Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn Read Free Book Online Page B

older son, Owen, all wearing scarves and the Everton colours, were standing at the side of the pitch to join in the minute’s applause on 25 August, weeping, of course, their faces reddened and smeared, their hair and clothes dishevelled, looking wrung-out with exhaustion and grief. Looking how people are expected to look when the comfortable facade of life has been torn away as a result of the unimaginable happening. The Joneses looked, in other words, the way Kate and Gerry McCann – controlled, collected, articulate, focused – had stubbornly refused to in all their appearances in public since Madeleine had gone missing.
    Gerry McCann was a heart specialist at the Glenfield Hospital in Leicester. But it was his background in sports medicine which had opened doors to the likes of David Beckham and Alex Ferguson and Manchester United’s Portuguese winger, Cristiano Ronaldo. Both teams at Celtic’s home game against Aberdeen on the last day of the Scottish season had worn yellow armbands to mark Madeleine’s fourth birthday. Four days later, on 16 May, Gerry’s brother John, accompanied by the former England rugby captain Martin Johnson, had launched the officialfundraising website dedicated to Madeleine, and the same day his sister Philomena – ‘Auntie Phil’ – had travelled from her home in Glasgow to meet the prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, in his office at the House of Commons; the ‘Iron Chancellor’ had apparently shed a tear as he held her hand.
    Gerry McCann and Kate Healy were clever children from working-class backgrounds, in Glasgow and Liverpool respectively. Both their fathers earned their livings manually, as joiners, and they had both aspired to become, and after the long slog of study had eventually qualified as, doctors. Much of the hostility directed towards them from the early days of the search for their daughter seemed to stem from the fact that they had been educated out of their class. Their accents – Gerry’s in particular, which was heard most often – connected them to the backgrounds they had grown away from, while their profession was an unmistakeable sign of where they were heading.
    In the meantime, in midlife – they were both thirty-nine – they were unrooted; they fitted nowhere. The sports-leisure wear that they wore for photo opportunities in Praia – Kate’s ghetto-style trainers, Gerry’s cropped trousers – seemed too up-to-the-minute for people who called themselves doctors; the names they had given their daughters – ‘Madeleine’, with its Proustian resonance; ‘Amelie’ rather than plain Emily – appeared pretentiously Frenchified and ‘European’ to people of their parents’ generation.
    That was one difference between the McCanns and Steve and Melanie Jones: the Joneses were part of a community that they knew and that knew them; they belonged. And their belonging, given vivid expression in the way they were embraced by, first, the Goodison and then the wider Merseyside tribes – the hated ‘Johnny Todd’, for example, was played at a Liverpool game for the first time in living memory, a few days after their son’s murder; the red of Liverpool became as common as the blue of Everton bunted across his shrine – was seen to represent a kind of authenticity that in the McCanns was lacking. By August Kate and Gerry had already emigrated to the new territory established by the likes of Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey and Richard Branson, where networking, influence and giving are inextricably intertwined.
    Among his friends Gerry McCann enjoyed a reputation as a joker, the fiery centre of any social gathering; his loud Glaswegian accent would come out on those occasions. But the Gerry who presented himself to the television cameras and in the newspapers was the Dr Sobersides (with a certain Roy Keane-like truculence) his tremulous patients were ushered in to see about their arteriosclerosis and pulmonary infarctions and to have angiograms and