Jubilee (2 page)

Then Cai, Satish’s next-door neighbour, and his younger sister Colette. Colette … he thinks of scooters, hair bobbles, cuddly animals, generic kids’ things.

Cai, of course, had his cultural contraband, the stuff that would
really
piss off his dad. Satish imagines it now, sitting in the drawer waiting to be discovered. Cai’s dad – Mr Brecon – doesn’t know about it yet. He’s downstairs in the sitting room with Mrs Brecon. They’re watching
It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum
, and Mr Brecon is laughing and laughing …

Satish rolls over. His pillow smells nice; it smells of himself, his hair. Finally he sleeps.

Satish sleeps for four hours. He’s finally summoned to consciousness by his travel alarm, its dutiful beeps telling him: shower, handover, home.

But he can’t go home, not yet anyway, because once he’s over at the hospital his replacement rings, claiming a traffic hold-up. No one seems to need him for a bit, so Satish retreats to his office and sits, bleary, at his computer, clearing messages while he waits. He scans the subject lines: a second opinion, a paediatrics conference, the legalities of a recent firing. Towards the end, there’s something else.

It’s from Colette. The subject line says
Happy and Glorious
, and his fist clenches. Then he opens the email and reads what she has to say, and he can’t believe she’s saying it. It’s
Colette
– his friend – and
she’s
telling him there’s going to be a reunion, a new photograph. They want Satish to be in it. He knew it would come eventually, but he couldn’t imagine it would come from her. She’s sent him a copy of the picture. He double-clicks on the attachment.

He’s been ambushed. Four hours of sleep have not prepared him for this. And with a kick of anger he remembers how this photograph, this bloody photograph, has always ambushed him.

When he was twelve, when it all happened, he felt stalked by the thing. It first turned up in his local paper, as they had expected it to, one image in a round-up of Jubilee street parties. But it was special, you could tell even then, and the nationals got hold of it, and it started reproducing promiscuously: in broadsheets, tabloids, and a Sunday supplement souvenir edition. It lay in wait for him at school; it followed him home. His Cherry Gardens neighbours couldn’t get enough of it. They bought everything it appeared in and the newsagents kept selling out. For a few weeks it was everywhere he looked, and each time he saw it – whack! – it gave him a good thumping. People called it ‘the Jubilee photo’ or ‘that street party picture’. Its photographer, Andrew Ford, called it ‘Happy and Glorious’.

Over the years it has ambushed Satish many times because of its endlessly flexible applications. For a while it seemed central to his country’s view of itself, a snapshot of a nation in harmony. It was used – the irony! – to illustrate Britishness, or the Jubilee, or in arguments about the monarchy or multiculturalism. He remembers how politically versatile it was. It allowed racists to deny that Britain was racist (
of course we aren’t: didn’t you see that lovely picture in the paper?
) yet provided a neat reference to Empire, and a gentle hint that assimilation might prove a better model than multiculturalism. Here he was after all, an Asian boy happy in his white-majority Buckinghamshire village, accepted by its good-hearted people, and posing only a minimal threat to house prices.

It was used, too, by those who constructed a different story for the picture. For them, ‘Happy and Glorious’ helped to redefine what ‘English’ might mean, to posit a new normality in which your mate might be Asian, a Britain in which black immigrants were British too, and as patriotic as their white countrymen. But even these ideological tussles didn’t earn the picture its status as a National Treasure. That came later.

There’s a noise at the door, a token knock. When Satish looks up he sees Niamh, the team secretary, already halfway across the office.

‘I’ve sorted through these for you,’ she says.

‘Not now.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She stops.

‘You should knock and wait.’

‘Oh. OK.’

‘Knock and wait next time, please.’

‘I’ll remember.’

She retreats, stepping back before turning away from him. Satish stares for a few moments at the desk, at an arbitrary patch comprising the corner of his keyboard and the lid of a pen. It’s time to look at the photograph. He’s going to make himself do it. He’ll pretend he isn’t Satish at all. He’s someone else, someone detached from this entirely. This isn’t history – national, personal, familial – it’s
art
. He’s going to make an
aesthetic
judgement. Think about the composition. It’s part of the reason for the photograph’s endurance, the pleasing balance of the thing …

The photograph is taken from the head of a very long table, but with a shallow depth of field, so that only those seated nearest to the camera are in focus. Behind them, the table narrows as it stretches away, a blurred runway of paper cups and plates and cakes and crisps and Coke.

Only six people can be seen with clarity. When Satish looks at them again he feels a rise of nausea. He finds he’s pushing his chair back, just in case he needs to leave. There’s Colette and her dad, Peter Brecon. There’s Mandy and Sarah. More to the point, here is Cai, and here he is himself, plump of cheek, his limbs already showing signs of the disproportion that will take hold of them in puberty. As the acid gathers in his stomach Satish tells himself that this is just an icon and its subjects are ciphers; they are significant only as tokens of something else. It doesn’t even look like the real world, he reminds himself, but is black and white, as all newspaper photographs were back then; he remembers newsprint coming off on his hands. And it’s thirty years old now. Look at us, he thinks. We look dated. We look funny. Don’t take this so seriously. Look at the clothes, the hair. It was long, long ago. Look at those people.

He starts with Peter Brecon. He’s nearest to the camera on the right-hand side of the table, head turned slightly away so that his face, framed by the dark curve of his comedy sideburns, is in profile. Both his arms encircle Colette. She’s grinning, kiddish, maybe six years old, and she perches on her dad’s lap, facing the camera squarely. Where was Mrs Brecon that day? She didn’t sit with the rest of the family, Satish remembers that (he remembers, too, hiding in her house, hearing her cry in her bedroom). He peers along the table and spots her – an arm, a shoulder, no more. Here, at the front of the shot, Colette is sitting stiffly upright for her moment in the spotlight. In her right hand she clutches a plastic Union Jack, a cameo of the Queen at its centre. With her left, she is pulling at the bottom of the flag, its plastic is straining at the wooden strut.

Next to them, a bit further down the table, is Sarah. She too is in profile, staring across the table at Mandy, unsmiling. Sarah’s shoulders are bare, and she’s wearing the kind of skimpy top usually seen on women whose curves would inhabit it properly. On her rangy, eleven-year-old frame it hangs loosely, its descent down her chest interrupted by the merest suggestion of breasts. Mandy, dark-eyed, shiny-lipped, meets her gaze. Neither acknowledges the camera.

Between them, and all along the table, Union Jack plates and cups are set out at neat intervals on Union Jack tablecloths. Here and there, dishes of food have been placed; he can see a pyramid of fairy cakes and remembers their meticulous red, white and blue icing. There’s a platter of small spirals – his mum’s chakli – and, further up, an amorphous pile he knows is the coronation chicken. There, at the point where sharpness is lost and the blurring begins, arms are reaching across to distribute food. Forks are already moving towards mouths, cups are being lifted.

Outside that charmed circle at the front of the picture, expressions can only be made out with difficulty. Satish sees a woman turning, smiling radiantly towards the camera: Colette’s teacher friend, Miss Walsh. Mrs Miller, Sarah’s mum, is next to her. Those two blobs are Stephen and Paul Chandler, Satish knows for sure. He cannot find his own parents and sister, but he remembers exactly where they were: halfway along the trestle table near the Tomineys, Sima staring longingly down at his end, itching to move.

The sounds outside Satish’s office have changed again. There are steps, and a gentle knocking, and then silence: Niamh again.

‘Come in.’

She eyes him warily. ‘I’m off now. I really do need to get these to you today.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry about earlier. I had to concentrate. On some …’

‘Of course.’ She’s holding the sheaf of papers to her chest and coming over to the desk. Satish sees it in split-screen: Niamh getting closer, the photograph waiting on his monitor. He stands and leans over the desk towards her, reaching out for the papers. She stops far enough away and hands them over.

‘Thanks,’ he tells her. ‘See you next week.’ She leaves.

I’ll get this over with, he thinks. I’ll just look at Cai and me, then I can go. His eye locates the photograph again, moves down past Mandy, towards the front of the table once more. There’s Cai, and then there’s Satish. He’s right at the front of the picture, the key compositional element.

Cai sits sideways on his chair, his back to Mandy, his face towards the camera, one arm around Satish’s shoulder, the other hand resting a quarter inch from Satish’s cheek in a kind of Morecambe and Wise happy-slap. Satish’s Union Jack hat is about to fall off. It obscures his expression, so that all anybody sees is a comical half-grimace. Out of sight and across the road in Cai’s back garden, the barbecue glows hot, the hamburgers are charring.

He wonders what it felt like for Andrew Ford, the invisible framer of this scene, resplendent in denim and cowboy boots. Satish remembers the photographer squatting down, feet planted wide apart on the tarmac, holding the camera at roughly the height of his subjects’ faces. He’d grasped the long lens underneath, adjusting it deftly in a motion so suffused with adulthood and competence that Satish was winded by envy. In the end the photograph was the product of chance, Ford reeling off a string of clicks, and Satish doesn’t know which moment this was: the first, the second, the ninth? Ford didn’t ask them to look his way; that was why there was this rag-tag feel, this diffuse attention.

Chance served Andrew Ford well. After those first, hyperbolic weeks, people stopped caring so much about the Jubilee. The news went back to normal. Elvis Presley died, Satish started at his new school. The photograph found other places to be – in lofts, in scrapbooks, in bins; Satish didn’t care. He wasn’t visiting his neighbours’ houses much any more, but when he did, he’d sometimes catch sight of it. As the months went by, even that lost its impact. Skewered with a drawing pin or propped on a mantelpiece, it curled until all he could see were the things behind the photograph – other pictures, stuff he didn’t care about, writing that had nothing to do with him.

Then, one day – it was the next summer, a whole year had gone by – a boy in his class brought in a copy of the
NME
. On the front cover: Riot Act, a new band. They slouched against a wall, avoiding the camera’s gaze, all tight trousers and discontent. Inside was an interview, and a picture of their LP. Satish just looked at it. Then someone said: ‘Shit. It’s Patel.’

For a minute he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Their record cover was a version of ‘Happy and Glorious’. They’d made the picture look different, but it was the Jubilee photograph all the same. He was in it. The band was in it, too; ragged cut-outs of them squeezed in between the real people. One lolled, smoking a cigarette. Another had his head on the table. Satish could see other changes, too: instead of the Coke, there was a bottle of whisky; Sarah wore a ring of black round each eye; Colette’s flag was burning and they’d put smudges of colour all over the photograph – red on Peter’s lips, red and blue on Satish’s hat. The album was called
The Only Language They Understand
.

Satish took the magazine and walked straight out of his prefab classroom, out to the end of the field where there was a gap in the hedge, and on to the pavement. He found a bin a few yards on and stuffed the copy of
NME
in there, down under other rubbish even though it made his hand dirty, down where it couldn’t be seen.

Lucky Andrew Ford. With the hindsight that Satish now possesses, he can see Ford’s success as inevitable; a smooth upward curve. After the album cover came profitable outrage: just what did that graffitied photograph, that ambiguous album title, imply? And to use
children
… Riot Act became huge, and a thousand disenchanted schoolboys leaned against walls, hoping they looked like their heroes. The
Bucks Gazette
was suddenly a tight fit for Andrew Ford, who was taken up by post-punk London. As ‘Happy and Glorious’ spun away from him (the endless pastiches, the cultural referencing), he became the chronicler of a new England, its underground and – not long after – of Thatcher’s Britain.

By March 2007, as Satish sits at his desk, ambushed again, Ford can credit to that picture his international reputation, both his wives, and all of his homes He’s planning a major retrospective, Colette says. He wants to take a ‘Thirty Years On’ reunion photograph in Cherry Gardens, a re-staging of the famous image. The
Sunday Times Magazine
wants to do a feature on the project. He’ll need them, those important six people, but most of all he’ll need Satish. How about it?

Satish is jabbed by a fierce spike of anger. He can’t believe what she’s asking him to do. He can’t understand how Colette fits in, why she’s mixed up in this at all. He resents having to make any decision, any pronouncement about it. He wishes Ford had never taken up the idea, but Ford knows no more about what happened that day than any other outsider – why should he? Ford looks at his masterpiece and sees, besides the money, the leapfrogging career, only smiling faces, party clothes, the bloody Union Jacks. How could he see anything else? Colette is a different matter. What was she thinking? Maybe it’s this: that what’s past is so long past it doesn’t matter any more. Satish considers the years it has taken to knit these memories into a manageable form and thinks it would be wise for her to fear, for all of them to fear, just as he does, the pulling of the thread that might set them unravelling.