So what O’Hagan does, in summoning the spectres of his childhood (a Daily Mail reader’s fantasy of hard-working salt o’t’earth types who “refused to see themselves as victims”), is offer an anticipatory self-defence that appeals to precisely the sort of material analysis he is attempting to discredit. [...] Reading the article, one does not get any sense of working class solidarity, or even that O’Hagan particularly grasps the realities of being a tenant of social housing in 2018. His proclamation of his own social positionality instead serves two purposes: firstly, it shores up his argument—which he already believes is, to paraphrase Kennedy, immanently right—by supplying him with working class ‘credentials’ of the sort that would only pass muster in a media culture entirely alienated from the people for whom it claims to speak; and secondly, it enables him to subtly position himself as the master of the narrative, somebody with the right to speak for survivors and victims. Crucially, neither of these manipulations would be possible without a media culture in which these types of assertions pass unremarked on a daily basis—a culture which routinely and reflexively misinterprets social critique as personal critique, and acts accordingly. In creating an obfuscatory master narrative that deflects from the complex, materially- and historically-conditioned realities of Grenfell, O’Hagan does nothing innovative. He merely reproduces the culture that produced him, that produced Rock Feilding-Mellen, that produced a tower block full of people who died because nobody would listen. [...]

The fog lifts. And we see it. The horizon—suddenly gone. An aqua sheen leading to the hard drop. Clean and merciful—just like he wanted. Just like the fairy tales. The one where the book closes and turns to laughter in our laps. I pull the mast to full sail. He throws my name into the air. I watch the syllables crumble into pebbles across the deck.

Right now I want to say something about myself and Colonel Tom. One morning toward the very end of my career in Homicide I came in for the eight to four—late, drunk, with a face made of orange sand, and carrying my liver on my hip like a flight bag. Colonel Tom got me into his office and said, Mike, you can kill yourself if that’s what you want. But don’t expect me to watch you doing it. He took me by the arm and led me to the second tier of the headquarters garage. He drove me straight to Lex General. The admissions doc looked me over and the first thing he said was, You live alone, right? And I said, No. No, I don’t live alone. I live with Deniss…After they dried me out I convalesced at the Rockwells’ residence—this was when they lived way out in Whitefield. For a week I lay in a little bedroom at the back of the ground floor. The distant traffic was music and people who weren’t people—as well as people who were—came and stood at the foot of my bed. Uncle Tom, Miriam, the family physician. And then the others. And Jennifer Rockwell, who was nineteen years old, would come and read to me in the evenings. I lay there trying to listen to her clear young voice, wondering if Jennifer was real or just another of the ghosts who occasionally stopped by, cool, self-sufficient, unreproachful figures, their faces carved and blue.

I never felt judged by her. She had her troubles too, back then. And she was the daughter of a police. She didn’t judge.