Fullalove (12 page)

A while ago, a man slipped into the seat next to mine in The Cinq-Mars and tried to sell me the sorts of things my mother used to call dust-collectors – souvenirs whose fate was to be forgotten – at fifty pence apiece. He was wearing no socks, and had boiled-looking blistered feet and ankles piling over his plastic trainers. He smelled equally of stale sweat and a stale pungent aftershave. He’d rummage in the hold-all balanced on his knee and pull out one small, damaged and insignificant object after another – a cracked vase, a porcelain pig with an ear missing, a glass giraffe or bambi, some Smurf-esque creatures; then a rawhide dog bone, a dented can of aerosol lubricant, all of it obviously the portable booty of a house-clearance; the effects of somebody who had recently passed away. ‘Fifty-pee,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Fifty-pee. What’s your problem?’ I remained stony-faced. ‘Okay. Tell you what. You can have the lot. How’s that? The whole lot’s yours for a fiver.’ Eventually I took a small plaster basket with chipped plaster flowers clambering up the side just to get rid of him. It is sitting on the table in front of me now, looking like the little white cloud that cried. Inside it is a shrunken oasis of waxy green matter pierced by the stems of the dozens of flowers it must have once held. For an instant it reminded me of the fondant-like mass of the brain suspended in its jelly sac in the cranium, and of a quote garnered from a neuro-anatomist during my background researches into Scott McGovern: The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. Brain tissue is not regenerative; once destroyed it is gone for ever.

There is a television over the bar. A few minutes ago the barmaid was watching an Australian soap about hospitals and doctors. That has been replaced by the quiz show that comes on every afternoon about this time and is taken as a signal by the stragglers that they should be making tracks back to their under-vented, miserly-partitioned stalls and cubicles.

This is wallpaper television and perfectly suited to the time of day. The set is to a formula: glitter graphics; columnated desks like piles of coins, with coloured lights that flash and flutter at punctuating moments and can give the appearance of being activated by the audience’s applause, although this is pre-recorded. The contestants are the usual decruited business executives, stir-crazy housewives, pizza-faced forecourt attendants, and trainee sex offenders. The presenter is a recognisable daytime tellyperson – pulverisingly genial, bland as Philadelphia cream cheese.

‘Well,’ he’s saying, ‘it’s a while since we’ve seen our first contestant, Steven, from Cheadle in Manchester. He’s a laboratory technician and also interested in military history and Kipling. Is that fun, Steven? Kipling? I wouldn’t know myself. I’ve never kippled.’ (Canned laughter that rings poignantly around the now nearly empty bar.) ‘I will start as we always do with a general knowledge question for one point. Finger on the buzzer. Here it is. The French designer whose after-shaves include Kouros and Jazz is Yves-who …?’

The only thing that lifts the show above the ordinary is the quiz-master’s (they still call him this) route to the foothills of mini-stardom. Four years ago Sean Norwood was an estate agent in Croydon, in south London, with a wife, three children, and a nice home on a satellite development still in the final stages of completion. Then one morning he got up to find that Shane, the middle child and, at nine, the older of his two sons, was missing. An upper window had been forced, although Sean Norwood and his wife, asleep in the next room, had heard nothing. Part of a man’s size-ten bootprint was found at the point where the partly made-up road leading to the house turned into gravelled slurry. But Shane’s whereabouts have never been discovered.

I was at Glenwood Close (the neighbouring streets were Greenwood, Redwood and Laurelwood) by mid-morning, pitched into a situation as usual brimming with deadly negative potential. The estate was desolate in its newness and its evidence of status striving, wallet-strain and killer commutes. The
whole thing could easily have whirled off the computer screens in the architect’s office and planted itself on the hundred and fifty acres of reclaimed sheep meadow, spruce and with all graphic co-ordinates intact (seven floor-plans, twenty-one different exteriors, no identical models to be built next to or facing each other). The place felt as aberrant, foreign and hostile that November morning as the event that had been visited upon it.

So here we all were. I made a note of the ‘Stranger danger’ warning notices at the entrances to the ash-and ilex-bordered play areas, and the ‘World Wildlife Fund’ sticker on the window through which Shane Norwood’s kidnapper had entered the house. Then I peeled away from the pack to go and find the abandoned mattress with its horse-hair stuffing and its continents of bodily stains which, invariably on these occasions, is never very far away.

I identified Sean Norwood’s father, Stan, as a family member within minutes of going into the pub. In the same way that some blind people eventually acquire a touch so sensitive that they can identify playing cards by the infinitesimal thickness of the shapes printed on them, so my senses are honed to lock on to people caught up in victim stories.

I knew straightaway from his accent that Stan Norwood was from the same part of the world I am originally from. He had been a fitter in the shipyards and had migrated to the soft south in the fifties to claim some of its featherbededness for himself. (He had had a string of jobs, and a string of illnesses, including diphtheria, testicular cancer and shingles; he was currently working as a delivery man for the Cookie Coach Company, a job that required him to wear a ‘Quality Street’-style cape-coat and squash hat and drive a vintage van with spoke-heels and olde-worlde sign-writing on the side.)

I felt my own submerged accent returning and growing steadily thicker as we spoke, establishing a mutual link (so I hoped) with the old close communities of the north, and an age when things were repaired rather than jettisoned, junked, thrown away. (A time – this was the clear intimation – when children
could sleep safely in their beds without the fear of being carried off by an evil stranger. A time when the four walls of a house seemed to offer secure protection against the secret intrusion of terror.) And yet even as we waxed nostalgic about the rag shop and the old feed store and other local landmarks that had long ago been reduced to rubble and bulldozed under, I kept itchily turning over the configuration of the name – Stan – Sean – Shane – and wondering whether it represented some mutation or progression, rushing headlong towards this ineffable conclusion; the breaking of a line.

Stan – Sean – Shane. My feeling was that it was something that had happened unplanned and – even now, with the three names monotonously mantra-ed alongside each other in cold type (at first this caused chaos among the copy-takers) – went unheeded; that it signalled a cheery lack of introversion in the Norwood clan, passed down from generation to generation. I was impatient to fuzzle it up into some sort of angle, or present it in such a way that it suggested some pseudo-psychological insight that the competition hadn’t got on to yet.

When the grandfather looked like he was about to start making preparations to leave, I pressed my advantage. This had all the makings of a whopper, after all; a major ‘Hey, Doris’ story (and so it was to prove). And I knew the drift of the notes that would have been being pushed through the letterbox at Glen-wood Close all day (I had left one myself): ‘Dear Mr and Mrs Norwood, This is obviously a difficult/emotional/tragic time for you. And if you’d like to tell your story to someone who’ll treat it with sympathy and understanding, please give me a call on my portable. I’m outside the house now if you want to talk. Certainly we can offer you protection from all the other papers.’ (The money bids would come later; I knew
X
from
The
Star
was already out there toting
£
5,000 in used twenties in a briefcase.)

I made my pitch to old Stan now, in person, as I helped him into his overcoat, in an accent that had become indistinguishable from his own. An hour later, to the fury of the rest of the pack kicking their heels on the pavement, I was indoors, eliciting the
factoids of Shane Norwood’s life, riffling through the pictures, pocket tape turning, making all the right noises, face like a well-kept grave.

A doctor had been in to sedate the mother, who was upstairs with a WPC stationed by the bed. A uniformed policeman was in the kitchen, fielding the calls from hoaxers that had already started to flood in, interspersed with crank calls from those who claimed to know the boy had been taken by aliens. In Shane’s room, his bed had become a mound of flowers, cellophane-wrapped and with a business-card bearing a newspaper logo attached to each artful spray. Disturb the crinkled, expensive surface, and you could have expected to find sandy soil and smooth spade-shaped clods of mud, rather than the Arsenal duvet, the pattern of rocket ships and spinning ringed Saturns on the pillow.

The house, like the estate, was only partly finished. Some walls were newly rendered and bare; some parts of some floors remained uncovered; there were manufacturers’ labels sticking to the undersides of lavatories and sinks.

The three of us – Stan Norwood, Sean Norwood and myself – got through the best part of two bottles of Lamb’s Navy rum, and I left with some good tales. Better yet – I could already feel the sun of Howie Dosson’s approbation on my back as I took possession – I left with the tape Sean had shot with his Sony Handy-cam on a cross-Channel ferry just a few weeks earlier, and from which we were able to grab some good-value stills of Shane playing with his brother and sister. (The cassette went straight into the editor’s safe afterwards to keep it out of the maulers of our rivals. Tosser played for time with the Norwoods by bulling them that it had gone missing ‘at the printers’ and bunged them a cheque for
£
500 as a temporary sweetener.)

Sean Norwood, it turned out, was a TV natural. He had obviously been a bit of a ducker-and-diver in his time (although he didn’t have a record – the other papers immediately checked this, hoping to run a spoiler); he instinctively mastered the difficult feat of being distraught-with-dignity; made repeated
appeals for the return of his son in a way that played expertly, though not cloyingly, on the universal reflex of tears; he looked good, he had an unfakeable feel-good factor, and the camera loved him. (This was whispered excitedly by young women with clipboards clutched to their chests in production suites all over London: ‘The camera loves him.’)

Very soon he was a powerful media presence, a fixture not only of the news bulletins, but also of magazine programmes, documentaries, phone-ins and talk shows. He started a foundation which campaigned on the issue of abducted children, sought new legislation and better education on child safety. A number of name columnists hailed him for having turned adversity to advantage, transformed personal tragedy into something positive, and found in his own catastrophe a cause. Five months after Shane’s disappearance, he moved out of the family home in Glenwood Close, and in with one of these columnists in her house in Acton. Within what seemed a very short time, she was penning a column on the impossibility of living with a severely traumatised male. Sean Norwood had already moved on to a researcher from Yorkshire Television by then and was living in Leeds, where he was reported to be drinking (and, some said, drugging) heavily.

Although several men have claimed to have killed Shane Norwood, his family have never found out for certain who, if anybody, did; the body has never been discovered. His father’s personal odyssey since the abduction has been a gift for the news media. There have been a series of other, widely publicised romances, and several public brawls. At one point Sean Norwood was rumoured to be hanging out in Dublin with Alex Hig-gins, Jerry Lee Lewis and some of the members of U2. There was the gun incident, following hard on the heels of the knife incident; and then, just over a year ago, he went into somewhere called the Exodus Recovery Centre in the West Country to dry out.

He emerged to tell the harrowing tale on the same shows on which he had originally appeared, three years earlier, to talk
about Shane. Soon there was the autobiography, which is still in the upper reaches of the best-sellers after five months, kept there by his new-found popularity as an afternoon quiz-show host.

I am looking at Sean now, playing to an audience of three through the sidewardly spiralling dust motes in The Cinq-Mars. He has just asked a woman called Esme, who is already taking home a computer chess game and a Kenwood cordless kettle, which sex symbol’s original name was Norma Jean Baker, and Esme has given the correct answer, which is Marilyn Monroe. ‘Marilyn Monroe!’ he says, as if she had just recited Otto Harm’s third law of thermoneutics and nuclear fission. ‘If you’d been given that name, you’d have changed it too, wouldn’t you, Esme?’

Sean Norwood’s face glows throughout its 625 lines with sincerity, humility, vigour, and a creamy resonance – no sign of human hurtability there. But whenever I look at this face, I see the counter-image – the face I saw on the night his son disappeared, as we sat passing the bottle of syrupy rum: a face transformed by the ecstasy of pain, the rapture of grief; scalded by tears, smeared with phlegm and giesers of green snot. It is the sort of moment phots like Heath Hawkins see it as their life’s calling to capture: human features calamitised by pain or terror; the moment of absolute animal abandonment.

The theme music is being brought up gradually now, and Sean Norwood is doing what he does at the wind-up of every show. ‘Say “Goodbye, Shane,”’ he says to the contestants, who, familiar with the format, are already waving in unison at the portrait of Shane Norwood which dominates a corner of the set that has been kept in darkness until now – a big blown-up innocent picture – the picture of innocence – surrounded by the hokey glamour of several dozen twinkling pearloid bulbs.

The makers of the show have not plumped for the sharp, professionally posed portrait that was available, showing Shane smiling and well groomed. They have opted instead for a snapshot picture – a second-generation print enlarged from copy negatives and pushed until it has a crude, documentary feel at odds with its showbizzy setting. Because of its lack of definition and
precision, it seems irradiated with muted pathos; glutted with event-value.