Fullalove Read online

  This is all by way of explaining their reactions to the material I started to send back from Zaire.

  I had travelled to Africa prepared. Ancestor reverence, secular dance, religious masquerade, rules governing the legal status of strangers, spirit mediumship and spirit possession. I had mugged up on all this. Kinshasa was going to be my shining hour. I had a smart new bush jacket from Abercrombie and Fitch. Oh I was keen. I got even more of an edge when I read in an interview with Mailer on the plane going over that he regarded Africa as being Hemingway’s territory (I was carrying a copy of Green Hills of Africa in my luggage), and so intended to be particularly on his mettle. That was it then: I was going to go mano a mano with my namesake, my nemesis, with my ‘sharer’ self – an idea that was crazy-arsed then, pathological now. I was going to stop him hoovering up the material and making it his own.

  And it wasn’t just Mailer. Hunter Thompson, George Plimpton, Bud Schulberg, James Baldwin and dozens of other big-foot reporters were all rattling round Zaire. The thing was (I bleated whenever the office got me on the phone), they had access, something I didn’t have; they got to go to the places I couldn’t go: the Ali bungalow in the Mobutu compound in N’Sele, just for instance, batting the breeze with Ali’s man Bundini, and the trainer, Angelo Dundee – ‘Hey, Angie,’ they’d call across the marbled spaces of the Intercontinental, lying back largely, ‘my man Angie!’ (what, we wallflowers were constantly asking each other, were these guys on?) – and ride on Ali’s bus and in the limos and sit on the counterpane in the bedroom at the house while Ali brought himself a Coke from the dresser, his toto playing taps on his great ebony trunk of a tufted thigh … Not to mention the breakfasts with Mobutu at Mobutu’s place by the brown silent river …

  The result was that I over-reacted. I over-reached. I pushed the envelope. (Where does that come from? What does it mean?) Certainly I over-wrote. What they wanted was basic information about Ali’s speed or Foreman’s bad mood, with a bit of spin here, a bit of vamping-’til-ready there; the tale of the tape. What they got was twenty paragraphs on the ivory market in Kinshasa, the weird house in the centre of town where streams of pygmies constantly came and went, the landscape of the bus ride out to N’Sele (urban shanty, then dusty hot-house exotic), Mobutu’s private zoo, Joseph Conrad’s Leopoldville contrasted and compared.

  But the all-time jaw-dropper was the piece I phoned through on tribal fetish objects, with special reference to the grotesque Zairian nail figure of a two-headed dog which was the first thing I saw when I woke up each morning, and which, on asking round, I discovered wasn’t corporate, in the sense of there being one in every room with the pants press, and the hair-drier and the watercolour washes of Mobutu-inspired motorway developments hanging either side of the bed.

  I established that these snarling, bristling figures were called nkisi, and made particularly excited note of the fact that the ‘dried organic matter’ clearly visible between some clumps of nails was probably blood from a blood sacrifice, possibly even human blood, possibly even a child’s: in certain villages in the interior, a child reported as having disappeared was presumed to have been sacrificed to mark the death of an important local man, and his or her head interred with the chief’s body. ‘Good-night, pal,’ I would say, made maudlin by the gin rickeys and the Planters Punches and the wine, bearing down on the braille spikes of the dog with a force I now feel sure I hoped would be enough to draw a sample of my own blood, which overnight would trickle down and join up with one of the boluses of ancient encrusted African matter.

  I started off with the heel of my hand and then the open palm (violet veined, soft, never exposed to a decent day’s toil in its life). Then I brought the nkisi in contact with the pad of my bare belly – cold nails hammered in at every angle – my toes enclenched in the flame-retardant carpet – put the two-headed monster on the bed and lay on it, straddled it face-down like a – what? – a fakir? – supported only by extended fingertips and toes, two middle fingers, two big toes, and finally nothing. Kabanga! A jungle moon framed in the high window. A stomach like the take-off board at the triple jump. That new journalism weirdness (although it goes without saying I didn’t pass a word of any of this on). Then I’d turn out the light.

  My adventures in ethnography went down like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl back in London. The despatches were ruthlessly pruned (as I knew they would be, having been for so long the pruner myself), and pretty soon I fell in with requirements: I rarely left the pack of reporters and filed little that couldn’t as easily have been lifted from the morning’s press handout or the stuff put over by the Press Association’s man. In this way, apart from the necessary topping and tailing, stories virtually wrote themselves.

  But until that happened, the blue pencil ran riot on – made Pollocks of – my ‘screeds’. (‘Made Pollocks of his bollocks’ was the joke, neatly combining references to my first and most recent efforts, when I returned home.) I’d get back to the Intercontinental to a stack of message slips all saying the same thing: Contact office soonest. I’d be paged in the lobby and in the coffee-shops and bars, and go to a phone only to have it reiterated that they were not National Geographic; that if they’d wanted animal stories they’d have got Johnny Morris, and that, contrary to what I apparently believed, there was no ‘a’ in my last name (conspiratorial laughter in the background).

  The method of paging at the Intercontinental consisted of a bellboy carrying a blackboard sign with Buddhist temple bells tinkling attention to the name of whoever was wanted at the desk or on a phone. ‘Martin Bormann’, ‘Aleister Crowley’ and ‘Kojak’ were popular. And so was ‘Norman Mailer’. Or ‘Miller’. You could never be sure. Without exception, Mailer’s was the name that got chalked up and paraded around. And so invariably, whenever we were both in the hotel, we’d both turn up at the front desk and go through an exaggeratedly formal routine: ‘You – No, no, you – No, please. You.’ Like codgers getting on a train.

  ‘“Norman Miller,’” Mailer said the first time this happened. ‘Would I be right in thinking those are Fleet Street eyes? Should I know you?’

  “‘I really think you are the best journalist in America” – “Well, Cal, there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America,”’ I said, quoting an exchange that Mailer once had with the poet Robert Lowell. He liked that. It started us off on a good footing. But it wasn’t as impromptu as I would like to believe I made it seem. If I’m honest, I suppose I hoped it, or some reference to the Miller/Mailer thing, might sneak into the book-length account of Foreman–Ali that Mailer was in Kinshasa to write. But if I did, I was disappointed – relieved and disappointed. A year later, I picked up The Fight with the heart-hammering, rib-racketing sense of apprehension anybody feels when they suspect they might be going to see their name in print and have no idea whether they’re going to be made to look false or stupid or craven or worse (smaller and greater betrayals, lesser and grosser misrepresentations of which I have been habitually guilty myself in the intervening years). Even vernacular spellings such as ‘No’min’ and ‘Nawmin’ came swimming up off the page and made me feel momentarily nauseous.

  Somehow – I no longer remember how – among the street jumble of socks, peanuts, toothpaste, chewing-gum, batteries, candles, tins of sardines, cigarettes and used cassette tapes in Kinshasa, I turned up a copy of An American Dream, which, on the morning after the fight, both of us still swaying drunk, I got Mailer to sign (‘To Norman M. from Norman M. Well met in Kinshasa. Remember (you know this): writers are always selling somebody out. It’s been fun.’). It had a supermarket sexy cover, and carried a recommendation from Time – ‘It races home into the station, blowing all its whistles’ – that I have always imagined appearing on a book of mine – a book of course that I have never written, and have now lost all ambition to write.

  Yesterday, the twentieth of June, was Father’s Day, a fact which went unmarked of course by me, but also by my children (one boy, one
girl, both more or less grown up now and effectively moonied by their mother into believing her version of what went wrong in the marriage).

  But, as a way, I can only suppose, of flagging its well-known commitment to family-mindedness and ‘traditional’ family values, this morning’s paper has gone overboard with Father’s Day mentions. Somebody has run a search and got the computer to spew up a ‘topical’ add-on for every reference to ‘father’ or ‘daddy’ or ‘dad’.

  So, a man has been gunned down by terrorists in Northern Ireland, ‘making a Father’s Day widow of his wife, Karen, mother of Susan, 7, and Tony, 8’. One of the England football team has run off with a woman described by his wife as being ‘all white shoes and sun-beds’, ‘leaving sons Michael, 8, and Peter, 7, to spend Father’s Day without their dad yesterday, riding their bicycles around the drive of the family’s luxury home in Coggeshall, Essex’. A boy of twelve has provided ‘the ultimate Father’s Day present – the gift of life’ by using a tea-towel to staunch the bleeding when a fish tank shattered and sliced through his father’s throat and windpipe. I’ve counted half a dozen references in as many pages.

  Even the three paragraphs carrying my puny byline have been given a Father’s Day peg. Headlined ‘The Look That Says: Live And Let Die, by Norman Miller’, they read as follows:

  As Scott McGovern continued his fight for life yesterday, the shamed TV star’s son was among those attending a star-studded reception at Smith’s Lawn, Windsor. Daniel McGovern, 19, chatted with celebrities including Billy Connolly, Susan Hampshire and Anneka Rice and drank champagne costing £200 a bottle while his father lay on a life support machine in an intensive care unit at St Saviour’s Hospital, London. There his condition continued to be described as critical but stable.

  It is now 18 days since £750,0000-a-year McGovern was found unconscious in his luxury flat at the Barbican. Police are continuing to examine thousands of frames of surveillance footage, including film taken outside the men’s toilet on the concourse at Victoria Station, one of the capital’s most notorious pick-up places for homosexuals, in an attempt to identify the man spotted entering McGovern’s building with him shortly before the murderous attack.

  Yesterday McGovern’s loyal wife, Sheila, continued her bedside vigil. But Father’s Day brought visits from neither of the McGovern children. While Daniel lived it up with the smart set at Windsor, Sophie, 16, was said to be being comforted by family friends.

  I wasn’t at Smith’s Lawn (have never been to Smith’s Lawn). I didn’t supply the verbals. I didn’t read them until I opened this morning’s paper. (They were almost certainly lifted from the first edition of the Express or the Mail.) I’m pretty sure the accompanying picture has been tweaked to bring Dan McGovern into a more intimate relationship with George Michael, whose own image has been electronically realigned – shivered, sphereised – to make him look like somebody suffering from a bad case of the munchies. (This is his most public neurosis, and one therefore that it is always in our interest to tickle up.)

  It doesn’t matter. Scott McGovern is the big-selling story of the year. ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ That’s the maxim. So when it’s celebrity blood that has been spilled – cowabunga! You’re off to the races. Every paper has put on readers since McGovern suffered ‘blunt force trauma’ – was found with his head stove in by a bronze award statuette based on a maquette by Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth, one or the other (it’s not an aspect of the story we’ve been climbing over each other to firm up). But cracking copy! Blinding telly! It’s been white-knuckle city waiting to see if McGovern comes out of his coma.

  Howie Dosson, my editor, doesn’t think he will. ‘He’s seriously kaputted, that guy,’ Dosson, generally known as ‘Tosser’, exulted the minute the news came over the wire. ‘Oh are you sure! He is vegetable and will stay vegetable.’

  Along with every other human-interest flammer and tabloid footsoldier in the country, I have been on the story since day one. Tosser Dosson made an instant decision to clear the decks. ‘You all know what I want,’ he said in his Churchillian address, jacketless, two high pulses of colour beating powdery Gainsborough crimson in his cheeks, long metalloid legs astride a desk. ‘I want what you want. What every newspaper reader in this country not too hypocritical to admit it wants. I want the wet details on McGovern. Everyfreakingthing. Who is the stooper and who is the stabber. The name of everybody who has been up McGovern’s arse. I want the guy sliced open like a mango. And I want it first. Forget anything you might have been planning to do in the next week. The dentist, the vasectomy, the new bed from Ikea, the bunk-up with that slapper you met round the wine-bar, the cosy anniversary dinner in your local tandoori. I want it now! Like … yesterday. We’re going all-balls-out on this one.’

  There was a stampede in the direction of the cashiers on the third floor with advance expenses chits – pink, carbon-triplicated, clammy. The office-bound got busy with lists and photocopies of the relevant cuts (the McGovern file ran to four bumper packets then, probably twice that now) and maps and multicoloured charts.

  Tame rent-boys, squat-heads, squealers and showbiz deep-throats were summoned by phone. Reporters were assigned to chase down McGovern’s children, his children’s friends, their friends’ friends, their teachers, his heli-chauffeur, drivers, gardeners, pool-cleaners, housekeepers, roadsweepers, the waiters at the restaurants where he kept an account, make-up girls at the BBC, BBC commissionaires, bar staff, the disc-jockeys working on the radio station he’d put together the consortium to launch, the partners in his video business. Plough the fields and scatter. The hounds were unleashed. There were posses, ambushes, false trails, cut-offs; minor deception, fraud, cat-burglary in the public interest. It was zoo-time.

  I spent the first five days in a leafy suburb of Stoke-on-Trent where the streets were named for Robin Hood and His Merrie Men – Nottingham Drive, Robin Circle, Maid Marian Lane – part of the pack doorstepping Peggy Askam, the mother-in-law. She lived in Alan-A-Dale Crescent, in a neat and trim house set back a good distance from the road, with plenty of trees.

  Half a street away there was a neighbourhood park with a brook flowing through it, flowers and benches, swings and other jungle gym equipment, and tennis courts for the older children and grown-ups. You have no idea how long the long suburban day can be until you have spent one in a place like this. The only break in the monotony was a neighbour arriving at the side-door of Peggy Askam’s house with food covered over by a tea-towel in case we might want to snatch a picture of that as well. Our own on-the-job food needs were taken care of by Genaro from the Appenines who sold hot-dogs and breaded drum-sticks at five pounds a pop from a trailer with tudor-timbered sides.

  A few years earlier, while her husband was fighting the illness which finally killed him, Peggy Askam had been done for shoplifting – walking out of her village shop with a carton of Fairy Liquid and a jar of Nescafé that she hadn’t paid for – and of course we gave all that another go around. She had a choice: talk to us about her daughter and her daughter’s life with Scott McGovern, or have her own criminal past resurrected, only used big across the front page this time. The curtains remained drawn. A melanin-mapped hand reached round the door to fumble the milk in. She kept her counsel. So we treated the shoplifting story to a retread (further investigation revealed there had been a third item, a half-pound pack of Kerry Gold) and put it back on the road again.

  After five days, and not much to show for it, I was reeled in and put onto a tale being peddled by the mouthpiece of a security and surveillance firm in south London who claimed to be representing the owner of a set of incriminating – ‘well detrimental’ – letters written to him by McGovern. This contact wasn’t entirely without form: prison paintings by famous murderers, Bobby Moore post-mortem pictures, tapes that proved that Elvis really was working as a supermarket bagger in Biloxi or Trenton, New Jersey – ‘You’re gonna hear Elvis Himselvis’ … He had made efforts to off-load all of these in the past.

/>   We met for lunch at the White Tower (his choice – he is a glutton for the taramasalata and the duck stuffed with cracked wheat and nuts. ‘Reckon you can spunk a ton on me for a lunch,’ he’d said. ‘Least you can do.’). We were into the second bottle of retsina, and he was beginning to give me his palaver when – it had only taken me seven days, and total, round-the-clock immersion in the McGovern story to come up with this – I remembered that once, many years ago, I had interviewed Scott McGovern at his house; that there was probably still a tape of the conversation mouldering away in a drawer among my souvenirs.

  This had been in the days when I seemed to have both feet set firmly on the up escalator and was establishing a reputation for juicing slightly more out of hardened interviewees than they were planning to tell. Zaire actually hadn’t done me any harm. It had got me noticed. By about 1977 my strike-rate was among the best on the paper. I was a young family man in my thirties with an occasional picture byline, hungry, crashing my gears, working round the clock.

  Aphasia – sudden black-hole amnesia – along with dizziness, anxiousness, a tingling in the fingers of my right hand, is one of the symptoms of the petit mal that has brought me down. But my memory of the – until then – lost afternoon spent doing the business on Scott McGovern came to me in a flash of what still feels like God-given recall. The sunny drive west out of London, the village with the ancient petrol pumps standing at its centre, the wrong turnings, the newly painted finger-posts, the winding track up to the house, the house’s yellow clay wattle-and-daub exterior walls, the hollowed herringbone-pattern brick floors, the kelims, the dried hydrangeas in the China-blue vases, the dogs, McGovern’s young friend William (not a T-shirt adonis or muscled love-boy, but a wire-glasses-wearing, pudgy, film-buff, Proms-going type) snipping flowers in the garden with a secateur.