Diary
Anne Enright
It is very difficult to kill a child by giving it sedatives, even
if killing it is what you might want to do. I asked a
doctor about this, one who is also a mother. It was a
casual, not a professional conversation, but like every
other parent in the Western world, she had thought the
whole business through. She said that most of the
sedatives used on children are over-the-counter
antihistamines, like the travel sickness pills that
knocked me and my daughter out on an overnight ferry to
France recently. It would also be difficult, she told
me, to give a lethal dose of prescription sleeping
tablets, which these days are usually valium or valium
derivatives, ‘unless the child ate the whole packet’. If
the child did so, the short-term result would not be
death but a coma.
Nor could she think of any way such an overdose would lead to blood
loss, unless the child vomited blood, which she thought
highly unlikely. She said it was possible that doctors
sedated their children more than people in other
professions but that, even when she thought it might be
a good idea (during a transatlantic flight, for
example), she herself had never done so, being afraid
that they would have a ‘paradoxical rage reaction’ –
which is the medical term for waking up half out-of-it
and tearing the plane apart.
I thought I had had one of those myself, in a deeply regretted
incident at breakfast on the same ferry when my little
son would not let me have a bite of his croissant and I
ripped the damn pastry up and threw it on the floor. She
said that no, the medical term for that was a ‘drug
hangover’, or perhaps it was just the fact that an
overnight ferry was not the best place to begin a diet.
We then considered the holidays with children that we
have known.
How much do doctors drink? ‘Lots,’ she said. Why are the McCanns
saying they didn’t sedate the child? ‘Why do you think?’
Besides, it was completely possible that the child had
been sedated and also abducted – which was a sudden
solution to a problem I did not even know I had: namely,
if the girl in the pink pyjamas was being carried off by
a stranger, why did she not scream? Sedation had also
been a solution to the earlier problem of: how could
they leave their children to sleep unprotected, even
from their own dreams?
But sedation was not the final answer, after all.
If someone else is found to have taken Madeleine McCann – as may
well be the case – it will show that the ordinary life
of an ordinary family cannot survive the suspicious
scrutiny of millions.
In one – completely unverified – account of her interrogation, Kate
McCann is said to have responded to the accusation that
the cadaver dog had picked up the ‘scent of death’ on
her clothes by saying that she had been in contact with
six dead patients in the weeks before she came on
holiday. My doctor friend doubted this could be true of
a part-time GP, unless, we joked, she had ‘done a
Shipman’ on them. Then, of course, we had to row back,
strenuously, and say that even if something had happened
between mother and child, or between father and child,
in that apartment, even if the child just fell, then
Kate McCann was still the most unfortunate woman you
could ever lay eyes on.
And we are obliged to lay eyes on her all the time. This makes
harridans of us all.
The move from unease, through rumour, to mass murder took no time
flat. During the white heat of media allegations against
Madeleine’s parents, my husband came up the stairs to
say that they’d all been wife-swapping – that was why
the other diners corroborated the McCanns’ account of
the evening. This, while I was busy measuring the
distance from the McCanns’ holiday apartment down the
road to the church on Google Earth (0.2 miles). I said
they couldn’t have been wife-swapping, because one of
the wives had brought her mother along.
‘Hmmmm,’ he said.
I checked the route to the open roadworks by the church, past a car
park and a walled apartment complex, and I thought how
easy it would be to carry my four-year-old son that
distance. I had done that and more in Tenerife, when he
decided against walking. Of course he was a live and not
a dead weight, but still, he is a big boy. Too big to
fit into the spare-tyre well of a car, as my father
pointed out to me later, when it seemed like the whole
world was figuring out the best way to kill a child.
‘She was only a slip of a thing,’ I said.
I did not say that the body might have been made more pliable by
decomposition. And I had physically to resist the urge
to go out to my own car and open the boot to check (get
in there now, sweetheart, and curl up into a ball).
Then, as if to pass the blame back where it belonged, I
repeated my argument that if there is 88 per cent
accurate DNA from partly decomposed bodily fluids found
under the carpet of the boot of the hired car, then
these people had better fly home quick and get
themselves another PR company.
If.
Who needs a cadaver dog when you have me? In August, the sudden
conviction that the McCanns ‘did it’ swept over our own
family holiday in a peculiar hallelujah. Of course they
had. It made a lot more sense to me than their leaving
the children to sleep alone.
I realise that I am more afraid of murdering my children than I am
of losing them to a random act of abduction. I have an
unhealthy trust of strangers. Maybe I should believe in
myself more, and in the world less, because, despite the
fact that I am one of the most dangerous people my
children know, I keep them close by me. I don’t let them
out of my sight. I shout in the supermarket, from aisle
to aisle. I do this not just because some dark and
nameless event will overtake them before the checkout,
but also because they are not yet competent in the
world. You see? I am the very opposite of the McCanns.
Distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form of
magic. It keeps our children safe. Disliking the McCanns
is an international sport. You might think the comments
on the internet are filled with hatred, but hate pulls
the object close; what I see instead is dislike – an
uneasy, unsettled, relentlessly petty emotion. It is not
that we blame them – if they can be judged, then they
can also be forgiven. No, we just dislike them for
whatever it is that nags at us. We do not forgive them
the stupid stuff, like wearing ribbons, or going jogging
the next day, or holding hands on the way into Mass.
I disliked the McCanns earlier than most people (I’m not proud of
it). I thought I was angry with them for leaving their
children alone. In fact, I was angry at their failure to
accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted
them to grieve, which is to say to go away. In this, I
am as bad as people who complain that ‘she does not
cry.’
On 25 May, in their first television interview, given to Sky News,
Gerry McCann spoke a little about grief, as he talked
about the twins. ‘We’ve got to be strong for them, you
know, they’re here, they do bring you back to earth, and
we cannot, you know, grieve one. We did grieve, of
course we grieved, but ultimately we need to be in
control so that we can influence and help in any way
possible, not just Sean and Amelie, but the
investigation.’
Most of the animosity against the McCanns centres on the figure of
Madeleine’s beautiful mother. I am otherwise inclined. I
find Gerry McCann’s need to ‘influence the
investigation’ more provoking than her flat sadness, or
the very occasional glimpse of a wounded narcissism that
flecks her public appearances. I have never objected to
good-looking women. My personal jury is out on the issue
of narcissism in general; her daughter’s strong
relationship with the camera lens causes us a number of
emotions, but the last of them is always sorrow and
pain.
The McCanns feel guilty. They are in denial. They left their
children alone. They cannot accept that their daughter
might be dead. Guilt and denial are the emotions we
smell off Gerry and Kate McCann, and they madden us.
I, for example, search for interviews with them, late at night, on
YouTube. There is so much rumour; I listen to their
words because they are real, because these words
actually did happen, one after the other. The focus of
my ‘dislike’ is the language that Gerry McCann uses; his
talk of ‘information technology’ and ‘control’, his need
to ‘look forward’.
‘Is there a lesson here, do you feel, to other parents?’
‘I think that’s a very difficult thing to say, because, if you look
at it, and we try to rationalise things in our head and,
ultimately, what is done is done, and we continually
look forward. We have tried to put it into some kind of
perspective for ourselves.’
He lays a halting and agonised emphasis on the phrase ‘what is done
is done,’ and, at three in the morning, all I can hear
is Lady Macbeth saying this line after the murder of
Duncan, to which her husband replies: ‘We have scorched
the snake, not killed it.’ Besides, what does he mean?
Who did the thing that has been done? It seems a very
active and particular word for the more general act of
leaving them, to go across the complex for dinner.
There are problems of active and passive throughout the McCanns’
speech. Perhaps there are cultural factors at play. I
have no problem, for example, with Kate McCann’s
reported cry on the night of 3 May:
‘They’ve taken Madeleine.’ To my Irish ears ‘they’ seems a common
usage, recalling Jackie Kennedy’s ‘I want the world to
see what they’ve done to my Jack’ at Dallas. I am less
happy with the line she gives in the interview when she
says: ‘It was during one of my checks that I discovered
she’d gone.’ My first reaction is to say that she didn’t
just go, my second is to think that, in Ireland, ‘she’d
gone’ might easily describe someone who had slipped into
an easy death. Then I rewind and hear the question,
‘Tell us how you discovered that Madeleine had gone?’
and realise that no one can name this event, no one can
describe the empty space on Madeleine McCann’s bed.
Perhaps there is a Scottish feel to Gerry McCann’s use of ‘done’.
The word is repeated and re-emphasised when he is asked
about how Portuguese police conducted the case,
particularly in the first 24 hours. He says: ‘I think,
em, you know, we are not looking at what has been done,
and I don’t think it helps at this stage to look back at
what could and couldn’t have been done . . . The time
for these lessons to be learned is after the
investigation is finished and not now.’
I am cross with this phrase, ‘after the investigation is finished’.
Did he mean after they’d packed up their charts and
evidence bags and gone home? Surely what they are
involved in is a frantic search for a missing child: how
can it be finished except by finding her, alive or dead?
Why does he not say what he means? Again, presumably
because no one can say it: there can be no corpse,
killed by them or by anyone else.
Still, the use of the word ‘investigation’ begins to grate
(elsewhere, Kate McCann said that one of the reasons
they didn’t want to leave Portugal is that they wanted
‘to stay close to the investigation’). Later in the
interview the word changes to the more banal but more
outward-looking ‘campaign’. ‘Of course the world has
changed in terms of information technology and the speed
of response, you know, in terms of the media coming here
and us being prepared, em, to some extent to use that to
try and influence the campaign, but above all else, it’s
touched everyone. Everyone.’
The sad fact is that this man cannot speak properly about what is
happening to himself and his wife, and about what he
wants. The language he uses is more appropriate to a
corporate executive than to a desperate father. This may
be just the way he is made. This may be all he has of
himself to give the world, just now. But we are all used
to the idea of corporations lying to us, one way or
another – it’s part of our mass paranoia, as indeed are
the couple we see on the screen.
No wonder, I think, they will not speak about that night.
Then I go to bed and wake up the next day, human again, liking the
McCanns.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2702285.ece |
From The Sunday Times
October 21, 2007
Too serene for sympathy
After an astonishing attack on the family by the winner of the
Booker prize and Kate’s suggestion that people don’t
sympathise with her because she doesn’t look maternal
enough, our correpsondent asks why some people find it
so easy to dislike the McCanns
Margarette Driscoll
The novelist Anne Enright must have thought that all her dreams had
come true last Tuesday night when Sir Howard Davies,
chairman of the Booker prize judges, announced that she
had won the prestigious literary award – and the £50,000
that comes with it.
Guests at London’s Guildhall were touched at how thrilled Enright
was, being more used to seasoned nominees who took the
prospect of the prize in their stride. But it wasn’t
long before the gloss was taken off her sudden success.
Attention turned from her “exhilaratingly bleak” novel, The
Gathering, to an equally bleak and somewhat
mean-spirited piece she wrote earlier this month – when
hardly anybody had heard of her – in the London Review
of Books, about her ambivalence towards Kate and Gerry
McCann. In the article, she talked of how disliking the
McCanns had become “an international sport”.
“Distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form
of magic,” she wrote. “You might think the comments on
the internet are filled with hatred, but hate pulls the
object close; what I see instead is dislike – an uneasy,
unsettled, relentlessly petty emotion.”
She went on, saying “we do not forgive them the stupid stuff, like
wearing ribbons, or going jogging the next day, or
holding hands on the way into mass”. She also criticised
Gerry McCann for using language “more appropriate to a
corporate executive than to a desperate father”.
Instantly, Enright found herself on all the front pages for all the
wrong reasons. Newspapers frantically outbid one another
for the rights to reprint her piece – all were flatly
refused. “She’s horrified and doesn’t want to become
known as ‘evil Anne’,” said a friend. But by then it was
already too late. ENRIGHT had given literary and
intellectual weight to the heartless abuse that has
rained down on the McCanns on the internet ever since
their daughter Madeleine disappeared from their
Portuguese holiday apartment on May 3. Her piece would
have struck a chord with all those who had felt a twinge
of guilty agreement as they came across message boards
criticising the couple for their composure, their
supposed arrogance, and particularly Kate for her
careful grooming and “endless supply of summer tops”.
In an interview with the Liver-pool Echo last week, Susan Healy,
Kate McCann’s mother, told how her daughter had been
berated in the street by strangers for being “out and
about” when Madeleine went missing and how Kate felt
persecuted for not looking like the ideal mother.
“If I weighed another two stone, had a bigger bosom and looked more
maternal, people would be more sympathetic,” she had
told her mother, who spoke loudly in her daughter’s
defence.
“She feels she’s being attacked because she isn’t crying every time
she is pictured,” said Healy. “She’s being targeted
because she manages to put on a brave face. People say
she has a stern look but inside she’s a wreck.”
The paradox for Kate McCann is that ever since the death of Diana,
Princess of Wales, we have been branded a crybaby
nation, and told that the stiff upper lip, that key part
of the British character, has been destroyed. But in an
age of “misery memoirs” and reality TV, if you do show
stoicism and coolness in the face of trauma, you are
despised for it.
Kate, 39, has never cried in public, which may be for a number of
admirable reasons: that she was told not to show emotion
by advisers as her daughter’s kidnapper might delight in
her distress; that part of being a doctor entails being
able to face traumatic situations without showing
distress; or because she knows just how much a picture
of her crying would be worth and is bloody-minded enough
not to let anybody get it.
But if she thinks people don’t like her because she does not appear
sufficiently maternal, she’s way off beam. This is the
age of the yummy mummy and in those stakes McCann, who
looks as though she could be Sienna Miller’s older
sister, is queen. It is her coolness of her manner that
repels, not her skinniness, nor her careful choice of
jewellery.
Most people would dismiss as ludicrous some of the rumours that
have surfaced in the Portuguese press in recent weeks.
The McCanns have variously been accused of engaging in
wife-swapping, of sedating their children so they would
sleep while they were out, of having “the scent of
death” found on Kate by cadaver dogs. But still some
spiteful undercurrent relishes seeing their perfect
world punctured.
“I suppose it shows the ugly side of human nature. We are intrigued
by disaster and horror stories,” said the novelist Rose
Tremain.
“There is an element of schadenfreude about it: there seems to come
a point with nearly every type of ‘celebrity’ where
something triggers a turnaround.
“People seem to be presuming that the McCanns’ lack of emotion
points to their guilt. It seems absurd as, at first, the
public admired their bravery in the face of such a
horrifying situation. They may not cry in public, but
you can read the agony on their faces.”
The film-maker Roger Graef, who recently took a group of experts to
Portugal to investigate the case, believes that the
mystery at the heart of the case – how did Madeleine
vanish into thin air? – has exacerbated our reaction to
the McCanns.
“What we all have trouble with is the uncertainty and the reality
that this has been done by somebody we’ll probably never
find,” he said.
“To judge the McCanns when they’ve had to endure months of that
uncertainty is gratuitously cruel. They’re being used as
an emotional dartboard.”
In an effort to prove their innocence, the McCanns have compiled a
huge file rebutting every allegation against them, from
the idea that Gerry McCann is not Madeleine’s natural
father to the DNA evidence that seemed to suggest her
body had been transported in the back of their hire car.
Last week it emerged that they have gone so far as to have their
two-year-old twins, Sean and Amelie, drug-tested to show
that they have never been given sedatives.
And all the while the days tick by: it is now almost six months
since Madeleine disappeared. They must, by now, have
resigned themselves to her being dead.
Yet for all they have suffered – think how appalling being
interrogated by the police must have been – some of us
still can’t sympathise.
The psychologist Linda Papa-dopoulos thinks Kate’s looks may play
some part in this. “Looks play a huge role in our
expectations of people. We can see it in things like
fairy tales, where the ugly outsider meets a nasty end.
Beauty is taken to mean goodness. We tend to believe
attractive people in the witness box more than
unattractive people.
“But on the flip side of this, it is much easier to hate attractive
people. There is a need for people to believe that an
attractive person is not completely perfect.
“A woman I spoke to last week was appalled that Kate McCann was
able to choose which earrings to wear in the morning.
She took it to mean that if she has the strength to put
on earrings she is not distressed enough.”
So is there a right way to grieve? Would people like Kate McCann
more if she collapsed in tears?
“People are very judgmental when you suffer a bereavement. As a
widow myself, I know that people have very strong views
on how you should or shouldn’t express emotion,” said
the broadcaster and writer Esther Rantzen.
“Kate looks anguished to me. They look like people in the midst of
a nightmare.”
Some think it is a class issue. The broadcaster and columnist
Kelvin MacKenzie says that when he wrote in defence of
the McCanns shortly after Madeleine disappeared he got
his biggest mailbag ever “and hundreds of e-mails full
of bile aimed not just at the McCanns but also at me”.
“I was told that I wouldn’t have said anything of the sort had the
McCanns been an unmarried, unemployed black couple and
that the whole furore about Maddy came down to class
bias,” he said.
“Initially I didn’t believe this to be the case, but now I have to
agree. The massive media and public interest stems from
the fact that they are a professional, upwardly mobile,
white family and this sort of thing shouldn’t happen to
people like them.
“Rhys Jones’s parents [whose 11-year-old son was shot dead on
Merseyside in August] displayed a combination of tears
and raw emotion with a basic intellect that came through
in their interviews. This raw emotion has been lacking
with the McCanns.”
And so the doubts linger. “Guilt and denial are the emotions we
smell off Gerry and Kate McCann, and they madden us,”
noted Enright. A friend of the family said Gerry McCann
“snorted in disgust” when the piece was read to him last
week.
Perhaps the McCanns’ central problem is that they don’t seem real
to us. Simon Hamp-ton, a lecturer in psychosocial
studies at the University of East Anglia, said the
McCann tragedy encapsulates modern reactions to the
media and morality.
“There is no sympathy because it is like a movie,” he said. “We are
examining their clothes, their expressions, their body
language much more closely than we would if we knew
them.
“We rarely look at the faces of our families and friends from a
distance of four inches, but that is how close
television brings us to the McCanns’ faces. The
narrative needs a villain and in the absence of any
other, Kate McCann is cast as the murderer. It sort of
has to be a woman because that is a better story.”
For those of us on the outside, it can appear to be just a story.
But for the McCanns the pain is very real and, in all
probability, never ending.
Maybe we should all just stop obsessing about them. A letter in
response to Enright’s piece in the London Review of
Books most neatly summed up our ambivalent relationship
with the couple: “I disliked Anne Enright almost as much
as the McCanns after reading her article, almost as much
as I dislike myself for disliking the McCanns, for
disliking Anne Enright, you for publishing Anne
Enright’s article, and me for reading it (I didn’t have
to do that). Where will it all end?”
Additional reporting: Jessica Jonzen and Lois Rogers
McCanns’ plea over 25 witnesses
THE PARENTS of Madeleine McCann have given Portuguese prosecutors a
list of 25 witnesses they believe should be interviewed
to try to clear their names and refocus police attention
on the search for their daughter, writes John Follain.
The witnesses, some never questioned by police before, include
relatives, friends and staff of the Ocean club in Praia
da Luz, where Madeleine went missing on May 3.
The request will create controversy in Portugal, where it is almost
unheard of for suspects to try to influence an
investigation. There was criticism last week after it
emerged that prime minister Gordon Brown had discussed
the case with his Portuguese counterpart at the European
summit in Lisbon.
The McCanns’ legal team hope that a thorough reconstruction of the
night Madeleine disappeared will help rule out her
parents as suspects.
A source close to the family said: “Kate and Gerry have singled out
these witnesses because they were present . . . they can
explain exactly what happened that night, and because
they can show what a normal, loving relationship the
parents had with their daughter.” |