Authors: Sam Baker
‘How injured?’ He gave me a look, one I was already coming to think of as a very news desk look. ‘As injured as you can get.’
Old Compton Street was rammed. The noise was overwhelming, sirens wailing, voices screaming directions and orders. ‘Stand back! Move! You can’t come in here, sir! Over here! Move!’ And in amongst it, music still flooding from neighbouring bars. Howls of pain and grief undercut by the Backstreet Boys. Beneath it, more unnerving than any howl, was a silence I would come to recognise in the years that followed.
The silence of utter shock.
There was a smell too. I’ve always been sensitive to smell, but this … I’d never smelled anything like it, although I’d come to recognise that too. The flat, metallic smell of blood. Exhaust fumes fused with singed hair, burning flesh overlaid with Italian food, Chinese food, burgers … Flesh, both human and animal. Beneath that, the stench of alcohol where the opticals had exploded. All that, and vomit.
Bile rose in my throat and I made myself swallow it down. Ridley glanced over and rolled his eyes. That was what did it. I swallowed again, and turned away.
Fuck you,
I thought
, fuck you.
It was almost too easy to lose him. So easy, I’m pretty certain he’d been hoping to shake me off. While he waved his press card in the face of the officer guarding the tape, I walked straight past with an ambulance crew. I should have felt bad about it, but I was too angry. Angry, and horrified.
‘How injured? As injured as you can get.’
It played over and over in my head.
Almost an hour had passed since the bomb went off. Long enough for everyone to have convened on the scene; not long enough for anyone to have started doing anything other than the most urgent clearing up. There were photographers and journalists
everywhere; all taking the same pictures, all asking the same questions, of the same people. What was the point of another shot of the blown-out pub? The first stretcher carried out? The policewoman with her hand over her mouth? The upturned bar stool in the middle of the street? I took those shots anyway. If
The Times
had them and we didn’t, I’d be out of a job as quickly as I’d found one.
Weaving my way up Old Compton Street, avoiding eye contact with anyone looking remotely official, I realised the smell of fear and alcohol was overpowered by something else, something acrid enough to make me swallow down more bile. The scent of burnt coffee coated the inside of my nostrils. I’d never feel the same about percolator coffee again.
‘There were people running out covered in blood, dust and bruises,’ a dazed-looking man was telling an ITN camera crew, outside the coffee shop next door to what remained of the pub. I doubt he had a clue where he was, let alone who he was talking to. The only people running now were ambulance crews, shuttling stretchers to and from the Duncan. Those from inside still able to run had done that long ago. On the pavement opposite, a row of the injured, red and blue blankets draped over their shoulders, dressings held to their heads, sat on the pavement awaiting treatment. Their number was slowly growing as police ushered walking wounded from the ruins. Their expressions hollow, eyes dead with shock, T-shirts covered with blood or dust or both. If they noticed me raise the camera Dad bought me to celebrate my new job, their expressions didn’t register it. Mine wasn’t the first to capture them and it wouldn’t be the last.
Soon, all that was left inside was the debris. The front of the Admiral Duncan was ripped away, shattered bar stools clogged the gutter, the shop windows opposite looked as if they’d been machine-gunned. The sheer devastation said more about what whoever did this intended than the occasional scream from someone being moved ever could. The emergency teams worked on: quietly, competently, moving through the rest of us as if we didn’t exist. As I slipped past, trying not to get in the way of the rescue services, side-swerving other journalists, staying as inconspicuous as I could, rumours swilled round me that the dead had reached double figures. A paramedic muttered, strictly off the record, that the injured were into the hundreds. Far more people than could possibly have been packed into the small Soho pub, more than could have been passing by or drinking on the pavement outside. Once I thought I saw Huntingdon, but never Ridley. I kept my head down and made sure neither saw me.
At the far end of Old Compton Street, I slipped under a tape, past a police car locking off Wardour Street, and leaned against the window of the chemist at the corner, trying to catch my breath. When I looked up, I found myself staring into the open rear doors of an ambulance. Inside, blood was already soaking the bright white of freshly applied bandages. The man was shirtless, grime-splattered. The nurse looked up from her charge, saw my camera and her face changed; concern turned to loathing in less than a second.
‘I wouldn’t,’ I wanted to say, ‘I’d never …’
Before I had a chance to, she shut the doors on me. All that stared back at me from the blacked-out windows in those doors was my own lie.
I already had.
Adrenalin had carried me from London Bridge across Soho, through hundreds of torn-up lives. When I let down my guard, it deserted me, courage draining my body like air from a leaky balloon. It was almost eight o’clock and the light was failing fast. My eyes were sore, my neck ached, my hands gripped my camera so hard my knuckles hurt. I couldn’t bear to see one more victim covered in blood, tread across another beach gravelled with broken glass. That empty expression, which I’d never seen before but already recognised, spoke of lives unutterably changed. I knew I’d never again shut my eyes without seeing it.
To my left I saw an open gate in the wall and stumbled through into what seemed to be a deserted playground. Except it wasn’t a playground – no playthings, no children – it was a churchyard. And it wasn’t deserted. It was one of those other-worldly pockets you can stumble across in every city; not particularly enclosed, but somehow eerily silent. Groups were scattered in twos and threes across the grass, some muttering to each other in a dazed blur, others staring silently into space, oblivious to the used syringes and cans left by its usual inhabitants. Every so often a siren would wail and someone would look up, confusion across their face, as if its sound was unexpected. In the far corner, where railings gave way to church wall, a row of benches stood concealed by trees. Concentrating on picking my way through cans and syringes, I didn’t notice they were already occupied until I was almost upon him. On the furthest bench a man sat in shadows, the lightness of what remained of his white T-shirt contrasting with the gloom. His head was in his hands. Blood soaked through his fingers. I knew I should turn away, leave him to his misery, but I couldn’t.
When my office mobile rang I killed the call without even looking.
Blood ran down his face from an open gash in his skull. Before today I’d never seen a wound beyond broken arms or grazed knees, but he wore an embedded nail like a stud beside one eye. His once-white T-shirt was bruising into grey and red.
His eyes looked right through me.
Not looking. Not seeing. Already dead.
‘You should …?’ I said. Should what? Get help? Get that seen to? I sounded as if I was talking to someone who’d cut his knee. He shook his head imperceptibly. Or maybe he didn’t, maybe the movement was mine. Then his eyes dropped, staring into nothing, at a spot somewhere between where I stood and his feet. I lifted my camera and quietly stole his picture. Then I left the churchyard, unintentionally kicking a discarded syringe ahead of me.
The picture made the front page. Of course it did. That one shot, the last of three hundred and ninety-eight.
‘Thank God for digital,’ the picture editor said when he saw how many I’d taken. ‘Cost me a bloody fortune in film, that would.’
And I’d taken it almost as an afterthought. It was a lesson that shaped my career; never disregard the afterthought.
My one unintended, unsought picture; taken at the point when I was beginning to realise what I’d just done. Walk through a battlefield like a recording angel, leaving others to dispense care or charity. The man’s name was Michael. Five years later we met for a drink when he was writing about his experiences and I wondered then if he wished he’d died. His lover did. The only person he’d loved in his entire life, before or since.
Huntingdon was furious. Ridley, only slightly less so. It was Huntingdon’s call I’d killed.
Not furious because I got the front page. No, they were perversely proud of that … Suddenly I was their little protégée. My success was down to them. I owed them, for letting me go with them. Patronising arseholes. They were cross because their piece would have been ‘even better’ if we’d got a quote from Michael. If I’d answered the call they’d have known where I was and could have got one.
Thousands of words they recorded that evening, and not one from the man who made the splash. The only excuse for that, usually, was that the subject was dead. Why hadn’t I stayed with them? Why didn’t I call them? I didn’t answer. I could have said he wasn’t capable of speech. That would have been true. I could have lied about crowds. But I wasn’t scared of them any more, and I wasn’t much interested in their questions. I had one of my own. Why, when a man sat badly wounded in front of me, hadn’t I gone for help?
Why had I simply taken his photograph and left?
An uncomfortable silence fell. It felt like several minutes but was probably only a matter of seconds. Gil finally broke it. ‘And you and Art Huntingdon have been together ever since?’ he asked. ‘Since the Admiral Duncan, I mean.’
‘God no,’ said Helen, then stopped, realising how that must sound. How heartless he must already think her. There was a place for gallows humour and this wasn’t it.
‘That didn’t happen ’til much later. Not ’til Iraq. Although, to hear Art tell it, I’d been pining for him the whole time. The man who gave me my big break.’
She noticed Gil glance down at her hands, and forced herself to stop endlessly twisting her fingers.
‘But your paths must have crossed?’
‘You’d think so. But no, not really. Art is, was, nearly ten years older than me. We hung with different crowds. You have to remember, I’m “just” a photographer.’ She looked at him to see if he understood. If he didn’t, he didn’t show it.
‘And then 9/11 happened and Art headed off on his path to glory. I don’t even remember seeing him again until Iraq. I say “again”. To be honest, I didn’t recall him from the first time. There was a bloke, I thought he was an arrogant arsehole, that was the extent of it. Like I said, that memory, the one I’ve just told you, most of that – or at least Art’s part in it – was Art’s memory.
‘It was another picture that got us together. Not the one on my laptop. Another one. Its twin, I suppose you’d call it.’
Iraq 2007
The small boy lay curled up in the shade of a peeling wall, his hair flopped across his eyes. In his hand was a Power Ranger, the red one. He was lovely, for all his striped T-shirt was filthy and his jeans frayed and his plimsolls two sizes too big. He must be, what …?
I leaned in towards the screen to study the picture more closely.
Five, possibly six. Small enough to look angelic and big enough to be a monster at home. He had what seemed to be a slight smile on his face.
So beautiful I could hardly stand it.
I was sitting in front of my laptop in a hotel room staring at the shot with tears streaming down my face. My hair was damp, the neck of my shirt clung where tears had leaked into my collar, but I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t even trying.
My fingers hovered over the keys. In my head I could hear the voice of the American colonel who’d dropped by long enough to shake us all by the hand and tell us he was sure we understood the rules. We were journalists, the truth was important to us. It was important to him too, that’s why he was fighting for it. His press liaison officer would be happy to discuss angles on stories before they were written and advise on suitable picture edits. I knew I should find him, go through the edit with him … But who knew where he was right now?
And more to the point, who cared? I didn’t.
Taking one last look at the boy, I hit send and watched the RAW file begin to upload. I chose the best of the later shots and uploaded them too, then found one of the burnt-out truck and uploaded that. Finally, just for the hell of it, I loaded some pictures of the hotel pool.
The picture desk Skyped within half an hour.
‘Helen.’
‘You like them?’
‘He’s …’ the picture editor hesitated.
‘Beautiful?’
‘That’s not the word I’d use.’
Mostly the only pictures of children that got approved were the ones that showed them being given sweets or walking down streets with their mothers under the gaze of soldiers there to keep them safe.
‘Tell me you have permission for this.’
I didn’t even pause. ‘I have permission for this.’
‘Good enough for me.’
Skype went blank and I took one last look at the pictures arranged down the side of my screen and shut off my laptop.
That wasn’t how the day began. But it was how it ended, pretty much, except for what came later. It began with us gathering in the hotel foyer to be given our groups and briefed for the day. The US army was big on briefing. We’d only been in their sector of Iraq for two days and had been briefed three times. This would be the fourth. A version of the same talk every single day.