*
[Countdown clock]
[Title music – jaunty and insistent, like the soundtrack to a fair pulling into town. Scenes of Birmingham play out in the background, but they all look grotty to my cynical eyes – motorways, underpasses, tower blocks, concrete boxes. And between these shots are stabs from previous editions of Welcome To The Masshouse depicting bizarre moving tableaux – lots of people dressed in chicken costumes, custard pies being thrown, fat men appearing to be telling jokes – though you can’t tell what they’re saying as they’re mute, thank God.]
Title card – WELCOME TO THE MASSHOUSE
Voiceover: ‘Welcome to the Masshouse! This week we ask Brummies whether [inaudible due to dodgy tape recording] really want to see another [inaudible, screen goes fuzzy and the picture sort of drips downwards, resolving into squiggles, then suddenly returns to normal] built? And, can foreign visitors to Birmingham do a little bit of Brummie on camera for us? We’ll see, bab!’
*
Welcome To The Masshouse aired late on Friday nights in the so-called ‘post-pub’ slot, but only on Mids TV, never networked. I guess viewers in other regions wouldn’t have got the punny title. But I’ve no doubt they’d have immediately understood the base humour of the show itself. Even a child could understand that. I skipped through the video using the fast forward button until I came to a part I wanted to watch.
*
[Cut to a human-sized chicken asking foreign visitors – fuck knows how we found any of those back then – if they could a) understand a Brummie accent and b) replicate one. Concrete in the background – definitely Birmingham Central Library. Which idiot is wearing the chicken costume this time? Oh… it’s me. Camera pans round to reveal a woman with honey-coloured hair sitting on a bench, looking right down the lens with the most intense stare. She’s puffing away, obviously. Pan left. An equally beautiful young woman with chestnut hair and twinkling blue eyes, smoking with equal fervour; she’s also staring at something. She has a book on her lap but I can’t make out the title. Something about… the future?]
[The chicken asks the brunette – the one who we just glimpsed – if she can do a Brummie accent. She makes a good fist of saying ‘Y’oright bab!’ before collapsing into giggles. She has a thick German accent. The chicken asks her why she’s in Birmingham, and she says she’s an architecture student; she’s also working as a barmaid at a pub in ‘Moseley Willage.’]
*
I paused the video and sat there for a while, transfixed by pixels on the flickering screen. The girl’s smile was freeze-framed, as if the world had ended and all that remained was happiness and youth. A train came past just before 10 a.m.
All the time that Belinda was considering the sublimity, or not, of spaces and the man-made monuments of the next thousand years (or as it happened, rather fewer years), I was writing gags about fucking chickens crossing fucking roundabouts. Or about men in planning offices deciding where to put roundabouts – which was my highbrow period. Or else I was dressed in costume, harassing people in the middle of a roundabout in Birmingham city centre for a light entertainment programme on regional TV.
I spent the rest of the day lying on the couch, bumpy cushions underneath me, hard armrest against my head. Sometimes I thought about various odd concepts that had intrigued me for years, and sometimes my mind was as empty as my fridge. I rolled from side to side on occasions. The clatter of trains passing every few hours broke the day into sections. The noise they produced – the rumble and the growl of a diesel engine having power applied; sometimes a whistle too – gave me a fleeting feeling of well-being that few other things could provide right now. This behaviour was becoming habitual. Every day. Just lying, or sitting, just watching life pass me by. Frozen. Unable to relate, unable to understand, unable to function. I knew the world was continuing around me, but it seemed to be on pause here in the house. I seemed to be on pause. Even the few things I actually did seemed laboured – a trip to the kitchen or the bathroom. Both felt like they took an hour. I couldn’t get excited about anything. I didn’t want to see anyone – well, there was one person I wanted to see, but that was out of the question now. The emptiness is a blue whale that swallows you whole. When you’re inside the creature’s belly every sensation is muffled; taste and smell and sight and sound are dulled. It’s impossible to get yourself back until the creature shits you out.
Night fell. I summoned up some courage to walk to the supermarket in the centre of Moseley. As usual, the lights were turned up to full. Bastards. Was I in heaven? No. The end was the end. With a head full of metaphysical conundrums I negotiated the crisps and dips. Though actually, what was Moseley if not a kind of earthly heaven? I used to love living here with Belinda, us sharing a house and a life in this cute Victorian village (which was actually just a ‘suburb’ with delusions of grandeur. It wasn’t surrounded by fields as villages must always be). Belinda, of course, thought Moseley’s architecture was too twee and too timid. But she bit her lip and indulged me. She liked the bohemian feel here at least, and the Middle Eastern deli where she could get Turkish spices that reminded her of the food she once enjoyed in Berlin’s immigrant cafes. I think she’d secretly developed a crush on Moseley when she was a barmaid at the Bride of Bescot in her student days. The Bride was, coincidentally, also my local.
A four-pack of lagers and some triangular Mexican-style crisps went sailing into a blue plastic basket. For about five minutes I dallied over whether to buy a jar of salsa too. Realising how trivial the internal discussion in my head was, I decided to beat myself once and for all. I extended my right arm and scooped every jar of salsa from the shoulder-height shelf into my basket. A woman standing near me, examining the ingredients of some breakfast cereal, turned and looked aghast. My right arm stretched painfully under the weight of a basket which now contained twenty-five jars of salsa – the shop’s entire stock. The basket’s handle bent.
Ayesha, the friendly checkout girl, looked me up and down briefly. ‘That’s a lot of salsa, Donald. Are you having a party?’ A sly wink. A licked lip.
‘I am, Ayesha,’ I lied. ‘Can you get me a bottle of single malt from up there too?’
‘Of course,’ she said, reaching, winking. ‘If I’m invited…’
I paid up and walked home with the heavy load and a heavy heart. Once I was back and safely ensconced on the sofa, I started eating the spicy tomato salsa with a tablespoon, but two jars was enough. I felt sick. I drank three of the cans of lager, said, ‘Prost!’ with guttural gusto, and wiped some tears away with my sleeve.
*
How can you describe what’s not there? I guess it’s my job as a writer to find a way, but it just doesn’t seem possible right now. How can words do justice to emptiness, nothingness? Photos contain fragments of truths, pieces of memories. They show lives paused. They’re more real than words because you can’t edit them or misremember them. Videos are even better because the memories move; they’re alive. Ultimately, everything that tries to capture a mood or a moment is an imperfect snapshot of a place, a time, an emotion. But if that’s all we have…
Belinda will always live on inside these photos. I held one, staring at it, staring into Belinda’s eyes, into her soul. And at her body, I must admit. Belinda is lying on her back on a Sardinian beach, her face turned towards the camera, her mouth open, her lips slicked and rouged. She’s smiling. The frame crops out everything below her stomach. The sun is in her eyes and they’re barely open. She’s holding up a hand to shield them, her nails red, a ring on the third finger of her left hand – my ring. Her white bikini top strains. Greenery licks the back of the beach.
I put the photo down, went downstairs, swallowed a couple of painkillers and some whisky, and stuffed a handful of triangular Mexican-style crisps into my mouth, crunching down, my mouth filling with the disgusting tang of sweaty pseudo-cheese. I exhaled deeply and lay down on my back on the living room floor, blinking, thinking. I put my right arm up against my forehead. The
small terraced house had felt like my castle keep. I wrote here when the studios became too boisterous. This was the place I could always retreat to; these were the walls that always seemed to deliver the jokes the script needed – however shit those jokes turned out to be in the final edit. Four walls. Two bedrooms. One living room. My office upstairs. A little garden and a railway line down beyond it. The front door was yellow, and the tiles on the hallway floor were exquisite Edwardian monochrome. And when Belinda moved in with me, the sun always shone through the windows set into the door, shone through coloured panes and projected a warm glow, shone into the hall, shone into the house, shone into my heart. And I found myself caring a little less about regional TV programmes and average-at-best jokes, and a little more about architecture and love, which were her two preoccupations. And to those preoccupations a third was eventually added: me. Feeling so treasured by someone was an addictive sensation, a rare sensation. And now I was having to go cold turkey in the most brutal way possible.
*
Ten Brutalist Buildings
By Belinda Schneider
Chapter Three
St Agnes Kirche, Berlin
The happiest day of my life took place here in Berlin. My husband and I got married at St Agnes Kirche in Kreuzberg. Go and see this place for yourself. Touch its walls. Think about it.
I heard about it when I was a teenager. We smoked cigarettes in a park where there were bushes you could hide in. It was our space, one of the few private spaces we had in a society that watched everything you did. A boy told me about seeing this blank-faced church in Kreuzberg, near to his family’s house. I can’t remember exactly who it was, but he knew one of my friends. I was intrigued – by his discovery, and by him. His family lived in the west, and so when he crossed over to our side he must have been shocked by us, by everything. He didn’t snarl like most boys I knew, I remember that. All the boys on our side were being prepped to join the army and kill ‘fascists’. In West Berlin you didn’t even have to do National Service; you could drop out and play in a band or do anything you wanted. He spoke softly and slowly. When he started talking about this strange thing, this weird building, it pushed a button somewhere inside me. I wanted to surround myself with art and explore the worlds that I couldn’t explore. Me and my friends told each other stories; we asked each other about our fantasies. When our contemporaries from the west came – like this boy – it made the possibility of an escape one day seem possible. Sitting in those bushes, it was all so profound, being caught between childhood and adulthood. We talked about boys, of course. There weren’t many I liked around Lichtenberg, just the ones who had some idea of a bigger world and a cultural life. Usually their parents were creatives. I didn’t like the boys whose dads were one of Die Grünen – the Volkspolizei – I was scared to speak when they were around, lest things be reported.
There was so little real art in East Berlin, aside from the state galleries we’d be shepherded round, and the pointless cultural centres. Real creativity was stifled. We had to retreat into our minds. I wandered round by myself and felt spaces, explored spaces, believed in spaces. Whether it was a caged bridge over a road or that little shrubbery in the park where we smoked cigarettes and giggled about boys. My inner monologue tried to make those spaces bigger than they were so I had some room to move.
But we were Berliners – we were outcasts and we were dreamers, we were wanderers and we were wonderers. My mother told me about how Berlin had always been a refuge for free-thinkers, for subversives, for those who wanted to live outside the normal mores. She told me about the Jews who hid in the forest through the entire Second World War; she told me about our friends who tunnelled to the west to escape the stifling atmosphere and the fear, about the gays and the punks and the people who wanted to find their liberation in Berlin, about how Berlin began as an industrial city, about how people were offered their freedom here, about how a quest for enlightenment had defined the city throughout its whole history.
I wanted to grow, we all did. We talked about what we might do when we got older and what we might see, but we knew there’d be trouble if we talked too much about that kind of thing: Das war die DDR. But no one could stop you talking about boys, blushing about boys. One day we played a game of listing all the things we thought our first boyfriend would have. I chose kindness, a handsome face, blonde hair, creativity – a boy who wanted to be an artist or perhaps a writer. My friends were perplexed by this.
‘Why would you want a boyfriend who writes? He’d be sitting on his own all the time, he wouldn’t have time to take you out. How about one who makes things with his hands and works 8–4?’
It was a silly game because it wasn’t even something any of us wanted then. We were just playing around with the notion of having a boyfriend – to look older than we were, to fantasise together about what it would be like when we were finally in control of our own lives.
‘Yes,’ I said, smoking, waving my cigarette and fluttering my eyelashes. ‘A blonde boy who writes. I’d marry him at St Agnes Kirche. The wall will have come down by then.’
Gasps. ‘You can’t say that! It’s an anti-fascist, counter-revolutionary protection barrier to guarantee our safety!’
‘Bricks should be our salvation, not our imprisonment.’ It made me laugh. It also made me scared. I smoked more. ‘Definitely blonde.’
The first time I crossed into West Berlin – just after the wall fell – I didn’t know where the hell I was. It was new territory. My mother told me to head past that hulking building that held the offices for the right-leaning newspapers of West Germany and eventually I’d find what I was looking for. And I did find it. I found the church – which, sadly, had rubbish bags strewn around it. St Agnes Kirche. It was plain, so plain that you could project your own thoughts onto the campanile just like a cinema projector shows a film against a white wall in a classroom. I ran my hands all over the porridgey exterior of the building and then I ran inside. The priest saw me and raised his eyebrows. He said he didn’t know me, and I said, ‘Of course, I’m an Ossie!’ He said, ‘Bless you, my child,’ and fetched me a barley water and asked me how it felt to be here and did they let us pray and were the Stasi real and did they and really and how did we and why and… I looked at the ground as I confessed that I didn’t believe in God but in people, though if one building could convince me to change my mind then this would be it. He laughed and said it wasn’t a problem, I was welcome any time. The priest asked what I was going to do next, and I said I wanted to try a banana but I didn’t have any Deutsche Marks. He went back to the rectory and brought out a banana. I said, ‘Danke!’ Peeling it seemed so odd, the custard-coloured flesh seemed so soft.
I felt drunk. It wasn’t the barley water the priest gave me – I was drunk on hope, excitement. That day thousands of East Berliners just ran round West Berlin. I jogged to Potsdamer Platz and then across the Tiergarten. I actually jogged. Walking was not fast enough. I had sneakers on so it was OK, and that first banana – which tasted weird, but nice all the same – gave me more energy. But the day was warm. How did I find my way? On the maps we were given, Berlin didn’t exist on the wrong side of the wall; it was just a blank, just cream space, just nothing. In reality the blank space more accurately reflected the real state of our side. I got to Interbau and I didn’t know where to start. I’d read about it in my parents’ books. I ran one way then the other, looking at the blocks of flats that the great architects had built for pure propaganda purposes to show that West Was Best. But they’d lied to us in the east and told us in the newspapers and on the state TV that Interbau was decadent and not Marxist; millionaires had moved in and spoiled the for-the-people rationale. Not true. But to me it was more socialist than the plattenbau blocks in Lichtenberg that we lived in. They were rows of emptiness. Prefabs. They would fall like a house of cards if you blew on them. At Interbau the blocks were strong and manly, like a built version of my blonde boy, the one I’d kiss one day. These blocks were handsome,
and the gardens blended in so nicely with the strong architecture. The flats were homes for normal people, not millionaires – they were socialist. But they were beautiful. If only people could sieve out the plattenbau rubbish when they think of modern architecture and see the beauty of the bespoke buildings put up with such love. They might change their minds. I was so tired after running round the Interbau, so tired after St Agnes, so tired after weeks of hope and years of fear, so tired of chasing and hoping, so tired of everything, that I laid my head down in the Tiergarten. And I fell asleep. And I dreamed of England, because as much as I was free in my homeland, it was too small and too Teutonic for me. I needed to see something different. I would be going to England to study. To an England that even Englishmen don’t go to – to the middle of England, to the best of England, to Birmingham. Not London. And perhaps because it rather reminded me of my home town, I felt happy there from almost the moment I arrived.
*
You probably don’t know what’s it like to lie prone in bed or on the sofa, morning after morning, afternoon after afternoon, doing nothing, just feeling the duvet or the cushions smudge against you – the only touch you’re likely to get. Nothing. No movement, no contact, no progression. Or maybe you do?
Jowls squeezed against cushion, cheeks crushed against sheets, arms by sides, stomach so flat because I wasn’t putting anything into it aside from booze and nicotine and snacks. Each blink lasted a minute, more time with eyelids shut than open. Breathing rate plummeted, I could hear and feel every long, drawn-out breath. A strange insensitivity – cut fingers and bleeding gums emitted the same dark fluid, but physical pain didn’t turn up to the party.
The Wall in the Head Page 3
