Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn Read Free Book Online

Gerry McCann live with their children a few miles north of Leicester looks similar in the pictures. The difference is that Orchard House in the commuter village of Rothley is a close neighbour of The Ridgeway, singled out as one of the ten most expensive places to live in Britain by the Sunday Times at around the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.
    Five miles to the north of Trimdon are the former mining communities of Haswell and Haswell Plough where the (at that stage still anonymous) Labour donor David Abrahams made a killing in 2001, when he put together parcels of land occupied by disused buildings and obtained planning permission so that the sites could be sold on for residential development.
    Trimdon and Kelloe pit at Haswell were once linked underground. Pairs of hewers drove roadways into the coal, fifteen feet wide, and the subterranean road between Trimdon and Kelloe stretched for mile after mile, with new roadways struck off to the left and right at intervals of twenty yards. The two pits are connected in local folklore by the Trimdon Disaster of 1882 in which seventy-four people were killed. But, whereas Haswell has become a popular commuter village built by Miller Homes,Trimdon itself remains a property black spot, stubbornly unarbitrageable and apparently ignored in the rush to coalfield regeneration.
    North Moor Avenue contains only a handful of closed or failing businesses. The Grey Horse is closed down and slowly collapsing. Inside the Royal, Blair’s local if he had one, it is like a permanent rainy Tuesday in late autumn. An overfed Staffie waddles up to the bar, sniffs each arriving customer’s shins, waddles back to his place in front of the fire trailing a thread of shining drool and a pungent body odour. Portrait of an English summer.
    And now Myrobella, whose comings and goings were some of the few signs of life in Trimdon Colliery, is starting to give the appearance of being uninhabited, maybe even abandoned in spite of the outgoing PM’s expressions of deep sentimental attachment and pledges of lifelong fealty. A van came and collected many of the Blairs’ personal belongings a few days after his valedictory address to the House of Commons. Already the uniformed officers who have been assigned to the house for ten years seem listless, even apprehensive. They are standing watch over an absence. They are guarding nothing. They are bearing witness to a kind of voluntary self-erasure.
    A week after Blair left office, the viewers of Richard and Judy voted as their YouTube clip of the week a little girl Madeleine’s age – a little girl very like Madeleine – refusing to eat her breakfast and sobbing over the void left in her life by the disappearance of Tony Blair. I love Tony Bair! she wails. I want Tony Bair! Doesn’t she like the newprime minister? her mother asks from behind the camera, knowing the answer, pushing her daughter’s buttons, prompting her bleatings for the benefit of the YouTube audience. Noooooo! Wheeeere is he? She bangs the table with her spoon and screams even louder. I love Tony Bair! (‘Thousands of little girls want him to be president so they can have him on the TV screen and run their fingers through the image of his hair.’ This from a political commentator in the Sixties, on the subject of Bobby Kennedy. ‘Nonchalance is the key word,’ the writer added. ‘Carefully studied nonchalance. The harder a man tries, the better he must hide it. Style becomes substance.’)
    Blair’s vanishing act when it happened, happened quickly. There were big attention-grabbing events: back-to-back, piled-up catastrophes and near-catastrophes – the terrorist attacks, the floods, foot-and-mouth – and somebody else taking charge of them, doing the reassuring. One minute Blair was part of the national static, and the next he was gone. The fact it had been a long time coming didn’t make any difference. The little girl (and, here, it is difficult not to hear David Beckham’s