Brutalism was a breath of fresh air. It emerged at a time when everything was being challenged, when a new society was being birthed around the world, when new art and culture was emerging. Everything was changing. The New Wave of theatre, film, music, art was in step with the new society. And brutalism was its new architecture. Funny then, that a lot of the people designing it were old fogies. And that it was never considered cool. Well, it wasn’t – was it? Brutalism was seen as prosaic. People were into throwaway stuff, pop stuff, plug-in stuff, space-station stuff. But nowadays we see brutalism as being a symbol of a new era. (If we don’t, we should.) Because it was. It is. If only we had such cultural vigour again in our lifetime, in the 2000s. If only we had the guts, the balls to build these monoliths for the people. One of the main reasons I chose to lecture and write about architecture in books and magazines is that I knew from pretty early on that no one would ever let me build the kind of buildings I really loved. It wasn’t even on the agenda. So, better to celebrate the best of what’s been built, rather than adding more crap to the pile like so many of today’s architects do.
Oh and, by the way, these monoliths for the people are also great places to walk your dog. I took Breuer, my beloved beagle, to all of them – and if he could have spoken, rather than slobbering and running around with a goofy grin on his face (like my husband does sometimes, too) he’d have said that he loved playing in brutalist mega-villages even more than in the park.
And if you can’t trust a dog, who can you trust?
15
2006
My hand was tightly clasped around Belinda’s. I liked the way it felt. I liked the touch of Bel’s left hand – I enjoyed the feel of the firm, silky skin wrapped around it, but I also liked how holding hands made me feel in my heart. Comforted. Connected. I liked what it represented to cling on like this, to show that you were together; lovers in a private world, displaying a symbol of unity and intimacy in a public realm we all had to share. Lovers were never totally committed to that public world, just to their own bubble within it. We were cut off. And isn’t this the trick of cities? To be a person (or a couple) who can function among millions – sometimes to engage with people, sometimes to float through scenes unnoticed, like a spectre. Life is just a series of seamless transitions between the world you spend time in alone and the one you spend time in with others. Sometimes the most alone you feel is surrounded by thousands, but the least alone you ever feel is holding someone else’s hand when you’re surrounded by those same thousands. That single connection of hands is a middle finger to the modern world; it proves to the world that you can’t be atomised, at least not while there’s someone else around.
Bel squeezed. I jumped from my thoughts to the real world. ‘You’re doing well. Look really hard. Look at the whole, look at the edges, look at the details. Look closely and look not so closely. Just relax and let your eyes enjoy the pleasure of it all.’
We both faced a painting. Standing side by side. There were a dozen or so other large paintings and photographs hung along one of the upper corridors of Birmingham Central Library.
‘Do you notice how, if you actually concentrate really hard on looking, everything looks different?’ I did. ‘See how something you thought you knew takes on different… forms, different meanings – if you study it with your eyes. I’m not challenging you, by the way!’ I felt her squeeze my arm. ‘I’m challenging the art. If it’s shit then it will never move you, but this is good, I think it’s good, and so if you give it time you can get to understand it more. I think that if art is really good, if it’s got a real meaning, if it’s authentic, then it defies anyone taking the piss out of it, right?’ It was a pointed question, or more accurately a pointed point.
‘You think I’m a heathen.’
‘I don’t! I understand your job is to prick pomposity and bust egos. That’s an important job. And most people need taking down a peg or two. But when something is just… when it’s so good and so real, when it’s been made with love and it’s imbued with all these meanings – hidden and obvious – and when its meanings give you feelings, then I think it deserves honest and sincere appreciation.’
I was happy with Bel as my art history teacher for the day. I stared at the painting some more. The painting was based on a photograph, but the colours had been switched, like a negative of a photo. There were shades of colours you see in florists – calming pastels. And the image was at odds with that; to me it was at odds with that because it showed a building that was large and seemed to have some swagger about it. A block of flats, I guess, receding at an odd angle. Something menacing shot out of the block, diagonally, in the direction of the top-left corner, like a gun barrel almost. But what was written on that protrusion was anything but aggressive. I read out the text to Bel. ‘Clare Middleton… I love you will u marry me?’
‘Exactly. That’s good, isn’t it? And it’s real. It means something, anyway – because of the way the artist has made it. But it’s real, too. A real place with a real message about real people and their real feelings. Just like us.’ She squeezed. ‘You and me, Donald. We’re real people with real feelings – we’re not fakes, we’re not constructs, we’re not characters, we’re not fiction. And neither is our love.’
I turned to her. ‘How can you be so sure?’
She smirked. Then tenderly pressed her mouth against my cheek, her lips hovering next to my skin even after she’d planted the kiss.
‘I’ve enjoyed my lesson.’
‘Good. All of these paintings, these photos, were inspired by brutalist buildings, and I think they’re all – OK, not “all” but nearly all – done with panache. But this one, the I Love You bridge one, this is really my favourite. The artist who did it is very young. She’s from Skopje – you know that city I visited in the Balkans that was flattened in an earthquake in 1963 and rebuilt? She’s very talented. She even came to a book talk I did and I signed her copy. Lovely girl. And look at what she made.’
I looked back once more at the work. Bel was so sure, she understood, she was confident about what she found and what she felt and what she thought.
After a few minutes I glanced down at the card below the piece, which read:
Marija Trajkovski (Macedonia)
Clare Middleton I Love You Will U Marry Me (2004)
16
2008
It was early when I arrived at Birmingham Central Library. The freezing dawn nibbled at my cheeks. Day two of filming for Ten Brutalist Buildings. Bob already cradled a tea whose plumes of steam puffed up into the sky as he joked around with some of the crew. Baxter appeared suddenly, like a ghost, from behind one of the hidden doors that lead in and out of the rabbit warren of ghostly subterranean snickets the library sits on. It’s hard to understand what’s down there sometimes. Paradise Circus is too complicated to comprehend. Concrete stretches and distorts the horizon. Shapes and angles fistfight with each other. Some spaces seem to suck you in, some doors are bolted shut like a prison – but are you on the inside or the outside? The whole ground level is jacked up, leaving this weird netherworld underneath. Baxter seemed to levitate too, floating slowly across a wide, flat, tiled platform, coming to a stop just where we were all standing. But it must have been a trompe l’oeil. He looked into my eyes. He glowered. I gave him the script. He looked up at the sky, took the script and held it, then looked back at me, and for the briefest of moments his eyes softened and we seemed to share something very tiny. It was as if he wanted to confess something? Baxter silently retreated to a bench and read while the cameraman set up the shots on instructions from Bob.
Baxter’s preparations to begin speaking were an elaborate routine, a baroque performance involving heavy breathing and quasi-yogic posing. I found it tiresome. Now standing, he clasped his hands together in front of his chest and seemed to be summoning up some kind of evil spirit from the paving stones below, from the earth itself. The ritual would last around ten minutes, and neither I nor any of the production
team paid the slightest bit of notice to this nonsense anymore. It was only the revolving cast of interns who gawped in awe and bafflement at the spectacle unfolding in front of them. I wondered if I’d ever seen Baxter without his dark glasses? I certainly couldn’t remember a time. Was Baxter born wearing shades? How could he have popped out of his mother in such a state?
It took about an hour for Baxter to complete his waspish pieces to camera. He walked as he talked. I wasn’t excited about seeing this idiot on TV in the final cut; I was just excited about seeing Bel’s beloved buildings and hearing about why they mattered. The camera panned up from Baxter to reveal what I knew were going to be some startling shapes on screen: avant-garde Tobleronic triangles that Brummies hadn’t really seen for some time – hadn’t noticed, at any rate. Brummies didn’t see the baffling, enticing poses their city struck right in front of their eyes. They looked at the floor, at their phones, at the shop windows, at each other. I squinted up at the corner of the great library, the piece that prodded with expectation and courage out into clear sky, and then I looked at the stepped levels that slid themselves beneath this prow, shadow giving each a slightly different hue. Was I beginning see what Belinda saw? Pieces of a puzzle sliding together ever so slowly. Maybe we could find some kind of whole. Beauty emerging. It was stark. I swallowed.
I left them to the filming and wandered about. A staircase presented itself to me like a gift. It wasn’t a staircase I remembered seeing before. I looked both ways as if checking whether anyone was following me. No one was; no one cared. I stepped down, pulse racing. At the bottom of the stairs was another world, a secret world, a hidden world. A huge square underneath the platform which led to the western entrance of the library. Dingy, dismal, mean in its way yet disgusting and thrilling too. The spaces between buildings are the thing. I hated the undercrofts, the underground car parks, the dungeons. So why was I drawn to them like a moth to the flame? I couldn’t stop myself. It was a macabre fascination, like an interest in crime and punishment, in horror movies, or diseases. I thought I knew Brum; this was my home. But this space under the library was new to me, a mystery I’d never discovered before. I tracked across the underground square. Something moved in my left-hand field of view. A fox pounced upwards onto a wall, plodded along and dropped over the other side into a bush. My eyeline was dragged down. A voice echoed, trembling and terrifying in the covered space.
‘Spare… change, mate?’ A talking sleeping bag resting on cardboard with multiple cans all around.
A human head popped out, a little like a tortoise, wary. We locked looks. For a split second it felt like we knew each other, but how could we?
He stared at me intently as if he knew me, mumbling something about a ‘factory’.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Masshouse. Ma… You…’
‘Yeah, that’s the programme I wrote. You watched it?’
‘Watch? No… TV.’ Arms flailing. ‘Masshouse. I… You… We… in Ma… they demol… so I… now here…’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and handed him a fifty-pence piece.
I penetrated further, into the eaves directly below the library building itself. How could this place, this space, exist in the middle of the city – right in the very eye of the storm, the dead centre of the city? It was dark and threatening inside the subterranean passageways. Two men with matted hair and faces drawn from despair squatted on a kerb, sharing a pipe which oozed noxious fumes. They looked up at me but said nothing as I passed by. Fours eyes, each one rattled. A broken-down car that must have been parked here for years. Bel never told me about this. Did she know? She must have. She was an expert, the expert. Did she like it? Was she ashamed by the sinister undertones of this place – did she think they detracted from the majesty of the building above? Or did she guiltily treasure such places, like me? A locked door; I was trapped. To my right I could see the outside world but it was barred and not available to me. There were trees swaying in the middle of Paradise Circus, on the island in the middle of a roundabout. That’s where we were. The library was on an island in the middle of a roundabout. Of course… she told me, I knew that. I knew all of this. I just… forgot it? I held the bars and stared at the outside world, at the civilised town hall beyond the lanes of traffic. That was a straight rip-off of the Parthenon in Athens.
I looped back round and found another space on the northern side of this underworld, still underneath the library. Bricked-up shafts where stairs or escalators would have dropped down from above to this, the minus-one level, made me feel like I was a ghost, an optimistic stiff searching for a way back to the world of the living. Concrete boxes and shelters and benches appeared to me and seemed to suggest that this was supposed to be a bus station, but I’ve never heard of any bus departing or arriving from down here. Maybe it’s a bus station for the dead, taking them to the city’s cemeteries.
I heard some clattering. It made me think of the filming that was going on above me. I decided to slip away from this place and leave them to it. I burrowed back up to the surface on a service road and vaulted a fence. I ducked out from beneath the greedy shadow the library’s podial superstructure cast and legged it across the road, dodging the roaring traffic of Paradise Circus Queensway. Escaping from the concrete island.
A feeling of calm returned momentarily as I meandered down Fleet Street, away from the traffic. My pace slackened; my breathing settled.
On my right was the old coffin factory on Fleet Street. Next I could see the base of the BT Tower, the second place where I’d tried and failed to shatter myself. It was rearing up on my left. The canal ran parallel to Fleet Street, down its northern side. What if, when I had jumped the other night, I had landed in the canal – which jammed itself right up against the tower – instead of hitting the street in rather more spectacular style? Would you live then? No, of course not. Falling onto water from a great height is just like falling onto concrete.
My body swerved left onto Newhall Street. I flashed past a Bangladeshi restaurant – though you’ll (wrongly) think of them as ‘Indian’ restaurants – where I once took Belinda. I forked fluffy hillocks of biryani and oil slicks of ghee-laden lamb bhuna onto her tongue. She nodded approval, held up her right thumb, and sipped her pint of gassy, tasteless lager as if she’d been English all her life.
St Paul’s Square seemed like an oil painting. Rusting leaves fell around me, their hearts fired up for one final performance. On the slabs of St Paul’s churchyard the foliage accumulated, creating a greasy surface. It wasn’t even my plan to arrive here.
At the north-western corner of the churchyard, a grave in a prison. Iron bars sprouted on all sides to prevent the cadaver from going on midnight walks in the Jewellery Quarter – or beneath the Central Library. I saw something a minute ago, and now, moving closer, I can eye it up close. A cream belt from a woman’s mackintosh, perfectly still on one corner of the grave, threaded gently and purposefully through the bars as if deposited deliberately. A totem. I rubbed the belt between my thumb and forefinger, and the friction produced the slightest feeling of heat, of life. A single strand of long, blonde hair was stuck on the belt. I yanked it off, held it up to the light to examine it. The bells of the church began to peal, throwing their clanks up towards the clouds, and I turned around to see two ushers had appeared at the door, ready to direct guests to their seats at the wedding inside. The ushers wore grey suits and big smiles and handed out orders of service to women wearing elaborate hats and looks of pure delight. One of the ushers took a call on his mobile phone and dashed off towards Newhall Street to deal with some unknown issue. Perhaps the bridal car needed to be shoved out of a pothole? I looked again. The church caught my eye this time, rather than the people milling outside and filing inside. Its windows glinting in the sun. What would Belinda have told me to note about this building – the hard stone walls shaped like a huge cardboard box that’s been airlifted in, or the added-later spire that doesn’t fit with the formal shape and yet somehow do
es add to the form as a whole? I knew Belinda liked St Paul’s because she’d pointed it out and cooed after we went for that curry. Why did she like it? Perhaps because its stone exterior looked almost like concrete and its toughness was almost forgiving, almost modern, almost a place for the people. Maybe, at a push, she’d have got married to me here if Berlin had been off the cards. For a second I allowed my mind to drift, to imagine what it would have looked like. What if these ushers were my mates and the old women sporting odd millinery were Bel’s aunts from Potsdam? What if we’d have emerged from St Paul’s Church, into the light, as man and wife? Our wedding photos could have had the auburn leaves of the trees in the square as their background – and we could’ve had our reception in that same Bangladeshi place in Newhall Street that we rated so much. A chicken tandoori and Birmingham Bitter wedding breakfast. A wedding breakfast of champions. I wondered how many couples in total had married here, had their photos taken on this square – tens of thousands? And each couple wouldn’t have given a second thought to any other couple – each couple would be totally obsessed with each other, with their day. The thought of marriage chilled me. The thought that I might have to do it again someday seemed so outrageous, so unexpected, so unappetising. I looked at my watch. It was time to head back to the library, to see if they’d finished shooting.
Bob was standing with the crew at the north-eastern corner of Paradise Circus, where the road leaps under the plaza like a four-lane bobsleigh run. He saw me crossing the carriageway and waved me down, then ran over like an excitable puppy and punched me in the gut.
The Wall in the Head Page 9
