The Wall in the Head

by Christopher Beanland

  ‘I don’t, no.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  She giggled. ‘I do know! I said “I don’t, comma, no”. I wish I did.’

  ‘I wish I did too.’

  ‘Do you think you and Bel were right for each other? Really? Did it always feel like it was as perfect as you remember? We romanticise the past sometimes. We remember the good and forget the bad.’

  I pondered. ‘I think we were right, I think things were right… but then how can you ever really understand another person? How can you ever know what they are thinking?’

  ‘I remember times you’d tell me about things that seemed to get between you both… feelings and ideas. Bel loved you, don’t get me wrong. But she was doing her own thing too, had her own path. I don’t think I know if she was ever… I don’t know… It didn’t seem to me like she was ever as comfortable being married as you were.’

  Maybe Kate had a point.

  *

  ‘Another drink?’

  ‘Great idea. Doubles. Thank you, sir.’

  After more drinks, we met Bob and walked up to a retro Italian on the Headrow that I distinctly remember going to on dates when I was at university. The trattoria was called Erno’s. It was as scruffy as I remembered. The waiter brought us a bottle of Chianti encased in a wicker basket, and Bob, by now as tipsy as Kate and I after emptying his minibar of its five or six miniatures while he was upstairs sorting out some paperwork for the shoot, playfully yelled, ‘You’ve got to be fucking joking!’ when the bottle was placed on the table. The waiter looked incredulous.

  I asked where Baxter was, and Bob replied, ‘By himself, reading, having room service. Which isn’t ideal for the budget, obviously, as we’re massively over.’

  ‘I hope he chokes on his club sandwich.’

  ‘Yeah, exactly. I bet he’s ordered some wine as well. Something expensive probably. Something… French.’ Bob sighed. ‘I don’t even know how I got any cash for this. The bean counters must’ve felt sorry for us or something. They have done everything in their power to systematically strip out anything bloody good in entertainment, factual, comedy, drama and current affairs in the last ten years.’ He paused. ‘Actually, fuck current affairs. Who needs those arseholes?’

  ‘There’s always the game shows,’ I offered, pouring the wine.

  Kate snorted and glugged some of the red. ‘Can’t beat a good game show, can you? Maybe it’s time to bring I Love My Dog! back.’

  Bob looked grave. ‘I’m serious about this. Don’t tell any of the crew, but I’ve been summoned to HQ in London. They want a meeting. Pronto. I don’t think it’s going to be “Bob, we’ve got some good news for you – you’ve all done so well, so fucking bloody well, that everyone in Brum is getting a car and a holiday in the Seychelles; we’ve decided you all need a reward for that consistent great work you’ve been doing!”’ He sniffed. ‘Anyway, forget it. Let’s get this film made. But first, let’s get pissed. Though I realise we need to eat. So what’s everyone having?’

  I already knew. ‘A Bo Bardi pizza, please – the one with all the meats. Oh, and with extra chilli.’

  Bob looked at me slack-jawed. ‘You are an animal.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  Kate shook her head. As she lifted her wine glass to her lips I could see sadness in her eyes. And I think, at that moment, she could see the same feeling reflected in mine.

  *

  This place used to wrap me up. Leeds University Library was the safest place in the world. Surrounded by creamy concrete and desks and beautiful bookish girls wearing scruffy clothes, who chewed their pens and picked their noses when they thought no one was watching. To the young me, these girls represented perfection.

  I chatted briefly to an elderly librarian, who gave me a visitor’s pass and opened the electronic gate. Inside, it was as much of a cocoon as I remembered – so quiet, so warm and welcoming, the ceilings so low, the aromas of adhesives and plastics and ink and moistened paper and coffee. I went to the English Literature section in search of novelists and critics I’d studied, Marxist texts that fired me up. I ran my fingers over the dust-covered spines of the shelved books and landed on two that looked familiar. A Dialectical Approach To The Ideas You Don’t Yet Know. And beside it: Was That A Cough Or A Fit Of Genius: Reading Modernism In Literature Using Your Internal Eyes. I picked them both up and went over to a reading desk.

  I glanced around, at the low lighting, the soundproof walls, the students snacking on chocolate biscuits – the knock-off brands sold by discount supermarkets. Someone had scrawled FUCK THE TORIES into the desk, but the graffiti looked very, very old. I ran my fingers over the indentation in the wood. I looked both ways then plucked my keys silently from my jeans pocket. I fumbled for the Swiss army knife on my keyring and whipped out the blade. I hunched over and began to carve into the desk. A big ‘S’ in front of the word ‘TORIES’. I sniggered like a schoolboy. I rose and span round, to see the very same librarian who’d let me in standing in front of me. She was only five feet tall.

  ‘I was just passing and I thought I’d see how you were doing,’ she said.

  I stuttered a little. ‘Er…’

  ‘Maybe it’s time to leave.’

  Upstairs was the Red Route, which sounds blue, but is in fact grey. The corridor stretches into the distance. Walking down it is like walking into your own future, and what is university really but a time machine? A machine that slows time to nothing, pickling the youth and optimism you came in with, the outside world sort of forgotten. It’s just the most perfect way to fill your head, learn about life and romance, and use up three blissful years.

  When we came to Leeds a few years ago on that romantic weekend trip, Bel told me that a sci-fi TV show was shot in this corridor, and I remembered the rumours going around about that nugget back when I was studying here. But in those days there were rumours about everything on campus, everything in Leeds; everyone was paranoid. There were tales about weird late-night practices involving dead bodies in the Worsley Medical Building, another concrete brute Bel had loved. There were stories about underground passageways – some blocked up and some top secret – stretching into the Merrion Centre (where defunct escalators descended into an open pit) and down, even, to City Square. There were fables about subterranean bunkers and secret rooms, about spies on campus paid by the security services to keep an eye on left-wingers and foreigners, particularly at the university’s notoriously rabble-rousing sociology department. It was a strange and beautiful time.

  I found myself lost in reminiscence. Who was that bookish boy obsessed by girls and indie music? Was he really me? Or was he an actor playing the young me, the me before I became an adult with a role and a soul? On our first date, I told Bel that I’d learned to become a flâneur here. It was a new word I’d learned from reading new books about new things in the new library. I didn’t know about architecture. What I really wanted to learn about was words and how to use them. That was my job, it would always be my job – what I was training for. But exploring was a different feeling to writing. My greatest feeling of relaxation came from this simple act of wandering around, even as an untutored spectator who didn’t really know what it was he was looking at. Birmingham’s weird landscape had a profound impact on me. It trained me in exploring. But in Leeds I was a puppy on my first stroll without a lead. Why did no one else want to just blaze around Leeds like I did? Why did no one else take their A–Z and a coat and sometimes a mini Thermos of tea and make off for places that were simply letters arranged into words and printed onto streets and fields on a black-and-white page in a slim volume of maps? Meanwood and Weetwood and Woodhouse and Kirkstall; Moortown and Horsforth and Burley and Adel.

  23

  1983

  I stubbed out the roll-up and closed my book. I could pass these exams. It would be fine. I fingered a bubbling spot under the crease of my neck. I was self-conscious about it. It was as red and angry as most of the students lolling around n
earby. I wanted it gone in case I bumped into Millie, which I always did when I was looking under par. The weather was getting milder as the year stretched out. What drew me to walk? It was a pure desire to see. To explore my territory. I was washed up on an island and I wanted to go to its edges. I heaved myself up and rubbed my eyes. I surveyed the scene. The brutalist campus of Leeds University flowed away from me. A huge, wide wave of grey stairs took people down from the main university campus at the top of the hill to the pond outside the Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre at the bottom. Students walked in both directions. Most of them looked happy. This was Eden. I looked up at the social sciences building, a great concrete ogre looming over me. You had to walk between its legs to get past it. It was a petrified computer-game boss that had duelled with a pixellated superhero, been beaten, and just ended up lodged solid. I followed the path down those steps, past that pond, through the campus, out. Then I passed the Worsley Building, and after that the Inner Ring Road announced itself with a sooty roar, just like Brum’s. I still didn’t really know where I was going today. Towards the city – that’s what it felt like. Just seeing where the desire took me. A friendly bakery jumped out at me on Park Lane – distinguished not so much by its visual contribution to the city (a red hand-painted sign on a white wall, a window full of loaves and buns) as by the enticing smells – of tepid shortcrust pastry and the raw sliced onions inevitably placed in the ham rolls they would sell. The old woman in the shop sold me a bottle of pop and a Cornish pasty. The sight of the pasty’s golden crust made me salivate. I inhaled its buttery roof. I passed the angular Wellington Swimming Pool with its starry facade, and the Yorkshire Gazette Building. I traced a dead straight route down Wellington Street, finally coming to rest in City Square. I flopped on a bench with my back almost against the Post Office – and in front of me a looming council block of flats of the most austere design. From at least three of the windows, women were leaning out and smoking, a repetitive pattern. A couple of kids kicked a football against the outside of the tall block. A sign above the door read Utopia Point (Leeds Corporation). I took my lunch out from my knapsack and laid it on the bench next to me. I popped the bottle and drew on the honey-sweet liquid. Then I carefully pulled the pasty from its white paper clothes, revelling again in the scent of the pastry. I took a huge bite, staring up at the tower block, at the women. My left arm hung over my head, shielding my eyes from the sun as I chomped. Shortcrust pastry fell luxuriantly across my T-shirt, which was emblazoned across its front with The Rationalists. I smelled my armpits. They were fusty. The shower in our despicable student house on Mayville Avenue was broken. I heard something.

  ‘Donald? Hi, Donald, is that you? It is you!’

  I mumbled, ‘Shit,’ under my breath and began to hastily brush the bakery detritus off my chest and legs. It was fruitless. There were crumbs everywhere.

  ‘Donald, what on earth are you up to?’ She regarded me, smirking. ‘Is that… lunch?’

  ‘Millie! Um, yes, just… been studying and then… walking and erm, pasty… a pasty.’

  She twirled her hair, not listening to anything I was saying, pouting like a goddess, wearing a flimsy summer dress and chunky leather boots. ‘Want some gum, Don?’ A slight scowl. Her nose ring caught the sunlight and glinted. From this angle Millie was exactly as tall as Utopia Point. I was suddenly very conscious of the spot under my chin.

  24

  2008

  The crew were setting up a shot. They were collected like lowing cows at the bottom of the huge, wide wave of grey stairs that takes people down from the main university campus at the top of the hill to the pond outside the Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre at the bottom. For this shot, Baxter was going to speak as he descended the (many) steps.

  What was he going to say? What I told him to. I’d noted Bel’s interest in monumental scale in her book, and this bit was going to be about the XXL nature of Leeds University’s campus (and of brutalism in general). The big stairs, the long corridors, the frankly frightening amount of open space. The industrial city aesthetic. The machine aesthetic. The bombastic aesthetic. The aesthetic of bigness. Baxter walked and talked when Bob called action, and it was done and dusted in a single take.

  The crew packed the stuff up and we headed off without hesitation. And if you’re thinking that it was a lot of stuff they had to pack up – you’d be wrong. Films use a ton of crew and equipment. We don’t. We had a camera (operated by a man who kept himself to himself), a sound mic (operated by a man who kept himself to himself), a producer who was also a director (Bob), a make-up artist, a writer (me) and a production manager (Kate) smoothing out the inevitable creases that occur when you shoot on location. No lights, no effects – we had to do all this in the daylight. And pray it stayed sunny. We dragged ourselves upwards to the Red Route corridor, a covered skybridge that starts off at ground level at the top of the hill – but by the time it gets to here and the gradient has tumbled away, it flows along five storeys high in the air. Up there, Baxter would be doing another piece about rivers of people, and pathways and movement and motion – corridors, bridges, and how people are like salmon.

  When we got up to the corridor in the sky, Baxter took a seat and, without a soupçon of anxiety or remorse or self-consciousness, took out a wrap of finely ground white powder and spilled a hillock of it onto a credit card. He moved it up towards his nasal canal – with the slight quiver of a hand that’s been through this arcane routine a thousand times – and snorted it all up in two big heaves.

  Bob turned to me. His eyes looking askance. A face painted with annoyance. Perhaps with jealousy too. He said nary a word, he didn’t have to. He just looked at me. His eyes boiled and despaired and longed in the same moment.

  Baxter clapped his hands, rubbed them together, and set off to take his mark a bit further down the corridor. As he walked away, he whistled. Bob looked like he was about to put his fist straight through a window.

  After the uni shoot was done we had to pack up once more and get to the Yorkshire Gazette Building. The journey was rapid. We piled into a minibus and then it was straight down the Inner Ring Road. The YGB, as Bel referred to it, was right next to the road. From the flyover you could see it standing out like a horrible sore thumb. It was deliberately placed in view of the traffic, Bel told me; it was deliberately placed next to the motorway so the two pieces of concrete philosophy would work together as a duo, each riffing off the other. Like the drummer and bass player in a band. An unapologetic rhythm section. Or two comics. A comedy double act no one was laughing at anymore. But maybe we should be? This was what I’d paraphrased in the script I’d written for Baxter to speak. Bel’s ideas, my take. She had an incredible knack for bringing buildings to life. I just made it all translate onto TV. I was really a translator on this job – words on paper arriving from Bel, words for the screen departing for Baxter. A conduit. Hopefully the sense wasn’t lost.

  Bob wanted to do a shot where Baxter would be saying his piece (even though it was my piece, and really, of course, it was actually Bel’s piece) while standing at the front of the YGB with his back to it. The camera – trained on him throughout– would travel over the flyover on top of the van and capture Baxter from a disconcerting moving position. It took a dozen takes and a lot of faffing to get this one right. Every time it wasn’t perfect, the van had to drive down to the Armley Gyratory, come back, shoot past us, then double back at the Park Lane junction to get back in the right starting position to do the shot once more. I watched the finished rush once we’d nailed it, and it was impressive. Bob was a little too pleased with himself when he saw how good the final product looked. We huddled around the little screen in the back of the van to see what we’d just captured on camera, happy that we’d created something which looked attractive, something that did justice to the point we wanted to make. It was the first time it felt like we might be making a good television programme.

  *

  TV might look glamorous, but let me tell you about t
he reality. Me, Bob, and Kate were squeezed into a minibus. Shazia was quiet – there to do Baxter’s make-up. There was the cameraman and sound man, who worked with us as freelancers and whose names no one ever stopped to ask. They played around on each other’s phones and bullshitted about football. Kate had found a couple of Polish guys somewhere – I got the feeling they were both heinously overqualified and rather embarrassed to be slumming it with us. One was driving us, the other was driving a bastardised version of our minibus which was the same shape and volume but had no windows and was thus a ‘van’. All the cameras and technical equipment were in there, along with the luggage – and by default Baxter’s array of pharmaceuticals, both legal and prohibited.

  A road journey was much less classy than a train journey – you couldn’t piss when you wanted and you had to drink whatever was available, and that meant anything bright-coloured, laced with sugar and contained in a cardboard box or oversized plastic bottle. The bumps of the road travelled up through my spine; the low-intensity conflict of boredom precipitated by the motorway against us all was felt keenly, especially when it got dark. The Polish drivers played a little game of constantly overtaking each other, making funny faces at each other as the vans raced, the clanking and clattering inside our van almost unbearable when it was going flat out, careering south. I knew it wasn’t far down the M1 to Sheffield. The signs counted down the miles as if they were marking the city they mentioned with a diminishing score. Sheffield 37. Sheffield 31. Sheffield 28. I liked how the signposts also told us we were heading towards The South (which was full of wankers) and The Midlands (which was home).

  ‘Why don’t we stop soon?’ I asked Bob, who was riding shotgun.

  He looked at his watch. ‘Yeah, we can do in… twenty minutes? Next services, Janusz. Fag and a hot dog, yeah?’