Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn Read Free Book Online Page A

voice on his television appeal for information about Madeleine: Anybody who may have seen this littoo gel …, holding up a picture captioned with the single word DESAPARECIDA , the broad diamond-encrusted ring, the buffed pearl-cuticled nails, the big fuck-off watch), the little girl was right. His disappearance from public life was eerie, its stage management both calculated and, in its eventual effects, its tiny but tangible tipping of the world (that trailing sleevegathering up the dirt of King’s Cross station, Cherie’s parting shot of ‘We won’t miss you!’ to the world’s press gathered outside Number 10, the look that said ‘Zip it!’ that he shot her) unexpectedly unsettling.
    Blair had announced his departure from public life at Trimdon Labour Club on 10 May. It was a full-scale media event, with satellite trucks crowding the village and reporters doing pieces to camera all along the edge of the green. The New Labour anthems – ‘Search for the Hero Inside Yourself’ and ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ – were sprayed around, and people appeared with placards, some (as observers noted) in suspiciously similar styles: ‘10 Years, 3 Elections, 1 Great Britain’; ‘Britain Says Thanks’, ‘Tony Rocks’.
    His bowing-out coincided with another, more subliminal subtraction: it was the last weekend of the football season, with the switching of rhythms in all English towns and cities, the adjusting of habits and routines, of traffic-flow systems and shop opening hours that the close-season always means. The football grounds falling silent is experienced, even by people who have never set foot in them and maybe resent the disruption that match days bring, not so much as an absence as a lack of presence: the very traces of life extinguished, of death stalking through the centre of life.
    Before their final game of the season against Chelsea in London on 13 May, Everton players wore Madeleine T-shirts during the warm-up. Brian Healy, her grandfather, was a lifelong supporter of the team that is traditionallyfollowed by Catholics in Liverpool, and soon the family would release a picture of Madeleine wearing her blue ‘Toffees’ shirt. It was piercingly reminiscent of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman photographed in their red-and-white Beckham tops just hours before they were murdered by Ian Huntley in Soham. And just two games into the 2007–8 football season in mid-August, an eleven-year-old, Rhys Jones, died when he was hit in the head by a bullet fired by a hooded figure on a mountain bike while he was on his way home from football practice in the Croxteth area of Liverpool. Rhys Jones too was an Evertonian. And three days after his murder, pictures of Rhys in his Everton jersey were being flashed onto the big screens at Goodison Park alongside the continuing appeals for information about the disappearance of Madeleine showing close-ups of the defect in her eye and the photograph of her in her Everton top.
    The observance of a minute’s silence had become a regular feature of match days at Goodison over the previous twelve months, as Evertonians in the armed forces continued to be casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the first Sunday after his murder, there was a minute’s applause for Rhys Jones before Everton v. Blackburn, and his favourite tune, ‘Johnny Todd’, the Z-Cars theme and Everton anthem, was played. The following morning the Everton coach stopped on the way to training so that the players could add signed football boots and jerseys and a signed ball to the shrine that had been made in the pub car park where Rhys died.
    Within forty-eight hours of his murder, Steve and Melanie Jones, Rhys’s parents, had submitted to the harrowing ordeal of a televised interview with Richard Bilton, the soft-spoken BBC reporter who had been covering the McCann case from Portugal and had interviewed Kate and Gerry McCann in their apartment in Praia da Luz. And the Joneses, along with their