The Wall in the Head

by Christopher Beanland

  Benedetti: ‘Ham finger rolls, Dundee cake and a fruit pie. It’s not exactly what they served when they opened the great campanile at Siena is it? But it’ll have to do, I suppose. Now, Seddon. Come over here, lad.’

  Seddon: ‘Sir?’

  Benedetti: ‘Now, Seddon. I’m only going to ask you this once. You and Harris absolutely, definitely cleared ALL of the custard powder out from the factory? Is this correct?’

  [Seddon scratches his head.]

  Seddon: ‘Absolutely, sir.’

  [Flashback to Harris and Seddon inside the factory. Harris kicks a football, which clanks into an industrial-sized tin of custard powder, jolts it, and causes yellowy soup to leap out.]

  Harris: ‘The rainwater’s turned the powder to bloody custard!’

  [They both chortle.]

  Benedetti: ‘Seddon…’

  Seddon: ‘Not to worry at all, Mr Benedetti. No custard. Not a drop.’

  *

  [Cut to half an hour later. The Minister and his entourage have arrived in a black car. The Minister greets the council dignitaries. He views the plans for the new development and then walks over to the table with the plunger on it. Mrs Pershore hands out bowls of apple pie to everyone standing around. Benedetti stands at the mic next to the table, tamping his pipe and wearing a face like a proud father on his daughter’s wedding day.]

  Benedetti: ‘It gives me great pleasure, as chief planning officer of Birmingham, to welcome the Minister to our progressive and civilised city – a city which we are civilising…’

  [Seddon and Harris walk in front of the table, conversing; Harris is carrying some wood, and Seddon a tin of paint. Seddon: ‘…and then she showed me it.’ Harris: ‘No bloody way!’]

  [Benedetti looks pained and clears his throat]

  Benedetti: ‘…a city we are working very hard to civilise and progress… ivise. And so, without further ado, I’d like to invite the Minister to press the plunger, which will signal the end of the old era of industrial Birmingham and the beginning of the new Birmingham, by removing the eyesore of this old custard factory. And while the Minister gets his plunging hand ready, I’d like to thank Mrs Pershore for baking this exquisite apple pie. And can I remind you that you won’t have to forgo your custard – it will be made in a new purpose-built, automated plant, which will be opening at Dawley New Town next year.’

  The Minister: ‘Thank you Mr Bemeletti, for the invitation. This government is committed to progress, and measurable progress at that, and today we progress on the issue of custard manufacture. Today is a big day, and I’d like to announce that when we remove this dirty old Victorian factory using dynamite, this government will have been responsible for blowing up a thousand buildings since the start of office, a quite exemplary number I think you’ll all agree. Britain today is about moving. Moving forwards. Moving upwards. Moving things out of the way, so we can move other things… into the… way. And that’s just what Birmingham is doing under the exemplary tutelage of Mr Remejetti here. Now… I’d like you to all move forwards with us, move forwards as a Britain united, move forwards as a Midlands united, and move forwards to a better era – with better custard. And I for one am going to enjoy getting my chops around Mrs Pershore’s sweet pie very much.’

  [Tittering from guests and a gentle volley of applause. The Minister smiles and pauses with his hands on the plunger while the photographer from the Evening Brummie newspaper captures the moment for posterity. Smiling, the Minister pushes down on the plunger and picks up his bowl of pie. After a delay of about three seconds, the factory explodes in spectacular style; it sounds like a bomb has gone off. The explosion takes everyone by surprise. Benedetti looks shocked. Some women let out screams. People look at each other to check everything’s alright. The ground begins to vibrate and a cloud of dust starts to coat the scene.]

  Benedetti: ‘What the blazes…?’

  Rocaster: ‘I think that was a bit too much dynamite, Mr Benedetti. Just a little on the high side perhaps.’

  [The sky turns faded-citrus pale as a storm of gloopy custard suddenly begins to pelt down.]

  Benedetti: ‘Rocaster, what the hell is that yellow…? Those imbeciles!’

  Rocaster: ‘Er… That’s custard, Mr Benedetti.’

  [Rocaster holds out his right index finger. A yellow dollop lands on the finger. He sticks his finger in his mouth and sucks the yellow gloop down. His face remains expressionless.]

  Rocaster: ‘Definitely custard.’

  [The custard begins to fall with vigour now on the assembled guests, covering heads, bodies and clothes in lemon-coloured gunk. A massive custard missile hits Benedetti so hard he falls to the floor. Women scream; men curse. Mrs Pershore is visibly on the verge of tears. The Minister looks aghast, but soon we can’t see his face as his head becomes enveloped in a giant globule of yellow dessert. The custard slides down his face and falls into the bowl of apple pie he is holding daintily at chest level. The Minister scoops up a spoonful, puts it into his mouth and swallows. Benedetti scrambles up to his feet but is now coated from head to toe in yellow sauce.]

  Benedetti: ‘SEDDDDDDDDON.’

  [Crash-zoom on Seddon, who’s laughing hysterically and wiping tears away from his eyes.]

  Seddon: ‘Bostin!’

  *

  2008

  I stood in the bar and watched him sitting in silence; he was oblivious to anything. He just stared through the window at the world outside our strange cocoon. He seemed to be entranced by a particular spot on the ground a few feet away from the Mids TV Tower. Why was he looking at this spot, this piece of plaza? Did it mean something to him? I noticed how pale his complexion was today.

  Baxter was a writer who came via academia, came via books, came up a path paved with knowledge. He deigned to do telly, but of course he hated it; he hated the people watching all the more. He hated the audience, hated Brummies, hated people who liked any of the shows Bob and I made. He played with the viewers; he wrote private jokes everywhere. In his defence he burned with a ferocity of spirit I couldn’t match, a hot fiery envelope of flesh surrounding a brain which begged for attention. He was an arch modernist who took risks and provoked, believed in the future, believed in the cerebral, made programmes that didn’t make compromises. Belinda liked his programmes. I sometimes think she liked him. What future was there left, though? High-minded discourse in mass media had been binned. Belinda said things like that. She was right. We’d have to travel backwards to the past to see any kind of future, any kind of… something clever on Mids TV.

  Baxter became the leading artistic light of the Midlands, presenting many of the cultural documentaries that Mids TV made. And like me, his fame never spread down the M1 to London and thence around the UK, and thus you probably won’t have heard of him.

  Baxter’s flame did not burn for long. Although he could still muster the spirit and bravado to present on TV, to say things with meaning and conviction, to speak like an actor should (even though he was a writer, an academic), he was a writer long past his days of being able to write anything worthwhile himself. Bob reckoned it was the drugs – they’d fucked him, he’d fucked himself. I’d have to write for him now.

  Unseen, I left him to it and walked upstairs to the production office. Not a single person was in, not even Bob or Kate. I walked into Bob’s office. There was a giant Welcome To The Masshouse poster on the far wall. It was obviously pinched from a bus shelter. The poster was abstracted and very colourful, and at the bottom a line of text read, Coming to Mids TV, every Friday at 10:30p.m., this autumn.

  On Bob’s desk there was a hardback copy of Baxter’s debut novel, Going Round And Round And Round In Circles Until You Die. It was obviously a crutch for Baxter to have this document near him constantly, a reminder that he was capable of something – a concrete reminder of that fact. His skin was thin. Why was it in Bob’s office though? Maybe Baxter had brought it in to use as a weapon during one of their regular ‘brainstorming’ sessions. I strained to
lift the tome, flopping it down on my lap and opening it at the beginning.

  *

  Awake. Become. Come. Defenestrate. End. Fenestrate. Gouge. Hurt. I. Jay. Kinetogenic. Litmus. Meander. Northwards. Or. Perish. Query. Register. Sate. Tumble. Uniformed. Veranda. Wayzgoose. Xenodochium. Yttriferous. Zenzizenzizenzic.

  I play literary tricks. On my readers. On my readers’ eyes. On my readers’ ‘I’s.

  I.

  Play.

  Tri.cks

  I’m talking to you! I’m fucking talking to you! I’M FUCKING TALKING TO YOU. I am a writer, riter, righter; esconced on top of bus, on bus bus bus. Daily I write words in the fish n chip stink of this top deck, in the beer stink of this top deck, in the fags sink of this top deck. I am causing all the stinks, for I am eating pie n chips, eating beer, eating fags. I am an unhappy writer stuck up here and the only way to escape is to use my jaculiferous words as weapons. It’s a case of writing as vaccimulgence. One day these words will be my cure, they will cause decrudescence of the mind and body.

  For now, round and round and round me goes on this Godforsaken bus – this diesel-powered ekka – with people poking questions in me ears and poking their looks in me eyes. And you, you’re the worst. You prurient bastard, thinking like that as you read these pages, thinking about me me me.

  But really, what can literature…

  *

  It goes on in this vein for rather a long time.

  The book was conceived and written in the suburbs of Birmingham while Baxter was recovering from the emotional trauma of the end of a romantic relationship. A secondary-school English teacher from Bradford, a woman he’d first met at uni, had cheated on him with a crisp-factory foreman from her hometown, and Baxter had discovered the betrayal. He retreated to the number 11 bus, circumnavigating Birmingham on a daily basis, chain-smoking and imbibing Birmingham Bitter from a can on the top deck, writing in hefty notebooks. His own loneliness gave him the fuel he needed, and the flânerie gave his writing the fire. His novel was an artefact of complete discontent, of powerful dislocation, of profound loss. The novel’s protagonist, ‘The Narrator’, was, of course, a disconsolate writer who was travelling Birmingham’s suburbs by bus. And as you’ve seen, he was addicted to addressing the reader at every possible opportunity. Can you work out why he’d do this? You, yes, you. What do you reckon? Because to me it seems like a cheap device. And another thing – why would Baxter set a novel in Birmingham? Ask yourself that. This must have been one reason why he hasn’t skipped town to a literary life in London. I can’t imagine the sales figures for this tome were exactly stellar. I had to set TV shows in Brum, write about Brum – because that’s what regional TV is. It’s close to home. But with a bloody book, you could set it anywhere. Why Brum? For one thing, you’re immediately destroying any potential American market, as they think there’s only one Birmingham – it’s theirs and it isn’t in the middle of the English Midlands, it’s in the middle of the American South.

  *

  The outline of (English) Brum on a map is the shape of an Abominable Snowman creeping from left to right. Its head is Sutton Coldfield (the posh bit), its heart, of course, the city centre. And then there’s all this body: all these arms and legs dangling down, all this flappy skin, all these southern suburbs, all these dual carriageways and all these cul-de-sacs, all these roundabouts and all these supermarkets. Trees fight with factories, railway yards scrap with canals, gardens have a punch up with motorway flyovers, and pubs play fisticuffs with gyratory junctions and DIY-outlet big boxes. No wonder Baxter lost his marbles going round on that bus all day every day.

  Ten Brutalist Buildings

  By Belinda Schneider

  Chapter Nine

  Nowheresville, built by nobodies

  Brutalist buildings, and especially brutalist mega-villages with multiple levels and multiple uses, are enigmatic beasts. Many of them were never written about by the architecture press in the 1960s and ’70s; many were never visited by people from capital cities. You stumble on a building here or a planned development there and you wonder what it’s about. You wonder who designed it – half the time you can’t find that out. You wonder what people thought of it when it opened – maybe a local paper would have asked them; mostly it wouldn’t have. There are some famous buildings and some famous architects, but not very many. Brutalism is really a story of nobodies building in nowheresville. Small cities around the world, provincial architects just doing a job or two. The architects who did New Street Station signal box in Birmingham are no superstars. They just plodded away. These were buildings by architects who weren’t famous, in cities that weren’t glamorous. But those architects believed in something, and they believed in themselves – in their own ability to construct something exciting and utopian. But it was always an anonymous utopia. A painter’s paintings have a nametag next to them and a signature on them; a book has the writer’s name on the cover. Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of buildings have no nameplate; no one knows or cares who built them. Our brutalist buildings – the ones I (and I suspect you, if you’re reading this) love – are only recognisable to a few people who know what they’re looking at. Even worse, sometimes the real designer of the building is erased from history completely and the boss takes the credit. I draw your attention here to the silver plaque on the side of Eros House. The bloody boss has taken the credit there – if you want to know the name of the real genius who designed it, well, it’s not on that plaque. I’ll happily tell you who it is after class. That’s architecture. The reason I’m not banging on about the superstar starchitects of the 1960s and ’70s (or even the ones with not-so-starring roles) in this book is that, to me, it seems like they want to be enigmatic; they want their buildings to be as well. That it’s sort of ordained to have this mystery surrounding buildings and who authored them.

  At least Eros House is still there. A present-day architect talked to me recently about designing a replacement for one of the many brutalist buildings we’ve decided to tear down. He said he liked what was being demolished, and he liked brutalism. He seemed sheepish. He guffed out the right buzzwords but didn’t believe in himself or in his work or in the world that we live in today. He was embarrassed. His designs were appalling. I think he knew it.

  *

  Still no one in the production office. Mids TV was becoming a ghost town. I went back to look at the Welcome To The Masshouse poster. There I was, about two inches tall, in the background. Dressed in stereotypical Victorian prison uniform – black and white stripes, ball and chain attached to my leg. My acting career was very short-lived. I wrote a sketch for Welcome To The Masshouse, the premise of which was that a poor writer had come up with an idea – to get locked up and sent to prison as the perfect fillip to finish a book. The idea had come from watching a kid’s cartoon at Christmas where the main character – some kind of anthropomorphised mammal – was too poor to afford any Christmas luxuries, and too cold to bear the whole frosty festive farrago. So he’d deliberately committed a crime so the police would lock him away somewhere warm where the grub was free.

  In the Welcome To The Masshouse version I was made up to look like I was starving and diseased. I slashed the tyres on a panda car (in front of a policeman) so I would be sent to jail. I then explained, from my prison cell, that it was indeed the perfect place to write. You didn’t have to pay for rent, you didn’t have to pay for food, and there were few outside distractions, like, well – anything at all apart from lifting weights. All great for the novel. The screws even helped out with a touch of on-the-fly lit crit. I was terrible in the sketch: hammy and sweaty and stiff. Bob and I joked about it, but he was quite firm that I’d be behind the camera from then on. One acting career: over. Cut. I was happy – who wants to be a performer?

  It sometimes struck me when I was listening to other people read out my lines that they weren’t funny at all. Had they ever been? When I had an idea and it made me chuckle it felt good, fresh. But after I’d written, edite
d, read that idea, heard other people speaking it over and over again – well, then it hardly ever seemed funny at all. Was I even a comedy writer? Had I ever been? Bob had me penning scripts for any old shit that Mids was producing. Light entertainment, quizzes, documentaries. Funniness, such as you have it, drains away with age too. You get less funny as you age. It just vanishes with time. But then what was the value in funniness? Was something funny less valuable than something serious? Bel liked it when I wrote things that attacked people in power, but she didn’t like it when I took the piss out of things that were rather closer to her heart. She believed in sincerity of purpose and result. Well, that made sense. Some of the ‘serious’ stuff I wrote was shite because I tossed it off, didn’t put any effort in. Knew that I had to pen a thousand words by the end of the evening and just typed away frantically like a newspaper journalist on deadline. Some of it, like Hail To The Brummies, was carefully considered and sincere and written with affection. Audiences could tell, couldn’t they?

  It was good to do different jobs, to write different things. You need to move on in life. Bob could have been a comic, an actor and a performer forever. But he moved on. He did different things. I don’t think that becoming a game show presenter was really the natural career choice for him – being pissed on and barked at. And that was just the human competitors on I Love My Dog! But it paid the bills and kept him busy. I think it’s good that he’s behind the camera now, pulling the levers, giving the directions, producing, running the show. No one would have believed that he’d end up as programme director and ultimately, de facto, the most senior member of the team in Birmingham, but then no one would have thought that Mids, that broadcasting behemoth, would have ended up with a team so decimated that a pisshead like Bob would emerge as the only passable candidate to lead this ragtag bunch from the pub to the studio and back again.