shirt. 14

Doctoring How do you declare someone dead? Resident medical columnist and trainee doctor Samantha, 28, fills us in… Medicine is about pattern recognition and once you’ve seen that gaunt, indrawn look and the slight discolouration of the skin a couple of times there really is no mistaking it. Your patient is dead. Still, there is paperwork to fill in, and you’d better do it right, because if the civil authorities are not satisfied with the death certificate the funeral of the patient can be delayed. Not an ideal situation for a grieving family. As I listen for sounds from the heart or in the lungs, often all I can hear is the faint buzzing of the neon lights and the nurses shuffling outside. Once, with my stethoscope upon a deceased patient’s chest, the daughter who had remained present asked me what I could hear. Another time, after I had finished pronouncing death, the family arrived in extreme distress. They staggered into the room, slurring their words and then one of the sons screamed as he swore blind that he had just seen his father move.

Under the Microscope Douglas, who studies the deadly bacteria E. Coli 0157, says vegetarians should watch out for hamburger disease… and remember to clean mum’s fridge. The bacteria I study, E. Coli 0157, is often referred to as the ‘hamburger disease’, which is a bit of a misnomer given that a lot of E. Coli food poisoning happens when people eat things like spinach. Salad can be a major problem because it comes into contact with animal faeces in the fields, and then transfers the bacteria. So even vegetarians can catch the bacteria, and I think the popular name is a bit unfair to hamburgers honestly. I still eat beef – it’s actually not a problem to eat meat as long as you prepare it properly. I suppose my job does make me a little paranoid about hygiene though: my hot tap is always set to boil, I scrub the chopping board pretty vigorously after each use, and re-bag any chicken I buy. When I go around to mum’s house I re-arrange her fridge, throwing away anything out of date, putting the meat at the bottom of the rather than the top. She kicks up a fuss, but I’m just trying to keep her alive.

Sebastian Meyer

Losing the Plot

By Jack Roberts “Why hello there! Are you here for ‘NaNoWriMo’? You are? Great! Come through.” Tavis grips my hand then leads me to the back of The Goldhawk, a west London pub beloved of young BBC trendies. We perch in a booth at the back, as a nearby blackboard advertises designer pilsner and £10 brunches alongside the following chalk scrawl: HAVE YOU EVER SAID “ONE DAY I WANT TO WRITE A NOVEL?” WELL, YOUR “ONE DAY” IS HERE. NOVEMBER IS NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH. This Saturday morning, affable gay Pennsylvanian Tavis is launching a pub-writing workshop in association with NaNoWriMo, an American group-writing organisation. Run by Oakland resident Chris Baty since 1999, the aim of NaNoWriMo is to make competitors write 50,000 words in the month of November, then register and upload a finished

novel to their website. Baty writes on the NaNoWriMo website that, “The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly. Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing.” Um… Whimsical in extremis, NaNoWriMo is also popular: 79,000 participants registered in 2006. West London is less enthusiastic though and today the two of us are the only players. Taking advantage of staff privileges, Tavis shouts me a cappuccino before settling at his laptop. ‘Tick-tick-tick,’ go the keys. I stare at the computer screen and have a go at bashing semispontaneous gibberish into the computer. My interest wanes after 30 seconds, and I feel a cold depression coming on. Guilt compels me to stay just a little longer though – the coffee was free, after all. Half an hour later, vague

daydreams of a Tarzan-style exit are broken by the arrival of Alistair, a thirtysomething stubblehead. He declares his novel a fanciful Victorian farce. “That sounds great. My one is verbal diarrhoea mainly,” says Tavis. “What’s it about then?” “It follows the adventures of a dungeon master who leads a team of adventurers through an imaginary role-playing game. The dungeon master is me basically.” “Yeah?” “I wanted to come up with something leftfield so I wouldn’t have to concern myself with the story making any sense.” That’s enough for me. I make excuses and ruffle my things. Alistair looks up in mild disdain, but Tavis isn’t buying my exit. “Oh, come on! You only win if you make it to the end – it’s like a therapist’s board game…” Check mate

Fountain of Truth

“Firstly, I’m a genius. Musically, culturally, everything. I’ve written two more albums. I’m writing a film in which I’m going to star in and I’m writing the soundtrack. I can’t stop. I’ve got stacks of songs, it’s just a case of getting them out there. It’s like [Bob Dylan and The Band’s] The Basement Tapes: it took years for people to hear them... Compared to the Razorlight album Dylan is making the chips. I’m drinking champagne.” Johnny Borrell –lead singer of Razorlight “If you are not a crooner it’s something you don’t want to be called. No crooner has the range I have. I can hit notes a bank couldn’t cash. What I am is a contemporary singer, a stylised performer.” Engelbert Humperdinck – crooner

Sebastian Meyer

Jenny Bull

Afterlife… Ann Widdecombe tells us why she’s forsaking frontline politics to write romance novels “Politics is the second great love of my life; writing is the first, but for a long time it got pushed out of the way. But with the election of Blair, I went from having a very high-pressure job on the Conservative front bench to being a backbencher, which of course gave me a lot more time to focus on my novels. Since then, many people have congratulated me on the quality of my books. They say they’re very clear and easy to read. My books don’t have sex in them. They do have romance, but I am not in control of it: the characters have complete agency, and they will often go and fall in love when I least expect it. At the end of one of my books, as a complete surprise to me, two of my characters got married. The love story developed out of my control. That’s the central way in which writing fiction is different from writing in politics: in speechwriting you have a great deal of control over what you are saying and the message you are trying to put across. But when I sit down to write a novel, I have no more than a vague idea of what is going to happen.”

Sebastian Meyer

Pop Hubris “My greatest competition is, well, me… I’m the Ali of today. I’m the Marvin Gaye of today. I’m the Bob Marley of today. I’m the Martin Luther King, or all the other greats that have come before us. And a lot of people are starting to realise that now.” R. Kelly – the self-proclaimed ‘King of R&B’

Gravely Mistaken Can you ‘Rest in Peace’? The term “Rest in Peace” is a phrase often seen on tombstones, where it’s commonly abbreviated to “R. I. P.” The expression comes from the Latin requiescat in pace, and often carries the religious overtone that the deceased rest peacefully until Judgement Day arrives. These days though, at least for those of us who live in Britain, it’s increasingly unlikely our bodies will ‘rest in peace’. For some time, grave space in our crowded city cemeteries has been at a premium, causing an attendant inflation in grave prices. In an effort to combat the problem, Harriet Harman (now deputy prime minister) announced new burial law reforms in June, authorising the re-use of any grave over 100 years old that shows clear evidence of no longer being visited; skeletal remains will be removed from exhumed coffins, and put into smaller boxes. Each box will be placed at the bottom of the newly deepened gravesite, leaving space above for more bodies to be buried.

When Dad Dies

By Amanda Richards Approximately twenty years before I learned dad had an estimated eight years to live, I told him, “When you die, you will look like this.” Mouth and eyes wide open, I wagged my head until he scooped me up and said, “Bedtime, you.” How do people actually look when they die? Bill, an octogenarian I befriended sophomore year at university, appeared badly bruised. Hands on his, I tried not to stare at the purple mass that spanned his shoulder and chest. He sobbed quietly, tearlessly. He had dried up. Karen Kristin, my dance teacher, dragged her oxygen tank up East 64th Street. I admired her pixie do and she patted where she once styled her bun. In her eyes, I read peace: the glimmer that yogis (suspect ones) and mothers-to-be radiate. She said, “Live for the moment.” I nodded when I should have asked how. Once dad told us he had

Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia – cancer of the lymphocytes, treatable, not curable – mom sometimes cried suddenly. But she echoed Karen Kristin. “In some ways this is a blessing, Mandy. We live for today.” How? What I noticed was that if dad snapped or bullied, or, as he once joked “had a beer in the AM,” she remained composed, gentle and patient. “You love well,” I told mom. “I hope to love Marko so well.” “So you asked Marko to propose? And he did, and you accepted?” she asked. “I live for the moment.” Before the ceremony, I asked dad, “You ready? For our entrance? Our big moment?” I expected dad to say, “love you, kid” or quote Shakespeare or Einstein, “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love,” or something funny or wise. But he murmured, “Did you tell

anyone? About my illness?” “No.” But probably people had guessed. He had postponed chemotherapy for Marko and me, and the abnormal lymphocytes in his glands had caused his neck to swell nearly past his ears. Plus he tended to “rest his eyes” every time he sat. “Because your grandparents said I looked strange.” “I heard Grammie tell Gramps you only looked strange because you didn’t shave.” Dad smiled up to his nostrils. His eyes seemed distant, dead. Today dad is slender, pale and minus muscle mass. Shirtless, his spine and shoulder blades protrude dreadfully. So I focus on his eyes. I see weariness, scepticism, humour, a great dad, and more life than I can currently comprehend. But what about when the chemo eventually kills him? How will he look then?

Family Roundtable: Nan’s Last Wishes

By Alyssa McDonald SYD: Nan had a stroke the night I left to go travelling. For about six weeks I travelled all around Thailand and they didn’t tell me she’d died. I couldn’t believe it when I found out; she’d been in the ground for weeks and nobody had told me. But Nan had said she didn’t want me to come back for her. And in Australia I met my husband and started my career. None of that would have happened if they’d told me. During the year, Mum called me about putting something on the headstone – there was a lyric from a song by The The that I’d chatted to Nan about – “love is stronger than death” – and we used that. So she’s the coolest wrinkly in the graveyard.

DICKY: On the night, I went with Syd to the airport, and got home late. I woke up the next morning hearing my step dad going “ROSE! ROSE!” trying to wake my Nan up. They called an ambulance, and they came and took her away on a stretcher. And I stayed in bed. I don’t really know why, whether it was because I was scared or if I just thought I’d get in the way. Maybe it was that and cowardice. Later Mum asked if I wanted to go to the hospital and I opted not to. After Nan died, mum was really strong, I regret not giving her more support. I didn’t miss Nan as much as the others, and I felt like I should miss her.

JOSIE: After Syd’s goodbye party I was going back to college, I kept saying to Nan, “See you at Easter”, and she kept saying, “We’ll see.” When Mum phoned to say Nanny had had a stroke, I said I’d come back, but Mum said Nanny had written a note saying “too far”. She died a couple of days after that. I did feel terribly guilty, I wished I’d seen her in the hospital but Mum said Nan didn’t want me to. The funeral was the next Friday. I did speak to Syd that day, but I didn’t tell her, it was really difficult. I probably needed Mum to tell me not to bring Syd back: that was the sensible decision.

Monica Jackiewicz

STELLA: My mum saw everybody at Syd’s party, everybody trooped into her room to see her, she was sitting up in bed like the Queen Mother. And on the Monday, Syd was due to go off, and mum gave her some money and said, “I won’t be seeing you again.” And Syd said “yes you will, because if I hear you’re unwell I’ll be straight back.” She was a strong, healthy lady for 87 before it happened. We couldn’t tell Syd – we decided if she rang we didn’t want it to spoil her holiday. That first Christmas Syd wasn’t there and my mum wasn’t there was the worst.

Boiling Natasha

By Tat Usher Although it’s not easy to tell whether a tortoise is dead or just hibernating, Lloyd is convinced that Natasha is dead and that we should boil her. At our allotment by White Hart Lane, in North London, I watch Lloyd building the funeral pyre. Natasha is in a shoebox in the back of the van. Lloyd got the tortoise-boiling idea from The Swiss Family Robinson. In Chapter 47, the Family boil some unfortunate tortoise they’d slaughtered. The shell emerges, shiny and beautiful, and they use it as an unusual bowl. They also enjoy the nutritious tortoise soup that ensues. Lloyd thinks that The Swiss Family Robinson is the greatest book of all time, and he’s read to me from it throughout my entire life. I’m bored senseless by The Swiss Family Robinson, and I don’t want to

boil Natasha. I want to bury her, give her a proper funeral and sing hymns. Lloyd has unearthed a rusty iron pot from somewhere. He whistles as blue smoke drifts across the allotments towards the football stadium. I glare at him from under the hood of my red anorak and consider informing him that normal dads don’t boil their kids’ pets. I know this would be a mistake, however, as he despises ‘normal’ people and doesn’t like hearing about what they get up to, or don’t get up to. Lloyd fetches the shoebox from the van, and I shut my eyes and block my ears so I can’t see or hear him plonking Natasha in the pot. Then I stand around not knowing what to do with myself. I’ve let Natasha down. I should’ve stood up for her and refused to

let this happen. I should’ve given her a decent burial with flowers and blessings. I fiddle with my anorak zip and kick at the dirt with my welly boots. Lloyd puts more wood on the fire and tells me how he once ate roasted guinea pig in Mexico. Apparently it was delicious. I make a mental note to take Gerald back to the pet shop. Eventually Lloyd decides it’s time to check on Natasha. He beckons me over and I take a deep breath. I peer into the iron pot. Instead of the beautiful, shiny shell there’s just some sticky, mushy stuff. I can hardly believe that this brownish mess is all that’s left of Natasha. “Well,” says Lloyd cheerfully, “it looks like the tortoise in The Swiss Family Robinson was a different kind of tortoise.”

Amy Hall

Daniel Stacey

Gambling For Glory

By Harry Deansway Running a magazine is very much like having a long-term girlfriend. You spend all your money on them, you never see your friends anymore and you stop having sex. The Fix, a monthly comedy magazine I founded, edit, and also write for, has been going for 6 months; and now the Edinburgh Festival comes upon us, where we plan to launch ourselves into the public consciousness on a grand scale. The week before the magazine goes to print, I wake up, and open my wardrobe; the only clean items are a pair of shorts and a vest, whilst to my left – in and around the laundry basket – is a bountiful mound of BO-ridden, beer-stained outfits. I’ve been working so hard that I’ve not had a chance to wash any of my clothes. This presents me with a stark choice: I can either

spend the day looking like a tramp or smelling like one. I plump for the former. Today also happens to be the deadline I’ve set myself to sell £8000 of advertising. So far we’ve sold £3000, which equates to 12,000 copies. Unfortunately, we told the advertisers we’d be printing 30,000. It’s crunch time. All I have to do is ring my list of advertising contacts and sell, sell, sell… Eight hours later, I stand in my office/bedroom and survey the room: the only thing I own worth over £50 is my ideas and they haven’t been selling particularly well. This is proven by the fact I’ve sold zero adverts. We are fucked. Then, a lightning bolt – I figure there’s probably just as much chance of raising the extra £5000 by putting the money on a horse,

than there is of raising it through ad sales. I also have a trumpet. I could probably get an extra £100 from pawning that. So it comes to this: I’m sat on a train, unshaven, tired and dressed like a tramp, on the way to Kentish Town to put £3000 of ad revenue on a horse and pawn a trumpet in order to save my business, my sanity, and my name. The good news is I win. The favourite comes in at 4/6, making me £5126, £2050.67 profit. If I throw in some of my life savings I will make the target. The bad news is I’m well on the way to losing my sanity. But nobody ever said independent publishing would be easy

Story

Tell It Like A Story

Dispatches From The Frontiers Of A Savage Age

Coroner’s Courts • New Age Memorials • Necropolis Now Mendozza y Caramba • Arms Fair • Kosovo Remembered

Story

The Death Files

Troubled Endings at Southwark Coroner’s Court

By Laura Barton

ut on Borough High Street the day is in full swing: broad-bellied men in dark suits scuttling along the greasy pavement, Hackney cabs, pushchairs, London buses, rolling beneath a flat, grey sky. A few steps away, in the quiet enclave of Tennis Street, sits Southwark Coroner’s Court, a low-lying modern building pressed up against the ungainly back view of a terrace. Its door swings quietly open and shut, and inside the air is calm, stirred only by the shuffled papers and muttered conversations of administrative duty. On a Thursday in early November 2007, there are three inquests to be heard at Southwark Coroner’s Court, the names of the deceased are printed on white A4 paper and pinned up behind a glass display case: Temur Sait, David Nicholas Lang, Heather May Phillips. A little after 10am, the relatives of Temur Sait stand together in the foyer, before a long plateglass window that looks on to a small, damp park. They talk softly, wheeling to and fro a small child in a pushchair, until an official gently ushers them into the courtroom. The room is painted a pale peach, and there are three tiers of wooden pews to the rear and two to the side, with red faux-leather seats, and red carpeting. On the two tables sit jugs of water and stacks of plastic cups, green paper towels and boxes of tissues. The court rises as the coroner enters. His name is John Sampson. He is a balding man in navy blue suit, white shirt, dark blue tie, and a red poppy pinned to his lapel. Mehmet Sait sits in a pale grey suit, his limbs too long for the witness box, as the coroner runs through the facts of his brother’s life and death: Temur was born in North London on 24th April 1967. He died aged 40 on 29th July 2007. His brother identified his body on 30th July 2007. He was Turkish Cypriot, and a married man. One of the strangest things about a

coroner’s inquest is to see a life stripped to the rafters; all the things that Temur Sait said and did and felt in his short life will not be made known, but in the following hour or so we will learn where he lived, the kind of lager he drank, how his fingernails were short and neat, he wore two gold rings, and his liver was heavy. “Is there anything else you wish to tell me, Mr Sait, about your brother?” the coroner asks. Mr. Sait looks uncomfortable. “He was mentally disturbed,” he says, and his voice is thin and tired. “He was seeking help, but getting nowhere really.” Temur’s wife, Sevilay, is in the front row, wearing black, her long, curly blonde hair tied back. Outside, it is their daughter in the pushchair. She does not look at the witness stand, or at her brother-in-law as he steps down and out of the courtroom, but at the table, at her hands. The story that unravels, via statements from Temur’s GP, from his psychiatrist, from a neighbour, from a friend, from Sevilay, from the London ambulance service, the police, another doctor, and a post mortem report, is one of a man who had spent much of his life battling psychiatric problems and substance dependence. His doctor speaks of long-standing addictions to alcohol, methadone and cannabis, of depression, bipolar disorder, a manic episode in 2006, admissions for formal detox. Dr Kezia Lange, consultant psychiatrist at Greenwich West tells the court that Sait had a history of opiate dependence, poly-substance abuse, hepatitis C, use of LSD, cocaine, glue, gas, heroin. He had been on psychiatric wards, in casualty departments; he had vomited blood, smashed windows, and heard voices. By the time his daughter was eight months old, he was drinking a bottle of spirits a day, as well as taking methadone and cocaine. Temur Sait’s final year began no more hopefully Photography by Sebastian Meyer

Left to right: PC Lawrence, George Omwvemezi, John Lang 00

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In the following hour or so we will learn where he lived, the kind of lager he drank, how his ﬁngernails were short, and his liver was heavy

” than any other: in February 2007 he visited his doctor and complained of feeling tearful, irritable, and of harbouring a passive death-wish. In March, however, events took an upward turn: he commenced a medically assisted detox; he also stopped taking lithium, which had stabilised his moods but also prompted considerable weight-gain. In May, he sought advice on stopping smoking, and at that appointment announced he would be going to Cyprus, to see his parents, for two months in July. But by early summer, though he was upset about his disrupted sleep, he seemed to have made some progress. It was the first time since he was 11 years old that he had been completely off drugs and alcohol. There is always a feeling of hopelessness upon hearing a medical history like that of Temur Sait. The path of his life seems to have run perpetually uphill and, even when you learn of his period of abstinence, his progress and his pleasant demeanour, any faint optimism is always tempered by the knowledge that the person in question has died; we just do not yet know how. Sevilay Sait speaks awkwardly, her voice heavily accented and tearful. She grows increasingly distressed when she recounts how last summer her husband, though sober, grew increasingly depressed and unable to sleep, tried to seek help from his mental health team. The consultant, however, could not see him for two weeks. “I knew he wasn’t well,” she tells the coroner. “He was suddenly crying, he wasn’t making sense. I said to the doctor, ‘that’s not my husband.’” Sevilay took Temur to the GP, who told them he had a problem with his thyroid, and prescribed sleeping tablets. Temur asked for something stronger, for temazepan, to stop his mind “shouting”. The doctor told him he could not prescribe anything more until after he had seen the consultant. Sevilay remembers her husband was distraught. “Did you think he would hurt himself?” the coroner asks Sevilay. She lifts her face, round and damp, up to meet his gaze. “Yes,” she says quietly. She recalls that in July the family went to Cyprus for two months, as planned, but just two and a half weeks into their stay, Temur announced that he had booked tickets back to London. 26

“And his Mother said ‘Please stay, ‘cos your dad is going to have an operation.’” Sevilay remembers, scrunching her tissued hand harder. “But he wouldn’t.” After their return, Temur began smoking heavily and grew increasingly restless. “He was in and out,” Sevilay recalls. “He was in the bathroom, in the kitchen...” She shakes her head. “What did you think he would do?” the coroner enquires gently. “Take tablets?” Sevilay does not answer directly but recalls how her husband had once spoken to her of suicide, and that she had urged him then “to think of his daughter, to rest his mind.” By the middle of July, Temur had begun to drink again. “Just one beer,” Sevilay says, “not drinking heavy-heavy,” and his behaviour was becoming increasingly unusual; one night she noticed that when she went to bed, he stayed in the sitting room and closed the door. It was odd, she explains “because in our house we keep all the doors open.” At one point she went through to him, and he was sitting with the lights off. “When I ask him to come to bed he says, ‘I’m just going to sit here and think for a while.’” Over the following days Temur’s restlessness and his insomnia continued. On the Saturday before his death, he accompanied Sevilay to her hairdressing appointment. There, they met a friend who told him she would accompany him to see the mental health team on the Monday. Temur returned home later that day and drank two cans of Special Brew, ate nothing, took a sleeping tablet. Sevilay put their daughter to bed at around 8 o’clock, and fell asleep next to her. When she awoke it was around 10 o’clock. “It was the same,” she recalls. “He had closed the sitting room door. I put my head in and said ‘Can you not sleep?’ I told him to come and lie down on the bed.” In the middle of the night she got up and he was still lying there awake. “He said ‘My mind’s not shutting.’ And he went to the sitting room.” Mornings always began the same way in the Sait household. Their daughter would usually wake first, Sevilay explains, “and she would just come through: ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’” Sevilay could not see

her husband at first. She called out “Tem, are you up?” and took her daughter through to the sitting room. He was not there. She checked the balcony, but it was empty. “I pushed the kitchen door,” she tells the court, “I couldn’t open the door. I saw blood on the kitchen floor, by the fridge. So I know he did something.” Sevilay is crying in the witness box, breathing heavily. She takes her inhaler, tries to swab her tears, tries to catch her breath, and her friend slides out from her seat to give her tissues. Wailing, she is led away from the witness box. The courtroom is full of her shallow breaths, the whispers of the court officer telling her “It’s alright,” the sound of her friend rubbing her back. After a few moments, the coroner speaks with gentle authority.

“If you want to take a break, just tell me.” Sevilay shakes her head, gathers her breath, and returns to the witness stand. She called for an ambulance. She ran to the door of a neighbour, Paul Vickery. She stayed in the bedroom with her daughter while he tried to open the kitchen door. She stayed in the bedroom when the ambulance crew arrived. He left no note. The coroner asks Sevilay if she has anything she would like to add. Her voice rises up full of anguish. “I just want to ask the mental health team why when I ring them and tell them he is a state they don’t send him to hospital?” she asks. “Why when I speak to GP and say I know my husband and this is not him they do not help?” Paul Vickery’s statement is read to the court. “Tem

Sevilay Sait 00

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There was an eight-inch kitchen knife, and he was sitting on a rug, it was soaked with blood

” was lying on the floor, with his back against the door, in his underpants,” it runs. “He had a vertical puncture wound on his left breast. There was an eight-inch kitchen knife, and he was sitting on a rug, it was soaked with blood. Tem was cold. I pushed his stomach, got no response. Tem’s eyes were partly open and I decided he looked dead.” A statement from the ambulance service follows, which recalls that at 7:01am they received a call stating that a male had stabbed himself. “At 7:08 met patient’s wife and small toddler. Wife was wearing a pink dressing gown and was very upset.” The report recalls how an ambulance crewmember squeezed around the kitchen door and saw Temur Sait, his chest covered with blood, the kitchen knife beside him. He picked up the knife with two fingers and placed it on the kitchen surface. It, too, was covered in blood. He moved Temur, pulling him by the ankles. There was blood on his stomach, his legs and his hands. There was a cut by his left nipple, no bigger than an inch and a half. “By looking at him I could recognise life was extinct.” Statements follow from PC Lloyd who attended the scene, and from Dr Rachel Pickering, who states that she was called at 12:10 in order to confirm life extinct. She arrived at 12.30, attended the scene 12:40, and at 12.43 on 29th July 2007, the life of Temur Sait was declared extinct. The post-mortem examination proves strangely soothing; a griefless description of a machine that has ceased to function. In this instance it notes that he was a well-built man, the fingernails, the rings, the faint purple bruise on his right leg and the graze on his left. His liver was heavy, his kidneys congested, in his stomach there was partially digested food and liquid. It states that on Temur’s chest, 7.5cm left of the middle line, was a gaping wound, between the fourth and fifth ribs; that the kitchen knife had entered the left ventricle of the heart, that the stab wound was entirely compatible with being self-inflicted, that the cause of death was 1(a) haemorrhage 1(b) stab wound to the heart.

he death of David Nicholas Lang was considerably less dramatic than that of Temur Sait, but the course of his life, too, had been directed by psychiatric problems. He was born on the 28

3rd October 1939 in Brighton, and died on the 28th July 2007. He had been a TEFL teacher and was a widower. As with Mr Sait, this inquiry also began with a brother: John Lang is sworn in at the witness box and confirms that on the 1st August 2007 he identified his brother’s body, two days after walking his daughter down the aisle. He tells the coroner that a few years ago, they had resumed contact after not speaking for 35 years. Although he had not seen David for two years, they had been in contact by telephone “often 20 times a week.” They last spoke in the week before his death, and on the Thursday David left a message on his brother’s answer phone. Their telephone conversations, he said, rarely touched upon personal matters but were generally occupied with wordgames. Accordingly, he knew very little about his brother’s health or about those missing 35 years. “He met a Japanese lady in South Korea, whom he married,” Mr Lang says, with only a vague certainty. “She died in a car accident somewhere, but it wasn’t something he talked about. David was a loner, a travelling loner.” David Lang was a paranoid schizophrenic who lived in sheltered accommodation in South London. The report from his doctor, Justin Hayes, noted that though Mr Lang had been registered at his practice since 2003, his medical records went back as far as the inception of the NHS. There was a gap between 1962 and 1988, when it appeared he had lived abroad. He developed schizophrenia in 1990, while travelling overseas. The statement of Dr. Jonathan Beckett, consultant psychiatrist at Lambeth, reveals that Lang was in fact married twice and that his second wife died in 1989, after six years of marriage. Travelling in Germany in 1994 he suffered a manic episode, was hospitalised and transferred to St Thomas’ Hospital in London. Travel, he said, had always been a coping mechanism. He first heard voices at the age of nine, and in adult life often got into fights because the voices were commanding him to attack. Dr Beckett noted that Lang’s mental state was quite stable, but that he required 24-hour care. He was frustrated living in residential care and requested a move to warden care. He was a frequent visitor to the Efra Road Day Centre and the Mosaic Club, and attended church three times a week. In July 2005, Dr Beckett

recorded that Lang had told him he was depressed, preoccupied, thought a lot about his wife, and that recently he had bought 100 paracetamol tablets “just in case I decide to kill myself.” He added that he would not commit suicide because of his Christian beliefs. Over the course of 2007, Lang’s decline was noted by the warden at his accommodation, who observed that his flat was increasingly untidy, he rarely wore adequate clothing, and seemed to have stockpiled a great deal of medicine. He often left his front door unlocked, and the warden was fearful that he might be exploited — he claimed, for example, that £6,000 had been stolen from him by a friend of a friend. On the 28th of July he attended A&E at the Mayday Hospital, having collapsed in the street an hour earlier. He said his legs had suddenly felt weak. At the hospital they found no apparent cause for the collapse, but expressed concern about his mobility. They referred him to St George’s Hospital, but upon arrival Mr Lang was unprepared to wait and walked out. To the witness stand comes George Omwuemezi, a friend of Mr Lang from the Efra Road Day Centre. He recalls how he popped by to see Lang at 4.30 in the afternoon. “I knocked on the door,” he says nervously. “There was no answer. I continued knocking. I went to look in the bathroom window. The lights were on and the window was ajar, I was able to see through, and I saw him slumped in the bath. I climbed through the window. He was looking like this,” Omwuemezi slumps back in his chair, head rocked back. “There was still water in the bath. It was very warm and the taps were still running. I immediately went out the door and called the police. I went to a phone box. No, I went to his friend’s place.” The coroner asks if there is anything else he would like to add. Mr Omwuemezi raises his voice to the court. “He was the most honest person I had ever come across,” he says. “Truly just.” It is a strange moment of intimacy in an inquiry that has proved strikingly impersonal. The ambulance service arrived at 18:50. They found no pulse, no respiration, pupils fixed and some rigidity. At 18:55, Mr Lang was confirmed dead.

Police Constable Lawrence sits in the witness box. He has short black hair and is burly in his heavy police vest. He tells the coroner how he was called to Spa Court, and found the door to Lang’s flat wide open. He knocked and shouted hello, and then saw the bathroom window wide open. He could see the deceased in the bath. The taps were off and the water had drained away. On his wrist was the hospital wristband from his visit to A&E. There was no one around, but he later spotted George Omwuemezi sitting nearby on a bench. They decided the scene was not suspicious. The post mortem took place on the 31st of July at the public mortuary. It found that Mr Lang was a slender man, 1.6 metres in height with eyes that were slightly sunken. Internally his scalp was healthy, his brain slightly heavy and pale and soft. His lungs were very heavy, roughly twice the expected weight, and his pulmonary arteries were patent. The toxicology report found that his body showed levels of medication that were well within the therapeutic levels. He had died as the outcome of myocardial infarction and fibrosis: a heart attack. The cause of death, the coroner recorded, was natural. Throughout the course of the inquiry, it becomes apparent just how little was known about David Lang. There was something substantial about the case of Temur Sait; from the fact that his wife always knew where he was likely to be, to his physical addiction to various substances, and even to the physically violent manner of his death. It is harder to put your finger on David Lang; he slipped out of his family’s life, he slipped back in again, he told them little, his psychological problems were not addiction-related, the extent of his physical problems were unknown, and when he died it was as if he just unexpectedly slipped away again.

he court breaks for lunch. Outside it is threatening to rain; the trees in the small park cower a little. By the time the case of Heather May Phillips begins, the first drops are falling on Tennis Street, hitting the long, plate glass window in the foyer. Heather May Phillips, maiden surname Ring, was born in Malden, Essex on the 12th July 1949, she died on the 28th July 2007 at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich, South London. Her 29

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His wife died in a car accident somewhere, but it wasn’t something he talked about. David was a loner, a travelling loner

” husband, Anthony Phillips, identified the body of his wife on the 1st August. He sits, now, in the witness box, a solid man with tattoos on his forearm and half a finger missing, stewing with grief and with anger. He describes his wife’s profession as ‘Carer’. “She cared for her father, she cares for two of my grandchildren,” he says, inadvertently slipping into the present tense. “She cared for my father in law since his wife died 11 years ago. In her late life, she was more busy than in her own early life. But she loved it.” The coroner asks Mr Phillips if his wife was in general good health. He nods. “Not the right thing to say,” he replies, awkwardly, “but it was a case [with her] of you only go to the doctor when you’re dying. You go through life, you suffer.” She had a body mass index of 28. She had smoked for most of her life, but had quit five and a half months before her death, in anticipation of the smoking ban. She was a social drinker. “She liked to spend Saturday afternoons with her daughter-in-law,” Mr Phillips recalls, “a drink and a cigarette, and they’d talk themselves to death.” Throughout the inquiry, Anthony Phillips never breaks down like Savilay Sait, but you suspect his grief is as keen. Instead of answering the coroner’s questions, he sits in the witness box reading a lengthy statement about his wife’s sudden decline in health, his complaints with her medical care, and ultimately, her death. At times he grows upset, pulling at his lower lip as he continues to read. “Heather began being unwell at the end of June,” his statement begins. “She had stomach pains, and when she went to the toilet, the diarrhoea had blood in it. Heather, she was a very private person. You had to prise things out of her. I managed to get her to see her GP on 15th June in Plumstead. He said her body’s making too much acid and he gave her some medication tablets.” The tablets made no difference, and Heather Phillips’ continued to be unwell. The doctor prescribed new tablets. The couple were due to go on holiday on June 29th, and a hospital appointment was scheduled for after they returned. She spent much of the holiday in bed. 30

“On holiday, you go on an all-inclusive, you think ‘I’m gonna stuff myself to death’,” says Mr Phillips. “But she didn’t. 50% of the time she was in the room… Took her to see the GP on holiday,” he reads. “Paid the money, as you have to do [when abroad]. Examined my wife. Said she might have an ulcer. Gave her exactly the same tablets she had at home.” After their return on July 6th, Heather made the first of many hospital visits. She was still suffering from diarrhoea, still bleeding, and unable to eat or drink very much. Each visit brought tests, X-rays, tablets, each time it was observed that Heather had low blood pressure. “On the 23rd July,” he reads, “she got out of bed and had a fall… She fell onto the laundry basket. When I seen the injury, her left breast was black and blue and very painful. I’m not a medical expert, but the first thing that came to mind was a cracked or broken rib.” His pace is slow and steady, like a long-distance runner; his daughters sit in the front row of the court. “At A&E they said she had a fractured rib and a tear in her lung. I don’t know what the technical term is, but they had to put a drain in her side. They said it wouldn’t hurt. But I know better.” He pulls at his lip. “I had to have a little word with the hospital, because her brother was in that same ward dying of cancer. They put her in a different ward.” For the next few days, Mr Phillips and his family performed a routine of telephone calls to the ward and daily visits to the hospital. He recalls one such visit on July 27th when his wife, propped up on pillows, suddenly sat bolt upright, “and her eyes bulged from her head and she said ‘Help me! Help me!’ She said to the doctor ‘I’m going to die aren’t I?’ And the doctor said ‘No, what makes you think that?’ She said. ‘I know.’” Heather Phillips died the next day. Anthony was summoned to the hospital on the Saturday morning and told that his wife had suffered a heart attack. By the afternoon she was on a life support machine, and he was told she was unlikely to survive. “Being a man of the world,” he tells the court, “you know what that means, once they’re on a machine.” She died at two o’clock that afternoon.

Between the end of June and her death, Heather visited her GP five times, and the A&E department three times. Mingled with Anthony Phillips’ grief is a fierce indignation that his wife was not saved by the medical profession. “You lose faith in the system,” he says at the end of his statement, and shakes his head. The court hears statements from seven of the medical staff who treated her during that period — her GP, hospital doctors, staff nurses. The pathologist’s report from Greenwich Mortuary notes diverticulitis, thickening of the bowel, heavy lungs,

and a tattoo of a dolphin on her right shoulder. The cause of death is given as a mix of natural and unnatural causes: 1 (a) sepsis arising from 1 (b) bilateral pneumonia, (2) complications from diverticulitis. The coroner records the verdict as accidental death. The court rises as the coroner departs. In the back row of witnesses is one of the staff nurses who treated Heather Phillips. On the table before her lies a cardboard folder, stuffed with sheets of A4, and on its cover two words: ‘Dead File’. She shuffles Mrs Phillips’ notes and slips them inside

Anthony Philips 00

Photostory

Death of a Soldier

As Told by Nasuf Hasan Thaqi, Kosovo Liberation Army Veteran

Along with 30 other KLA members, I laid an ambush for a convoy of Serb forces. After the ambush on the Serb patrol, me and another soldier retreated across open ground to an area of farmland. We found a ditch on the edge of a field facing back towards the road where the ambush had taken place. It was silent for a short time, then we could hear lots of commotion and random automatic gunfire. We heard more shouting and vehicles revving their engines, and knew the Serb forces were looking for us.

By Mark Seager The Serbs started firing mortar rounds in our direction to probe and see if we would engage them again: they didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know which direction we had retreated too. The mortar rounds continued, but we couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make a run for it across open ground, so we laid low in the ditch. My comrade was in a squatting position when a mortar round exploded just behind the ditch.

He fell forward onto the ground, and I was hit in the leg with shrapnel from the blast. I pulled myself over to where my comrade lay. Half of his face was missing and part of the rear of his head.

I stayed in the ditch for a couple of hours with him, until the Serb forces left and the KLA fighters came looking for us.

Near the village Arllat in the Lapushnik region, Central Kosovo: the resulting conflict claimed the lives of four KLA members and 12 Serb forces. Nasuf was badly injured during the ambush. 37

Story

Remember Me? The War Memorial for Everyone

By Oliver Harris

meet Sandra Smith and Josie Graham in the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society Garden. A group of carved wooden animals, the size of small children, stand in a circle amidst fledgling pines in supportive, plastic cylinders. I had first noticed the two women a few metres away, studying a commemorative gate dedicated to The National Ex-Prisoner of War Association. Now they are off into a thinly wooded area devoted to lives lost at sea. It is Sandra’s second visit to the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. This time she has brought her friend “I keep seeing things I haven’t noticed before. The first time I came it was all damaged by drought. But I love it. I thought I’d bring Josie along.” “It’s just great. Beautifully thought out,” Josie says. Around us, scattered over forty acres of land, are more than 120 separate commemorative plots. Most involve a simple stone or sculpture with a plaque and an explanatory panel. There is often a bench and a few metres of shrub or hedge for a border. Dedicatees range from the Royal Hong Kong Police to those lost in the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Hemmed in between a conservation area and the looming machinery of Lafarge Aggregates sand quarry, the effect of the arboretum is somewhere between that of a golf course, a cemetery and an outof-season theme park. I find Mr and Mrs Mitchell, from Stoke-on-Trent, in a remote corner, trying to get reception on a mobile beside the memorial to sailors lost in the Yangtze Incident of 1948. “I can remember the end of the Second World War as a child,” Mr Mitchell says. “But soon no one will.” “This place jogs your memory.” “Things like the Korean monument - things you forget.” Beside the Yangtze memorial is a small area dedicated to ‘All those who Served in or Supported the Armed Forces of the Sultanate of Oman.’ Another monument, an odd, shrine-like structure covered in plaster sea-shells, honours ‘All personnel of the

Combined Services Task Force who served during the Nuclear Tests at Monte Bello, Emufield, Maralinga, X-mas Island and Malden Island, 1952-66.’ A long avenue lined with chestnut trees takes you back towards the cafeteria and the Millennium Chapel of Peace and Forgiveness. This avenue, known as ‘The Beat’, commemorates death in the nation’s police forces. Beyond it, an imitation beach, wooden shack and lifeboat belongs to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

n October 12 the Queen attended the opening of a new memorial at the arboretum, by far its biggest and the one that has received the most press coverage. The Armed Forces Memorial remembers ‘all those service men and women killed on duty or as a result of terrorist action since the end of the Second World War.’ On the day I visit it is open to the public for the first time. The woman on reception, manning a laptop containing the names and location of all those remembered in the arboretum, complains that many of today’s visitors think that there is only one memorial here. “They don’t realise we have more than a hundred others. That we’ve been open for almost ten years.” There are four or five times as many visitors as usual. Most have been drawn by the new memorial and it is clear that it has provided a new focus for the arboretum, as well as bringing it £2.8 million of Millennium Commission funding. It dominates the landscape. Where the site was once a contourless expanse it now spreads out around a large burialstyle mound crowned by a 150 ft-wide circle of Portland stone. The design is by architect Liam O’Connor. Two straight walls contain most of the names. They stand within a circular stone enclosure, on the inside of which the list of dead continues. A crack in the south wall is aligned so as to let a shaft of light through into the centre of the memorial on the eleventh hour of November 11.

Photography by David Foster 39

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If a soldier suﬀering battle stress shoots two or three of his mates and then turns the gun on himself, he might still be included in the memorial

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The monument is reached either by a flight of steps or a sloping spiral walkway past evergreen Holm oaks. At its head is a tall, thin obelisk. To the sides are two sculptured groups by Ian Rank-Broadley, comprising fourteen bronze figures in total. In one, a naked corpse is about to be wrapped in a shroud. The other, to the north, includes four men, three with bare torsos, bearing a fifth man on a stretcher. There are echoes, according to the memorial brochure, of the removal of Patroclus from the battlefield in Homer’s Iliad. Uniformed volunteers circulate the memorial, clutching bulging files of information, trying to help visitors find the names they seek. There is always relief when they do. The dead are listed by year and, within each year, by service. The sober uniformity masks a vast variety of fates in over 47 different conflicts, although none are mentioned on the stone. One man is curious as to why there are so many names under 1965. “Aden,” one of the volunteers thinks. “They weren’t happy to have us there. Bit like today’s situation.” Another volunteer searches through her ring-binder to see if she can help. “1965...” She reads out the conflict zones in which our troops were present. “Saudi Arabia, Malaya, Cyprus, Borneo...” “Arabia was Aden,” the first volunteer insists. “Come through the Suez until you’re at the Red Sea. Before you cross it you get to Aden.” I ask the man who raised the question if he is looking for anyone in particular. A former serviceman, who asks not to be named, he says he is looking for the name of a colleague and friend who he used to cycle with competitively. But he has come primarily so his wife can pay respects to her brother, killed in an army Land Rover in Cyprus in 1987. “It basically fell apart on the highway.” The memorial is intended for families like these. The task it sets itself is to remember the accidental as well as the heroic, to identify a common cause between deaths bound only by the military occupation of the deceased. How are we to remember a soldier’s road accident in Cyprus? Like all memorials it must answer the question: what did he die for?

“

This is not a war memorial,” Lieutenant Colonel Richard Callander insists. Callandar has headed the Memorial Project since it was set up in 2001 following a commons statement lamenting the insufficient recognition of forces killed since 1945. I meet him at his headquarters in Bloomsbury. The only clue that we are in anything other than a normal open-plan office is a notice on the wall advising us of our designated emergency bomb shelter. “The first thing I had to check were that the services agreed this was a good idea,” Callandar says. “Then we had to decide who, exactly, should be commemorated.” There was general delight with the concept. “A sense that it was overdue.” The second question proved less straightforward. “I presented them with a series of options regarding deaths to be included. These ranged from including only those killed in actual conflict, to listing everyone who died while in service.” Were they, for example, to include someone killed prior to deployment? An individual killed in training? Those who died in suspicious circumstances? Callandar gives a glimpse of the semantic labyrinth that opens behind the simplest of phrases when they are to be carved in stone for eternity. The formula of words finally agreed upon was: “Those killed on duty or as a result of terrorist action since the end of World War II.” “On Duty” itself is defined by what Callandar described as a book-length document. But even this is an abbreviation. A more expansive formulation reads: “to remember those killed whether in action, in training here or overseas, whilst supporting peacekeeping missions or as a result of terrorist action, including members of the Merchant Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary who have died while serving in conflict zones.” “The essential idea was to include anyone who died while in a medal-earning theatre,” Callandar explains. “So as to emulate what happened after World War Two.” The concept of a “medal-earning theatre,” linking the comparatively straightforward world of the Second World War to the disparate military operations of the last sixty years, is central to the thinking of the Memorial Project. It was the “medal41

earning period” of 1939-1947 that defined the remit of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) when it set out to ensure that the names of all soldiers killed in the fight against Fascism were suitably recorded. They collected deaths up to the end of December 1947. The new Armed Forces Memorial begins on the first of January 1948. It is in some sense, then, simply a continuation of the earlier project. But any attempt at establishing equivalences between the two periods only highlights an unprecedented complexity faced by Callandar and his team. Among the non-combat deaths remembered are those of four recruits who took their lives in suspicious circumstances at the Infantry Training Centre in Catterick, North Yorkshire between 1995 and 2002. The more publicised deaths at Deepcut, in Surrey, over the same period, are not included. When Lembit Opik raised the question of this omission in parliament last month, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defence replied that, in the military, “deaths of a self-inflicted nature were treated as equivalent to deaths by natural causes.” “Each case is decided on its own merits,” Callandar explains. He gives, as an example, “an incident where some soldier shoots two or three of his mates and then turns the gun on himself.” If it can be shown that this is a result of “battle stress”, he might be included, he says. Likewise, if a soldier took his own life while in the UK: “so long as medical records can be seen to show evidence of post-traumatic stress...”

he idea that every soldier deserved his own grave and gravestone was legally instituted for the first time by the North in the American Civil War. It is, unsurprisingly, a Western tradition. Even today, in the memorials of Russia, China and Japan, long lists of names remain a rarity. The first, widespread UK project of commemoration followed the Boer war, but it was the First World War that established the war memorial as we now know it. By 1916, individual burials were often impossible. In battles over that summer, 72,000 German casualties were identifiable, 86,000 missing or mutilated beyond recognition. Statistics were similar on both sides of the front. It was in the absence of bodies that our commemoration turned to listing names. Kipling chose “Their name liveth for evermore,” from Ecclesiasticus, to serve as the official Imperial War Graves epitaph. The Armed Forces Memorial is not the first in the arboretum to fundamentally extend the remit of this commemorative tradition. Hidden in one of the few copses of mature trees stands the sculpture of a blindfolded soldier awaiting the firing squad. It is modelled on Private Herbert Burden, shot at Ypres 42

when he was seventeen years old. He is surrounded by three hundred and six stakes of varying height, each with its own small plaque remembering a British or Commonwealth soldier executed for desertion. When the Shot at Dawn memorial was unveiled in 2001 it was not without controversy. In the words of Conservative MSP and former Scots Guards officer, Ben Wallace, “This is history we are tinkering with. The crime of desertion is serious, and we cannot judge the severity of the punishment by our values.” Several executed men had been only recently denied mention on memorials in their local communities. Private Thomas Highgate, a seventeen year old who fled the Battle of Mons, was executed just thirty-five days into the war. In 2000 the parish council of his hometown in Shoreham, Kent, voted not to include his name on their war memorial. It was not until 2006 that Secretary of State for Defence, Des Browne, offered formal pardons to all three hundred and six men, a gesture now recorded on the plaque beside the statue of Private Burden. The Armed Forces Memorial reflects other changes in our recent thinking about war and memory. In front of the bronze stretcher-bearers stand a woman and child, the child clinging to the woman, the woman raising her arms. Behind them crouch an older couple, holding one another. While there is a French tradition of depicting bereft parents or other grieving civilians on twentieth-century memorials, it is almost unheard of elsewhere. “Is it a mother and child?” Callander asks. “We don’t know. She’s looking up at a husband, or it could be a brother. All we know is that this is a civilian who has lost someone; a child who has lost someone. Then the older couple at the back – are they a mother and father? The important thing is that everyone can relate to one of the figures in the sculpture – if they want to. It is open to interpretation. There is no glorification of war, no religious symbol, no cross of sacrifice.” “Yet there is a reference to the afterlife,” I suggest, “Or at least the spiritual, in the crack in the wall to which one man is gesturing.” “Is there?” “Or perhaps he is gesturing to the future,” I say. “To memory.” “Perhaps he is gesturing to hell,” Callandar says.

he new memorial’s foundation stone was laid by the mother and three sisters of Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi, the first British Muslim soldier killed on active service since the start of our ‘war on terror’. His sister expressed hope that “lives sacrificed in recent conflicts will achieve a greater degree of peace worldwide and promote

a better understanding between different religious ideologies and cultural identities.” The only non-white faces I see on my visit to the arboretum belong to the Grewal family, from Sutton Coalfield. They were here last week, before the Forces memorial was open. Now they have brought their daughter, a student of A-level History. They don’t have any relatives listed, but are pointing out all the Indian names. “There is a Rai.” “And there is another Rana. Two Ranas.” “We go to a lot of memorials,” Mrs Grewal explains. “Sad gits really. We went to the Washington one, memorials all over the United States.” “Both our fathers were involved in the army,” her husband adds. “The British Indian Army. We’ve just met a gentleman who served in Burma and Singapore, and he’d been down the road my wife’s family live on.” “But this is just great,” they insist. “You must write how fantastic it is.” “The Americans have their Vietnam memorials, their Korean memorials. It’s right that we have this one. We’re still fighting for the same principles: freedom, liberty.” The new memorial in Staffordshire compliments the 1998 Strategic Defence Review and the white paper of 2003, in which our enduring military values are presented: “To defend the UK and its interests, including against terrorism, strengthen international peace and stability, and act as a force for good in the world.” To ensure the preservation of these values

Lafarge Aggregates have sponsored an Education Centre beside the arboretum gift shop. It promises “to deliver an educational programme for school visits linked to the National Curriculum with a focus on Citizenship, incorporating remembrance, conflict, Britishness and the environment.” As well as providing a geographical site for the commemoration of almost 16,000 deaths across the globe, the Armed Forces Memorial situates them historically. It lends a political as well as a physical unity. “The Memorial will be a place where school children and the public for future generations can come and learn about the ongoing cost of democracy and freedom,” states the brochure for the dedication ceremony. Britain has been relatively lucky in its ability to continue identifying national and moral victory. We have had to confront nothing like the complexities of commemoration in Germany and Russia: the challenge of commemorating defeat, of causes and ideals no longer deemed historically legitimate (they are there, of course, even in the Memorial, but silently). After the First World War, German memorials carried the epitaph “In the battlefield, undefeated,” but all that was permitted in former enemy countries was “Here lie German soldiers.” Soviet WWII memorials, with their quotations from Stalin, are now often seen as symbols of oppression or occupation, and destroyed. One condition of the departure of Soviet troops from Berlin was that their war memorials would be maintained. As the cause for which the men died rolled back eastwards these 43

“

Britain has never had to confront the complexities of commemoration in Germany and Russia: the challenge of commemorating defeat

” came to commemorate previously unspoken traumas, referred to by locals as ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Rapist’, and ‘Monument to the Plunderer’. We have had to rewrite our text-books less frequently. For Prince Charles, the new British Memorial is “a poignant reminder to us all of the continuing cost of the democracy and freedom we enjoy, as well as the constant sacrifices being made on our behalf around the world.” But it is not always so clear on whose behalf the men and women laid down their lives. Frank Shorter knows more than most about history’s selective memory, especially when a cause becomes unfashionable or inconvenient. One of the volunteers at the arboretum, Frank is 79 years old and a veteran of Palestine, Jordan and Korea. He offers me a lift back to the train station and swings his Land Rover towards Burton-on-Trent. “They look at us and think ‘the old codgers’ but they don’t know what we’ve been through,” he says. “Or what we’ve done. We were sent into Palestine when there wasn’t a thing there. Landed on the beach just like D-Day. You know what we were there to do, don’t you?” he asks, like someone used to having to explain. “We were there to stop the Jews coming down from the Golan Heights.” Dennis Peck, another Palestine veteran and, like Frank, a member of the Sherwood Forester’s regiment, only realised he’d been awarded a campaign medal in 1998. In 2002 the on-line journal CounterPunch reported a systematic failure to issue medals to the British soldiers who fought in a conflict the government would rather forget. According to the journal, “Until two years ago, the campaign was never mentioned at the Armistice parade in London.” There is not even a definitive figure for the British troops who died, although it is around four hundred. It is the London ceremonies that will lose out now, Frank insists. “November 11, Whitehall. A lot of people from the north will come here instead. We’ve got free parking, restaurants. You can spend a day here. You’re not told to get off Horse Guard’s Parade. That got me really ratty. I’ve done a couple of marches there and they’ll tell you to move along because the next lot are 44

coming.” When Callander first proposed the Staffordshire site he was asked to rethink. Geoff Hoon, then Secretary of State for Defence, didn’t like the idea of it being outside of the capital. “But I felt London was the wrong place,” Callander says. He chose the arboretum for its peace, quiet and tranquillity, and because he did not want to conflict with the Cenotaph. It also offered him space. “The Royal Parks were willing to help, but it had to be no more than three feet high. Anything more than a button in the middle of Hyde Park would have involved a 10 year appeal process. And there are so many memorials in London.” There is also something appropriate about it being away from the pomp and politics of Whitehall, a good two hours from the sceptical and largely pacifist metropolis, closer to the Middle England that provides the forces with so many of their young. “Londoners say ‘why put it right up there? Everyone goes to London.’ Well, no they don’t. Certainly if you’re a soldier or a soldier’s family you probably don’t. London’s too expensive for them.”

he Armed Forces Memorial, which starts with the first British deaths in Palestine, currently ends with the names of fourteen servicemen killed in September last year, when their Nimrod jet exploded over Kandahar. The 15,500 odd names are followed by 15,000 blank spaces, waiting to be filled. I had wondered at the significance of this symmetry, as if we might be half way to getting somewhere, but Callander denies there is any prophecy involved. “When we got to finalising the design we still didn’t know how many names were to be included. The blank spaces are dictated by space left over, by the size of the memorial, that’s all. But we knew we wanted space, that it would go on for a considerable amount of time into the future.” Already, the names of 80 more personnel are waiting to be engraved, servicemen and women killed since the initial list was finalised. These additions will be made in 2008

Confessions: Power & Money

Confessions 1: Igor Mitukov Art Collector and Former Ukrainian Finance Minister

Photography by Sebastian Meyer 46

first became a collector of art in the late 80s, when I was working at Bank Ukraina – an old style Soviet agricultural bank – alongside our current president Viktor Yushchenko. I started to pay attention to art because a lot of our foreign banking associates would have nice paintings hanging on their walls; initially my interest was more a tribute to the professional manners of bankers than a desire to study art. Then the economic crisis started in Ukraine. A lot of art, especially traditional Ukrainian paintings, started to be transported from the Ukraine. And mostly they were being exported illegally. The market had suddenly opened up, there was a lot of poverty due to hyperinflation, and people were selling very unique national paintings for cheap, which were leaving the country by their hundreds. In Ukraine there are laws prohibiting the exports of antiques and art, but that wasn’t stopping anyone. So some of my friends and I, we decided to try and protect our history and our national heritage by simply buying almost everything suggested to us: all late 19th Century and early 20th Century Ukrainian art that was for sale. Not Aivazovsky – I’m not so rich as to buy Aivazovsky – but some famous Ukrainian’s: Kholodovsky, Svetoslavsky, Svetlitsky, and Makovsky, and other smaller artists of importance who Ukrainian’s were ignoring at the time, but whose paintings now sell for $50,000 USD. At that time there were maybe one or two professional galleries performing auctions, so mainly we bought from private collectors, and we had a number of intermediaries – some of whom were artists themselves – who knew about private collections. After you’ve bought maybe three or four paintings, information spreads very quickly that you’re a buyer: that you’re looking for art. We would travel around visiting one flat after another, collecting information. In that period most art came from the families of old scientists, doctors, musicians – the intelligentsia – who for many years had passed collections down through the family, and needed cash to survive. These people were selling a lot of paintings outside of auction. I bought around 20 paintings during the economic crisis, and the price I paid was usually around $200300 USD.

Then all of a sudden I understood that Soviet realist art was becoming important and popular. Foreigners who were living in Kiev in the early 90s had already worked this out, and were tracking down great living artists and buying up their back catalogues – works painted in the 50s and 60s. For us locals this art was part of our old Soviet system – propaganda, slogans – something very simple and primitive. But I started to understand that, irrespective of what you see in a picture and the fact that artists throughout the Soviet period were forced to illustrate specific scenes of rural and industrial life, the technique is superb. There was a very limited amount of things you were allowed to paint, but painters managed to, whilst describing formally pictures of Soviet life with simple and correct composition, expressing feelings in hidden ways. The early 90s was when I suddenly realised that these works would eventually be recognised as a vital, fascinating part of our heritage. I buy much less now, because prices are going so high I can’t afford to compete. Paintings I bought back then sell at auction now for tens of thousands of pounds, and even most non-Ukrainians have stopped buying our art in the last three to four years because of the boom. 15 years ago say you could buy Piotr Stolerenko for a few hundred USD. Seven years ago you could buy Stolerenko for $2000-3000 USD. The last Stolerenko, sold in Germany earlier this year, fetched $27,500 USD. The economic progress of the last few years – with 7% growth – has made the number of potential buyers much bigger. There is a construction boom, there is a boom all around the country. If I could bring something back to Ukraine though, I’d probably buy some works by Sergei Shishko. 15 years ago I remember seeing his art up for sale in Japanese auction houses, and wondering how it ever got there. I’m sure a lot of the great works by him will never come back though; we just don’t know where they are. It happened that way with so much of our art. A number of great collections disappeared from national galleries in the early 90s, and it was rumoured that they were sent out as ‘exhibitions’ throughout Europe, and then they never came back

As told to Daniel Stacey 47

Comic

First Date – art and story by Mendozza

For a first date…

It had gone well…

The film was good, she loved it.

And she showed it.

“Let’s go eat now.”

Story

Red light…

Stop...

It’s the law.

Stop dead...

Story

“Step on it! Go!”

This deafening sound in the black night turns an unreal attack into sad reality.

Story

Runâ&#x20AC;Ś go further, ask more of your legs...

Hide, lose yourself in the belly of the night... beg for its protection.

Story At least thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what she thinks...

Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what life is like: when some laugh, others cry...

Story

Thinking Inside the Box British Undertaking Enters the 21st Century

By Jack Roberts

t’s 2.55 pm on Whitehorse Road, Croydon, a cold, grey passageway in the withered suburban expanses of South London. Amongst the local business signs - the bright, garish, poorly Photoshopped approximations of sweating kebabs and orange fish and chip suppers - stands a conspicuously muted white plastic clock. Its long arm moves tortuously towards a full revolution as sullen pedestrians pass underneath; printed on the clock face in faded ocean blue type: “Rowland Bros. – Funerals”. An anodyne conference room, blue carpet. A framed picture of a bald man in a grey suit is mounted on the wall: Tony Rowland, director of Rowland Brothers International, one of only two global undertakers recommended by the British Council for international repatriations. Across the conference table is Steve Rowland, the MD of Rowland Brothers; a powerfully compact man with close-cropped ginger hair and the slab face of an Easter Island statue. “The thing you have to understand is that when you die, you cease to be a person, you become a possession,” Rowland says. A possession that requires treatment, preservation, transportation, documentation, then disposal. “Other cultures have a healthy attitude to death – possibly because they’re more religious. Funerals are a celebration, a preparation for eternal life. In Britain we don’t like to think about death, we put it off and ignore it.” This cultural attitude is evolving in line with the UK’s demographics, however. The acute rise in the number of immigrants (591,000 in 2006) is well documented, the rise in emigrants less so: over 400,000 Britons left the UK in 2006, the highest

Photography by Sebastian Meyer 59

“

Many of the people who buy pre-paid funerals are driven by having no friends: they’re afraid of the pauper’s funeral – city life can do that to people, they can get really lonely

” number recorded by the Office of National Statistics. It’s estimated over 4.5 million Britons live overseas, and, with the current trend of retired Britons choosing to spend their dotage abroad, the volume of emigrants is growing. In an increasingly globalised world, more foreign nationals are dying abroad, which means more business for internationally connected undertakers like Steve Rowland. Steve’s family founded Rowland Brothers in 1870; it used to be a builder’s merchant before the company moved into the funeral trade. They only moved into repatriations in 1971 after being asked to return the body of a French countess who had been exhumed in England. Nowadays repatriations form an integral part of their business, as they make arrangements for deceased Polish and Jamaican nationals to be transported to Warsaw and Montego Bay, and bring back dead civilian contractors from Iraq and Afghanistan. “Only a few companies can handle incoming repatriations,” says Rowland. “We’re able to do it because we’ve developed relationships with a number of agents around the world, and we have offices in every country, except for Zambia.” “Why not in Zambia?” “Our agent was shot in the head.” Repatriation can be a complex business. Your brother has just died in Iraq: what do you do? How does the body get home? Who will look after it? Insurance has to be settled, flights may need to be chartered, embassies alerted, with each country having its own protocol for transporting bodies across borders. For example, international law states a body must be embalmed before it can fly, but most nonChristian religions disapprove of the preservation of corpses. What if your brother is a British Muslim? Such dilemmas are Rowland’s stock-in-trade. “Obviously different countries and different climates require different specialist skills; in the West Indies the climate is much hotter than here, so any embalmer would need to use more formaldehyde to compensate.” There are other practicalities: coffins travel as international freight in the cargo holds of the vast majority of passenger jets, and have to be hermetically sealed to slow decomposition. They also need to be 60

zinc-lined, so they can be X-Rayed and comply with anti-terrorism and narcotics legislation (coffins have long been a popular means for smuggling cocaine from South America). The demographic changes in Britain are being mirrored by a cultural shift; previously uncomfortable and reticent when confronted with matters of mortality, modern Britons are pre-purchasing their funerals in increasing numbers. Rowland estimates 65,000 such pre-paid funeral plans are now sold in the UK every year, his own company selling them through a subsidiary called Golden Leaves, which has grown to account for 6% of their overall business. Apart from relieving the financial stress put on relatives at a difficult time and saving money against the rate of inflation, the principal attraction of purchasing a pre-paid plan is that you get to design your own death. “Have you had unusual requests?” I ask. “We had a Polish priest come to us, and he wanted a traditional Tibetan funeral. He wanted us to travel up into the Himalayas, employ a Buddhist priest to prepare his body, then flay it open for the mountain vultures to pick his carcass clean. So we said ‘OK’, and looked into the practicalities. When we made enquiries with the Chinese authorities they told us that only Chinese nationals could do the ceremony. Then there was a person who wanted to be buried at sea over the wreck of the Titanic. I spoke to the maritime authorities about the possibility of doing it, and they said it could be done, but we would have to drop the coffin a little way from the remains – they didn’t want it to fall directly onto the wreckage and damage it. I went back to our client with this information, and it turned out he had lost interest in the idea. It was a total waste of time in the end, but this is what we do.” Clients often request Viking funerals, where the body is placed on a burning boat and pushed out to sea, for their ashes to be compacted into a gemstone, firework explosions, or more fanciful ideas. Most are impossible to execute – legally the options are limited to burial, cremation, burial at sea – but the romance helps sell the package. Pre-paid funerals have been popular in the US for many years; on February 9, 1997, the ashes of LSD pioneer Timothy Leary and

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry were famously blasted into space aboard the same rocket. Britain has traditionally been more recalcitrant, but a 2007 Mintel report estimates the domestic market for funerals, worth approximately £1.3 billion in 2006, will increase by a further 18% between 2006 and 2011, rising to £1.5 billion; the report states that this growth will primarily be powered by increased sales of pre-paid funerals to consumers over the age of 45. Put simply, pre-paid funeral plans are the future of the industry, as more Britons preoccupy themselves with the question of what happens after. “It’s not always easy to control what happens to you after you die though,” says Rowland. “I’ve had relatives ask us to reject the wishes of the deceased, because they’d like to make cheaper arrangements and keep the money themselves. I’ve always turned them down. I’m not sure if that’s legally correct, but it’s not right to disrespect the wishes of the dead.” Rowland looks down at an expensive, shimmering watch. Our time is up. “I’m going to have to cut it there.”

“

People (who purchase pre-paid funerals) are preparing for their passage into death. I often use the analogy that if someone’s ready to ask the question, they’re ready to hear the answer – their head is preparing to accept the possibility of death.”

Roslayn Cassidy, the genial South African founder of Green Endings, an alternative undertaker in Tufnell Park, North London, sits and shivers in the November chill, employing her grey jacket as a makeshift blanket. “I’d add that many of these people are driven by having no friends: they’re afraid of the pauper’s funeral – city life can do that to you, people can get really lonely. And most of these requests will be for cremations, not burials – these people would rather not exist than have an unvisited grave… The other day I met a woman in her forties who wanted to pre-arrange because she’s estranged from her family. They live in America and she wanted to make sure they wouldn’t be able to attend her funeral… I mean, depending on who they are and how lonely they are, there may be as little as 10 phone calls and two visits for people like that after they die. When they come in to me to discuss their own funeral it fulfills a need for some kind of contact. It’s immensely sad.” Cassidy tells me that the pre-paid funeral business was more or less unregulated until the last two years or so; unprincipled undertakers would prey on lonely clients by taking their money, then use it as working capital for their business. “But what happens if the business goes bust?” she says. She cites a friend who bought a funeral direction business only to discover the previous owners had spent all the money taken

from clients taking out pre-paid funeral plans, leaving a giant hole in the company’s finances. An MBA graduate, Cassidy founded Green Endings in 2000 after reading about woodland burials: funerals where trees will be planted over a body. “I thought, ‘If I were to die, that’s where I’d like to be. And that’s what inspired me; the big, homogenous companies like Dignity and Co-op can’t offer me that.” Cassidy’s niche is “green funerals that celebrate life,” but she’s found that London’s increasingly multicultural population is fracturing the market. This also creates new opportunities for specialist funeral directors though; these days most Hindu and Sikkh funerals tend to be handled by a funeral director in North London, Muslim funerals by a director in East London, Catholics in Kilburn, and so on. Green Endings have come to specialise in personalised, secular funerals. “I would say this is the biggest change in British society in regard to my profession: the rise of the nonreligious funeral.” “Like a humanist funeral?” “No, people often confuse that. The Humanist Association is actually atheist. When people tell me, ‘I want a humanist funeral,’ I ask them, ‘Was

your father an atheist?’ And they’ll say, ‘Nooooo… he definitely believed in something, but he hated the church.’ You find that people may not be religious, but they aren’t actually atheist in the main. I’d say the proportion of atheists is as small as the church-going believers. In between are the rest of us.” The rising consciousness of environmental issues amongst the British public has also filtered through to the funeral industry. In the 2007 Mintel report, 64% of British adults questioned said they would favour a green funeral. For Cassidy, this means they need to be buried, not cremated. For reasons of cost, cremations have been growing in popularity since the 1950s and today, about 75% of UK citizens are cremated, partly because local authorities have enthusiastically endorsed the process on account of it being cheaper than burial (saving them money on means tested funeral grants). Cremation is toxic though; it can take up to 25 litres of oil to burn a body to ash, the process releases harmful dioxins into the atmosphere, and according to Defra approximately 16% of the UK’s daily emissions of mercury come from crematoria – or rather the tooth fillings of the burning corpses. Many people feel cremation is necessary though, particularly with Britain’s crowded cemeteries leading to skyrocketing grave space costs, although Cassidy doesn’t buy this.

“

We do an X-Factor style audition for British embalming students. The winners of the competition get to go out to America

” “It’s a myth that we’re running out of cemetery space,” says Cassidy. “It’s true that we’re pushed in the cities at present, but in June a really important piece of legislation was passed [when Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, announced new measures would be added to the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act of 1994] stating graves could be re-used if they were over 100 years old, so a lot of graves will be re-used now. The gravestones will be moved and kept, but whatever’s left in the grave will be disinterred and put in a bone vault. So that’s starting to happen, and it’ll make life much easier for local authorities and cemeteries.” Cassidy’s own solution to the problem of pollution and limited grave space is price-competitive, biodegradable ‘eco-coffins,’ which she sources from specialist suppliers and worker’s co-operatives. These are variously made from bamboo, wicker, willow, cardboard, and papier mache, and break down far more easily then the ubiquitous steel and veneer coffins, which are easy to mass produce. She also feels British families are becoming increasingly open to less formal services that celebrate the life of the deceased more explicitly. At Green Endings, families are given the option of decorating the deceased’s coffin with personal artwork and messages. Cassidy points to a photo of a decorated coffin from an album catalogue, which is covered in colourful children’s graffiti and drawings of the deceased. “It’s comforting for people to paint the coffins, it gets them really involved. In this case, the family had a decorating party, and when people turned up and saw the body in the coffin they found it was no longer such a shock for them.” For her part, Cassidy clearly enjoys being a mortician.

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever done - the most fun I’ve ever had. Getting the job done well is the most rewarding thing, giving the person a good send off, no matter what that might mean for that particular family… The clapping and the applause… Listening to fantastic music choices – sometimes not so fantastic – in beautiful buildings, and hearing people say nice things about people. Then there’s the humour… I’ve dropped my mobile phone into a grave, all kinds of things happen. Don’t get me wrong though, it can be as tense as hell.”

evin Sinclair embalms corpses for a living. A co-founder of the London School of Embalming, a start-up institution based in the badlands of Feltham, Middlesex, Sinclair is an affable, relaxed character. He set up his embalming school after realising no other institutions offered practical embalming tuition in the London area. With the demand for embalmers increasing in Europe, and British embalmers considered some of the best outside of America, he saw a gap in the market. “Interest in embalming is increasing in Germany, Poland, and Russia. Up until recently embalming just didn’t happen in these places for religious reasons, or a lack of skills, but Europe is opening up now, things are changing. A lot of our trainees go off to work abroad, and recently we’ve had requests for places on the course from the continent. We were recently contacted by a qualified embalmer in France, who wanted to have our qualification because of its reputation.” Out of the ether, a funereal church organ plays Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,’ a ridiculously melodramatic Gothic piece, made famous by the Phantom in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom 63

of the Opera. Sinclair apologises for his mobile phone ringtone. “Sorry, it’s the Missus…” He diverts the call. “… Don’t worry, she can wait.” Studying on a part time basis, students take a series of modular theory exams at the London School of Embalming over a period of approximately five months, and study anatomy, thanatology (the scientific study of death), and embalming theory. This is followed by 12 months practical tuition, where they’ll sit in on embalming demonstrations – anything from how to administer the “last offices” (bathing the corpse, washing the hair, closing the eyes and mouth) to drawing blood from the body using an aspirator, before replacing it with a preservative fluid such as formaldehyde. The practice of embalming has a very low profile in the UK, but a few years ago the profession made a prick on the public consciousness through the cult HBO series Six Feet Under. Ironically, British embalming is in many ways indebted to American film and television in a more technical sense; most of the new cosmetological techniques and technologies used in the UK are a by-product Hollywood’s special effects industry. One of the latest is ‘airbrushing,’

Rosalyn Cassidy, Alternative Funeral Director

which can mask all kinds of imperfections. “ It’s the same principle as a spray tan booth, but the cosmetics are heavier, as they also have to mask and hold things,” says Sinclair. “The skin below is much firmer, but it doesn’t need body heat to dry – it air dries, and will actually go into the pores rather than lay on the surface.” Cosmetic technology has come a long way since the 1950s, when the use of oil based stage make-up was common, but the aim of the embalmer has remained the same through the decades – to achieve a ‘natural’ look, as if make-up hadn’t been used at all, and to create a ‘memory picture’ to comfort the bereaved. The US has led the way in the development of such embalming methods since the American Civil War (1861-65), where techniques – many of them used to this day – were invented to help preserve the bodies of battlefield casualties. American embalming procedures are more advanced than those used in Britain, but the British embalmers often have to work under more difficult conditions. “I know it sounds silly, but the American dead and English dead are totally different,” says Sinclair. “With the legal process we have in the UK, the average time before we have someone in our care will be 7-10 days, purely because of the registration, legal procedures, and paperwork that has to be organised. In America the process can be very quick, with the body handed over in hours. When you’re working over there the bodies you’re dealing with can be warm.” Through his ties with the British Institute of Embalmers, Sinclair has helped facilitate exchange programmes with the American embalming institutions. These, perhaps bizarrely, have also been informed by the television industry. “We do an X-Factor-style audition for British embalming students who’ve been recommended as the cream of the crop. The winners of the competition get to go out to America to experience embalming school over there for 2-3 weeks.” X-Factor embalming competitions, eco-coffins, re-usable graves, the rise of the secular funeral, body airbrushing, death rites by design: slowly, imperceptibly, British attitudes to death and its processes are changing, and becoming savvier, more personal, more celebratory. But what of the funeral workers who oversee all this? “We’re just the people in the mortuaries or the embalming rooms, and we don’t really exist,” says Sinclair. “You don’t realise there’s a big team involved. It’s like a duck swimming – you see the body on top, you don’t see the legs that are swimming under the water.”

Kevin Sinclair, Embalmer

Special Report

MADELEINE ANATOMY OF AN INVESTIGATION In the first of an occasional series of contemporary histories, BAD IDEA sets our team of researchers the task of reading every news article on a current event, and creating a comprehensive news digest. This issue, we investigate the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. On the evening of May 3, 2007 at the Ocean Club, a holiday resort in Praia de Luz, Portugal, a phone call was received by the Portuguese police alerting them to the

Art by Tony Easley disappearance of Madeleine McCann. The parents of the threeyear-old child, Leicesterbased doctors Gerry and Kate McCann, reported they had left their daughter in their apartment with her two-yearold twin siblings at 18.00 hours, before leaving to dine with friends at a nearby tapas bar in the resort, approximately 120 metres away. They left their apartment unlocked.

The McCanns said they had taken turns to check back on the children throughout the evening - first Gerry at approximately 21.05 hours, and then a friend, Dr Matthew Oldfield, at 21.30. When Kate McCann returned at 22.00, she found Madeleine’s bed empty and the bedroom window open. Charlotte Pennington, a nanny employed at the resort who was at the scene, said Kate McCann subsequently screamed, “They’ve taken her, they’ve taken her!” The Portuguese police were alerted by a phone call received at 22.14. Other than these ‘facts’, details of the events of that evening have been widely contested, and the attempts of the Portuguese police team to contain information in relation to the investigation, along with intense international media interest in the case, has led to rolling public speculation and conjecture as to what actually happened. The task of the Portuguese investigation team has been made more difficult by the attention the case has been given in the British and Portuguese tabloids, as well as the efforts of the McCanns themselves to seek publicity for their daughter’s cause. Since May, the McCanns have been running a professionallycoordinated publicity campaign, ‘Find Madeleine’, and a search fund, ‘Leaving No Stone Unturned’, securing the

backing of high-profile figures including the Pope, Richard Branson and David Beckham. More than six months after the disappearance, the British tabloids’ appetite for the story is undiminished; in The Daily Express, the story has supplanted ‘revelations’ on the death of Princess Diana as a front page staple, the word “Madeleine” running in bold, red-type as a virtual sub-head to the Express masthead. As of writing, the case remains unsolved, with Madeleine McCann apparently no closer to being discovered alive or dead. So what did happen to her? Numerous theories have been proposed, challenged, and discarded in the international media throughout the investigation. While evidence seems to point to a kidnapper, a case has also been made for the McCanns to be considered as legitimate suspects, with

details on her birth certificate. These appear to be wholly unsubstantiated – but what of the theories considered more credible?

their conduct since Madeleine’s disappearance coming under scrutiny, particularly in the Portuguese press. Some theories have been wild and lurid: that the McCann’s were on a wife-swapping holiday, that they doped their children to put them to sleep, that Gerry McCann isn’t Madeleine’s real father and abused his position as a doctor to alter

On May 14, police arrived at Casa Liliana, a villa situated less than 150 metres away from the McCanns’ apartment where Murat lives with his mother Jenny, and took various materials including mobile phones, computers, and videotapes. They even drained the swimming pool. The next day, Murat was given “arguido” (official suspect) status.

THEORY 1: THE KIDNAPPER

(I) ROBERT MURAT & SERGEY MALINKA A bilingual resident of Praia de Luz with Portuguese and English parents, property developer Robert Murat was ideally placed to help the Portuguese police and the hordes of journalists who descended on the small town. Murat told them he wanted to help because he sympathised with the McCanns, as he was going through a custody battle for a daughter of similar age and appearance to Madeleine. Lori Campbell, a Sunday Mirror reporter, became suspicious of his interest in the case, and reported her concern to the investigation team.

Sergey Malinka, 22, a Russian contact of Murat who helped him design a website for his property business, was also arrested. Malinka and Murat had exchanged frequent telephone calls since Madeleine’s disappearance, arousing the investigative

SECRET

BASEMENT team’s suspicions. It later emerged there were inconsistencies in Malinka’s account of his relationship with Murat: he claimed it had been a year since he had spoken with the Englishman, but mobile phone records allegedly show Murat had called him at 23.40 the night Madeleine went missing. Three of the McCann’s holiday companions – Rachael Oldfield, Russell O’Brien, and Fiona Payne – also said they had seen Murat outside the holiday complex on the night of the disappearance, contradicting his claim of having been at home with his mother, although Murat’s mother corroborated his alibi. The Portuguese police were also contacted by Des Taylor, the 78-year-old British architect who had built the Murat property, stating that the villa contained a “hidden basement” beneath removable tiles in the living room floor. Despite thorough searches of Murat’s villa using sniffer dogs and DNA tests and close examination of his personal materials, the Portuguese police found no new evidence to implicate Murat, although the British tabloids remain suspicious of his involvement. 67

MYSTERY SAILOR Murat is not the only individual under suspicion, however. (II) THE BRITISH YACHTSMEN A fortnight after the disappearance, Portuguese detectives became increasingly interested in yachts at the marina in the town of Lagos, approximately 5 miles away from the Ocean Club. They interviewed a number of boat owners, many of them English, and made efforts to trace “a British man” who left the harbour shortly after Madeleine’s disappearance, having been moored there for two years. A witness also reported seeing a man walking down to the marina, a child in his arms, hours after the disappearance.

(III) THE GRAN CANARIA KIDNAPPER On May 25, the Portuguese police disclosed information about a possible suspect seen by Jane Tanner, a friend of the McCanns, in the Ocean Club complex at 21.30 on May 3. He was said to have been carrying a child in a blanket, or an object that appeared to be a child. The man was described as a Caucasian 3540-year-old of medium build, 170 cm tall (5”7), wearing a dark jacket, beige trousers, and dark shoes. According to a police source quoted in The Daily Mail newspaper, he was said to be “walking urgently, neither walking or running.” This description fitted that of a suspect Spanish police were searching for in connection

Bernard Alapetite

with the Gran Canaria abductions of both 14 year old Sara Morales and 7 year old Yeremi Vargas in July 2006 and March 2007 respectively. Both the Morales and Vargas cases remain unsolved. (IV) BERNARD ALAPETITE On June 7, the newspaper El Mundo published an interview with Antonio Toscano, a Spanish investigative journalist, claiming also to be a private eye specialising in missing children cases. Toscano claimed he was “100% sure” Madeleine had been abducted by “a Frenchman” who was working with two other men for a Europe-based international paedophile network, saying that; “This man is a cold and meticulous criminal… Little Maddie was no coincidence and was selected long before her disappearance, probably in Great Britain.” According to Toscano, his informant met this “Frenchman” in a Seville bar, about two hours from the Portuguese border, and was told that the man was going to the Algarve to visit friends. Toscano claimed the “Frenchman” had gone missing after Madeleine’s disappearance, and his story was reported in all of the British tabloid newspapers. Toscano subsequently contacted the McCanns, who were frustrated by his refusal to divulge key details. Family spokesman Clarence Mitchell said; “At every stage Mr Toscano declined to provide a name for the suspect. This is frustrating and potentially hurtful to Gerry and Kate.” Toscano later said he had been interviewed by the Portuguese police and provided them with the name of the suspect,

but refused to disclose more information. Paulo Reis, a Portuguese journalist, has since revealed that Toscano’s “Frenchman” was almost certainly Bernard Alapetite, a 57 year-old film director, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2000 by a court in Macon, France, for trading in child pornography. Contacting Alapetite via email, Reis asked if he had abducted Madeleine, and was told, in an email dated June 30, “I have not been in Portugal since 1977!!!” Alapetite later phoned the owner of a French blog, ‘SOS Madeleine’ to reject the Toscano accusations, and claimed he had been in Paris on the evening of May 3 and had witnesses to prove it. Several months on, Alapetite has not been charged or named as a suspect by the Portuguese police, and little has been heard of Toscano, who Reis has branded “a cruel hoaxer.” (V) THE JOANA CIPRIANO AFFAIR On June 10, the McCann investigation was thrown into confusion with the news that Goncalo Amaral, the detective coordinating the search efforts of the Policia Judicaria, was facing criminal charges related to another infamous missing child case: the disappearance of Joana Cipriano, who was eight years old when she disappeared from the village of Figueira near Portimao. The case was closed when both Joana’s mother Leonor and uncle Joao were convicted of murder, after the prosecution successfully argued the child was killed for witnessing her mother having sex with her brother. Joana Cipriano’s body had never been found. In addition, Leonor Cipriano

Urs Hans von Aesch

had only confessed to killing her daughter after 48 hours of continuous interrogation by Amaral and four other detectives, and retracted the confession the next day, stating it had been beaten out of her. Amaral and his team of detectives denied the allegations, claiming the injury and bruises she sustained were the result of a suicide attempt, and that she had thrown herself down a flight of stairs. Leandro Silva, Leonor Cipriano’s common-law husband, claimed his wife had been made a scapegoat by Amaral’s team, telling ABC News, “The only difference between the McCanns and us is that we don’t have money.” Silva’s mother, Maria de Lourdes, added; “If Kate McCann were Portuguese,

she would already be in jail.” If Leonor Cipriano truly is innocent, the abductor of Joana Cipriano could still be on the loose. Despite the criminal charges facing him, Goncalo Amaral was only removed from his position as head coordinator for the McCann case on October 2, a direct consequence of his public accusation that British detectives were only pursuing leads endorsed by the McCanns. Amaral was replaced by Chief Detective Paulo Rebelo. (VI) URS HANS VON AESCH In early August, a 67-yearold man called Urs Hans von Aesch was linked to the McCann disappearance when Swiss police alerted Interpol to similarities between the case 69

and that of another missing girl, Ylenia Lenhard. A blonde five-year-old of similar height and build to Madeleine, Lenhard had been taken from a swimming pool in her home town of Appenzell, Switzerland. Swiss police considered von Aesch to be the prime suspect in the Lenhard case before he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Prior to killing himself, he had gunned down an unidentified 46-yearold man. Von Aesch had lived in the

town of Benimantel, near Benidorm, Spain, for more than 10 years with his Spanish wife, and at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance was thought to be holidaying near Praia de Luz in the Algarve. Von Aesch also owned a white van carrying Spanish number plates. This matched the description of a vehicle parked in front of the McCann’s apartment for several days, said to have vanished after Madeleine went missing. On September 15, the Swiss police announced they had 70

discovered Lenhard’s body in the woods between the villages of Oberbüren and Niederwil. Wild animals had dug the corpse out from a shallow grave and ripped it to pieces. Now dead, von Aesch remains the prime suspect for the murder of Ylenia Lenhard.

THEORY 2: THE INTERNATIONAL PAEDOPHILE RING

Since May 3, there have been many sightings of Madeleine in Portugal and elsewhere in the world. Although there have been no firm leads, the McCanns have expressed their belief that Madeleine could be alive, and is most likely being held captive in the Iberian Peninsula or in North Africa. With the financial support of multi-millionaire benefactor Brian Kennedy, the McCanns have employed a team of private investigators to work in Morocco, where it is believed that a number of international paedophile networks base their operations. In early November, Spanish private investigator Francisco Marco of the Metodo 3 agency told the newspaper La Vanguardia he believed Madeleine had been stolen to order and taken to North Africa: “A blonde girl like Madeleine is a symbol of social status in Morocco. That is the way it is.” Marco has been employed by the McCanns on a six-month contract since September. Despite the protestations of the Moroccan interior minister Chakkib Benmoussa, who on November 4 claimed there was no evidence of Madeleine being in Morocco, private investigators have continued to concentrate their efforts in the country, where there have been numerous sightings of

blonde girls fitting Madeleine’s description. Almost all of these sightings have been dismissed by Interpol: in one instance, a Spanish tourist called Clara Torres took a picture of a blonde girl in the Northern town of Zinat that was printed in newspapers across the world, but it was proved to be a Moroccan child, Bushra Binisha. On November 5, The Daily Mail reported that private investigators were narrowing their search to a remote farm in the Rif Mountains. Chief Detective Paulo Rebelo, the new head of the Policia Judicaria investigation into the Madeleine disappearance, has had previous experience with high profile paedophile investigations in Portugal, including a notorious case involving the Casa Pia orphanage in Lisbon, and “Operation Predator”, which saw police raids on over 70 suspected paedophiles. His recruitment of two child sex abuse experts to the investigation team appears to suggest a belief that the involvement of an organised paedophile network is a serious possibility, and it has been reported that the involvement of Russian child traffickers may figure in his thinking.

THEORY 3: THE ACCIDENTAL DEATH

On September 6 the Policia Judicaria officially interviewed Kate McCann for a second time in Portimao, as the McCann’s Portuguese lawyer, Pinto de Abreu made a formal application for the couple’s status to be changed from ‘witness’ to ‘assistant’. This was a technical move that would have given the McCanns more information on the progress of

Map Of The Ocean Club Resort, Praia de Luz

the investigation. Emerging from the police station after his client Kate McCann had been tquestioned for 10 hours, de Abreau said, “Kate was interviewed as a witness and she still remains a witness.” On September 7, Kate McCann returned for a further interview, after which it was announced she had been given formal “arguida” (feminine form) suspect status, and released without charge. Prior to the police interview, she had been quoted in The Daily Telegraph as saying, “The police don’t want a murder in Portugal and all the publicity about them not having paedophile laws here, so they’re blaming us... [They] are running out of budget for this investigation and want it to end.” Although publicly cooperative, the McCanns had grown increasingly frustrated by the Policia Judicaria’s handling of the investigation. Officers had failed to cordon

off the crime scene for 24 hours after the disappearance, allowing tourists to stroll around the area and potentially contaminating forensic evidence. They also failed to seal off the Ocean Club resort, and failed to alert border police for 12 hours. Chief Inspector Olegario de Sousa said the presence of so many friends and staff from the Ocean Club in the apartment immediately after Madeleine’s disappearance had complicated the work of the scientific team, telling the newspaper Diario de Noticias, “At the very worst they would have destroyed all the evidence. This could prove fatal for the investigation.” Gerry McCann was also re-interviewed twice on September 7. Previously, he had told The Washington Post that reports in the Portuguese press that he and Kate might be responsible for their daughter’s disappearance were “incredibly difficult to deal with… [But] we should be

subjected to the same scrutiny as everyone else.” Relatives of the McCanns claimed the police had offered Kate a plea bargain if she’d admit to accidentally killing her child; the police had posited to the McCanns that they might have hidden the body and then used the hire car to dispose of it. Pinto de Abreu later stated the family’s claims of a plea deal were wrong and the result of “a misunderstanding” while Kate was being questioned. Police sources would later reveal the McCanns’ assumption of arguido status was the direct result of new DNA evidence taken from a Renault Scenic hire car, which they had rented 25 days after the disappearance of their daughter. Traces of Madeleine’s DNA were found in the boot of the car and the cockpit, and “bodily fluids” with an “88% match” to Madeleine’s were found in the space under the boot liner, an area where a spare tyre would normally 71

be kept. The police sources also claimed large quantities of Madeleine’s hair were in the car – enough to suggest it could have come directly from her body, as opposed to being transferred by other means. On September 11, however, Alipio Ribeiro, the national director of the Policia Judicaria, stated that the forensic tests had not been conclusive, “We can’t say with certainty whether it was the blood of person ‘A’ or person ‘B’.” Several British forensic experts pointed to the limitations of such evidence, arguing the DNA could have been transferred by Madeleine’s favourite toy, ‘Cuddle Cat’, an item that Kate McCann had carried around for months after the disappearance. Professor Allan Jamieson, a forensic scientist, told Sky News. “If I shake hands with someone then get into my car, it’s likely that their DNA would be transferred.” In addition, other British forensic experts explained the science of matching profiles was made very difficult if members of the same family were involved; anything less than a perfect match made it likely the DNA would belong to Madeleine’s siblings or parents. Alan Baker, a DNA expert, urged caution over the way the samples had been obtained, telling the Press Association, “The sample is only as good as the person that took it.” However, Sky News claimed a source in the Portuguese police was “adamant” that the evidence implicating the McCanns was “damning.” Leaks to the Portuguese press at this time, apparently from the police, hypothesised the McCanns could have sedated their children to put 72

them to sleep, possibly with an antihistamine, and that an overdose or adverse reaction might have caused Madeleine’s death. The McCanns might then have stored the body somewhere for approximately five weeks before using their hire car to transport the body to a yacht – possibly that of the unidentified British sailor suspect – and then thrown Madeleine’s body into the sea in a sack filled with stones. Portuguese newspapers alleged emails discovered on Robert Murat’s computer proved he knew the unidentified sailor suspect, and that investigators were probing possible links between Murat and the McCanns. They also noted that Murat’s sister is based in Exeter, where the McCanns’ friend Dr. Russell O’Brien lives

party in Leicestershire. Murat protested on September 12, “It’s absolutely ridiculous… I’d never met the man before.” The investigators interest in the McCanns’ involvement has been consistent throughout the case. Since the investigation began, the focus of the Policia Judicaria has been the threehour “window of opportunity” on May 3, between 19.30 hours and 22.30 hours, when Madeleine could have been taken, or her body hidden or disposed of. The McCanns, by contrast, have always insisted their daughter was taken between 21.00 and 22.00 hours. In early August the Portuguese press reported that traces of blood had been found on a wall in the McCann’s apartment, leading the Police Judicaria team to consider

with his wife Jane Tanner. Another source in the Policia Judicaria told the 24 Horas newspaper the investigation team believed Murat knew Gerry McCann after meeting him while McCann was campaigning for the Labour

the possibility that Madeleine had been killed within the apartment; samples of the blood were then sent to a forensics laboratory in Birmingham for testing. At the time of writing, the Portuguese police have yet to release information

on the findings of the UK forensic team. Inconsistencies in the statements and timelines given by the “Tapas 9” (as the McCanns and their friends dining at the bar have become known), and those of Ocean Club staff, have led to the police repeatedly interviewing all of the individuals involved. Jane Tanner’s statement that she saw a man carrying a “child with a blanket” at 21.30 on May 3, having left to check on her ill daughter at 21.15, was contradicted by Jeremy Wilkins, a British television producer who had become acquainted with the McCanns through the resort’s tennis club. Wilkins stated he had bumped into Gerry McCann, who had

returned to the apartment to check on his children, at 21.10. The McCanns have since stated their conviction that, with Gerry outside, this was the time an abductor – who was already inside the apartment – would have taken their daughter. Wilkins said he had spoken with Gerry McCann for “several minutes” on the narrow pathway thoroughfare, situated between the tapas bar and the resort apartments. If the timeline given by Jane Tanner is correct, Wilkins is convinced he would have seen both her and the “man with the blanket” she claimed to see, but he says he saw neither – a discrepancy that aroused the suspicion of the investigation team.

There were further inconsistencies. In Dr. Matthew Oldfield’s first police statement, he told the investigation team he had left the tapas bar at 21.30 to check on his and the McCanns’ children, but only listened at the door of the McCanns’ apartment, 5a, to check the children were not awake. The Evening Standard reported that, in a second statement, however, Oldfield clarified he had actually entered the apartment and looked into the childrens’ bedroom. He did not have a clear view of Madeleine’s bed, but he noticed light coming in through the windows as though the security shutters had been opened. Thinking nothing of it, Oldfield returned to the table at the tapas bar and reported to the McCanns that all was well. This account apparently contradicts that of Najova Chekaya, the Ocean Club’s aerobics teacher, who was invited to the McCanns’ table at 21.30. Chekaya told the police no one had left the table or come back to it in the half hour she was there. The McCanns’ claim that an abductor must have broken into the apartment by forcing the security shutter on Madeleine’s bedroom window has been denied by the Mark Warner company, who run the Ocean Club, who have said there was no sign of a forced break in. For the time being, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann remains a mystery that appears no closer to being solved. As Antonio Cluny, the head of Portugal’s public prosecutors service has stated, “Without the little girl’s body everything is extremely complicated.” The investigation continues 73

Photostory

“Does It Come In Black?” Shopping for Military Muscle at the London DSEi Arms Fair

By Sebastian Meyer

he DSEi is one of the world’s largest arms fairs, held every two years in London, with 27 national pavilions, 1352 exhibitors, and official government delegations from over 50 countries looking for military equipment. Exhibitors can more or less display any weapon they want with a few exceptions such as weapons of mass destruction, landmines, cluster bombs, and instruments of torture. At the entrance to the ExCel Centre – where the fair is held – there were police everywhere, and protestors had managed to park a real tank outside the building. I passed through security, they X-rayed my bags and

checked my press pass, and I was allowed through into the main hall. Inside there were Suits as far as the eye could see – European, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, South American, a lot of Eastern European, but barely any African. In the press centre the only people there were guys working for the trade magazines, like Defence Technology International, Battlespace and Soldier of Fortune. I started going around to people to do vox pops, and see what they were up to. The first guy I approached, I took a quick peak at his ID and it said he was Latvian. I asked him what his name was, who he represented,

A Lockheed Martin advertising billboard outside the ExCel Centre in the London Docklands and what he thought of the DSEi. He was about 6’3”. He looked me up and down and then said, slowly in a very sinister Eastern European drawl, “Is better you not know my name.” I was in no doubt that he meant it was better for me, not him, that I didn’t know his name. Then I tried talking to two English guys standing together. “I don’t want to talk – you handle this, bye,” said one and left. I asked the other guy: “Why are people so cagey here?” “Well – people are buying guns, they’re nervous about that.” “Are you buying guns?” “No. I’m from the ambulance service, we’re looking at military technology to help us with air rescues.” “So why are you nervous to talk to me?” “I don’t know, I guess I just don’t really want to be associated with this.” His arm gesture took in a few tanks, grenade launchers, and submarine torpedoes. All the companies in the hall were grouped together by country: Turkey, Austria, Russia, etcetera. I don’t think it was a coincidence that India was placed in one corner of the centre, and Pakistan in the other. Most Western companies had quite benign names and logos – like General Dynamics and IVECA. But one of the largest Pakistani companies, Pakistan Ordinance Factories (POF), had the ‘O’ drawn like the cross hairs 76

of a rifle, and bombs and machine guns all over their banner. They hadn’t quite caught on to the trend for understatement. I was taking photos of their stand and one of their salesmen ran over and literally shoved me away. “No photo, No photo!” he said. I don’t really take that kind of bullshit, especially when it’s within my rights to take a photo of something, so I told him to get lost. When I lifted my camera again, he jumped in front of me. I leaned forward and told him that stopping me taking pictures made him look terrible, like he was hiding something. When he wouldn’t move, I stormed off. I didn’t get more than 10 steps before he ran up and grabbed me by the shoulder. “Is my boss, my boss – come back in 10 minutes when he’s gone and you can take photo.” At another stand selling Norwegian military equipment, I talked to a guy demonstrating an outrageously large tripod mounted machine gun. I asked him: “How would I go about buying this?” “We don’t sell to individuals,” he said. “The way it works is someone comes here to the fair, they look at the product, then they go back to their government and make a suggestion. Then an arms agent contacts us, representing a particular government, and, ah, then they place their order.”

Visitors watch a weapons video display in the Russian area of the exhibition centre 77

1. Wall mounted guns at the POF (Pakistan Ordinanc Factory) stand 2. Visitors handle guns in the Belgian area 3. Colombian military personnel observe Lockheed Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s range of munitions 4. Visitors examine a tripod-mounted machine gun in the Norwegian area 5. Visitors inspect the Lockheed Martin display

4 5

The Glock showcase in the Austrian area

Confessions: Life & Death

Confessions 2: Julie Dunk Bereavement Services Manager, Bournemouth Council

Photography by Sebastian Meyer 82

ost people don’t even know we exist as a profession. The only time people come to our premises is when they need us, and then it’s not a good time in their lives. So they’re not likely to find out much about us. We’re quiet but we’re there, providing a professional service. My major was archaeology, studied at York University. One of the courses was on what they called mortuary behaviour – looking at funeral rights through the ages and across different religions. I got quite interested in death at the time: how people disposed of bodies and how we might find out about that in the archaeological records. I was still based in York as an archaeologist at around the time Westminster Council sold off three of their cemeteries for 5p each [in 1987]. It was a bit of a scandal at the time, and raised the issue of cemeteries, and what we do with them when they’re full. A research project was put together funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and I was offered the job of running it. As part of the research we had to travel around the country, visit lots of cemeteries, talk to cemetery managers – find out what they were up to. And I just sort of fell in love with the profession. I’d excavated lots of skeletons, but because I was young, no one close to me in my family had ever died: I’d never been to a funeral that meant something to me. Suddenly, meeting all these people working in bereavement services, it was like – wow, there’s all this going on out there, this is a real job. Managing cemeteries and cremations, and dealing with the bereaved becomes a way of life. It goes beyond working 9-5. I can walk down the street now and see people that I’ve dealt with and we’ll stop for a chat, or I’ll be in the pub and people might come up and talk to me because I’ve been there for them when their spouse died. You never get away from it really, but that makes it very special – to be able to help, and for people to trust you enough to be able to do that. On anniversary days people often come in to visit us at the cemetery. Bereavement is a lonely time; we’re not counsellors, but we can provide a friendly face and a good listening companion for a while. In time, I think we’ll see a move away from having funerals at traditional centres, and cemeteries will become less important: there will perhaps be an increase in funerals at hotels or village halls or even in people’s homes. It will be much more about having a celebration in a place that meant something to the deceased person. There’s no laws as such prohibiting

you from bringing a coffin into a hotel – it’s all down to the hotel management and how they feel about it. I even know of some pubs in London that have begun having services. The disposal of the body itself will become a much more minor part – largely directed by environmental concerns. Cremation, which uses a lot of gas and creates harmful mercury emissions, is looking less and less of a good thing. There are some new technologies beginning to be tested for getting rid of bodies. There’s a method called promession, developed in Sweden, where the body is frozen and then subjected to a shock, and it splinters down. There’s also one called water resomation, which is again supposed to be a lot greener than cremation. The body is heated in a very high alkaline medium, which dissolves the body down to its basic elements. It produces a liquid that is reduced to a white powder, which can be scattered like traditional ashes. We’re also seeing a move away from the afterlife aspect in a funeral service, to a celebration of the life. 15 years ago when I started, there was less customisation of funerals. It was always assumed that if somebody died, you’d go and see the funeral director and the funeral director would make all the arrangements – you don’t need to worry or know what’s going on. This fed all sorts of myths and fears about what goes on, especially with cremation. People often thought we took bodies out of coffins and reused them, that we took people’s teeth out, that we stole their jewellery, that we put multiple coffins in a cremator at once and then handed relatives some token ashes. That has changed a lot: people are more interested now, they’re wanting individual funerals, something that’s special to them, rather than just what the funeral director suggests. People talk about the deceased much more in a funeral service now, and the family will stand up and give readings, maybe read a poem that somebody’s written specially, and it’s about celebrating that person, it’s not about the idea that they’ve gone on somewhere better. In most traditional Christian funerals the eulogy is a small part of the service, but in modern funerals the eulogy is basically the whole thing. Often, when I have a bit of a break, I’ll go to our chapel and listen to someone’s funeral service – the life stories you hear are amazing

As told to Daniel Stacey 83

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Art by Steph von Reiswitz 00

The Honeytrapper

From Edinburgh to San Francisco, the Life of an International Love Spy

By Lauren Gard

he blue door opens just as I think my ass is about to permanently fuse to the wooden bench. I’ve been staring at this portal into a stately stone apartment building for four hours, willing a tall middle-aged man to step through it. “That’s got to be him,” I tell my boss, Chris, whose thigh is pressed up against mine in an effort to retain some body heat. We’re both underdressed for autumn in Scotland, and freezing. I reach into my back pocket and quickly unfold the snapshot I’ve studied a dozen times since our plane took off in San Francisco, 24 hours ago. The man in the photo, arm around our client, is indeed the same gent who just took a left out the door. A major relief: we’d been worried that his statuesque wife was wrong about him flying into Edinburgh last night. It would have been a shame for her to pay us $10,000 to find out if he’s being unfaithful only to discover that his business trip to Scotland was utter fiction. During our two Stateside meetings she appeared to know very little about him. “It could be another man, even,” she suggested while counting out a mess of 20 dollar bills, extracted during numerous trips to the ATM, on our dark cherry conference table. “We don’t, ah – we’re not intimate anymore. I can’t even remember the last time…” She looked up then and offered a limp smile. “Can I write you a check for the remaining $2,000?” “It’s definitely him,” I whisper to Chris as I leap off the bench. I’m sure Chris can hear my heart thumping, but I’m still new at this. “Here we go!” Chris slowly rises, a chunky camera bag bobbing in his right hand. We give our guy a half-block lead, trailing him from across the street. We have to be particularly cautious

with this one since we’ll be following him on foot for four days straight. If we’re burned today, we’re screwed. He continues along the winding sidewalk towards a flashing red traffic light a few blocks away. He’s oblivious – yet clearly on a mission. Chris stops and scans the street. Then he whips out his video camera and, without turning his head, barks a quiet command: “Stay on him! And be careful – traffic’s backwards here!” Duly noted, although Chris is the one who has nearly been run down twice already. I scurry onward and watch our target approach the light, cross to our side of the street, and saunter out of view behind a thick hedge. Fuck! I make a mad dash for the corner, my heavy purse, a designer knock-off housing a hidden camera system, bouncing awkwardly against my hip. I careen around the corner. “Shit!” A split second later, Chris appears. “Where is he?” he huffs. And then I’m forced to utter the three dreadful words that may one day get me fired: “I don’t know.” The street is nearly empty and our mark has vanished. We’re in a part of the city known as New Town, but it’s as though we’ve stumbled upon an 18th Century village. Flowers spill from wooden boxes flanking brightly painted window frames. A bulbous black taxi toodles by. Off in the distance, a pristine white steeple splits a turquoise river. We soak it all in for 30 seconds. The good news is there aren’t many places our target could have ducked into. A chain supermarket. A sandwich shop. A dry cleaners. 85

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He’s unexpectedly dashing. If we decide to sting him later in the week, it could be fun to play the part of decoy

” The sky, Disney blue just a few moments ago, begins to spit. “Check the market,” instructs Chris, camera still in hand. “I’ll cover the rest of the block.” I breeze into the shop, tilting my head just so, nibbling my lower lip, and adopting a daft expression I hope reads, ‘Now, why did I come here, again?’ My eyes dart up and down the aisles, past a blonde woman examining loaves of bread and an elderly bald man lost in a cat food selection haze. I nearly jump when I see our target plucking a carton of milk from the dairy shelves – not in the least because he’s unexpectedly dashing. Not quite the Pierce Brosnan lookalike our client advised us to be on the lookout for, but then, I knew that from the photo she’d given us. Still, it didn’t do him justice. Square jaw. Crinkly blue eyes. Plenty of stylishly mussy hair. Quite fit for 50. If we decide to sting him later in the week, it could be fun to play the part of decoy sent in to flirt with him. I spin around and make a beeline for the door, trying to suppress a jubilant grin, and give Chris a thumbs up at waist level as I bounce towards the other end of the street, where he’s pacing. “Got ‘im,” I announce. “He’s buying milk!” “What kind?” The hokey smile topples off my face. I have no idea what kind. Was I really supposed to have gotten that close to this guy? I consider the question. He didn’t look like a skim guy. More like a whole milk kind of bloke, the kind with a ridiculously high metabolism. “I’m kidding!” chides Chris. “Excellent work. Now, c’mon, let’s get out of the rain.” We lie in wait opposite the market and when our target exits 10 minutes later, Chris’s camera is rolling. “Bet you 20 bucks he walks right back home,” I challenge. I currently owe Chris about $200 in lost bets. “I’m sure you’re right,” he says. Darn – no bet. “But you never know.” Ah yes, we never do. Even if Mr. Cute-for-50 returns to his apartment, what’s not to say he hasn’t just picked up supplies for a romantic breakfast with a lingerie-clad lover lounging in his bed? Unfortunately, there are certain things we cannot do. Not at this point, anyway. 86

“Don’t go home! Don’t go home!” I chant softly as we set out after him again. The last thing I want to do is spend the remainder of my first day overseas in forced communion with the bench. But a few minutes later, as the familiar blue front door slams shut, the seat, now dappled with raindrops, beckons. The sky has cleared, but the sun is still MIA and the shivering has begun again. A single syllable enters my mind: rum. “We passed a liquor store about a block away,” I inform Chris. He forces a dramatic sigh and, without a word, pulls a fat wad of cash out of his front pocket. The equivalent in pounds of the $1,000 USD he exchanged at the airport, I’m guessing, which a mini-mart clerk has already suggested he never again whip out in public. He slips a £50 note from beneath a silver Montblanc money clip. I pocket the bill, drop the hidden camera bag on the bench and take off. Welcome to the thrill-a-minute world of private investigations.

f you’d asked me back when I was a nose-in-abook kind of kid what I hoped to be when I was verging on 30, chances are I would have said a grown-up female version of Leroy ‘Encyclopedia’ Brown, the precocious boy detective who was drawn to look kind of like me (gangly, glasses) and could always be relied upon to counter neighbourhood crime with nimble wit. That or Danielle Steel, whose scandalous sex-drenched books I’d sneak from my mother’s bedside drawer and skim beneath the covers at night. So I suppose it’s fitting that I’m now a professional love spy. A journalist by trade, I was writing for a weekly newspaper in March 2006 when I tripped across an online Craigslist ad posted by Butler & Associates, a small agency owned by a former competitive bodybuilder turned rogue cop turned private investigator. (That’d be Chris.) “Private investigations firm is seeking undercover decoys, age 21-50, for select undercover assignments,” the ad began. Last among a list of desirable qualities that included the ability to ad lib, to elicit information from targets and to remain calm under stress, flashed two words that really ignited my imagination: BODY WIRE. As in, “the ability to

perform the above tasks while wearing a body wire.” I clicked on the link to the firm’s website. “Betrayed by someone you love? Deceived by someone you trust?” asked the page highlighting the firm’s infidelity work. “For your peace of mind, let us uncover the truth.” Ooh. I picked up the phone. “Sure,” said Chris, who later admitted that he was wary of reporters but figured the publicity wouldn’t hurt. “Come on in.” I approached the story like any other. I spent hours quizzing Chris, whose trilling Blackberry interrupted our chatter every few minutes. He explained that he invites client to call at any time, at no charge. “Better to vent to me than to their husbands. I think of this job as investigator-slash-therapist. A lot of P.I.’s won’t touch it – it’s so emotionally charged.” He hadn’t planned on tracking cheating spouses when he quit the police force after a decade. He’d advertised general investigative services in the phone book, and to his surprise anxious wives phoned in droves. Despite the rise of the Internet, he still believes in the power of the Yellow Pages, shelling out thousands of dollars a month for the ads. I sat down with Cyndi and Angelica, Chris’s two full-time investigators. Affable, bright, and discernibly cautious, they’d been hired through decoy ads like the one I’d seen. Thirty-something Cyndi was a former prison nurse and competitive horseback-rider

from Kentucky. Angelica, a newlywed, was fresh out of UC Berkeley and lived with her in-laws. She’d applied to be a cop but was told she needed more life experience. Chris invited me to tag along on a case. One Friday night sting in a crowded pool hall was all it took to hook me. I went as a reporter but before I knew what was happening I found myself chatting up George Clooney’s could-be cousin while the husband of Chris’s client flirted with a buxom decoy. When I went out a second time Chris offered me a purse cloaking a hidden camera. “Think you can do it?” he challenged as we raced across a mall parking lot. “Do what?” I asked, trying to keep up “You didn’t think I was going to walk in there with a purse, did you?” He handed me the bag. I slipped it over my shoulder, screwed up my courage, and, a few minutes later, surreptitiously filmed an adulterous couple smooching near a turtleneck display at H&M. Although I had to genuinely repress my natural inclination to shop – an adorable dress sashayed on a hanger nearby – I’d never felt so alive. I whipped off an article for the newspaper. “You totally crossed the line here!” my editor scolded me after I turned in my first draft. “You’re supposed to report the news, not make it.”

Story

I blushed. I stammered. I shrugged. Then I quit my job and took my Toyota Corolla in to have the windows tinted.

nfidelity investigations comprise about 75% of our caseload. The rest of the time we tackle everything from tracking down runaway teens to performing surveillance for worker compensation cases. About three quarters of our infidelity clients are women. They arrive at our office, located in a lowslung beige industrial building in Concord, a suburb nestled 30 miles east of San Francisco, in varying states of shock and distress. Most can’t quite believe their lives have come to this, that they actually opened a fat copy of the Yellow Pages long forgotten in a hall closet or googled “private investigator San Francisco” and wound up rapping on our locked, blacked-out front door. We monitor our small parking lot via video camera and have witnessed potential clients pull into a spot, only to speed away moments later without ever getting out of their cars. That way they can pretend they were never quite this desperate. “I never in a million years thought I’d be sitting here right now,” are often the first words that spill from their carefully lipsticked mouths as they reach into their Prada purses for Kleenex. (They tend to be a well-groomed bunch, able as they are to afford our $95 and up hourly rates.) “I feel like I’m going crazy” is the sentiment that typically follows. Yet clients rarely seem crazy to me, even when they speak of 88

steaming open their husband’s credit card statements or sabotaging his cell phone by dousing the battery with drops of olive oil. If clients share anything in common, it’s that they tend to be very sad and, when we reach beneath the surface of their sorrow, very angry. One woman recently thrust a piece of paper towards me on which she’d provided the basics on her husband and his suspected lover, whom he had repeatedly denied being involved with. “My Husband” read the first line: “6 feet tall. Thin. Ultra marathon runner. White hair. Beard. White 1999 Volvo station wagon.” It was what we required, in addition to a photo and a point of acquisition, to perform surveillance. Below it, she’d scrawled “WHORE,” followed by a few mundane details on the other woman. My immediate, uncomfortable, instinct was to laugh. Chris sat across from me at the conference table, and I studied his framed P.I. license on the wall behind him as I waited for him to say something. “How could she do this?” the client asked, cutting the silence. “We went to her wedding two years ago! Can you believe the Whore bought a house just a mile away from ours?” She looked to me for affirmation. I shook my head slightly, studied the piece of paper she’d given me and gave a little tut. “I want evidence that he’s cheating on me, in case he tries to back out of the divorce agreement he agreed to last week.” She paused. “He said he’d give

“

I have to stop myself from telling clients about a certain expertise I bring to the job: I’ve cheated, and I was remarkably good at it

” me his entire retirement fund. Crazy, right?” “You have to protect yourself,” I replied. It was my multi-purpose line of choice. She was halfway out the door when she stopped and threw a question over her shoulder. “You’ll be careful, right?” She turned around. “I did notice yesterday that one of his guns is missing.” Most clients are less dramatic. “We’ve been married for 27 years and I feel like I barely know him anymore,” they’ll say. We routinely hear about husbands who claim to sleep at the office, creep out of bed in the middle of the night to feed an online porn habit, grow more concerned with the state of their pecs and their abs than that of their children, drive drunk more often than not, or spontaneously drop 80 grand on a sports car after spending 60 grand on one the year before. Cliché, cliché, cliché. But every so often we’ll hear a truly jarring story, like the one from a woman who first found out about her husband’s philandering after their entire family participated in a community blood bank donation for a sick kid in their neighbourhood. A few days later a letter from the blood bank arrived in the mail, addressed to her husband. She opened it: “Your request to withdraw your donation has been received and processed.” The letter may well have concluded, “Thank you for informing us that you’ve had unprotected sex and that any number of nasty venereal diseases may be coursing through your bloodstream.” Our client confronted her husband, who admitted he’d slept with a few prostitutes here and there. She forgave him, but never quite trusted him again.

often have to stop myself from telling clients about a certain expertise I bring to the job: I’ve cheated. And I was remarkably good at it. “Really?” I imagine they’d say, taking in my everywoman looks – the clear skin, minimal make-up, straight teeth, long dark hair and bangs. If I’m pretty at all, it’s the kind of pretty that would never cause a wife worry. “You must have had a good reason. Was it revenge cheating?” “Oh, no,” I’d reply. “No one’s ever cheated on me.”

I’d sigh then, that tiny waft of air propelling the client’s gaze to the platinum wedding band circling my ring finger. I’d watch her watery eyes pop. “I was just unhappy,” I’d continue. “I wanted to— you know, feel the butterflies in my stomach again. To have someone touch me and not know what their hands were going to do for a change.” She’d lean in, successfully repressing the desire to say, “Yes, I’ve felt that, too.” Instead: “Did he catch you?” “Nope. Although I told him everything, eventually. I’m too damn honest.” “But didn’t you feel guilty?” “A little. The first time especially.” “Oh. You did it more than once?” “Uh-huh. I don’t know how many times – I can’t bring myself to count.” It’s true. I tried to make a list once but stopped when I couldn’t conjure the name of a guy I met in a Tokyo nightclub. I did remember his bright orange vest, though, and the fact that it turned out he was a far better dancer than lover. “A dozen? Two dozen?” A little gasp, then, in a voice buoyed by hope, “But you’re still married? You worked through it?” “Oh, no. This was before I met my husband,” I’d say. Then I’d utter a conviction similar to that many of our clients’ spouses have sworn, even when confronted with damning evidence. “I’d never cheat on him. Never.” In my case it’s true. Almost. Case in point: I’d been working for Butler and Associates for a month when a new client rang. She was a fast-talking neurologist who wanted to protect her kids from her alcoholic ex-husband and knock her alimony payments down a few notches. She painted him as a successful building contractor who lied to the court about his income and often knocked back a few pints before picking the kids up for his visitation. She wanted us to catch him on a DUI. Chris tailed him for several nights, hoping he’d get behind the wheel after leaving his usual watering hole. On one occasion he did – but then he simply drove a few blocks to his house. Not a chance the cops could nab him that quickly. Somehow we had to make him drive a greater distance. The plan Chris orchestrated was beyond complicated, and involved 89

my colleague, Cyndi, and I. “Chat him up at the bar, watch him get sloshed, convince him to take a dip in your hot tub,” Chris said, peering at me through his blue-tinted contact lenses, a small smile playing on his lips above a carefully manicured goatee. “The key is to act like he’s going to get a threesome. No guy will turn that down – at least, no straight one.” I rolled my eyes. “I’ll be waiting outside the bar. I’ll call the cops the minute he gets in his car, and follow him. All you have to do is keep driving.” “You’re just doing this because you want to see me and Cyndi make out,” I told Chris. He denied this, failing miserably to keep a straight face. “Just, you know, put a hand on her leg, run a hand through her hair – ” “Enough!” said Cyndi, who hadn’t been shy about her burgeoning interest in tantra. “We know what to do.” “We’ve got it covered,” I added. “So we’ll just go to his favourite bar and hope he’s there?” Chris shook his head. A few days later, 5pm. I’m pacing the kitchen of a house for sale, awaiting the grumble of a white pick-up truck pulling into the driveway. I’m wearing a low-cut jersey top that shows off cleavage I’ve artfully created with a mega-bra and bronzer, my favourite butt-hugging jeans and three coats of mascara. My purse is wired. Chris and Cyndi sit across the street in the sleek black Mercedes Chris’s mysterious silent partner, whom we know only as ‘G’, recently contributed to our fleet. They’ll listen in, just in case our target’s serial killer side emerges. Chris’ realtor contact hooked us up with the house, and my fingers are crossed that no other realtors show up for a viewing. “Hi!” I say, grasping the hand of the short, balding man in a polo shirt and khakis. “I’m Lauren.” I’ve decided to stick with my real first name as much as possible in the line of duty. My memory just isn’t that good. “Hullo,” he replies in a singsongy Irish accent, the one I found unexpectedly alluring when I left a message on his voicemail the day before. He quickly takes in my outfit. “Patrick McCauley. Pleasure to 90

meet you.” I lead him into the kitchen, where his attention turns from my bust to the cabinets. The room is bright with the late afternoon sun so he doesn’t seem to notice that the lights are off. Whew. I couldn’t for the life of me find a switch that worked. “You can see what I was talking about on the phone,” I say. “The cabinets look like they haven’t been touched since the 60s. The house just isn’t moving, and my realtor thinks a quick makeover might help.” He tugs on a cabinet door and peers inside. “Well, there’s a lot we can do. All depends on how much you want to spend.” “Whatever you think will help it sell, and fast.” “It’s your house?” “No, it was my aunt’s. She just died and I’m handling the sale for my parents, who live back East.” I step toward him and peer into his grey eyes. “You know, you look really familiar. Have we met before?” “I don’t think so,” he replies. With a shock I realise that he’s staring at my breasts. Has anyone ever been so fascinated with them before? Not that I can recall. “Maybe at a bar? Yeah, somewhere around here. A place with all sorts of beer on tap?” “Right, well, most nights I’m at Conlin’s.” “That’s where it was!” I exclaim. “Yeah, I think you were sitting up at the bar.” “Yep, that’s my spot. On my way there now, actually.” He glances at his watch. “Is there a light in here?” I grimace. “Burnt out. Guess I’ll need an electrician, too.” I cross in front of him, lean over the stove and open a high cabinet. I examine it for no apparent reason – other than to “show the goods,” as Chris so tactfully suggested. If only my women’s studies professor could see me now, I think. Patrick pokes around the kitchen for a few minutes before reporting that for $40,000 I can have a gorgeous new kitchen in just three weeks. “Wow, so fast! You must work all the time.” I bat my lashes a la Betty Boop. “When do you have time to drink?” “I put in 14 hours most days,” he says. Then, a chuckle, “but I make the time!” I bet you do, I think.

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A man’s car is his sanctuary. When he’s in it he feels invincible. He’ll call a girlfriend from your driveway

” He proffers a business card and I tuck it into my back pocket. When we shake hands again I let mine linger. “Thanks so much,” I say, flashing him a coy smile. “So…what time did you say you’d be at that bar?” His eyes widen. “Right,” he stammers. “You should come join me for a drink. That’d be fun.” “A friend and I were planning to go out in San Francisco, but we might just come by on the way.” “Alright, then,” he replies. “Goodbye.” From the door I watch him lumber toward his truck, and before I can even think about what I’m doing I’m back beside him. “Oh, and Patrick,” I purr into his ear. “My friend just loves Irish accents.” It strikes me then that I sound like an underpaid phone sex operator, and my cheeks blaze. Fuck, I’m really, really bad at this. I dash back inside and hide until I hear him drive off. “Who are you?” I ask my reflection when I pass a gawdy mirror in the entryway. If I were a spigot, Patrick would have drowned soon after stepping foot in the house. And yet he played right into my hand. Four hours later, we’re in a redneck bar where dozens of autographed cowboy boots dangle from the ceiling and so-called shots of lemon juice, sugar and vodka are served up in six-ounce glasses. I guzzle cocktails with Patrick while Cyndi nurses a soda water. After we’d ordered our first round a few hours back, she’d planned to stealthily slip the bartender a twenty and request that my future drinks be made virgin, per our usual drinking-with-targets protocol. But it was a no-go – Patrick and the bartender clearly know one another well. In fact, he seems to know half the people in the bar. He turns out to be quite a charmer, with a gentle way about him and a selfdeprecating Irish humour. “I’ve never met a client for a drink before,” he admits. “C’mon,” I retort. “You can’t be serious!” I brush his knee with my fingertips. He leans in close. “In fact, I haven’t been on a date in 11 years.” He sips his drink and looks away. I run a finger down his cheek and shoot a woeful look across the table at Cyndi, who I can tell has become a bit panicked about my increasingly obvious state of intoxication.

Poor Patrick! When I signed onto this P.I. thing, I never anticipated feeling sorry for the people we were out to sting. En route to the bathroom to phone Chris with an update, I whisper to Cyndi: “He’s so nice! Don’t you wish we could terminate now and get out of here?” She nods. “But remember why we’re here. If he drives drunk, we’ll be getting someone dangerous off the road.” Good point. And it’s not like we’ll force him into his car – he could easily call a cab. I return just as Cyndi knocks over my newly arrived gin and tonic. She meets my dazed gaze with arched eyebrows and embarks on a napkin search. I plop into Patrick’s lap. He wraps his arms around my waist. And that’s the last scene I can recollect. I don’t remember Patrick accepting Cyndi’s invitation to take a dip with us in her hot tub. I can’t recall the flashing blue and red lights atop the police car that pulled Patrick over, even after later viewing his arrest on video, as Chris filmed it. Nor can I summon up the memory of stumbling into our waiting room soon after midnight and collapsing in a chair usually reserved for forlorn clients. I come to briefly when my husband arrives to take me home, and again later when he tucks me in and brushes his soft lips against my forehead. The next morning I recoil at the site of a plastic sick bag in the kitchen wastebasket. “You had that in the office, and the car,” Adam reminds me as I fill a glass with water, a task that seems to involve 18 steps. Right. I call Cyndi on the way to work. I’m due to interview a decoy applicant at 9am, with four more meetings to follow. “Tell me I didn’t sneak off to the bathroom and have sex with our target last night,” I ask flatly when Cyndi picks up. “You didn’t!” She laughs. “I’m serious. I blacked out, so I have no idea what I did. Adam told me the cops got our guy on a DUI. That’s all.” “I’m sorry! I did everything I could think of to slow you down, but it was like the deck was stacked against us. When you ordered those lemon drop shots and the bartender – ” “Just tell me what happened.” She has a tendency 91

to ramble and my head is exploding. “Well, you did kiss him.” I figured as much. I hear a honk and realise I’m stopped at a green light. I step on the gas. “You sat in his lap for like, an hour. He was super into it and you were, too. I mean you were pretty much glued to him. You really don’t remember this?” I groan. I thought I’d kicked that old get-drunkand-hook-up habit, and the fact that it happened in the line of duty doesn’t make me feel any better. “I’m so sorry. Must have been a blast for you!” “Oh, I was fine. I just wish I could have done more to help. You seemed totally focused on the sting most of the night, and then suddenly you were just – gone.” I’m on the freeway now, on autopilot. In other words, speeding. It occurs to me that if I were pulled over right now, I may well get slapped with a DUI of my own. According to Adam, I registered a blood alcohol level of .16 on Chris’ breathalyser test last night, way above the legal limit of .08. Seven hours have passed – enough time to metabolise all that alcohol? I slow down. “What else happened?” “We kissed, too,” says Cyndi. “You and me, I mean.” Just the news I was hoping not to hear. I

can’t bring myself to request details and I’m grateful that she doesn’t supply any. It’s not the fact that I’ve kissed a woman, or her, even. What freaks me out is not remembering it. What if I said something embarrassing, or even worse, took it a step further? Sucked on an ear? Felt her up? All I can do is apologise. “We did what we were supposed to do,” insists Cyndi. “Let’s just say that you were an exceptionally determined bait girl.” I’m not sure I believe her, but when I later search the term “alcohol blackout” online I come across an academic paper highlighting the fact that people who black out can indeed engage in goal-oriented behaviour. I print out a copy and save it on my hard drive. I barely make it through the decoy interviews that day, although my spirits do lift temporarily when an applicant shares a tale about appearing on the Howard Stern show. She claims she shed her clothes and asked if he’d use her bare bum as a set of bongo drums. He did. So I suppose life could be worse. “Just be glad I didn’t tape you last night,” remarks Chris, who has been out in the field most of the day, as I leave to go home. He claims that he was watching

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We give clients information that helps them feel in control of their lives again: our evidence usually conﬁrms their suspicions

” us through the windshield of his mammoth black Chrysler, purportedly parked right in front of the bar. I’m not convinced. “You know why I didn’t?” “Because when it comes down to it, you’re not a total asshole?” I venture. “Noooo,” he smirks, his deep voice arching. “Because if you saw yourself on video doing that, you’d never agree to be a decoy again.” Hah! As if I ever will. But my future role at the agency is the least of my worries. For starters, I have to tell my husband what happened. Don’t I? Then there’s the unnerving notion that Patrick will figure out he was set up and try to track me down. He doesn’t know my last name, and the mobile number I left on his voicemail when I called him to set up the meeting is billed to our corporate P.O. Box. Our address is unlisted. Still, that night I take down my profile from MySpace and other networking sites, and enter what winds up being a long period during which I cannot glimpse a white pick-up truck without trembling. I suddenly long for the sterile cubicles and looming deadlines I used to despise.

few more months on the job teach me that coming off a case feeling physically ill, guilty and fearing for my life is the exception. Instead, I grow accustomed to a quiet satisfaction that comes with empowering our clients. We give them information that helps them feel in control of their lives again – I can’t think of any situation where the maxim “knowledge is power” is more fitting. Most of the time, the evidence we produce confirms their suspicions. “How often are you successful?” Clients repeatedly ask. Chris will point out that success depends on their definition of it. “If you mean, how often do we confirm clients’ suspicions, then the answer is 99%” he replies. It’s simultaneously what they want to hear, and not. They desire desperately to be validated, to not be wasting their time and money, and yet it seems to me that some small part of them wants to believe the lies they’ve been told. Under California’s no-fault divorce statute, proof of infidelity rarely earns our clients a

penny more in a divorce settlement. But that doesn’t stop them from wanting evidence. Or, in the case of one client who requested 17 copies of a video showing his wife dining with her lover, from wanting everyone they know to see the evidence, too. Midway through an initial consultation, Chris usually asks a client: “Can you get his car and bring it here?” “The reason I ask,” he continues, “is because for many men, their car is their sanctuary. When they’re in it, they feel invincible. Untouchable. They’ll call a girlfriend from your driveway. Talk to their best friend for hours about their latest sexual conquest. It’s almost – pardon my directness here – an extension of their penis.” He reddens on cue here. The women almost universally love this part. “Now, he’s your husband, right? You co-own the car?” Once a client establishes that the car is communal property – and thus fair game – Chris suggests having us install a Global Positioning System or one of the more sophisticated homemade monitoring systems he concocts using old mobile phones. Once installed, users simply log on to a dedicated Web site to snag real-time and historical data about the car’s location, and speed. And if we need to pick up a car to start surveillance, or we’ve lost it in traffic – it’s rare, but it happens – we can get an immediate locate. We call that a ping, as in, “Ping it!” This helps cut down on the number of red lights we run. Then there’s the monitor. As far as Chris can deduce, few, if any, other private eyes in California offer clients the opportunity to hear what’s going on inside their car as their husbands drive to work. Or, as has been the case, bump and grind with a mistress. Another option Chris tosses somewhat less frequently onto the table is a sting. If a client suspects her husband is a player we’ll often test her theory using one of the dozen or two women on our decoy roster. Sometimes a sting is as simple as sending two attractive decoys – one known as the bait, the other, the control – into a target’s environment to see how he responds. Though bars are the norm, we’ve also carried out stings in delicatessens, health clubs, office building lobbies and AA meetings. There are few places we won’t go. The bait’s job is to allow the guy to buy her drinks, 93

match but never exceed his level of interest, and allow him to take her digits at the end of the night. We refer to this as a stage one sting. The phone number she gives is for an agency-owned phone which we set up in advance with her voice mail message. The woman acting as control – the role I prefer to play –has a tougher job: to ensure that her cohort is comfortable, and that the hidden camera purse is positioned to optimise our footage. Chris is always present, too, either observing from behind the scenes or right there in the mix as the control girl’s boyfriend who has – surprise! –wound up getting off work early. A stage two sting involves a phone call. If a target calls a decoy, our client can access his voicemail message and decide if she wants the decoy to call him back. If so, she’ll give us questions to work into the conversation. (“Are you married?” is a popular one.) If a client wants to go all the way to stage three, our decoy suggests a romantic dinner, which our client just happens to interrupt. Of course, many stings are far more complex. Take the one involving our decoy, Star, who introduced herself to a client’s husband via a casual sex personals site he’d recently begun frequenting. They emailed for six weeks: patience, we preach, is key. Then they met for drinks, which we caught on tape. At the conclusion of their second in-person meeting, Jessica left him, naked but for a heavy dousing of hickeys, chocolate sauce and whipped cream, tied to a fourposter bed in a $400 a night hotel room. Last time I checked, his clothes, shoes and car keys were still in a bag in our office. Hey, don’t blame us. Our client wanted to send him a wake-up call. All we did was deliver.

chance to play decoy in Scotland never materialises. After hitting the supermarket that first day, our target stays home. Chris and I wait on the bench until ten o’clock at night and then terminate. We stagger, exhausted, back to our hotel. The next morning we follow our target, clad in a perfectly tailored navy suit, two miles to work. We take up post in a modern café near the sparkling glass office tower where he works. I read four different 94

tabloids cover to cover. Around six we relocate to a stone wall across the street from the building. “And we’re off!” Chris says two hours later as I’m pondering whether smoking, a habit I generally despise, would warm me up. We hurry after our mark – and wind up outside his apartment. We plop down on the blasted bench. I break out a small bottle of Diet Coke laced with rum that I’ve been lugging around all day. My stomach churns on contact, but it gets me through the next few hours. The next evening seems to mark a turning point: our target leaves work alongside a handsome blond business associate. As the pair wind their way through the moonlit streets of old town Edinburgh, engaged in animated conversation, Chris catches sight of the castle perched on the hillside. “Lauren, look! It’s Grayskull!” he cackles. I’m so intent on remembering the He-Man theme song that I nearly miss seeing our targets slipping into a bar. We huddle together in a doorway a few doors down and power on the hidden purse camera, then go inside. Perfect: they’re at a small table. We choose one across the room, and Chris positions the purse atop our jackets on a chair so that the camera is pointed directly at them. “He can’t take his eyes off that guy,” Chris comments. “I don’t know,” I reply, trying to analyse the pair’s interactions without actually looking at them. It’s impossible. “He could be gay, but is he really going to be having an affair with someone from work? Over here? When he lives near San Francisco, a virtual gay mecca?” Chris shrugs. They abruptly push back their chairs and leave, and we’re on them from a distance through what seems like a mile of near-deserted streets. They finally alight on a section of the Royal Mile, and I sprint ahead of Chris and catch sight of them just as they disappear down a steep alley. “Where the hell did they go?” Chris asks as he catches up, his chest heaving. “Don’t tell me they’re in the wind.” We move together down the alley. “They’re here somewhere.” I’m ever the optimist. “We’ll get ‘em.” Chris eyes me dubiously, but before I can wager $20 on my hunch, we round a bend and hit the

jackpot: a tiny French bistro tucked away behind a tall stone wall. Candles flicker in its windows. I rush inside, nearly knocking over a harried server in the process. “Excuse me. Uh, do we need reservations to dine here tonight?” I peer over his shoulder in search of our duo and spot them shrugging out of their overcoats at a table twenty feet away. Shit. Gotta get out of here. “Uh, I’ll be right back!” We dine al fresco on the chilly patio, Chris’ leather jacket slung across my shoulders. Midway through the meal I make my way past the mens’ table to the bathroom, angling the purse cam to capture their image. A quick glimpse tells me they’re sharing a bottle of wine – their second? – but there’s no way to tell if they’re also, say, stroking one another’s legs beneath the table. When I ask Chris if we can bribe a waiter to do a bit of spying for us, he laughs. “Too risky. Besides, the other guy could be a regular here.” Three and a half hours later the men emerge. They walk a few blocks, their pace more leisurely than before. Chris’s camera is set to night vision mode. We’re ready. They reach an intersection and stop. Our target lunges towards the other man and – clasps his hand in a firm shake. They amble off in opposite directions. Damn it! We shadow our guy to his apartment and wait an hour, thinking that perhaps he’ll head out for a late-night reunion, or a taxi will glide up to the curb and his business associate will emerge, overnight bag in hand. But no such luck. One solid handshake is the most intimacy our client’s husband displays in public during our entire trip to Scotland. But our work is not done. We’re waiting by the baggage carousel in San Francisco when Chris’s Blackberry buzzes. It’s our client. “I can get his car to you tomorrow,” she says. “I want the GPS tracking thing, and that monitoring system. Because something is going on. I know I’m not crazy!”

Comic

Story

Cultural Revelations

Specialise In Something Until It Specialises In You

In Search of Michael X • Sex, Lies and Videotapes in Dubai I Killed Britney Spears • Literary Corruption in Ukraine

Film

Arabian Vice Sex, Lies and Videotape in Dubai City

Photography by Mimi Chakarova

By Sachi Cunnigham

ur last evening in Dubai and we’re walking into ‘Cyclone’, one of the largest night clubs in the city, known for its high quality mix of Eastern European, Asian and African sex workers. The décor is decidedly cheap and neon, pulsing with clusters of coy women who bat their eyes at men circling the room. It’s like any large club really, except the dance floor is eerily empty. I have taped a small video camera to my inner thigh, and have a mini disc recorder in my bag – that to the eye looks like a poor man’s iPod – with stereo mics attached to it disguised as headphones. There is security and a metal detector at the entrance, but I don’t get patted down. In the bathroom I stare at a bloody pad drowning in the toilet as I move the camera to my purse. I join

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my reporting partner Mimi sitting at a table near the bar, the camera poking out of an open zipper on the side of my bag. Mimi takes a drag of her cigarette and looks around. Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’ pumps through the speakers, as a herd of international businessmen and young women size each other up, bartering fantasies. Unlike regular clubs, where an interested look can start a conversation about your work, your interests or your astrological sign, the exchanges here are short and to the point. “How much you want?” a man in a pressed blue shirt asks as he stops at our table. “Too much for you,” Mimi says. Previously we had played along with these

A Moroccan prostitute displays the henna patterns on her arms

advances, but we are burnt from nearly two weeks in clubs like these, trying to learn more about Dubai’s sex trade for our PBS documentary. Like most boomtowns, Dubai has become a city full of paradoxes: a mixture of glamour, opportunity, desperation and human rights abuses. It’s a city that shapes itself as a modern cosmopolitan paradise, a playground for international visitors, yet when 15 year old French schoolboy Alexandre Robert was raped by three local men in July this year, he was advised to flee Dubai because he could be prosecuted for homosexuality. It’s a city with the tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai (still under construction), yet that same building was the site of a 2,500 strong riot last year, when labourers on as little as $4 USD a day smashed cars and offices in a dispute about pay and poor working conditions. Most of these workers, and nearly 75% of Dubai’s population, is foreign born: the city has become a Mecca for taxfree multinational business, luring a young, hungry, disproportionately male work force from India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Dubai’s utopian cluster of man made islands is literally rising from the sea to house the elite of this work force that totaled nearly 25,000 newcomers per month last year. Everyone from subcontracted kitchen workers to Halliburton’s hired guns stop through for R&R from the war in Iraq. Here the oldest profession in the world has found a ripe and thriving market. “She ain’t messin’ with no broke…” I mistakenly make eye contact with one of the guards patrolling the floor. Paranoid, I walk to the bar to see how visible my camera is to the passing eye. The camera can pass, but what sticks out prominently is Mimi and myself. The prostitutes are clearly divided into enclaves based on nationality. Mimi, a Bulgarian American, and myself, a Japanese American, appear to be the only women of different colours that are actually talking with each other. Depending on nationality these women are making anywhere from 200 – 2000 Dirhams for the night [approx. £26 – £260]. The going rate for four hours is based on nationality, with the Arab women demanding the highest price and the Chinese the least. “There’s just so many of them,” explained an American journalist that we had met at York, another popular club, earlier in our trip. He boasted that he could get several Chinese for the price of one, “and they clean your apartment in the morning too,” he said with a pasty, pock-faced grin as a set of three longhaired beauties swarmed him.

I walk back to the table with two vodka tonics. “Get down girl, go head get down.” Sasha, a Siberian prostitute that we interviewed earlier had sent home enough “gold” to buy her family a house. When she first came to Dubai she told us of being locked in a room where she would sleep with dozens of construction workers every night for less than a dollar per John. Now she could be selective. She had regular clients like the American from Texas who texted her a love note during our interview. “He wants sex for free,” she told us, but she wasn’t interested in love. She was in Dubai for the same reason as every other foreign worker that we met: to get rich quick. We’d come to Dubai as part of Mimi’s photojournalistic investigation of the sex trade. She had focused on sex trafficking in Eastern Europe for the last three years. In Moldova she met a woman who had been trafficked to Dubai. The woman was supposed to return to Dubai this week to try to find the illegitimate child she had left behind, but in the end her paperwork didn’t go through and the father, a policeman, discouraged her visit. We’d come to Dubai anyway, but it didn’t take long to realise that women with illegal papers doing illegal work aren’t so keen on talking in front of a video camera. So we got creative, combing the clubs and malls for documentary subjects. After one more drink and a little more footage, we decide we’ve had enough and head back to our hotel to pack. I’m booked on a return flight to the US the next morning. The first thing that I notice when we open the door to our room are our beds. The sheets are made despite hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door that morning. A few feet into the room and we see our clothes and belongings strewn all over the floor. My computer and hard drives are gone. Mimi’s reporting notebooks have vanished from the night table. Mimi calls the front desk, but they refuse to contact the police. “We’ve just been robbed, and you’re telling me to wait until the morning?” Mimi asks with disbelief. I open the safety deposit box to make sure that my passport, ticket and shot tapes are still safe. They are all accounted for. I walk down to the lobby and demand an explanation. Not wanting to make a scene, the worker finally places the call. Within five minutes a team of police are at the hotel. I take them to our room and explain the scene: that I have told the cleaning crew that morning not 107

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The going rate for four hours is based on nationality, with the Arab women demanding the highest price and the Chinese the least

” to come to our room, but that the beds were made when we returned that evening. We look through the remaining clothes to try and figure out what was stolen. I try to conceal the purses with holes ripped out for the camera on either side. The police assume it is an inside job. They tell us that all of the cleaning help, like most low paid labourers in Dubai, live together; finding the thief and stolen goods should be easy. Another crew of officers take fingerprints while a group of plain clothed officers are dispatched to search the cleaning crew’s housing. Mimi photographs the crime scene. We’re asked to come to the police station to file a report. Problem is, we have to get our passports, tickets and tapes from the safe deposit box. Mimi has already disclosed that we’re reporters. “We were told that Dubai was one of the safest places in the world,” she says as she takes another shot. Something doesn’t feel right though; I’m nervous about the police seeing the footage we’ve shot. We had recorded a side of Dubai on those tapes that the local authorities would not be happy about. Without any discussion Mimi, a good deal taller than me, grabs my purse and stands in front of door of the box in order to block the view as she fills the bag with tapes. Grabbing five at a time, one batch slips from her nervous clutch and crashes to the floor. My heart surges as I pick them up and Mimi hands me the filled bag. The police station is empty apart from a drunk guy with a bloody head. We give our fingerprints and they copy our passports. When they see that Mimi is born in Bulgaria, their questions become more suspicious. “Why are you here again?” “When did you leave Bulgaria?” We maintain that we are journalists and file written reports. “Show me your camera,” the police chief asks Mimi upon hearing that she had photographed the crime scene. A lump grows in my stomach beneath my purse filled with tapes. “My camera is in the hotel room,” Mimi says in her icy Eastern European accent, without skipping a beat. I know she has her camera with her, and that the camera also contains photos of prostitutes. 108

An officer takes Mimi back to the room as I wait at the police chief’s desk. A Somalian officer continues to take down my information. I remember a faulty memory card that Mimi had discovered at the start of the trip and wonder how she will ever be able to pull a switch off. The morning call to prayer sounds as the glow of dawn comes through the windows. Mimi returns and hands her camera over to the police chief. “What’s wrong with it?” he asks, showing her the ‘error’ sign that pops up when he turns the camera on. “I don’t know,” she says, playing along. I find out later that, escorted by two officers, Mimi went back to the room, and pretended to find her camera in the far corner of the room where her broken memory card sat stashed in a side pocket of her camera bag. She put the card full of images in the tiny pocket of her jeans. In front of the police chief she takes the camera card out and dusts it off. She does the same with the camera batteries. The error message still shows up. “You can take it if you’d like,” Mimi tells the chief. He hands her the camera back and tells the officers to return us to the hotel. I throw my clothes in a bag while we wait for our fixer to pick us up and take us to the airport. He arrives, and after running over the night’s drama with him as he drives, he tells us that the hotel is owned by the Chief of Police, and that the robbery, conveniently staged on our last night in the hotel, was likely something more akin to a planned raid. We had probably been watched, he says. As he and Mimi try to piece together the evening’s events, I pull all of the labels off of the tapes and disperse them throughout my bag. Mimi is scheduled to leave the next day, so I give her my video camera to take with her so as not to draw any attention when checking in. At the airport I try to look nonchalant, but immediately after walking through the first security pass I am pulled aside, before even checking in. Behind a curtained room, a veiled woman frisks my clothes and goes through my bags, collecting all of the tapes and putting them in a paper bag. “Why are you taking those?” I ask, explaining that they contain video of the grand construction and

sights of Dubai. “Let’s watch them now, together,” I say. “There’s nothing on them!” Waiting on the other side of the security checkpoint, Mimi raises her voice. “Why are you taking her things?” she asks. People in the airport start to turn their heads our way. I move out of the detention tent and start to call the numbers stored in our cell phone of the police officers that we met earlier that night. The man who took my deposition tells me that airport security is a separate department and that he can’t help us, but that he will send someone to see what the problem is. Almost immediately a plainclothes officer sitting against the airport wall stands up and walks towards the scene. “Our hotel is broken into, and now I’m being detained?” I ask loud enough for onlookers to hear. I continue making calls to everyone and anyone as Mimi does the same. The human rights worker we had interviewed earlier that week doesn’t answer, but I carry out a pretend conversation anyway, and then

continue calling in for help and with complaints to other locals. With 10 minutes to go before my plane is scheduled to take off, my young UAE escort, outfitted in a traditional white cloak and headscarf, receives an order in his earpiece. He hands the bag of tapes to me. “I’m sorry, but we made a mistake,” he says without explanation. “We thought you were someone else.” He walks with me to check in my bags and escorts me to the plane. Still in a state of shock, I unload the tapes into my purse as the plane takes off. Why did they let me go and how could we have been so naïve as to think that we could have filmed all that time without anyone noticing? But then, surely prostitution is so widely practiced here, and so visible, that the authorities wouldn’t really care if someone shot footage of it? Someone clearly did. Confused, but thankful that I’m flying home with taped evidence of the sex trade rather than a bunch of tall tales, I collapse into a deep sleep, clutching the purse strapped over my body

You can watch Sachi & Mimi Chakarova’s documentary online: www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/09/dubai_sex_for_s.html 109

Literature

The Paper Curtain Ukrainian Authors Face the Publishing Divide

Photography by Sebastian Meyer 00

By Daniel Stacey

n a café next to the Kiev Opera House I’m conducting a very difficult interview through an increasingly irritating translator. My subject, Oleksandra Koval, the middle aged president of Ukraine’s Publishers Forum, which runs the country’s largest book fair in Lviv, has adopted the reticent, stonyfaced attitude that seems to be automatic for everyone in this country the moment they’re asked to answer difficult or probing questions. Short, one-sentence responses. “Are there any attempts to market Ukrainian literature locally, to encourage people to read locally written books?” “Yes, we are involved in activities promoting Ukrainian books.” Full stop. “What would some of those activities be then?” “The activities we carry out, or that others carry out?” You, everyone, the whole bloody country. “Well, let’s start with what you do…” All the interviews I’ve conducted these past few days in Ukraine seem to begin this way. People sit arms crossed, unsmiling, waiting for the next question. They analyse it, breaking it down into its possible meanings, then reply with the shortest, most succinct, and journalistically most useless phrase they can conjure. Press interviews here are apparently less about selfpromotion and storytelling, and more a close cousin of interrogation. After about half an hour of questioning though, something changes when I bring up the topic of the local culture ministry, and Koval suddenly perks up. I’m searching for the backstory that will explain why such a small amount of Ukrainian literature has managed to prick our consciousness in the West. And why, even here, there is generally just so little of it? Ukrainian authors don’t suffer under the same government control of expression and dissent as writers in their burly neighbour Russia, yet for some reason their cultural output is small. In the last 15 years only one contemporary Ukrainian novelist – Andrey Kurkov – has had a book translated into English in Britain. “If you want to know why our local publishing industry is not what it should be, just look at the Committee for TV and Broadcasting,” Koval says. “It is incredibly corrupt. Around 60%-70% of the books produced in the Ukraine are made to fill state orders for school textbooks and library books. 120 million hryvna (approx. £12 million) is set aside for this annually, and for every order placed by the Committee for TV and

Broadcasting, a 30% kickback is expected.” “Really? So this must place serious limitations on local publishers?” My question is barely half finished by the time Koval, gushing and in her flow, continues. “This does two things – it makes the whole market unresponsive to readers, because the publishers produce books that the state wants, not that book buyers want. Secondly, it encourages a culture of self-censorship, because people produce books that the state will approve.” “This culture committee is full of old timers, people who have been around since Soviet times and some of whom are opposed not just to the Orange Revolution, but to Ukrainian independence itself. They choose what are ‘suitable books’ on the basis of ideas no one subscribes to anymore. And they hate me.” She takes a breath. Her translator catches up. “Surely though they can see what they’re doing is not good for their national culture, their publishing industry? Doesn’t that affect the people in the Committee?” “I don’t even think they believe there should be a publishing industry,” says Oleksandra, her stony eyes now fiery under her ginger dyed bob hairdo, leaning forward and glaring over her glasses across the table. “I think they’re still in a mindset where they think the state should manage all creative output, like Soviet times.”

hen Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, freedom of expression was at an all time high, but money for the creative industries were at an all time low. In the forward to the only short story anthology published in English from that decade – From Three Worlds – the writer Solomea Pavlychko lamented that the country did not have “a single paper mill within its borders.” And, until 1992, “no independent publishers.” This period of criminality and chaos offered us only one modern Ukrainian writer who you’re likely to find in your local bookshop: the St Petersburg raised Kiev local Andrey Kurkov. Meeting Kurkov just off St Sophia Square, in an outdoor teahouse, he seems happy and buoyant, despite his apathy towards the coming parliamentary elections taking place that Sunday. “The Orange Revolution did change the Ukraine, it’s just that it’s a very slow evolution,” he says. “During the revolution I was happy but I wasn’t optimistic. And I was right. Within a few months everything went back to life as usual, including debts and conflicts with Russia, all predicted in my books.”

Irena Karpa at the MTV Ukraine studios 111

September this year saw the release of Kurkov’s fifth book in English translation – The President’s Last Love – a political satire set across five different time periods, following an ordinary man’s journey from Soviet era food caterer to leader of the country in 2015. But most readers probably know Kurkov from his first translated novel, Death and the Penguin, the story of an obituary writer and his depressed pet penguin set during Ukraine’s tumultuous early 90s. Kurkov tells darkly comic tales of the poor and the damned, of prostitutes, drunks and hitmen finding solace in their vodkas and broken love affairs, in amongst the Khrushchev-era apartment blocks and puerile, violent economy that shores up the landscape of Kiev. Although he’s now an established literary figure, who you’ll find writing for the Guardian and jetting between international festivals, the lengths Kurkov had to go to to establish his career almost defy belief, and are an astonishing tribute to the implausibly disorganised, corrupt and improvised nature of post-Soviet Ukraine. His first published books after independence in 1991 were Mr Bickford’s World and a children’s book called The Adventures of Baby-Vacuum-Cleaner Gosha. He printed the books himself, importing seven tonnes of paper from Kazakhstan, using $15,000 borrowed from friends. With few functioning bookstores, he distributed his novels to newspaper vendors in Kiev, or sold them himself on the streets wearing a sandwich board reading “I am the author,” where he was once approached by Mafiosi demanding he, like the other street vendors, join their protection racket. To advertise his novels, he approached the Kiev transport authority and asked if they might consider, for the first time in their history, pasting posters on the sides of their buses. They agreed, and he paid £40 for space on six buses for three months, but they remained up for 18 months because no one could afford to take them down. He also harboured dreams of building a foreign readership. “Every time I wrote a book I would have the first chapter translated into English and write an English language synopsis,” he says. “I’d done that with all three of my books with no success. I would send copies to 40 publishers in Europe and another 40 in the English language markets.” Meanwhile he continued distributing his books himself in the Ukraine – using trains, buses and at one point a hearse in Odessa to deliver parcels of his literature to stores. In 1997 he began looking for foreign publishers for Death and the Penguin, his seventh book, having been writing since 1981. He sent his first 40 translated packages to English language publishers, with no response. Then, stoically, he did the same for his European list. Swiss publisher Diogenes read his first 112

chapter using a Russian translator, and immediately offered him a contract. The book became a best seller in Switzerland and Austria, and was picked up in other world markets, eventually appearing in British bookstores in 2001. According to a Time magazine profile last year, his novels have now sold four million copies worldwide, appearing in 32 different languages. But Kurkov’s overseas success has had little effect on the fortunes of other Ukrainian writers. Only one other contemporary writer since Ukrainian independence, Yuri Andrukhovych, has had novels translated into English, and then only in North America for two academic publishers: The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Study and Northwestern University Press. For a country with 46 million people, which can claim Gogol and Bulgakov as part of its literary heritage, this seems a little strange. Then again, less than 3% of the fiction for sale in Britain is translated from a foreign language, compared to 30-40% in countries like France and Spain. Our distaste for the foreign, combined with their corrupt local publishing industry, means Ukraine, with all its paradoxes, post-Soviet alienation, intrigue and tradition, may as well be another undiscovered planet.

n another café in Kiev, I conduct another stilted interview. This time I’m talking with Petro Matskevych, the bespectacled chief editor of Calvaria Publishing House, one of the first local publishing houses to establish itself following independence. Like Koval, his experience of the local publishing industry is stark: “Apart from the kickbacks, the big problem is that 80% of our book market is supplied by books from Russia, leaving only 20% for local publishers. I don’t know how the Russians produce these books so cheaply, although a lot of them are probably the waste they can’t sell. But you can often buy a new Russian language hardback here for one Euro. I can’t even print a hardback for one Euro, let alone profit at that price. There is meant to be a border tax placed on the books as they enter the Ukraine, but that is clearly not being levied.” “Why wouldn’t the border guards take the tax, doesn’t the government want to protect the local publishing industry?” “Many of us suspect that the Russian Culture Ministry funds the production of these books, or has some way of getting the books across our eastern border, so they can continue flooding our market with Russian language products, to keep the Russian language alive here. That way our Ukrainian language publishing industry suffers.” A breakdown of the figures provided by Koval

and Matskevych, which are confirmed over and over again by authors, editors and publishers during my 11 day stay here: 20% of the market is supplied by local publishers, the rest comes from abroad (mainly Russia). Of this, publishers independent of the state supply only 30%. This leaves about 6% of the local book market to Ukrainian independent publishers. Irena Karpa, one of Ukraine’s most popular younger authors and the host of MTV Ukraine, is happy to lay the economics of this situation bare when I meet her for a drink later that night: “I know writers here who have signed three book deals, and they end up getting maybe £75-£100 per book total – advances, royalties, everything. Part of it is that some writers here are a bit stupid, and we don’t really have agents yet in this country, but largely it comes down to how hard it is to sell books here.” Karpa used to be published by the local house Folio, and says at best she could sell 5,000 copies of a book nationally, which qualified as a big success. Her books are currently published and distributed by the Family Leisure Club, a subsidiary of the German publishers AG Bertelsmann, which use a unique method to circumvent corruption and poor distribution channels (Ukraine only has approximately 300 book shops): an old style mail order catalogue system. The FLC has allowed Karpa to sell 15,000 copies of her latest novel Bitches Get Everything. Writing is still not paying enough to support her, but she has her television career: “MTV is just my silly day job, though I need to move on,” she says. “At 27 you’re finished in this business, I’m 26, I’m too old to be doing this crap.” Born in the Carpathian mountains, she has always considered Ukrainian her mother tongue, and remembers even before the fall of the Soviet Union and perestroika, that Russian was only halfheartedly promoted as an elective language at her local school. Since Stalin’s forceful Russification of Ukraine, tension has existed between the Ukrainian and Russian languages, as Soviet era cultural imperialism established Russian as the language of choice for Ukrainian professionals, newspapers, schools and universities. Karpa has always published in Ukrainian, but some authors, like Kurkov, prefer to continue writing in Russian. Kurkov lives in Kiev, where most people speak and read predominantly Russian, and writing in that language also helps his books transfer easily to the Russian market. But part of the spirit of writing in Ukrainian is tied to nation building, and writers like Karpa refuse point blank to write in Russian, although they’re capable of it. Ljubko Deresh, 23, is the most prominent of the current young crop of writers from Lviv, a city closer to Europe and the west than any other in Ukraine, and the

site of riots in 2000 in which ultra-nationalists smashed and looted Russian language stores. It was also the site of Yuri Andrukhovych’s BuBaBu literary movement in the 1980s, which inspired authors and readers to reimagine Ukrainian as a literary and intellectual language. Deresh remembers the first time he read Andrukhovych: “I had never realised Ukrainian could be used like that, could have rhythm and word play, and could be a creative language in a way Russian couldn’t” he says. Deresh’s fifth and most recent novel A Bit of Darkness, about a group of young depressives who meet in the Carpathian mountains to commit suicide, was a mixture of mystical teen drama and postmodern novel of ideas. Publishing houses in Poland, Germany, Serbia, Spain and Italy all carried out translations, but the only place you’ll find it in Britain is at Grant & Cutler’s bookshop in London in the original Ukrainian. None of his back catalogue has been translated into English either. Likewise, Irena Karpa’s second last book Pearl Porn sold well in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany and Poland. But her Russian agents Goumen & Smirnova aren’t ready to take the risk with English. Without the support of publishing houses translation is expensive, and where other countries have arts councils and government bodies charged with helping to promote national culture abroad, Ukraine pledges no money to support the translation of its own literature. Even if they had the money though, the Ukrainian language itself poses a formidable barrier. Deresh’s first three books were published by Petro Matskevych at Calvaria, and although Matskevych thought about trying an English translation, he struggled to find someone with all the right qualities. “A good translator needs English as his first language, and Ukrainian as a very fluent second. They also need a thorough knowledge of literature – both English and Ukrainian. We have never found this person. For the Russian language it is no problem, but for our Ukrainian writers it is a big problem.” When I mention this to Kurkov, now the old hand, he has his own perspective. “Deresh writes about ideas that get in his head and can’t get out,” says Kurkov. “He needs an editor – a lot of these writers need editors and agents, and more professionalism. That’s what’s holding them back.” But then Kurkov writes in Russian, and always has. For the younger crop of Ukrainian writers, many of whom refuse to write in anything but Ukrainian, they’re not just going to need editors and agents to shape their work, they’re going to need translators and publishing houses with the money to pay them

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Art

The Death Of Peter Fechter The Execution of an East Berliner in Plumstead

Mark Gubb interviewed by Jack Roberts

round midday on August 17, 1962, just over a year after the construction of the Berlin Wall, two teenagers from the East German Democratic Republic (GDR), Peter Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik, attempted to flee across the wall into West Germany. Jumping out of a ground floor window on Zimmerstraße, East Berlin, they ran into a patch of no-mans land near Checkpoint Charlie, widely known as the ‘death strip’; their aim was to climb over the barbed wire covered wall, and then escape into the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin. As Fechter and Kulbeik approached the wall, GDR border guards shouted to them that they should halt, but they ignored the orders. The guards opened fire; although Kulbeik made it across the wall, Fechter, a bricklayer, was shot a number of times, and fell back into the ‘death strip’. A total of 21 shots were fired by the guards, wounding Fechter in the back and the abdomen, all of this happening in full view of West German onlookers, who had gathered in their hundreds. Over the next 50 minutes or so, Fechter’s screams for help were ignored by the GDR guards and also by American soldiers patrolling the western side of the wall. As he slowly bled to death, West German onlookers shouted “Murderers!” at the border guards. Photographed as he lay dying, the image of Fechter lying sprawled by the Berlin Wall became an icon of divided Germany. A full 45 years later, at noon on Saturday, August 18, 2007, the death of Peter Fechter was painstakingly reconstructed in Plumstead, East London, by the Nottingham based artist Mark Gubb. Funded with help from the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Gubb’s re-enactment, which was filmed and later screened, used professional and amateur actors to perform the roles of those involved in the Fechter shooting, as well as audience volunteers and unwitting passers-by. Shooting from three fixed positions throughout the reconstruction, Gubb filmed perspectives showing the GDR border guards, the American soldiers, and Peter Fechter in real time. The footage was then cut together to create a three-screen triptych in a film Gubb describes as “a documentation of a performance”, a historical re-enactment as original artwork. Here, Gubb tells Jack Roberts why he reconstructed the death of an East Berlin teenager, and why watching a man bleed to death can be very boring. Photography by Lydia Polzer 115

only came across this story three years ago. I went to Berlin because my wife was going and I piggybacked her trip. I had never been to the Berlin Wall before, but I’ve always been interested in it as an entity. Having said that, growing up as a kid in the 80s, I had no real appreciation of what it was, and what it meant historically… that this thing tore people’s lives and an entire country apart. So, I spent these few days just wandering around Berlin, visiting places, not really researching, just experiencing the place. I went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum and that’s where I came across Peter Fechter. In staging this re-enactment, I was trying to remain as apolitical as possible, because a lot of the written accounts of the Peter Fechter story really demonise the GDR guards. It’s always ‘look how barbaric these guys were they shot him and left him bleed to death’ but if you look into the backstory, about a week previous to the killing, some other GDR Guards had stepped into the ‘death strip’ themselves and were shot dead. So while they claimed they were waiting for orders, what’s really believed to be the case is that they feared for their own lives, and that’s why they didn’t step in to help. Two of the GDR guards who shot Fechter stood trial in 1997, and although they were convicted for murder, they were given a one year suspended

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sentence – presumably because they’re old men now. I am not a historian. I’m interested in the Fechter incident as a human story, and of course you have to engage in the politics that exist around it – that’s how and why it happened – but I’m not claiming to be an authority on the politics of the time. I’m an artist. As far as I am concerned, the film itself is the documentation of a performance. The artwork, if you like, was the specific one-off live re-enactment we conducted. There’s actually a growing tradition of such artwork re-enactments, like Jeremy Deller’s ‘Battle of Orgreave’ [where Deller reconstructed the 1984 miner’s strike riot in Orgreave, Yorkshire]. It’s a medium in the same way paint and canvas is a medium, video is another medium, stone carving is another medium. I think re-enactment is just another tool, it’s another set of materials you use to create art pieces. Hopefully this piece will inspire thought and debate. Essentially you’re talking about a guy who was shot dead attempting to cross a border because he perceived his life would be better the other side; you had the GDR guards defending the integrity of their nation, the Americans supposedly defending the threat from communism, whatever that means, and then there was this guy in the middle who died because of the broader political situation. This has a very specific contemporary relevance. Whether it’s

Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, or Gaza the world is full of borders and it’s full of hundreds of thousands of political and economic migrants who suffer every year. By taking the Peter Fechter incident, and putting it back into the public consciousness in a small way, I hope people will think about the issues involved in his death beyond their immediate political context. We chose Plumstead because the site was absolutely perfect, not because we had a particular desire to do the performance there. If I had staged the reenactment in Berlin, it would be a very, very different piece of work, because you’d be dealing with that country’s history, and creating a completely different resonance to the one it has from staging it in a run-down borough of London. By stripping away that context, all the baggage went with it, leaving a fairly pure work. The details were important to me. The wall we constructed was based on a photo I had of the Berlin Wall, taken in 1962, just days after Fechter’s death. After the re-enactment, quite a few people came up to me and said, “Well the wall you had was a bit small wasn’t it?” Well no, actually, it was very accurate for how it was at the time. We also sourced the guard’s uniforms from a specialist company who provide TV and film companies with military props. From the 1997 trial of the GDR guards, we knew there were 21 shots fired, so I made a point that we would also fire 21 shots on the day. This led to an interesting negotiation, because we used real AK47’s, obviously firing blanks, but to get those guns you have to go through a licensed armourer, who brings the guns, trains the actors and so on. Although an AK-47 can fire 30 rounds per 2.4 seconds, we were splitting 21 shells between three rifles. When I told the armourer, he was like “Well OK we can just stick in 10 in each.” And I said to him “No, no. There were 21 shots fired.” And he was quite insistent. He was saying “Look, if you’ve got them on automatic fire, no one is going to know any difference if five shots have been fired or whether 10 shots have been fired.” But I was adamant that 21 shots be fired, because those kind of details… at the end of the day you’re re-enacting a historical moment and it’s really important that these kind of things are as specific as possible. The actual movements of the actors were based on first person accounts, but we also encouraged them to improvise. We had eight principal actors: there were three German Guards, three American Guards and then Peter and Helmut. We also had about 30 extras, plants in the audience, who were there in normal, contemporary civilian clothes that appeared to be part of the crowd. Once the performance had started, they took on the role of West Berliners, shouting at the guards. If you stick a load of extras in with the audience,

and they then assume their roles, the audience will work out they are supposed be there – they’re not stupid. But by blurring that boundary a little, it gives the audience a license to join in. There was one audience member who had lived in Berlin for 20 years, since 1964, and had a lot to do with smuggling stuff between East and West Germany. Although he didn’t shout at the guards, he did speak to them in German. It was great talking to him afterwards because he was very complimentary about the feel of the performance – he was impressed that the actors, not speaking German, just blanked him completely. He said their refusal to speak was exactly what the GDR guards would have done at the time. If you read the historical accounts of Peter Fechter’s death, it sounds very dramatic; this poor guy got shot, fell back into no man’s land, took an hour to bleed to death, and a crowd of West Berliners gathered. Hollywood death is generally quite dramatic, isn’t it? However, the reality of watching someone bleed to death for fifty minutes is not an exciting experience. It’s challenging, boring, and hard to sit through. That was a very specific interest of mine in creating this piece. How would people feel standing and watching a guy bleed to death for 50 minutes? As an educated compassionate human, you think ‘I shouldn’t be bored at the moment.’ But you are watching a guy dying, and you can’t deny the fact that it’s boring 117

History

In Search of Michael X Britainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Forgotten Black Revolutionary

Art by Georgia Harrison 118

By John Williams

n Thursday afternoon the American folksinger, Judy Collins, called the English prime minister, Harold Wilson, to beg for mercy. In London, the defendant’s lawyers attempted to file one last plea for clemency, this time on grounds of insanity. John Lennon and Yoko Ono kept working the phones all that night, by now reduced to praying for mercy. But no mercy came. Early the next morning, May 16, 1975, the man born Michael De Freitas, but known to the world as Michael X, was led out into the prison yard in Port of Spain. He was dressed in a white robe and as he approached the gallows a white hood, ironically similar to those sported by the Ku Klux Klan, was placed over his head. Minutes later he was hanged by the neck until dead. As the body swung in the breeze the hangman and the prison officials ate a cooked breakfast. If Michael X is remembered at all these days it’s as a murderer. Three years prior to his execution two bodies were discovered, buried in his kitchen garden in rural Trinidad, where he had recently started a kind of commune. One body belonged to a local man, Joe Skerritt, an unemployed drifter. The other belonged to an upper class English girl called Gail Ann Benson, a Tory MP’s daughter who had drifted into the world of black power and found herself out of her depth. Michael was never actually convicted of her murder; it was for Skerritt’s killing that he was hanged. However, in the public mind, and in subsequent accounts, most famously V. S. Naipaul’s Sunday Times article ‘The Killings in Trinidad’, it’s Gail Ann’s murder that Michael is associated with. After all, what more perfect illustration of the souring of the 60s dream than the murder of a hippie girl by a black revolutionary? The truth, however, is more complicated. Michael X was the British face of 60s black power. He was the token black in Swinging London. He was a Trinidad sailor, a pimp and a conman. He was instrumental in founding both Release, the “underground welfare” charity that offers information and legal advice to drug users to this day, and the Notting Hill Carnival. He was it’s fair to say, a man of many parts. And so, it seemed to me, a great subject for a biography. All the more because so few people today seem to know anything about him. If Michael’s largely forgotten, it’s most likely for the same reason that makes him such an interesting figure, because he doesn’t fit into a simple pigeonhole. He’s not a straightforward role model for today’s kids. Neither is he simply an evil bogeyman for crime

ghouls to worship. Instead, he’s a complex figure who crossed all manner of boundaries and knew everyone – John and Yoko, Malcolm and Stokely, Burroughs and Ginsberg, Alexander Trocchi and R. D. Laing, Peter Rachman and Mandy Rice Davies, Colin MacInnes and Leonard Cohen. A very quick resume of his career runs like this. Born Michael De Freitas, the son of a Portuguese father and Barbadian mother, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1933. Went to sea in the late 1940s. Settled in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay in the fifties. Moved to London in time for the 1958 Notting Hill Riots, in which he was one of the leaders of the black resistance. Worked as a rent collector for Rachman, the notoriously unscrupulous Notting Hill landlord. Became a beat poet and black power leader. Was the first man to be sent to jail for inciting racial hatred in 1967. Set up pioneering black cultural centre, The Black House, on Holloway Road in 1969. Returned to Trinidad in 1971 and set up a commune. Early in 1972, two dead bodies were found buried on his land. Executed 1975. If Michael X’s name has lived on, it has not been in the authorised histories of black Britain – where he barely rates a footnote - but in the autobiographies of the luminaries of London’s hippy underground. There’s scarcely a book written by anyone connected with the UFO club night or International Times magazine without a Michael X anecdote or two. So when I start work on seeking out memories of Michael, I begin with a journey into the hippy diaspora. First up is Hoppy - John Hopkins - the one time atomic scientist who became the in-house photographer, not to mention dope dealer, to the nascent underground. In old photos Hoppy’s a sharp handsome fellow in a suit, only his eyes giving any real hint of the hippy within. These days though he’s almost a caricature of the old-time hippy: long grey ponytail, ethnic headgear, and the wrinkled face of an ageing elf. Hoppy’s London lair is in a part of Islington that was for years and years a run down postindustrial wasteland, but is now a hip gastropub zone. The name on the doorbell reads ‘Fantasy Factory’. I ring and wait. The door opens and Hoppy leads me down into a basement full of photos and video equipment. We sit down and drink tea and Hoppy shows me some of his 60s photos, both framed on the walls and stored on his computer. Among them are a series of shots of the audience at the Wholly Communion poetry reading in Albert Hall in 1965. Michael is sat in the front row wearing a sharp suit, leaning over to 119

“

She’s happy to make the links between Michael X’s rabble rousing and the contemporary likes of Abu Hamza. She also suggests he might have been gay

” say something to the dark-haired white woman sat next to him. It’s striking how at home Michael looks in this environment, despite being the only non-white face. I ask Hoppy about Michael and we have an interesting talk, but one that rather confirms the old adage that if you really were in the midst of the 60s then you can’t remember it. Just as the interview is winding down there’s a knock on the back door and Hoppy’s long time associate Sue Hall appears. She digs up memories of going round to Michael’s original Black House, in West Hampstead. In contrast to Hoppy’s mostly benevolent view of Michael, she stresses that there were plenty of black people she knew who had had hard dealings with him, and who knew him as essentially a gangster. Not all the 60s survivors have such patchy memories. Miles, a 60s writer and general eminence grise, is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. Whenever an interviewee fails to remember some key 60s events he or she will say, “Ask Miles, he’ll remember.” Miles knew everybody. He still lives in the West End flat he’s had since the 60s. Like Hoppy’s place it’s full of memorabilia but in Miles’ case it’s rather better organised, and what’s on view is only a fraction of the whole archive. Miles digs out assorted underground artefacts with a Michael connection, then we head round the corner for a long lunch, ending up with further drinks in the Groucho Club, ruminating on the notion that Michael’s ideal métier would have been as a rock and roll manager, a proto-Malcolm McLaren. Miles, like Hoppy, is broadly positive in his memories of Michael. Interestingly both men feel they didn’t know him that well; they both credit each other with being closer friends of Michael’s. I’m starting to get a picture of Michael as having been one of those people who has many friends but precious few intimates. Someone who everyone assumes has better friends elsewhere. It’s been noticeable that all the men I’ve spoken to so far have broadly positive memories of Michael. The one dissenting voice has been from a woman. I begin to sense a possible pattern when I get in touch 120

with Caroline Coon, the artist, writer, and founder of Release, to ask for an interview. Her initial response is one of horror at the very idea of writing about Michael. Caroline Coon still lives in the Grove, in a new development close to the Westway, the thoroughfare once celebrated by the Clash. In fact as I arrive Caroline is admiring a new box set of original Clash singles reissued on CD, several of them sporting her original photos. She’s still remarkably full of life and enthusiasm. For Caroline, Michael X isn’t just a set of anecdotes but a challenge to our view of the present. She’s happy to make the links between Michael’s rabble rousing and the contemporary likes of Abu Hamza. She’s also provocative on the question of why Michael might not have appealed to women on the hippy scene as much as to men, suggesting that he might have been gay. Later information suggests that she’s picked up on something real, particularly as she first met Michael in company with Colin MacInnes, the English novelist, and sensed a jealousy there. Overall, though, Caroline’s distaste for Michael is less personal than political: she feels that hustlers like Michael are always taken up by white liberals at the expense of those activists who actually get on with the hard work. Another woman who didn’t care for Michael, but very much for personal reasons, is Nicky Samuel, whose brother Nigel was the teenage hippy millionaire who bankrolled Michael’s Black House. This is hardly surprising given that, after his involvement with Michael, Nigel had lost pretty much all the money he inherited and was plagued by mental problems. He eventually died, broke and alcoholic, in the early 90s. Nicky was a teenager at the time of her brother’s involvement with Michael, a 60s ‘It Girl’ photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue. Today she lives out in a remote and beautiful valley in mid Wales. She’s still a strikingly good looking woman, a definite survivor. She blames Michael for her brother’s decline. Unlike Caroline, she found him initially attractive, and rather than getting a gay vibe from him, she got a strong pimp vibe: one of Michael’s principle ways of

influencing her brother was to set him up with black women. It was after Nigel finally cracked up - and the grand project they had worked on together, the Black House, collapsed - that Michael made his final return to the country of his birth, Trinidad. Having canvassed the remnants of 60s London, it was time I headed out there too

iarco Airport, Trinidad, a place I’ve previously seen as the backdrop to assorted photos of Michael getting on and off planes, (the last time in handcuffs), turns out to be a bustling modern airport. My rental car is waiting and in no time I’m driving towards the city. It’s only when I stop to get petrol at the nearest station and spend twenty minutes queuing up behind a bunch of locals in extravagantly beaten-up motors that there’s any suggestion I’m outside of the western comfort zone. I head for the place Michael used as his HQ on his return to Trinidad, the Port Of Spain Hilton. The Hilton was built in the 60s and looks like a Bond villain hangout. It’s known as ‘the upside down hotel’ because the floor level you enter at is actually the top floor. The floors containing the bedrooms and so forth are built into the side of the hill below; it’s a wonderfully out of place outpost, and, if you walk out into the car park, you can see the streets of Belmont, Michael’s hometown. It’s Belmont I visit next. I’m hoping to speak to Rawle Maximin, the old school friend of Michael’s who later ran Mike’s Car Service. He’d supplied Michael with flash American cars to ride around in on his return to Trinidad and had considerable respect for his old friend. As he told V. S. Naipaul, in a wonderfully double-edged tribute: “Michael impress me a lot when he come back. He always move in a big way. If they are selling orange juice in that bar there for a dollar a glass and they are selling the same orange juice in that other bar for two dollars, he wants the dollars one.” Mike’s Car service doesn’t appear in the phone book and no one I speak to seems to know whether it still exists or not, or where its office might be if it does. I obviously need to talk to someone who knows the area.

I have a number for an artist and writer called Chris Cozier who grew up in Belmont, so I call him. He tells me to come up to his house. We sit and talk for a while, Christopher trying to figure out what my angle is, why I’m interested in Michael. He tells me he saw Michael once, walking through Port of Spain with Gale Ann Benson. Christopher was 12; Michael was a local celebrity. There are crude parallels between them: both from Belmont, both left the island and made a reputation abroad - Christopher has exhibited around the world - and then came back to a place that has limited time for their global visions. We get into Chris’s car and drive back down the valley, skirting the foothills of the Hilton and heading into Belmont. We enter into the maze of small streets that make up lower Belmont, between the main road and the Dry River, and the place begins

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to reveal itself. It’s not really a neighbourhood for cars, the streets are too narrow – old men on bicycles are making faster progress than us squeezing our way down the alleys. It’s sort of lovely, though, this Belmont, in the sort of lovely way that depends on the onlooker not actually having to live there in a tiny, jammed together house. I’m reminded a little of New Orleans, and the tiny row houses of Bywater. I wonder if Belmont, like Bywater – at least before Katrina hit – is getting gentrified. As we drive I’ve been looking out for Mike’s Car Service. Chris has a rough idea where Mike’s used to be and turns back into the labyrinth to have another shot at finding it. We’re just about to turn round, faced with an apparent dead end, when I notice a very large, very elderly American car parked outside a garage, and then, off to one side, a hand-painted sign saying ‘Mike’s Car Service’. More by luck than judgment we’ve found it. We park up and I get out to have a look around. The American motor is a Lincoln Town Car circa 1970, and next to it is a little minicab office. The lights are on but nobody is around. Over to one side there is an open gate leading into a yard. It’s dark but there’s life there, kids and chickens. I call out a greeting and a woman emerges from the shadows. She looks Amerindian, which kind of figures – the Maximin family who run Mike’s are Venezuelan. She looks at me and asks if I want a taxi. “No thanks,” I say. “I’m looking for Rawle Maximin.” She shakes her head, says “Rawle gone America,” and heads back into the yard, leaving me standing there admiring the last survivor of a once proud fleet of cars. More than likely Michael himself would have used this very Lincoln, but Michael’s long gone and the car is now a relic.

nother hot and humid Trinidad morning. Apparently Michael used to shower three times a day. It’s not hard to see why. I’m heading out of the city to interview Raoul Pantin, the writer and filmmaker, who Michael had hoped would replace Colin MacInnes in the role of his own personal Boswell following his return to Trinidad. Pantin turned Michael down but still had regular dealings with him. When Michael wanted to get a story into the press, Pantin’s was one of the first numbers he called. Calling Pantin’s number these days is no easy 122

matter, however. He has no email and the first few people I try don’t have a phone number for him either. Eventually I track down his brother who passes on his number, and warns me that Raoul is something of a recluse these days. That is hardly surprising. On July 27 1990, Raoul Pantin, by then one of the island’s best known journalists, found himself in the wrong place at an extremely bad time. This was the occasion of the Jamaat al Muslimeen coup attempt, a farcical yet bloody re-run of the 1970 Black Power uprising that had come close to unseating Eric Williams, Trinidad and Tobago’s then prime minister. Back then, one of Williams’ cabinet ministers, an up-and-comer called ANR Robinson, had resigned in sympathy with the protestors, but by 1990 Robinson was the Prime Minister and the new uprising was led by a small group of Black Muslims, under the command of one Abu Bakr. 42 Black Muslims took over the parliament building, the Red House, in which Michael X had stood trial nearly twenty years before. They shot ANR Robinson in the leg and took him captive along with much of his cabinet. Meanwhile, another 72 Black Muslims, including Abu Bakr himself, took over the TV station up on Maraval Road, taking a whole lot more hostages in the process. Soon afterwards Abu Bakr himself appeared on TV, announcing that there had been a revolution. Raoul Pantin was one of those held captive at the TV station. It soon became clear that there was no popular support for the revolution and after six days the rebels gave up in exchange for an amnesty. The whole business would have been funny if it had not been for the fact that 40 people lost their lives during the days of lawlessness. And those held hostage still bear the scars: literally in the case of Robinson, metaphorically in the case of Raoul Pantin and his fellow hostages. I finally track Pantin down to an unmarked cottage set back off the road up a hill outside the village of Cantaro. I knock on the door. After a while, a door opens in back and out comes a tall, skinny man of 60 or so with a shock of white hair, a drinker’s nose and a very Trinidadian white-but-not–quite complexion, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a vest. I introduce myself and, after giving it a moment’s thought, he admits to being Raoul Pantin, ushering me in. Then he makes some tea and we talk a bit about Cardiff, where I’m from and where Michael lived for much of the 1950s, and where, by an odd

coincidence, Pantin studied journalism. Talking about Michael now it seems to me, as it often does, that there’s been a certain amount of revisionism going on. Everyday utterances of Michael’s have acquired a retrospective sinister tinge. Pantin is sure that Michael was a fraud - understandably enough given that their primary contact involved Michael asking Pantin to fake up an interview for him: “I said, ‘What d’you mean?’ and he said ‘Well, you know me and you know what I’m about, you can frame the questions and answer them yourself’. I said ‘Are you serious?’” However, what’s harder to explain is what lay underneath the fakery. What it was all in aid of. Pantin has no real answers, and after chatting for a while it’s time to go. He gets up and sees me out, and as I leave him there, this gaunt recluse in his rainforest hideaway, I’m reminded of the lone Lincoln Town car left at Mike’s Car services, a thoroughbred adrift in a changing world. And it strikes me too that, had he lived, this could easily have been the kind of place, and the kind of state, that Michael might have ended up in.

nother Trinidad morning and it’s out to Arima to have a look round Christina Gardens: the site of Michael’s commune, his last residence as a free man. When I get there I have a hard time keeping from laughing. In terms of Trinidad, Christina Gardens is a commuter belt development. It’s one of the most staidly bourgeois enclaves I’ve yet seen on the island. The idea of a revolutionary commune here makes Citizen Smith’s attempts to bring the barricades to Tooting look plausible. I get out of the car and wander round a bit, but there’s really nothing to see. Michael’s old place was, of course, burnt down and new houses have been built on the site. Is there any sense that this is a place where terrible things once happened; where a young woman walked blindly to her death at the hands of those in whom she’d placed her trust; where a Port of Spain drifter was killed by his own countrymen? No, to be honest, I can’t say there is Michael X: A Life in Black and White by John Williams is published by Century in April 2008

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Music

I Killed Britney Spears The Decline of the Whorish Virgin

By Jean Hannah Edelstein

t’s Britney, bitch. I was unhappy when I heard that she had broken up with Justin Timberlake. I was saddened when she married her hick friend from Louisiana on a drunken night in Las Vegas. I felt troubled when she wed the horrible Kevin Federline. I winced when, barefoot and pregnant, she wept on national television before an audience fixated on the spectre of her decline. I frowned when she was photographed stumbling about Hollywood with Paris Hilton and without her knickers; I worried when she shaved her head. And when I saw Britney Spears stumbling fitfully across the stage of the 2007 Video Music Awards, grabbing the crotches of her male back-up dancers without feeling, mouthing the words to a song that was clearly not coming from her heart, something died inside me. She’s so lucky, she’s a star / but she cries, cries, cries in her lonely heart I fell in love with Britney Spears on a cold winter’s day in the December of my eighteenth year. I was shopping for accessories in a tatty store for teenagers; she was dancing through the halls of a high school in a sexy uniform on a large flat-screen television suspended above a rack of Christmas earrings with flashing red-and-green lights. Baby, I’m so into you / You’ve got that something, what can I do? While I had heard Britney’s first earth-shattering single, ‘…Baby One More Time,’ on the radio occasionally before that particular moment of epiphany, the depth of her growling voice had led me to believe that she was a middle-aged AfricanAmerican woman. Thus, I was quite taken aback by the juxtaposition of the basso profundo and the pinkbowed mouth of a blonde pigtailed nymphet. Oops, I did it again / I played with your heart / got lost in the game

Art by Jussi Brightmore

It is not, I will mention here, as a small caveat, that my affection for Britney Spears was ever romantic – or at least not very much. Rather, my worship of her was heroic. Britney Spears, I decided, embodied all of the possibility of my young female life. In my 125

“

She made my secret shame into a brand: Miss Britney Jean Spears, the whorish virgin, the untouched slut

” case these possibilities had been trampled over by the ambitions of my parents in a not dissimilar way from that in which Britney’s infamous mother Lynn had guided her daughter’s career with an iron fist. The path my parents selected didn’t involve nearly as exciting a wardrobe though: without consulting me too much, they carefully moulded my life with the ultimate aim being the receipt of a respectable undergraduate degree, instead of a Video Music Award. Adolescent, I necessarily resented it. Say hello to the girl that I am / You’re gonna have to see through my perspective / I need to make mistakes just to learn who I am / And I don’t wanna be so damn protected Britney was an apt figure upon which to fixate my girlish dreams because she was (as discussed in the various celebrity magazines which I consumed in shameful secret) the same kind of girl as me: born in 1981, in a small, boring, American town, the middle of three children. At 17, still a virgin, although (as evidenced by the way in which she writhed through the frames of her videos) replete with all the pentup sexual frustration of a nice American girl who had been strictly forbidden to have sexual relations with her boyfriend… and was probably struggling to understand the meaning of sexual relations thanks to the exploits of her very own President. Except that while these things filled me with secret shame, she made it into a brand: Miss Britney Jean Spears, the whorish virgin, the untouched slut.

I’m not a girl / Not yet a woman / All I need is time Time has marched on for both of us: for me, the transition into womanhood has been comprised of a mundane string of typical middle-class benchmarks, struggles, minor triumphs: tertiary education, unsuitable boyfriends, a string of chilly rented flats, career starts and stops and missteps. Through it all I’ve kept an eye on what Britney has been going through. At first, it seemed, in contrast to me, that she was going from strength to strength. But then, at some point, the trajectory of her life seemed to go in completely the opposite direction from mine. Where my interest in her was once based on envy and aspiration, it now became all about Schadenfreude: any time that things felt a little tough, I could always check to see how Britney was getting along and feel relieved that at least I still had all of my hair. It was as if our roles had reversed: I couldn’t help but think that maybe if Britney had known about me she would have wished to have my life as I had once longed for hers. With a taste of poison paradise / I’m addicted to you /Don’t you know that you’re toxic? Although my fandom was quite half-hearted and cynical, I nonetheless was one of millions who fed the Britney machine. I gave her family and managers a reason to continue bleeding her dry as it became increasingly apparent that she was no longer able to fit in the box that made us all love her, be fascinated by her, want to be her or sleep with her. Flicking through the gossip blogs, I wince when I see the pictures: her bloated, spotty face, her ratty hair extensions, the enormous soft drink perpetually clutched in her chewed fingers, her two unhappylooking children who are the unassailable proof that she, too, has fallen victim to base carnal desire. It’s like the Britney who I once loved is dead. And I can’t help but feel that every time I lurk in a newsstand, flicking through a copy of OK! to glean the latest developments in her tragic decline, I am at least partially responsible. When I see that dead look in her sad, bewildered eyes, I feel like maybe, in a little way, I killed her

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Contributors

Laura Barton (Pg 24) is a features writer for the Guardian, specialising in literature and music. She lives in London. Bill Bragg (Pg 5) has worked as a freelance illustrator since 1998 for clients in the UK and the USA including The Independent, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and Faber and Faber. He is also a member of London’s Le Gun collective. Mendozza y Caramba (Pg 48) is a graduate of Abidjan’s Academie Des Beaux-Artes, in the Ivory Coast. He founded the artists’ association Tache d’Encre and the popular Abidjan based magazine Gbich! This is the first time he has had original work commissioned for a British publication. Mimi Chakarova (Pg 106) is the recipient of the 2003 Dorothea Lange Fellowship and the 2005 Magnum Photos Inge Morath Award for her work on sex trafficking. She is currently the series curator of Frontline/WORLD’s FlashPoint, and teaches photography at Stanford University and UC Berkeley’s Graduate Journalism School. Lauren Gard (Pg 84) is a former staff writer for San Francisco’s East Bay Express, and was formerly associate editor at Marie Claire. She’s currently working as a private investigator in California.

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Oliver Harris (Pg 38) is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Masters program, and also has a Masters in Shakespearean literature from UCL. He’s a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. Georgia Harrison (Pg 118) is currently at the Royal College of Art, working on a series of illustrated books about unusual collections, including a toy robot fanatic, and a gynaecologist who has over 75 contraceptive coils. If you have a collection of any kind and would be interested in featuring in this project, or if you know of anyone that would, please contact her at georgia. harrison@gmail.com Mark Seager (Pg 32) is a UK based photographer currently investigating the effects of war on architecture, travelling through Lebanon, Afghanistan, Chechnya and the Balkans. His work has been published in The Independent, Foto 8, and The Sunday Times amongst other publications. John Williams’ (Pg118) first book, an American crime fiction travelogue called Into The Badlands (Paladin), was published in 1991. His next book, Bloody Valentine (HarperCollins), written around the Lynette White murder case in the Cardiff docks, came out in 1994. Following a subsequent libel action from the police, he turned to fiction. Since then he has published five novels through Serpent’s Tail and Bloomsbury.

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Backstory

Deadly PR By Leon Neal

’d travelled down to the Labour Party Conference in 2004, hoping to take some photos of the protestors. I wasn’t accredited to get inside the Brighton International Conference Hall, but still thought it was worth it. On one of the days of the conference, I’d been covering quite a fiery anti-Blair protest when a rumour went around the press corps that something ‘significant’ was about to happen at Brighton Station. Obviously the rumour had spread to the police, because by the time I arrived at the station they were frisking anyone with a ‘FUCK OFF BLAIR’ T-shirt. I eventually gave up waiting for the stunt to happen, and walked off from the station down West Street, near the central shopping district. It was then that I saw this dead horse lying in the middle of the road, with a placard driven into its belly. I must have missed it being dumped by seconds – there were no police and no other photographers. But there were people from the Countryside Alliance around it, while along the street little girls, who were out shopping with their parents, were bursting into tears. One of the Countryside Alliance members, a young woman, was obviously enjoying this, and told anyone who would listen what a great stunt it was. I pointed out the crying kids and she said – “Whatever, this is what life is like in the country.” Then she went up to 130

the horse and posed with her thumb up, pulling back the horses lips to show people its teeth. Another CA member told me that if the Hunting Act – which was in the process of becoming law and would specifically prohibit fox hunting – were enforced, then many CA members couldn’t justify keeping all their horses anymore, and would have to kill them. He said they would drop one dead horse in town centres around Britain every weekend until the ban was lifted. This never happened though; whichever militant wing of the CA was responsible obviously realised when the papers came out the next day that it had backfired as a PR stunt. Of course, no one noticed the message on the placard, they just asked, “What the hell are these psychos doing?” Shortly after I took this photo, and before other photographers turned up, the police arrived and put a tarpaulin over the dead horse. I still have the photo up on my website, and frequently get emails from teenage girls that I have to reply to very delicately, which ask why I had to kill a horse. This is despite the fact it says ‘News Photography’ on my website. I got one the other day saying “Sicko, how could you do this, you better take this photo down asap or there will be consequences.” The whole message was misspelled and in capitals, so what’s really the point of replying?

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..................................................................................... The BAD IDEA Anthology, a paperback collection of the best writing from BAD IDEA magazine, will be published by Portico Books in the summer of 2008. To celebrate, we’re running a writing competition for our readers with a very special prize: the chance to be a featured author in the anthology itself. PLUS, the winner and other finalists will have their work reviewed by Tom Bromley, publisher of Portico Books, and literary agent Charlie Campbell, of Ed Victor Ltd. To enter, write a non-fiction story under 1500 words on the following topic: The pen is mightier than the keyboard. Has the internet liberated new writers? Or are blog-zombies taking over our brains? Is the publishing world a closed, elitist coterie? What is Web 2.0 anyway? Is the “democratisation” of media a good thing or is this age of selfbroadcasting insane vanity? Should content be free or expensive? And who the hell writes in longhand these days? We’re looking for narrative non-fiction features that are imaginative in form and content, as opposed to “I think…” comment pieces with no basis in personal research or experience. A WORD FROM THE JUDGES… “As a publisher, I’m always on the lookout for new voices, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what talent this competition uncovers.” Tom Bromley, Publisher of Portico. “My previous experience of judging prizes has involved terrible, filthy sex writing and, worse, contemporary poetry, so this prize comes as a tremendous relief. I’m hoping for lively, unusual stories.” Charlie Campbell, Ed Victor Ltd. “Let the games begin!” Jack Roberts & Daniel Stacey, BAD IDEA Editors

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