The Wall in the Head

by Christopher Beanland

  Janusz said, ‘Fuck yeah.’

  Bob turned to the rest of us. ‘Have they opened any fucking pubs at motorway service stations yet? A beer’s just what I could do with. Just a cheeky one.’

  ‘I think that would be asking for trouble,’ said Shazia. ‘Drinking and driving?’

  ‘Well anyway, we can get a burger.’ Bob reached into his wallet and fanned out three fivers. ‘I’m buying!’

  The car park at Cribdon motorway services. ‘Is desolate.’ Janusz said everything that needed to be said. He wrinkled his nose, locked the van and then vanished like a ghost into the bland concrete pavilion of the service station, a hexagon that seemed like it should be slotted next to a few more of its mates. A fierce wind whipped in across the Pennines. I couldn’t see any trees. Instead of trees, purple bins and white posts carrying flags and petrol branding appeared. The flags clanked against the posts.

  ‘You need to be tough to live up here, don’t you?’ said Kate, as we walked to the hexagon. ‘I hope uni toughened you up. No heating and all that.’ She shivered, slotted her arm through mine. ‘Bloody hell. I need a holiday after this. Somewhere warm.’

  I held the door open for her and we went in. Bob took our orders for burgers, and I walked up the steps to the bridge chucked up over the motorway and connected to an identical hexagon on the other side. It featured the same small, all-purpose shop selling bananas and colouring books and chocolate bars and newspapers, but was topped off with a fried chicken outlet instead of a burger bar. I sat down at a table on the bridge. Cars thundered beneath us. The view was intoxicating. Traffic pouncing towards me without end. Dangerous and unchecked. Lunacy. It was hypnotic. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. A lorry: whoooooosh. It was hardly decadent; it was primal, disgusting, exhilarating. There weren’t many other diners. Noise echoed around. The smell of deep-fat frying tiptoed up from both ends.

  ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about the future.’ Kate took a seat and stared out of the window at the booming traffic below. ‘Because Belinda was obviously drawn to how people in the 1960s saw the future, how they were trying to create the space age.’ She cast her eyes around this sad dining area, then turned to see me sniggering. ‘But it just turned out a bit shit.’ Now she cracked a smile. ‘Didn’t it?’

  ‘Yep. Life never keeps its promises. I guess all we can do is try to see what people were trying to get right – before it went wrong.’

  ‘Right, where the hell are the rest of them?’ Bob breathed out as he sat and immediately unloaded a tray of burgers wrapped in greaseproof paper and fries in cardboard containers. The packaging said Paul Rudolph’s Burgers. The scent of salt and fat and sugar trounced my nostrils.

  Janusz sat down and started talking Polish with his mate, who’d just arrived in the ‘technical vehicle’ – that is, the one without windows. His mate produced a medium-sized bottle from his pocket.

  ‘Vodka?’

  I nodded. I turned to see we were all nodding, and Janusz’s mate poured a generous double measure of vodka into the soft drinks and coffees we had lined up between us. Suddenly we were all cheeky schoolkids on a study trip to the Lake District again.

  We ate the burgers and fries with the levels of enthusiasm you reserve for visits to the dentist.

  Baxter looked particularly miffed about the meal. He lowered his head to look closely at his triple-layered burger like a dog with full bowels inspecting a forest clearing. The flabby bread barely rested on the greasy patties; limp green pseudo-lettuce poked from the side like infectious pus from a wound. Baxter removed the top of the bap and sniffed at the ochre burger sauce. I chewed as I watched, savouring the way melted cheese and ground beef mixes in your mouth, caressing your tongue with a light touch of grease, making you feel horrified and elated at once. Disgusting. Bob rubbed his eyes and looked like a dad with an uncommonly weird brood.

  After the meal, me and Kate shared a cigarette outside the hexagonal pavilion. Bob stomped past on his way to the car park. ‘No sleep ’til Sheffield! Let’s get the hell out of this shithole.’

  Back in the van. The air had begun to deteriorate. As we jolted over a speed bump and accelerated back towards the motorway a sign read Thanks For Visiting Cribdon Services. Have A Safe Journey & Enjoy Yorkshire!

  Most of us fell asleep as the saturated fat hit our stomachs and caused a kind of food lag, a sensation that whatever time it was, it was actually time for a post-prandial nap.

  Ten Brutalist Buildings

  By Belinda Schneider

  Chapter Six

  Park Hill, Sheffield

  Where did it all go so right? Not everything we tried was as much of a failure as the media would have you believe. I say ‘we’ because ‘we’ was the spirit of the times – different times, times that we were all in together. It’s not the spirit of these times, where we’ve become atomised individuals competing with each other for scant resources, to see who can earn most, buy most, show off most. Back then we were in awe, of worlds and the future, of our own futures. Today we live in a present which is mostly just a series of ‘sorrys’ and suggestions, an expectation of averages, a certainty that we can’t do better, that we just do our best. ‘Our best’ is a cop-out, a realisation that we have nothing firm to offer history.

  Brutalism is cheap. It’s not the cheapest – the cheapest was system building, and sometimes people conflate brutalism and system building, wrongly. System building was a bit of a scam – mass-produce crappy pieces in a factory and throw up rows of identikit towers. The building companies were the ones making money out of that ruse. And the government, in Britain at least, encouraged them. Political parties fought to see who could build the most houses. At least their hearts were in the right place. When, of course, the politicians weren’t in corrupt league with the building companies. And yes, those blocks could be bloody awful – they fell apart and they made people’s lives miserable. But that story has been repeated so often, you could believe that was the only story. But it wasn’t. Not everything conforms to the official narrative; concrete didn’t always come before ‘jungle’ or ‘wasteland’ or ‘monstrosity’ or ‘hell’. It’s startling to see how much the language has changed, how much hope was present back in that time after the war, and how little hope we have now. What do we seek to change now? Nothing. But the things we did seek to change – well, sometimes we got those things right. The answer to the problem could be a correct one; it didn’t always have to be wrong.

  Park Hill was built as a one-of-a-kind place. It’s finished decently and it stands for something. It literally stands above Sheffield. Now I’m not trying to sweep history under the carpet – there were problems here too. But of course you’re going to get problems if housing officials put too many problem families in one place or if councils are forced to skimp on maintenance and let things fall down because central government slashes their grants. But there’s also more power and prestige in cutting a ribbon with big scissors than with funding all the expensive care and attention that buildings need: the workers to look after them, the cleaners to clean them, the painters to paint them, the upgrades and refurbishments of homes, the new play equipment, the replacement lifts. Maintenance isn’t sexy, is it? And as soon as you start to let a place go to the dogs – well, people stop caring so much; they stop doing their bit too. People would fall apart if we didn’t have the NHS. Everything needs to be cared for, especially as it gets older. The men in suits should have splashed more cash on all our brutalist buildings to keep them looking good, to stop them going off. Buildings need love too.

  Yet love permeates from the pores of Park Hill itself. A love for people – for all people – is what made the place get built in the first place. This estate worked. It housed folk. It was socialist in intention. Give people the best housing. No more slums. A future of positives and possibilities. In a bold building. And people fell in love here in Sheffield. I can’t get the image of the graffiti up on a balcony at Park Hill out of my mind. It reads:

  Clare
Middleton I Love You Will U Marry Me

  *

  ‘Clare Middleton I Love You Will U Marry Me.’ Kate slowly and gently read out the words that had been daubed up on the highwalk that separated one block from another. This time she said them more theatrically: ‘Clare Middleton… I Love You! Will You Marry Me!’ She paused and turned to me, her hands on my chest, almost curtseying. ‘Will you, Clare? Oh, will you!’ Now switching to an approximation of a Tyke: ‘Go on, love, you know you want ter. Go on.’

  ‘That’s how it should be said, I reckon. Reet Yorkshire.’

  ‘Exactly. You know the story?’

  I did. ‘I do. Belinda told me the tale. It’s a sad one. Clare and this guy called Jason, her paramour, were in love. He wanted to get married to her. He proposed by spray-painting this… declaration, and taking her to the Odeon cinema over there…’ I pointed across the valley to where I assumed it was. I’d never been to Sheffield before. The wind howled in at us on this exposed hill above the railway station. ‘He took her out on the cinema’s balcony and showed her this; she could see it across the valley from there. Apparently she was slightly embarrassed by it.’

  ‘You would be.’

  ‘Well, exactly. She said yes though.’

  ‘So they got married?’

  ‘No, they never got to the aisle. They broke up. And Clare, sadly, has died.’

  ‘Oh my God. Wasn’t she young, though?’

  ‘She was. Belinda read everything she could about them. This was a really big obsession in her mind, this connection between buildings and lives. Especially this connection. Real stories playing out in real places, real people that architecture books never mentioned, walls hearing things, reliquaries and stuff like that. People were just… well, stick men I guess, for most writers, most architects, most planners. No one cared about thoughts or feelings. She did.’

  ‘But people aren’t just stick men, are they? They’re real.’ Kate pressed towards me and urged us both onwards.

  ‘Right. We don’t behave as they want us to behave, do we?’

  ‘Bob doesn’t behave as we want him to behave.’

  ‘Neither does Baxter.’

  Kate looked around. ‘What do you think to this place? Honestly? Doesn’t it scare the shit out of you – a little bit? There’s something a bit like a castle about it. Like a compound. I don’t know – some of the things Bel loved, obviously the intent was always right, but the execution? I’m not so sure. These guys in suits, do they really know what’s best for mums with prams? My friend in Brum, Emaline, I remember her talking to me about this. She made me laugh. She was drunk this one time and just going off on one about how it was men that’d fucked up the city, men that’d knocked everything down, and men that’d invented the subway – and that you’d have had to be out of your mind to invent something so stupid and stick them all over, literally all over, the city centre. Women push prams and wear heels and…’

  ‘Very feminist of you.’

  ‘Shut up, it’s her point, not mine – OK, some of the time women do. Anyway a subway is the most idiotic and useless concept if you think about either of those things.’

  ‘Brum’s nearly got rid of them all now.’

  ‘Thank fuck. They were horrible at night. Grimy and scary. What are you supposed to do if you see dodgy-looking lads just hanging around down there in the middle of the night? I know it’s a cliché but I really did see some disgusting old man pissing in the underpass at Five Ways, and that’s a nice area of the city. God knows what the ones in… Aston or somewhere are like.’

  ‘Sometimes I don’t know if you’re a real city girl.’

  ‘Of course I’m a city girl. I’ve always lived in Brum and I always will… unless I meet a rich Australian guy with a passion for surfing on the side, in which case I’m on the next flight out – in business class. But no, I couldn’t live in the country. It’s too boring.’

  ‘Our parents all wanted to though, didn’t they? Even a lot of people our age. They hated Brum. They hated the city – like you.’

  ‘I don’t hate the city, you dickhead. I hate the bits of it that are scary and dirty and shit-looking and annoying. And Brum can be a bit rubbish sometimes, a bit boring sometimes, and my God there’s enough weirdos there, aren’t there? But I’m not like all those people – they thought escaping the city was the only answer, that the countryside was their salvation. They thought only the desperate would still live in cities. But hang on a minute, wasn’t it architects who all moved out to the bloody country too? Or at least to the green suburbs, to Edgbaston, or to the nice villages by the motorway like Lapworth. I remember Bel telling me that. She wasn’t impressed about it.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t. I think even Moseley seemed a bit “boho” for her.’

  ‘I don’t quite have Bel’s love for the whole… shall we say… “weird and wonderful” world of concrete. Don’t get me wrong, I love the library, and…’ Kate turned and glanced up and around at our surroundings, at the austere lines of concrete running along the blocks, at the angles the creased-up building made when parts of it hit other parts of it. ‘…I could probably love this place too. After a while. But I’d prefer a nice little terraced house in Moseley, like you. Doesn’t everyone? A house with a garden, not too big, just nice. A family home, not too many noisy neighbours, not having to worry too much about being robbed or anything.’

  ‘Not everyone can afford those things.’

  ‘No, well that’s the problem, isn’t it? Bloody male politicians or male bankers spending all our hard-earned money on whatever crap it is they do spend money on.’

  Kate and I heaved ourselves up a staircase and mooched along the long corridor on the top deck of the building. I thought about Clare Middleton a lot as the wind and our footsteps echoed around the street in the sky. I thought about the people who had lived here, the people who still lived here. I stared at each heavy door and wondered what went on behind each one, how happy or sad the inhabitants of each flat were. The air was melancholy, but I knew it wasn’t always this way, and it didn’t have to be. You couldn’t blow these bloody flats up; they were like rock. They’d last a thousand years. All you needed to do was spruce everything up, clean the concrete.

  ‘They used to have a milk float run up and down here, didn’t they?’ Kate turned to me, wide-eyed, looking for praise. ‘On the walkways.’

  ‘Someone’s been looking through archive footage.’

  She laughed. ‘I saw it. I remember seeing it. A bloody milk float, depositing milk bottles full of milk and picking…’

  ‘Or orange juice.’

  ‘Orange juice?’

  ‘Yep, that too. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I don’t remember milkmen bringing orange juice to our house.’

  ‘I think they did.’

  We stopped and leaned over a balcony.

  ‘You know Mackenzie was born here?’ said Kate, looking wistfully into the sky.

  ‘Mackenzie as in “The Bastard”? That Mackenzie? Born in Park Hill?’

  ‘Yep, The Bastard. Our esteemed CEO was born right here, apparently. It’s in the newspaper cuttings I checked out. Self-made man. Millionaire.’

  ‘I never knew that. Just goes to show – social mobility used to happen.’

  ‘I can’t see that happening today. Can you? Can you see one of these kids going on to manage a media conglomerate?’

  ‘Not really.’ I paused. ‘I think this was a happy building. I think this was a place that was built with the right intentions, and I think that…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Inspired speech, big boy.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Me and Kate walked down the steps to the ground floor. The sound of our stomping echoed around the stairwell. It sometimes seemed to me that buildings were alive, especially when they heaved and sighed like this one. Bel would have liked that; she believed that these things were organisms in some sense, not just inanimate
objects we can treat like shit. We walked out towards the edge of the ridge where the hill fell away down to the railway tracks in the canyon, Sheffield city centre on the other side. We turned round and looked back at the building.

  ‘Look up there,’ said Kate, gesturing to the roof of the flats above the I Love You bridge.

  ‘What the fuck is he up to?’

  ‘Beats me, but he’s going to get himself killed if he gets it wrong.’

  Baxter was limbering up for something.

  Bob sauntered over. ‘You’ve got to see this. He’s lost his fucking marbles this time.’

  *

  Baxter stretched and twisted then went off like a gun. He ran at full pelt along the roof line, then somehow span himself round and began to perform a series of repeated backwards somersaults across the top of the flats. He must have done about twenty in a row. He finished the demented routine with an elaborate double flip of the kind you’d see in the Olympics – at this point he was only about eight feet shy of a very long drop indeed.

  ‘He wants to die?’ said Janusz, matter-of-factly.

  ‘He does, but… why?’ asked Shazia.

  Janusz shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ said Bob.

  Kate scowled at Bob.

  ‘What? I’m just saying what we’re all thinking. Why did I sign him up for this? I should’ve known better. Even Ralph fucking Marks would’ve been less annoying.’ Bob sighed. ‘And he’s long gone too!’

  Kate’s face turned beetroot, looked like it was about to explode. ‘Will you shut up?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Bob looked at his shoes. ‘Right, let’s get this pissing shoot set up so we can go and get some fish ’n’ chips.’

  ‘I’ll have a battered sausage,’ I added.

  ‘You disgust me.’ He turned to Kate. ‘Are you sure those kids aren’t going to nick anything?’

  ‘Not with me around they’re not,’ she said. She strolled over to where a gaggle of estate kids had assembled with bicycles and began talking to them like a teacher would. The kids smiled, harmless, excited.