The
Times January 19, 2006
Murder in black and white - Comment - Times Online
Murder
in black and white
Camilla Cavendish
THE MURDER of Tom ap Rhys Pryce has really got under the skin of London’s professional class. When a 31-year-old Cambridge-educated lawyer is viciously stabbed to death in a Tube station for no apparent reason, it plays to our deepest fears of what happens when parallel worlds collide.
“I
live on the Bakerloo Line too,” I’ve heard many say this week. “He was me
— all of us.” The optimistic young man on his way up, living with his fiancée
on the fringe in Kensal Green — not wealthy Kensington — carrying his
downloaded wedding plans. The archetypal City worker whose death was apparently
treated so lightly that a black man in a white pork-pie hat nonchalantly
produced his Oyster card the following morning, then just ambled away when the
ticket machine rejected it. A shocking, grubby finale to an unspeakable event.
We
cannot shake it. The grainy CCTV shots of Mr ap Rhys Pryce’s last unsuspecting
moments ride on top of an accumulation of other recent images in our minds. The
banker John Monckton and his wife, struggling in vain to close their front door
against a junkie on bail and a murderous thug on early release. The security
chain swinging loose, his shouts of “No, no no!” and all the futile gestures
that intelligence makes when confronted with dumb brutality. Richard Whelan, 28,
stabbed six times on the upper deck of the No 43 bus for standing up and
politely asking a black youth to stop throwing chips at his girlfriend. The
street lights passing on the Holloway Road, the fatal lunge, the dizzy shock of
collapse.
These
images run like a constant commentary in my head. I, born and bred in London and
used to blithely wandering the streets, now see would-be attackers out of the
corner of my eye. I grasp the keys in my pocket in a pathetic, premature gesture
of defence and defiance. Statistically, I know that these horrific events are
still highly unusual. But they are amplified because they feel so close. They
loom large in monochrome: black on white killings, fitfully sketched on CCTV. An
Irish-born businessman told me this weekend that he felt London was turning into
Johannesburg. An overstatement, surely, but heartfelt.
We
abhor randomness. We search for motive where there is none. We seek to engage
rationality, but find only hate. In a city driven by ambition, this violence
does not fit the lexicon. It is senseless, gratuitous, the desire to strike even
when all the cash is handed over. The realisation that this brutality is not
negotiable — that there was nothing the victims could have said or offered to
stay alive — brings on a queasy vertigo. I feel a heightened consciousness of
the fragility of intelligent life, a sudden tenderness towards bicycling
professors, nerdy executives, even the witnesses behind the windows in Mr ap
Rhys Pryce’s street.
What
are we supposed to conclude? That we must stand stock still in the face of
violence, as the Asian man did who was robbed by the same gang 30 minutes before
Mr ap Rhys Pryce was killed? It is possible, although we do not know, that the
lawyer did try to fight back in some way. Some of my neighbours recently hired a
private security firm after a spate of muggings. But is that really the answer
in the long term, to seal off the community? Should we all run from the station
to one’s front door, gripping our keys and holding out our wallets to
strangers?
My
powerful mental pictures are somehow erasing the daily courtesies: the hand-up
with the pram, the black teenager in the hoody who gives me his seat on the Tube
and winks a smiling “so there”. The fact is that “stranger murder” is
still relatively rare in London, and those at most risk are poor and black. The
number of murders has fallen. Since April last year there have been 130,
excluding the July bombings. That compares with 144 over the same period the
year before.
The
great wheel of capitalism turns, raising some up to heights they never dreamt
possible. That is the great achievement of this city. But those on the wheel
rarely see those who languish off it. It is only when they venture out of
Clapton’s murder mile or Loughborough Junction that they come into focus.
Meanwhile, the middle-class advertising and music set, who slope to work in
beanies and trainers to “fit in”, as scared as anyone of attracting hostile
attention, are busy blasting minds with a different, even more powerful set of
images.
Forget
the TV watershed: go to the gym any morning and see how MTV gyrates to a
synthesis of glamour and brutality first perfected by Stanley Kubrick. Watch the
software industry deny yet again the obvious conclusion found by a recent
American study, that violent computer games make people more aggressive. Read
the fawning reviews of gangsta rap by middle-class white boys who have no idea
what it is like to live in the world it describes.
Tomorrow
the film Get Rich or Die Tryin’ opens in Britain. Its hero is the rapper
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, whose album of the same name contains the usual
litany of guns, gangs, bitches and blood. The BBC’s Urban Review says of the
album that Get Rich or Die Tryin’ is “the antithesis to the pop-looped
chart-friendly sound of mainstream hip hop”. How cool, how clever, how naive.
Reviewers
always mention, with a sort of reflected pride, that “50 Cent” has been shot
nine times. Their fascination was not dented one iota by the adverts showing him
carrying a baby in one hand and a gun in the other. The Advertising Standards
Authority ruled that the advert “gave the impression that success could be
achieved through violence”. Universal Music Group defended the imagery,
stating it was meant to “portray 50 Cent’s struggle to escape the hardened
streets of Queens, New York”.
Come
off it. We must keep the danger in perspective, but we must also stop glorifying
a world that is colliding with ours.
camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk