clearing the bags out, grabbing a sly smoke and then waiting for the next load to put in, at the beginning forever cracking his head or his back. At school he was a dreamer and had failed to apply himself. He left school at sixteen and started an apprenticeship as a joiner. He left at nineteen with a belief that he was being exploited and was taken on as ‘hold fodder’ at the airport.
The day he became the Smeatonator started as a day like any other. It was a Saturday, Gordon Brown’s first in office. On 30 June Gordon Brown had been prime ministerfor seventy-two hours. In the early hours of Friday a green Mercedes primed with petrol and nails and cans of propane gas had been parked outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in central London. A second car, similarly primed, had been discovered in a side-street, just around the corner. On the Saturday, just after three, the flaming Jeep Cherokee had been aimed at the main terminal building at Glasgow airport.
Smeato had done something unusual for him: he had screwed up. Saturday is always a busy day, but this one was even busier. It was the first day of the school holiday in Scotland. The arrivals hall was mobbed, his gang were working flat-out and, because he was working so hard (all those golfers, all those sets of clubs, forty or fifty sets to deal with on some flights) he managed to misread one of the screens showing departure times. Either the flight is going to have to be delayed or the golfers’ plane is going to have to leave without their clubs. He feels such a jessie. It’s a no-brainer job but he takes pride in doing it. He feels so peed out. So he has a cigarette. He goes outside and has a wee ciggie. When that’s finished he flames up another one. And that’s when, after two or three draws, this fucking fuckbag of a terrorist cunt – something Allah, something Allah – these bastards, doctors mind, turn their car into the terminal building which is packed with families off for their summer holiday.
There is a sort of screeching, a lot of commotion, a big bang. He looks around to his left and sees a four-by-four that’s on fire. As he runs to help, he sees one of the men inthe car get out and hit a policeman – he’s been a lot of years at the airport, these policemen are his friends, and besides which you can’t stand back anyways and see the law fall: the law falls, we all fall – he sees a man of Arab appearance egress the vehicle and start whackin this polis in the face. And so what are you going to do, he’s going to get the boot in – he wears the steel toe-caps to work – and some other guy banjoes him, banjaxes the cunt nae bother. Then he sees another man, on fire on the other side of the Jeep, bits of his flesh peeling away, blackened flesh, the smell of burning, the intensity of the heat, a taxi driver hosing him down. A man turning to charcoal. A human ember. But still throwing punches, his skin on fire and still fighting, very, very determined. You’re nae hitting the polis mate, there’s nae chance … Boof! Take that home to Allah. You have a duty to care. That’s what you’re told in the airport.
Of course it fucking all went fucking off then, the T-shirts and the websites, the world and its granny wanting him to give them high-fives, the folks going through Paypal to stand him thousands of pints at the airport Holiday Inn which he passed on to the lads at Erskine hospital back from Iraq with fucked-up heads and broken bodies and shattered families, the real heroes.
For a while right after 9/11, New York City firemen attained authentic hero status: the generic ‘FDNY’ secured a position analogous to the one individual heroes used to occupy. But then there was the marketing of ‘Calendar of Heroes’ showing real firemen decked out intheir gear but stripped to the waist and invitingly posed for their admirers. Real heroes today, wrote Thomas de Zengotita, must become stars if they are to exist in public culture at all. That is,
The day he became the Smeatonator started as a day like any other. It was a Saturday, Gordon Brown’s first in office. On 30 June Gordon Brown had been prime ministerfor seventy-two hours. In the early hours of Friday a green Mercedes primed with petrol and nails and cans of propane gas had been parked outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in central London. A second car, similarly primed, had been discovered in a side-street, just around the corner. On the Saturday, just after three, the flaming Jeep Cherokee had been aimed at the main terminal building at Glasgow airport.
Smeato had done something unusual for him: he had screwed up. Saturday is always a busy day, but this one was even busier. It was the first day of the school holiday in Scotland. The arrivals hall was mobbed, his gang were working flat-out and, because he was working so hard (all those golfers, all those sets of clubs, forty or fifty sets to deal with on some flights) he managed to misread one of the screens showing departure times. Either the flight is going to have to be delayed or the golfers’ plane is going to have to leave without their clubs. He feels such a jessie. It’s a no-brainer job but he takes pride in doing it. He feels so peed out. So he has a cigarette. He goes outside and has a wee ciggie. When that’s finished he flames up another one. And that’s when, after two or three draws, this fucking fuckbag of a terrorist cunt – something Allah, something Allah – these bastards, doctors mind, turn their car into the terminal building which is packed with families off for their summer holiday.
There is a sort of screeching, a lot of commotion, a big bang. He looks around to his left and sees a four-by-four that’s on fire. As he runs to help, he sees one of the men inthe car get out and hit a policeman – he’s been a lot of years at the airport, these policemen are his friends, and besides which you can’t stand back anyways and see the law fall: the law falls, we all fall – he sees a man of Arab appearance egress the vehicle and start whackin this polis in the face. And so what are you going to do, he’s going to get the boot in – he wears the steel toe-caps to work – and some other guy banjoes him, banjaxes the cunt nae bother. Then he sees another man, on fire on the other side of the Jeep, bits of his flesh peeling away, blackened flesh, the smell of burning, the intensity of the heat, a taxi driver hosing him down. A man turning to charcoal. A human ember. But still throwing punches, his skin on fire and still fighting, very, very determined. You’re nae hitting the polis mate, there’s nae chance … Boof! Take that home to Allah. You have a duty to care. That’s what you’re told in the airport.
Of course it fucking all went fucking off then, the T-shirts and the websites, the world and its granny wanting him to give them high-fives, the folks going through Paypal to stand him thousands of pints at the airport Holiday Inn which he passed on to the lads at Erskine hospital back from Iraq with fucked-up heads and broken bodies and shattered families, the real heroes.
For a while right after 9/11, New York City firemen attained authentic hero status: the generic ‘FDNY’ secured a position analogous to the one individual heroes used to occupy. But then there was the marketing of ‘Calendar of Heroes’ showing real firemen decked out intheir gear but stripped to the waist and invitingly posed for their admirers. Real heroes today, wrote Thomas de Zengotita, must become stars if they are to exist in public culture at all. That is,
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