Moving hands and digital displays marked time in an aggressive way, the ticks baying at me. The radio alarm clock on the bedside table seemed particularly malicious, with its red, robotic numerals. Me and that machine were at war. Ten minutes I’d say, fifteen minutes I’d say, then I’d get up. Then I’d be cured – for a little while. Ten more, five more. Sometimes the snooze button, sometimes the infernal beeps yelling at me to GET UP. I’d stare at the wall, at the ceiling, through the window at the sparrows and at next door’s cat, who was also staring at the sparrows with a murderous glint in his eyes. Sometimes I’d smoke outside and contemplate clambering down onto the railway tracks. The gradient was almost vertical, the drop more than a two-storey house.
I wrinkled my nose; I frowned. Here’s where Bel did Pilates. Here’s where Bel wrote. Here’s where we fucked. All in the past. It was a disconsolate soap opera with no resolution. I could write this up. Many Mids TV viewers must be sad or old. The majority of daytime viewers, surely? And if that was true then maybe there was a market for a soap opera where the characters just eke out a pathetic existence, where they succumb to pressure and just lie there doing precisely sod all. That could work. I’d suggest it to Bob next time I saw him. Something really sad, really pathetic. Oh, but it’d have to be sadder than the saddest thing you could think of. I hope you know that feeling. I hope you’ve known it at least once.
My eyes were drawn to our bookshelves. My novels, her books about the world. So many of my books were funny or sad (I thought that writers who could blend both together were really hitting the sweet spot). So many of Bel’s books were about utopia and optimism, about how ideas could work and how people were ready to adapt to new worlds.
Belinda had thought I fostered a climate of cynicism which had led us to lose any belief in doing better by everyone, in thinking we could build nicer cities for all with incredible, ambitious buildings sitting at their heart. Sure, it was my job to take the piss out of people, out of the stupid things we saw every day. I told her satire was very different to blind cynicism. We had playful arguments. I told her that, today, people thought all authority was bullshit – whether it was benign leftist or malign rightist. Once when we were in London on a trip to see one of her beloved concrete monstrosities, I told her that people just wanted to do their own damn thing and that individualism wasn’t necessarily part of the capitalist conspiracy, was it? It’s just the counter-culture. Think of the freedom we have now: we don’t have to live or love in any way we don’t want to. All social barriers have come down. Grand narratives are for the past. We just do whatever we want in whatever city in whatever country we want, and we don’t listen to anyone. We especially don’t listen to anyone who thinks they can dictate our lives or rebuild our cities. And surely, as she came from a totalitarian state, she knew the importance of freedom? My job was to prick pomposity. My job was to take the piss. My job was to be against all authority in all of all authority’s multifarious forms. This is what I said. She’d make her eyes expand as much as she could and call me a ‘fucking anarchist’ with a look of mock horror, then she’d crease up with laughter, take her top off in one motion, sidle over and kiss me.
Ten Brutalist Buildings
By Belinda Schneider
Chapter Four
Eros House
We were in South London. I wanted Donald to kiss me up against Eros House. I wanted to feel his hands around my waist. I thought it would be funny. Actually it felt better than that. It was sensual to experience the concrete cheese-gratering up and down my back, to place my hands on that rough exterior, to feel hot breath on me and smell his sweat, the beer and the cigarettes and the lust when he half opened his mouth and looked down at me.
We went to the top of the Catford Centre car park afterwards and drank cans of cider. He thought it was a ‘concrete monstrosity’. He was joking – mostly. There were all these French paperbacks lying around on the car park decks – books by Baudelaire, Camus, Houellebecq. It was very strange. These things don’t happen by chance. Each end result is the end result of a complex chain of events. So what was going on here? Who had been here? What was the building trying to tell me? What was it trying to tell us all? I loved that place. It was no-nonsense. I got drunk pretty quickly. We started talking about politics and about comedy. About how attitudes in society shape attitudes to things, to art, to architecture, to TV. Donald said to me, ‘People just want to do their own damn thing. Individualism isn’t necessarily part of the capitalist conspiracy, is it?’ I told him he was a fucking anarchist and I seduced him again.
Did you like that bit? I hope so. I’m trying to write something here that’ll make you sit up and think. Call it criticism if you want – maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Don’t assume that all architectural criticism has to be as pointed as ‘This is a good column’ and ‘That is a bad pediment’. Break through the walls of words and the words of walls. Examine and feel. Brutalist buildings are the ones that precisely lend themselves to this state of intimacy, an intimacy between space, people and words. They provoke. They provoke you. They provoke me. Prod them back. They’re beasts, they can take it. Experience what’s being meant by the building, however abstracted the thought might seem or the building might look. And when you’ve done that, for pity’s sake just go and enjoy the damn place. What’s wrong with going to a multi-storey car park and making art or getting drunk or holding a rave, or fucking, or reading French paperbacks? Nothing. It’s your space – get out of the house more and use it. Buildings love to be loved, like people.
*
Another afternoon lying on the sofa. I felt myself drifting off. My heart tapped out the faintest tick-tock like a shy clock. My breathing was laboured like an old man’s. So it’s no wonder that I slipped into yet another make-believe world.
*
This is a dream:
I can see dead people. The people who used to live in buildings. And seeing dead people suddenly seems to bring these dead buildings back to life. I’m in a flat. They’re everywhere. All the people that lived here. It’s like being in some kind of computer game. They fuss around but they don’t bump into each other. They don’t even seem like they can see each other. Next I’m in Priory Square. Dead shoppers are milling around. A guy is walking round the roof. He pauses for a moment, looks down, then throws himself off. I wake up sweating; my stomach aches.
3
1988
‘Thanks for a nice night, Donald.’
‘My pleasure, Julie. Wanna do it again?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Another Chinese?’
‘Or… something else?’
‘Anything.’
‘Yeah, sure. Give me a ring. There’s a phone in the corridor. I’m back most afternoons.’
A peck on the cheek. ‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
Julie was a girl I’d been out with a few times. A psychology student at Aston University. I’d walked her back to the halls she lived in. The hall was actually a tower block, but the drugs consumed and the disturbances made in the tower were very middle-class variants of the type of disruption you read about in the Evening Brummie, the type concerning the crumbling council tower blocks that stood in less comfortable parts of the city.
I started walking back towards Digbeth, happy enough with the date, a little fretful. I saw Masshouse Circus looming up before me. It was characterised by light and dark, purporting – perhaps – to represent good and evil. The structure of the roundabout floated in the sky, eight entry and exit slip roads. The tangle was impossible to fully comprehend at night. As a pedestrian, you’re funnelled down into the bowels of the interchange.
Henns Walk subway.
James Watt subway.
Chapel Street subway.
New Meeting subway.
Ryder subway.
Hospital subway.
All the roads are above you, held up by stacks of brick and concrete, heavy legs. You have to descend in the direction of your own grave an
d you must lump it.
The sonic deluge builds up and up as you penetrate into the junction, like a pressure cooker going full tilt. The echoing and booming and clattering of cars rumbling over tarmac makes your heart march at double time. I felt woozy and strange. Not in control of myself. This had happened down here before; in fact this sensation of being overcome had hit me in other subways too – Old Square, Colmore Circus, Bull Street, Hurst Street, Lancaster Circus, Holloway Circus, Paradise Circus, Hockley Circus, Five Ways. I’d ended up down in this liminal zone for hours. I was too puzzled and ashamed to admit that fact to anyone. I needed to know, for myself, what made the subways make me turn into Mr Hyde. I didn’t know.
I reached a point where it felt natural to stand still and concentrate on the noise in my ears and the greasy tangerine glow from the street lights in my retinas. I remembered how much my mother hated this place, how terrified by it she would become. She said she felt trapped down here. She said she constantly worried that she was going to be attacked. It menaced her. It was a weird set-up, like no other junction in the city, like no other I’d seen. The main road ran at ground level with the roundabout above. A car park was inserted into the spare spaces. A fiendish plan. Hard to fathom. Impossible to escape easily.
A guy was here too – elderly, bearded, troubled, drinking a can of beer and having a smoke.
I said, ‘Can I join you, pal?’ He nodded, a little perplexed look dancing across his features, trying to suss me out. I sat down next to him. We sat there together in silence for what seemed like a long time. I offered him cigarettes, and he offered me a can of strong lager. The whoosh of cars shooting past over our heads every five seconds kept nerves sharpened like knives.
After about half an hour, the tramp shuffled over to me a bit. He looked straight into my eyes. ‘You, sonny, you just… ah, what’s the point?’
‘What is it?’
He looked to his left, but at what? ‘The factory… I used to. It was… we all did. No more. The bloody, the… bloody… shut, they… the…’
And then he folded himself back into himself, pressing his whole body towards the wall that kept all the hot metal and masonry above from crashing down onto us and snapping our necks. The subway rebelled: reeked of piss, was stained and dank, sucked at your soul. The walls were streaked with black shapes, Rorschach tests that would never end well. The space seemed to close in with every passing car. The strong lager made me feel sick. The cigarettes made me jittery. And yet… it was an island of sanctuary. Nobody would bother me here. I had a companion. I had a place. Masshouse was a madhouse. Maybe the madhouse was where I belonged.
What would Julie’s reaction be if she knew I was here, sitting on a step with a tramp, casting my eyes around the subterranean pathways, the red parked hatchbacks, regarding the bricks and the stains running down once-white walls, obsessing over the piles of grit and grime? Would it be enough of an excuse to say that I would one day write a sitcom about the insanity of the Birmingham city planners and this was (sort of) research? Would she agree that I was experiencing life to write about it better – or would she worry that something was wrong, really wrong?
4
2008
You know nothing much is going to happen, right? But that’s honesty, that’s reality. I’m not pretending to be someone I’m not; these words aren’t pretending to be something they’re not. How many times do you catch authentic representations of what grief looks like? Of what alienation looks like? Of what post-industrial cities in the English Midlands look like? The dullness and the sadness and the boredom of all of it? Well I can confirm, now I’ve been punched in the face by grief, that it doesn’t look anything like it did on TV. It’s even more prosaic. It’s even more trying. Thanks for sticking with me this far.
When you lose someone, your mind is consumed by them. You might not have thought about this person very much when you saw them each and every day, but when they’re not there your mind goes into overdrive. The brain reacts badly when deprived of its normal routines. You notice this if you have to get up early or go to bed late, if you’re jetlagged from a long-haul flight, if you’re suddenly made redundant, if you move to a house in a considerably noisier area, if you give up cigs. However, humans and their minds are actually surprisingly adaptable. But we need time. Within a few days, weeks or months, humans can adapt to a new situation and a new environment – that’s what helped us to become masters of our universe. Pete told me that the brain is so good, it can adapt to the loss of the most important person in your entire life – eventually. He also warned me that it might take a while. I wonder what Bob would say?
I drove the car to town. Snow Hill car park. I screeched up the spiral ramp to the top floor of the multi-storey, parked at the front of the deck, switched the engine off and reclined the seat. I looked out over the city. And when I got peckish I snacked on crisps and salsa – I had enough of the bloody stuff to get through. I thought. There’s no reason to the way things happen, of course. It’s just bad luck, and sometimes there’s good luck to balance it out.
I knew each of the skyscrapers. Mids TV Tower, BT Tower, Evening Brummie Tower, Bank Tower, Legal Tower, Local Government Tower. We’d filmed outside most of them, and inside some of them. One thing I always liked was the way puffs of steam strolled upwards from the tops of the roofs, from the vents, or wherever it was they came from. It made me think of Toytown, of a playful chocolate factory. I sometimes imagined that inside, rather than bored middle-aged Brummies pushing around meaningless pieces of paper, the priapic office buildings were instead full of dancing midgets causing a fucking hullabaloo as they sought to make sweets or toys or whatever, crashing into table legs and each other. In fact I wrote that very joke into an episode of Welcome To The Masshouse.
I lit a fag and wound down the window, but it was too stale even with a bit of breeze. I got out of the car and slammed the door. It was windy – trees and aerials slow-danced, leaves flew all over, even though no English trees grew this high. I wandered over to the edge of the rooftop. My original plan was to kill myself by jumping from this very spot – but I wasn’t convinced it was quite high enough and decided on the Mids TV Tower instead. And then of course I also tried the BT Tower, which is higher still. I leaned over. The drop from the car park was ultimately unpromising – only five or six storeys, I guessed. Peering over the edge was still enough to give you that sensation that someone’s reached right down your throat, dragged your stomach up and wobbled it around. Looking down towards the ground from here was like looking through the camera lens. Your view is sucked into one place by one point in the near distance which drags your eyes. There’s nothing you can do about it. And around the edges of that view, the spaces close in. Like now – the parallel lines of the parking decks below me stacked until they smashed neatly into the street. A computer-game character walked along the street from left to right, a round head with two protruding stubby arms and two stubby legs. I tossed the cigarette and watched it whirl away from me, blown outwards from the car park decks by the wind. It dropped until it hit the street, making a Lilliputian firework display on impact, a tiny copper puff of sparks before it died.
I heard a train whistle. This car park sits above the tracks and platforms of Snow Hill railway station.
I felt hungry again. Strange. There was a Chinese food stand a few floors downstairs, in the upper concourse of the station. It had been a while since I’d been here.
‘A pork bun please, Mrs Chu.’
‘Mr Donald! Haven’t seen you for ages.’
‘I know. I’m back now though, aren’t I? Couldn’t live without your pork buns.’
Handing it over, along with a fortune cookie, Mrs Chu frowned and said, ‘I can see your future, Mr Donald. Your phone is about to ring. They’re going to invite you back in to work.’
My phone rang. Mrs Chu beamed and turned round to busy herself preparing some food.
‘Donald, how are you holding up? I’m glad you answered.’
‘Not bad, Bob. I’m just eating a pork bun.’
‘Great news! I’m glad you’re eating again.’
‘I’m trying.’
‘Listen, would you like to come back to work? It’d take your mind off things.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘OK, no rush. You look after yourself. Either way, meet me for a cuppa? Or a beer. Friday? There’s something I want to talk to you about. A programme. A film.’
‘Sure. I can do that.’
‘Great, see you soon. Chin up.’
Mrs Chu winked at me. ‘You gonna go back?’
I shrugged.
‘Mr Donald!’ Mrs Chu called as I wandered away. ‘A blonde woman.’ I didn’t know what she meant. ‘She’s… well, you find out soon enough.’
I squeezed the fortune cookie and it cracked under the strain, like a miraculously burst Brazil nut on Christmas morning. The unfurled slip of paper read: You will be happy again. I scoffed, shook my head. Smiled though. Just a tiny one.
5
1990
‘I want you to write the script for a new game show we’re going to do. About dogs.’
‘About dogs? Are you pulling my fucking leg?’
‘About dogs. It’s going to be called… ‘‘I Love My Dog!”’
‘I love my dog?’
‘Yes, isn’t that great?’
The Wall in the Head Page 4
