The Wall in the Head

by Christopher Beanland

  Priory Square

  I’m not a Sturm und Drang kind of girl – I believe in rationalism and modernity. But rationalism and emotion are not incompatible. Rationalism and fun can be cosy bedfellows. Things that make sense can also be beautiful and enjoyable. Places that make sense can be settings for beautiful and enjoyable experiences. To wit: dancing fills me with glee. Brutalist buildings aren’t always thought of as gleeful locations, but this one is. Why can’t somewhere that’s thoughtful also be a place you can get enthusiastic about, even a place you can get exuberant about? Brutalist buildings aren’t boring, and if they’re cared for they’re not depressing either. This building is called Priory Square, and it has rhythms – like the music you can hear inside. Levels on levels, sharp corners and stacked boxes. They call it a ‘square’ but it’s more like a tiny town wedged into a hill as Birmingham city centre slopes from high ground to low, with shops on top, and below, this wonderful, huge covered den for drinking in live music. The outside of the music venue is just a cliff of concrete, uncompromising and stark and grey and ready to have any experience or any sound imprinted onto it. It’s a blank sheet where you can draw your own fun. This is a building where fun triumphs. Sound, concrete and emotion conspire. It’s neat.

  Donald and I went to see The Rationalists play at Priory Square. They were astonishing. I think I fell in love with Donald that night. I thought he might become my husband. He did. We’d got drunk at the pub before the gig – me on gin and him on woeful English lager, which I think was to spite me in some way. He always shouted ‘Prost!’ before the first gulp as a satirical gesture. I asked him why his countrymen couldn’t make beer – or, rather, why his countrymen insisted on drinking the worst of their brewed output while phasing out the breweries around Birmingham that could whip up the half-decent stuff. He always just shrugged his shoulders.

  The gig was great. The Rationalists saved their best song, ‘Elizabeth Anderson’, until the encore. Elizabeth Anderson was the name of the girlfriend of the band’s singer, Charlie Sullivan. Ex-girlfriend. They broke up, and forever she’d be remembered by this song. And that song always made me think of that moment and this place. That song made shivers of pure electricity snake up and down my spine when I heard it performed live or listened to it through headphones or on the stereo.

  It was such a lilting, beautiful song, so… strung out. Its power built and built from foundations that weren’t so solid. In fact it was made of nothing; it would have probably floated away – that’s how fragile it seemed when it started. So brittle and beautiful. But then as the song progressed it became more potent and more substantial. Those words and those guitar lines just dragged at your soul as you listened. They pulled you into the world that the band were inhabiting, and it was so exciting and bewildering all at once. Tribal and yet gentle, so poignant it made you think of your own life and the important people in it. The best songs always make you think of people – of a person – like the best buildings do. They provoke you and they evoke things from the past at the same time. They tumble up your insides and change the way you feel. And if you don’t feel anything, then something’s wrong. Perhaps you’re too old, because if you’re young you’ll feel things and they’ll mean something to you because they’re important, all this is important, songs are important, architecture is important, all art is important.

  Donald pressed his hand into the small of my back as the song began, then he curled it round the top of my hip and squeezed me into him, my head coming to a soft rest on his chest, which moved up and down as he sang the words to the song. I sang them too. And as I sang them I looked around the room and marvelled at the right angles and the space above my head. I’d never been to see a band in a venue where the roof was so high above your head. The Rationalists were from Birmingham, and their songs were only about two things: architecture and love. That’s why I adored them, I guess. My two favourite subjects as well. Why did Donald like them though? He was a cynic, but he had some blind spots.

  *

  Anguish growled at me. Pity was wired in from heart to brain; lolling sadness permeated body and mind. I couldn’t concentrate on reading or writing. What I wrote was staccato. Disjointed. Small. Pieces. Of a bigger whole. A whole I could no longer comprehend, perhaps a whole I didn’t ever comprehend, and perhaps there was no whole at all? There definitely wasn’t a whole, I knew that. Just bits and pieces. Most of the time all I could do was watch – stupefied, petrified, paralysed, anaesthetised, deadened – as other events took place on a screen in front of me. When I got home last night and wrote about the evening’s horribly failed suicide bid it was the first thing I’d written since Belinda went away. At least last night I began cataloguing what was happening to me. Still, what I’ve begun to document isn’t what you might call a great story; it’s not exactly a compelling narrative. It is a trove of one man’s sadness. It’s not good enough. My work has never been good enough. I’m a writer for regional TV. I need editing. Edit me. Edit this.

  I could hardly speak: 218 missed calls on my mobile. I couldn’t face the interrogations of others, however gentle and well-meaning they were.

  There was one thing I needed to do. Do right. The pain was too much. I emailed Pete, a telephone engineer I’d been to school with in Moseley a very long time ago. He was kind and quiet, clever and polite. Though there was something behind his mask I could never work out. I bet he’s a spy! Or in the special forces! It would be fine though. He replied immediately, agreeing to the plan. I had to lie and tell him that I needed his help scouting locations for a new TV programme I was writing for.

  10 p.m. I glugged a double shot of whisky and caught a bus into town. I had to cross the city centre on foot to get to the place where we’d arranged to meet. But it didn’t take long – Birmingham’s core is disproportionately small for a city whose suburbs stretch for miles and miles and miles. I walked without thinking. It was unreal. What was I doing? Recently, I’ve found myself doing a lot of things that I’m not really sure about – which is strange, because, before all this stuff started happening, I always knew exactly what I was doing. Which was usually ‘failing’, but at least it was failing in a comprehensive, ordered and predictable manner.

  So this was almost it. I stood at a crossroads. Not a metaphorical one – I knew exactly what was about to happen in the plot. No, I stood at an actual crossroads. I’d been walking up Newhall Street. Great Charles Street sliced across the road from left to right. I knew that, underneath me, a tunnel carried more traffic – I’d driven through it myself. Dignified Victorian buildings wearing three-piece suits of ornate decoration rose on two sides, 1960s and ’70s office towers on the others. Offices for solicitors and property developers in the new buildings and the old ones. I wasn’t sure exactly where Pete would be. I waited for the green man and crossed the road. A young couple – she in a dress, he in jacket and trousers – walked towards me, deep in conversation with each other, not noticing anything or anyone else. The night was crisp, the air had been paused. No weather, no wind. I pushed on for one more block and turned right into Lionel Street. A few paces down the road and I saw Pete leaning on a silver saloon car, smoking. He saw me and stuck his hand out.

  ‘Hello, mate.’

  ‘Hi, Pete. How the hell are you?’

  ‘Yeah, good thanks. The wife probably thinks I’m having an affair, out at this time on a Tuesday. So we’d better be quick.’ He looked me up and down. Perhaps I should have changed out of the green tracksuit I’d been wearing all day. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you look like shit, mate. Everything OK?’

  ‘Oh yeah, course it is. Just like to, you know, keep it casual sometimes.’

  ‘There’s casual and then there’s the bloody charity shop.’

  I laughed to lighten the mood. I felt like I’d swallowed barbed wire. One of the fears that paralysed me was that I’d break down in front of people. At home by myself it was fine, but I hated getting upset in public. These days I felt like
I could go off at any minute. Just one trigger. One little trigger.

  ‘I heard about Belinda…’

  Her name. When I heard her name and we were together it summoned a cocktail of delicious Pavlovian responses: excitement, awe, pleasure, calm, lust, longing, delight. Now it’s the opposite. I felt as if I’d been slashed with a penknife every time I heard the word ‘Belinda’. How many more cuts could I take?

  ‘It’s awful, really awful. If you ever want to get rat-arsed then you just pick up the phone, you hear me? Any time, Don. Actually, I wouldn’t mind a night off the missus and the kids, so the offer’s there.’

  ‘Cheers, Pete, I appreciate that.’ I swallowed hard.

  ‘No problem. So let’s get this sorted then,’ he said, leading me towards the priapic tower. ‘Can’t stay long. You’re sure you want to stop up there all night? It’ll be sodding cold at the top, mate.’

  ‘Yep,’ I lied, ‘that’s what I need to do – to see the sun come up. We need a location for a sketch… in this new show I’m writing, and I need to make sure this is the right one.’

  ‘Oh, so you’ll be writing for the telly again? Brilliant. Always watched the shows you wrote, I did. Always. The one set in the planning department…’

  ‘Big Plans.’

  ‘That’s it. That was pretty funny. You wouldn’t have thought that a planning department could produce many laughs.’

  ‘The TV critics agreed – they didn’t think a planning department produced many laughs.’

  Pete chuckled warmly at this.

  ‘Big Plans was only ever shown on Mids TV. Never networked. Did you know that nothing I’ve ever written has been shown outside the region? Spectacular, isn’t it?’

  ‘Londoners don’t know their arse from their elbow. You’ve got the knack, don’t fret.’

  ‘Thanks, pal.’

  My career as a comedy writer was starting to get back on track, and I was just minutes away from death. The BT Tower loomed above us both. It glowered down at me, provocatively. I bent myself backwards and strained my eyes to catch sight of the top. It looked like a hideously stretched, upended cardboard box which could have been stuffed with a billion sweets to make a rich child’s Christmas present.

  Pete rattled some chunky metal keys in the outer door and we were in. There was another locked door to the staircase; he opened it with ease. He flicked a switch and the staircase was illuminated by bare bulbs chucking light against naked concrete walls. Sometimes it stuck, sometimes not. I stared up through the murk.

  ‘We’re walking!’ he said, beaming masochistically.

  It was a pull. When we finally reached the top I was hopelessly out of breath; Pete was too. The pair of us stood there wheezing – two men in their forties who were utterly past it. Sweat dripped from Pete’s greying hair and fell across a stretched face that was starting to wrinkle. Did I have wrinkles? I couldn’t look in the mirror anymore.

  ‘Ciggie?’ Pete offered.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I said, taking one.

  ‘Built in 1962, this was.’ Pete exhaled. ‘Tallest building in the city.’

  We sat in silence, staring out at the twinkling lights of Birmingham – from this height it appeared as an ocean of warm neon contrasting sharply with the blackness. The amber light bobbled and jostled against itself. In the distance, to the north, a river of lights ran both ways the full length of the horizon. Pete must have clocked me looking puzzled.

  ‘The M6.’

  ‘Ah right. I was wondering.’

  In the still of the windless night the city suddenly looked more relaxed, more sure of itself. We were surrounded at the top of the tower by a more chaotic scene: aerials, vast circular satellite dishes, boxes of equipment, coloured wires. Pete gently said his goodbyes and walked back down the steps. In my ears: his feet stomping against cold hard concrete, all the way to the bottom; echoes; the clanking of metal. I thought I’d give it half an hour first.

  I was mesmerised by what lay before me. But it was nothing without her. I was scared by the depth of love I’d felt for her, the amount I missed her when she was away speaking at events or visiting buildings abroad, the daydreams about her I kept having when she was away. Now my love for her has unfolded, spread out into sticky desperation and boring grief that stretches beyond every horizon. Beyond Sutton Coldfield in one direction and the Lickey Hills in the other. That far. As far as I could see. So far. What was a tightly wound bundle of feelings we shared and nurtured is just a flat, featureless desert of memories and despair. No direction, no thought, no shape. I would give up everything to change things, to change the ending. Everything so futile. Liquid poured into my eyes, then out down my cheeks. The view became wobbly and ill-defined.

  Calm descended after half an hour. I fudged the right arm of my shirt across my face to erase the tears and the snot, and I stood up by the ledge. I looked out across a tarmac-bottomed canyon. On my right a giant ‘M’ smiled out from the crown of the Mids TV Tower, the point I’d jumped from before. This would work out better. It was cleaner this time, more serious, less dramatic. I didn’t hesitate.

  I said, ‘I’ll be with you soon, darling. I love you.’

  And I stepped off the top of the tower.

  But here’s the funny thing: I didn’t feel myself falling. My eyes were screwed tightly shut as I realised that. So at first I couldn’t confirm my sense that I wasn’t falling. I opened them and saw Lionel Street thirty-one floors below. It was moving very gently forwards and backwards. Was I dead already? I turned round and immediately it became obvious that my belt had caught on an aerial and I was dangling over the edge.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I mumbled, scarcely able to believe it. And then, as I looked back to where my belt was caught, I felt a warm jet of liquid land on my left cheek and forehead. Confused, I made to wipe it with my hand. It was white, sticky. I saw an enormous shadowy bird swooping majestically above me, having just squeezed a piping-hot shot of ornithological effluent all over me. A peregrine falcon. I knew there was a pair living on top of the tower. It crowed and flapped away in triumph. A few minutes later it returned with its mate. They perched side by side on a satellite dish right above my head. I could hear their feathers ruffle as they shook their wings and folded them in.

  Using my last reserves of strength, I hauled myself back up onto the balcony on which I’d just been sitting, careful not to let my belt snap. I sighed, crawled into a ball and drifted off.

  At dawn I was woken by a light so blinding and a sunrise so brilliant that I thought I’d been born again. I squinted towards the east as the sun rose above the city. It was a cold morning, icy and full of promise. I don’t know how the cold didn’t wake me up. I felt bemused. Maybe it was time for the suicides to stop.

  Pete arrived at 7 a.m. and let me out into the street. If I’d done it properly he’d just have found a stain on the pavement. And entrails in the canal. I promised I’d go for a drink with him soon. He didn’t suspect a thing. I bought a cinnamon pastry and nibbled it very slowly as I walked back towards the bus stop on Moor Street. I concentrated on each sweet mouthful, but my chewing provoked only a feeling of ambivalence. I caught a bus home, and once inside I went straight up to my office on the first floor. I reached to take my diary off my desk but stumbled a little through tiredness. I knocked very gently into the bookcase, and it wobbled. A single photo fell from the top shelf and floated down to the floor in slow motion.

  I picked the photo up and stared at it. The photo showed Belinda standing among a forest of grey pillars. I stared intently at her auburn hair and her blue eyes, at her cheekbones and her full, pink lips. She wore a short-sleeved top and a knee-length skirt. The palm of her left hand was resting on one of the pillars. She had a handbag slung over her shoulder and carried a bottle of water and a camera in her right hand. The location was the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas – the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. The picture was taken in the afternoon, at about 3 p.m. You can make out bolshy sunlight, make out s
hadows cast by the pillars. The shot is almost perfectly framed, save for a blonde woman wearing sunglasses and standing in the background. I didn’t remember her being there.

  It was quite a day. Seven hours later, as we were finishing dinner at a restaurant in Hackescher Markt, I’d got down on one knee, pulled out a ring and asked Belinda to marry me. She said, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this. I’m in shock. Of course I’ll marry you, Donald. I want to be with you forever.’ We kissed and hugged, and the waitresses – seeing what was going on – began to clap. One waitress brought out schnapps, and even our shy fellow diners – strangers, Germans, tourists from Scandinavia and Britain – joined us in a toast. They yelled, ‘Auf Euch’, and Belinda and I replied, ‘Auf Uns!’ Sometimes, even though you’re aware the earth is still spinning, it feels for a moment as if it’s stopped for you, and you don’t have to feel dizzy anymore. That’s how I felt during that entire day.

  The photo was one of my fondest memories of my and Belinda’s life together. I delicately placed it on my pillow and lay on the bed next to her for an hour. Thoughts spun through my head: reminiscences, conversations, ideas, plans.

  I went downstairs and fished around for a VHS tape in a cardboard box under the stairs. I went over to the VHS player and stuck it in. The machine swallowed the cassette greedily and a fuzzy picture emerged on the TV.

  Welcome To The Masshouse. A light entertainment series – with jokes and comedy sketches that I wrote. The title? A wheeze that only Brummies would get – there is a small pie-slice of Birmingham city centre called Masshouse. The title of the show is a play on ‘Madhouse’ and cocks a snook at the ‘craziness’ of the planners who, in the 1960s, created a city some people felt was a place that could only have been built by the insane, for the insane – a place whose false monumentality would eventually drive all of us insane too. Masshouse was a fool‘s paradise of interlocking platforms, decks, dual carriageways and subways, which provoked a primal scream in people who got lost within the confines of its damp walls and blackened ceilings. I was shocked by it, drawn to it – and unable to figure out quite why. Like so much of my home city, this piece of a place doesn’t exist anymore. The roundabout, the motorway, the slip roads, the subways: all wiped off the map. Now in their place: car parks, waste ground, some tall residential blocks for yuppies.