The Wall in the Head

by Christopher Beanland

  ‘Is this working?’ I asked Bob. ‘Really?’

  He didn’t reply. He just cast his eye over the castellated skyline of Sheffield.

  ‘It’s just… well, we both know… adapting books for the screen. Sometimes it turns into a dog’s dinner. Books are meant to be read, and scripts are written to be filmed.’

  ‘I know. It’ll be alright. I think. Trust me.’

  *

  This is a dream:

  Belinda is dancing. She sways and ducks and shimmies for me and me and me, just me. A summer dress floats around her lithe body. Her lips are bursting, rose-tinted. Her eyes are half-closed to defend against the brightness. We’re by the sea wall at Alghero. The light is fierce and the sun bakes the scene. She grabs a lamppost and twirls around it, then hauls herself up onto the wall itself and dances along the length of it. She puts her arms out and I help her down, supporting her; I can’t feel a thing, she’s weightless. She dances round a trebuchet that had been left on the piazza in front of the sea wall by a giant who’d finished playing his war games for the day. My Steadicam eyes follow her round to the left, and she grabs a waiter who’s standing by the door of a restaurant, trying to encourage tourists inside. She dances with him. He jigs along in good spirits. Then she turns and fixes her missile lock on me. She dramatically slides over like a ballroom dancer – first one foot then the other, until she’s right in front of my face. She’s open and blinking, smiling and perfect. Willing me to kiss her.

  Ten Brutalist Buildings

  By Belinda Schneider

  Chapter Seven

  On building

  Do you know what we forget about? We forget about the builders. Buildings aren’t built by machines; they’re built by humans. Buildings aren’t designed by machines either; they’re designed by the hand of a person.

  The words associated with building flit around my head. ‘Sites’ and ‘plant’ and ‘plans’ and ‘spirit levels’. They are evocative; they speak of more than just blind bricks and dead mortar. When you build brutalist buildings, men must mix concrete. They drive it to the building site. They pour it and they shape it. Concrete is basically a huge chemical reaction, yet it’s something more primal than that too. The immense natural forces that form rocks and rivers are invoked when we pour concrete. The power we unleash is beyond our comprehension. Concrete freezes or sets or sticks or hardens or however you like to think of it. It’s our answer to stone, our answer to the very part of the earth we stand on. The concrete we pour stays in place forever if we want it to be there for that long. And those men that do it are like so many ants in a colony. You watch them work, each doing a job, each one (perversely) invisible in their high-visibility jackets and hard hats. Hidden in plain sight. Pushing and pulling, heaving and lumping and smashing and smoking and hitting and measuring and cursing and believing in the rightness of the job they’re doing. The job. These are some of the real heroes of our story. And yet who gives them a second thought? No book of architecture mentions the builders. Least of all by their names. But how can I even know their names? Architects are often illusions once their buildings go up; builders are scarcely even an idea. We can’t even trust ourselves to say we really saw them, because we turn the other way, we put boards up around building sites, we pretend towers just rise and concrete just flows. In hot, dusty, dangerous emerging new cities where European rules of fair play don’t apply, we close our eyes as men fall like ragdolls and splat like flies. They die for our architecture and we don’t even know their names. What are their names? Without them we’d be nothing. We’d have nothing. Our cities are made by people. And then they are made once more by the people who populate them, who create their lives in the cities and inside our brutalist buildings. Hearts and minds are inside, hidden mostly. Maybe architects should be immured in their own buildings, set in their own concrete; maybe they should infect a building with their own spirit as a nod to the builders who’ve done the leg work and the arm work. Why don’t we fill brutalist buildings with people, have them as 3D graveyards? I’d be happy to be interred inside my favourite building when I’m gone. Rather that than in the creepy churchyard or the deserted cemetery. You’d never be lonely, and the building would come alive with even more humanity.

  25

  2005

  ‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this Birmingham University event. Tonight we have five speakers putting the case for different styles of architecture – each has picked one as their favourite, and we’ll see who wins at the end of the night. The styles that will be duking it out tonight are Georgian, classical, post-modern, Gothic and brutalist. So, first on stage, I’d like to introduce Belinda Schneider, who’ll be arguing the case for brutalism.’

  I thought architecture was supposed to be dynamic. This lot looked like they’d been wheeled in from the hospital round the corner. A trickle of applause reached a damp crescendo, then subsided. Lots of coughing followed. Two women in their eighties, who were seated next to me, rummaged in a handbag – I presumed one of them owned it – and relieved it of a pack of the type of disgusting sugary boiled sweets that are fit only for the glovebox of an old car. They loudly unwrapped the sweets and muttered something about them ‘getting smaller’ as Bel took the stage.

  She said, ‘Hello,’ then pressed a button. The screen behind her read GLOBAL PROGRESSIVENESS.

  She continued. ‘What if, instead of “brutalism”, the most exciting type of architecture we’ve had for 200 years was known as global progressiveness? It’s progressive – in moral character and in its sheer artistic bravado, its bold, bulky bravery. And it’s global. Just an idea. Maybe you’ve got a better one. Really, “brutalism” could be called anything. Brutalism was a word that ended up being pejorative. Though today, perhaps we can see that it’s been reclaimed as a positive thing. Anyway. Let’s look at some unrepentant buildings.’

  She pressed the button again – and then again after each slide had depicted the building she mentioned. Clicks. After. Each. Paragraph.

  ‘Skopje, Macedonia. The Central Post Office.’

  ‘Scarborough, Canada. A university.’

  ‘Lyon, France. Couvent de la Tourette.’

  ‘Buffalo, USA. Courthouse.’

  ‘Marseille, France. Unité d’Habitation apartments.’

  ‘Vienna, Austria. Wotruba Church.’

  She ran her eyes over the audience. ‘Look how inventive these buildings are, how sculptural. Yet they’re just lumps of concrete!’

  ‘Freiburg, Germany. An office block.’

  ‘Poplar, Britain. A housing estate. Several, actually, next to each other.’

  ‘Sao Paulo, Brazil. The MASP art gallery.’

  ‘Gateshead, Britain. A car park and rooftop cafe on top of a shopping centre.’

  ‘Sydney, Australia. University campus.’

  ‘Chandigarh, India. A whole city.’

  ‘Tokyo, Japan. Rissho University.’

  ‘Brutalism was globalised, and it was exciting. It was the future. Brutalism was honest, raw, avant-garde, a cry for more and a call to arms. Was it inhuman? In scale – perhaps; in looks – possibly. It was often provocative and it was often overwhelming. And sometimes we want an architecture that doesn’t play nice, doesn’t kowtow. But what people forget is how nurturing it could be too. Look inside those buildings and see how warm and inviting they can be, how they can be like cocoons protecting you from the world. There are so many plazas and cosy libraries and cafes and seating areas that we forget about. A true style for our times. A modern modernism. A style which wanted to be utopian, not dystopian – because the architects felt that what went before had let people and cities down. This new style would match up to the new way we were going to live our lives. Harmoniously. Purposefully. Peacefully. With technology as our servant.’

  Bel looked down, paused, then flashed a wide smile at the audience. Some muttering wafted from around me. People seemed perplexed. Intrigued. ‘I had another thought on the way here today. Do you want t
o hear it?’

  A man in the audience piped up. ‘Of course!’ Some others giggled. The mood was instantly leavened.

  ‘OK, so I was thinking about ageing. Bet a few of you lot know about that!’ More laughter. I was spellbound by how Bel was working the room like a stand-up comic, like a… TV presenter. Fuck. Maybe she was going to end up on Mids TV one day, talking about this stuff. It would make a welcome change from Baxter. I’d prefer to hear my wife on TV, to show her off to the whole region too. I could even write a bloody show for her.

  ‘I was thinking about how age affects our view of architecture, just as age affects our view of… well, human-tecture.’ Some more laughs. Bel winked. ‘We love babies; they are so magical.’ She paused for a split second. I knew how much she wanted children. How we might not be able to have them. It’s not as easy as you’re led to believe. There are little hiccups along the way that you’d never dream of. ‘We love babies and we love new buildings – even the shit ones. Well, a new building is so shiny and fresh, how could you not love it? But then buildings in their teens and twenties, they’re not really appreciated. Teenagers, young people – they’re annoying, aren’t they? Self-centred, desperate to change the world, angst-ridden, try-hards, not really knowing their place. Same with buildings. People in middle age, they mellow. They’re parents, they’re artists and writers and thinkers and doers, they’re calm and caring. They’re attractive. Same with buildings – give them fifty years and suddenly we see their appealing side, the way they’ve adapted to their world, to their surroundings. Except so many of these great buildings aren’t even given until their fiftieth birthday – they’re snuffed out in their prime. Before we can come to some accommodation with them.’ She paused. ‘Think about colour. What colour are the buildings we’re in?’

  A student piped up. ‘Red?’ (It was said with a rising inflection? You know how all young people speak now?)

  ‘Red, exactly. These buildings are a deep, controversial red. Sexual, I’d say. Gosh. Forthright, certainly. Loads of buildings in Birmingham are red. The colour, the way the bricks or the tiles are fired, it doesn’t wear away. It’s strident. People hated that red. Now we think it’s quaint. How can the colour of fire and anger be quaint? But that’s the way we see it now. Arts and Crafts niceness. Well, grey – concrete’s colour – people have despised that. But why? Again it’s just a point in time. Give it a hundred years, everything might be… stupidly, garishly coloured like a Tokyo crossroads, like a shopping centre, like a funfair. Maybe then that sombre, sober grey will suddenly seem so reserved and civilised. Buildings live in a time. But if they’re lucky, if we do things right, they should live through many times – times that might eventually end up being kind – kinder – to them.’

  Even I was becoming convinced. Georgian architecture won on the night, of course. There were a lot of old folk here – set in their ways; respectable, conformist, non-boat rocking types clad in cardies. But with her superior argument, her sultry and informal presentation and an air of total belief in what she was saying – bordering on devotion – Bel and her brutalism came in a very respectable second place. Partly because she was the most charming and least soporific speaker – not soporific at all in fact. When I heard Bel speak I wanted to listen. I wasn’t the only one.

  26

  2008

  Janusz looked like he was on his way to dreamland. His head kept lolling to the side, then abruptly snapping back to rigid as he tried to jolt himself awake. We’d been driving for over an hour, maybe two. The van was calm and quiet, the radio off. Everyone seemed to be dozing. From my seat next to the left side window I could read each road sign – each instruction, each letter-shaped white island floating on a light-blue sea, each huge signboard illuminated by a fading fuchsia sky, each advertisement aimed at another cluster of humans just like us. The sun was beginning its daily death. Each mile down equalled a mile nearer to home and a mile nearer to darkness. We came off the M42 onto one of those extended, brusque slip roads that connects one motorway with another. This slip road ran through fields and acted like it owned the landscape, carving its way right through farmland, going wherever it sodding well wanted. Tower blocks surprised me on the horizon, suddenly rearing up right in front of us, and we motored straight for them. Then, at the last minute, we curved up to the right and joined the M6. The countryside was over. Now the tower blocks had appeared on my left, hard on the left, right on the left, right there – right outside the window, right up against us. An aggressive move. They wanted to be seen, to start a fight perhaps. ‘Come on then!’ they seemed to shout. One vanished, then another appeared, and another, and another. Castle Bromwich. The tower blocks kept appearing. They were coloured-in as the 1970s was coloured-in: beige, brown, grey, black. Dusk did them no favours. They wore windows and balconies, placed so regularly that everything about them seemed unnaturally managed – mismanaged? I’d seen them before, driving into Birmingham on this route, but I’d never had a chance to really stare at them before. I saw a man standing on a balcony three floors down from the summit of one of the blocks. He was motionless, just staring out into space, perhaps staring at the waning sun. Perhaps just having a fag. He could have been a statue. Still more of them kept appearing, a real army now. Dozens in total; I lost count. Sunlight glinted off them. The streetlights at the side of the road broke each scene down into one-second frames as we passed each pole – cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. We seemed to be floating; it all looked like an apparition. But it wasn’t, it was just the impression you got when you saw them from a moving vehicle. And maybe those tower blocks had been designed to be seen like this. To be floated past in the middle lane of the M6 at 65 miles per hour. Maybe that’s what Birmingham wanted everyone to see. To see its proud flats from the window of the car. We passed the last block. The road we were on was high up now. From the top of the viaduct you could see the city skyline, tantalising and distant, just out of reach. Growing imperceptibly. I was aware of a jolt every time we passed over joins in the carriageway – bang… bang… bang…

  The sign said Birmingham Central. Janusz steered the minibus off the motorway. This was the best way to enter Brum. We swooped high in the air, like a bird of prey, over the tangle of Spaghetti Junction slip roads, but these slip roads were narrow and short; the effect was like riding a rollercoaster. We crested, then fell forwards, down, faster. A churning in my stomach, a grin on my face. Onto the Aston Expressway. Over on the right I caught sight of traffic thundering towards us. There’s no barrier down the middle of the carriageway. It’s visceral to be on Brum’s wide roads – the thrill, the speed, the notion of death round the next corner, the city unfolding itself but never revealing everything. Just glimpses. Now we were in a cutting, the skyline playing hide and seek. Then out as quick as a flash. All the biggest buildings right next to the road – where they can be seen. Everything designed for the driver. Occasional pedestrians up on bridges or emerging from subways, forlorn wanderers with strained orange or white supermarket carrier bags weighing their arms down. The best bit of all now. Approaching the city centre. In other cities the Expressway would have terminated and you’d be coughed out onto older, slower streets. Not Brum. It keeps going. Still double lanes. The road jumps up over Lancaster Circus. It’s like you’re flying. (This very point, right here, right over the very middle of Lancaster Circus, fascinated me. Julie – that short-lived girlfriend from many years ago. In halls at Aston University. Another type of tower block, ‘a better class of people’, they said. Not much more than 500 yards away. When I showered in her stale, communal bathroom on the twentieth floor, I could see right across and down to this precise point, to this flyover. I could watch the cars flying through the air from right to left, a careless stream, a ceaseless conveyor belt. As I was washing my hair and soaping my body. It was an electrifying sight watching this flyover flurry bubbling through that little corner of window. Everything moving, everyone moving, nothing stopping. Where were they going? From her kitchen window on
the opposite side of the block I could see down to Masshouse Circus – the place where I was drawn on strange days and nights without really knowing why, drawn to sit with those tramps, necking high-alcohol cider and smoking fake cigarettes bought in Eastern Europe. Especially after Bel’s accident. I went down there a lot in those few weeks. I wasn’t afraid of the traffic, the traffic that robbed me of happiness. I wanted to be near it, to understand it.)

  Round a curve. Now the road heads down again, under St Chad’s Circus, with its mean Z-bend that tested a tired Janusz’s resolve. But he got us through it. Out the other side, and I could see the BT Tower looming on my right, a huge monster. I wanted so desperately to go through the tunnel with the sign that reads QUEENSWAY above the portal, but Janusz steered us left, up the hill of Great Charles Street, towards Paradise Circus. The library rose on my left, looking so glum yet so convincing, sober and absolutely ideally placed above a bloody road. We plunged underneath it. I loved the Birmingham City Council-branded stripes of red and blue inside this tunnel beneath the library. Sharp right. Mids TV ahead. Sharp left. A little further, another left, into the car park. Janusz parked and switched off the engine. He yawned extravagantly. No one in any hurry to move. Kate made a face like a contented child and squeezed my leg tenderly. ‘Come on then, mister.’ The grind of the sliding door opening. I felt dizzy and apprehensive out on the tarmac, outside the hermetic world of the minibus. Cold air pricked my cheeks, woke me up. The sun had disappeared behind the Repertory Theatre. The city seemed empty, it felt mournful. All those people travelling through, around, under, over. No one pausing, no one relaxing. I needed to go home. A shuffle over towards my car – silver, nondescript – and a button depressed on the keyring. The car greeted me in its own language with a ‘Wheek wheek’ and a wink of its indicator lights.