The Wall in the Head

by Christopher Beanland

  ‘That’s incredible, isn’t it? My wife wrote a book.’

  ‘What was this book?’

  ‘Ten Brutalist Buildings.’

  Marija’s mouth widened into a grin; her eyes brightened. She skipped off down the corridor like a caged songbird that had just been released. I heard some clattering and then she returned, grinning. She held a book aloft and opened the front cover. The signature of my dead wife appeared right in front of my eyes.

  ‘Isn’t this amazing? I went to see your wife speak and, after that, bought a copy of her book and she signed it. She was very charming. I’d love to meet her again.’

  My face fell. ‘Me too.’

  Marija looked confused.

  Silence.

  ‘She died,’ I said.

  Marija looked stunned. ‘I… Oh, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe it. What happened?’

  ‘She was riding her bike, and a lorry…’

  Marija looked horrified, hands raised to mouth. ‘Oh God…’ Marija raised her hands up over her face, defensively, and began to cry.

  ‘Really, it’s OK. You don’t have to.’ I offered her a tissue. She mopped her eyes.

  ‘I really was inspired by Belinda. I felt her work was important. You know? It meant something. It meant something… to me.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Please, I’d like to show you something.’ Marija gently took my hand and led me down the corridor, her manner of movement this time less like a freed songbird and more like a sad crow sloping across a lawn. Inside her bedroom, on the walls, were Marija’s paintings and photographs. I ran my eyes over the images. They showed people inside rooms, and the rooms were always like boxes: haunted perhaps, but somehow homely. The people were looking directly into my eyes. The images also showed people outside the kind of buildings Bel loved. The people were still looking directly into my eyes. Some of Marija’s paintings were in black and white, some in pastel shades of magenta or lavender.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘You like them? My entire practice, it’s inspired by the buildings Belinda loved. She made me see them in a way which… allowed me to make art about them.’

  Marija guided my eye across the room. ‘Look at this one.’

  ‘Sheffield.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  A bridge painted with graffiti. Clare Middleton I Love You Will U Marry Me.

  The power of the image hit me, almost physically. ‘I know this one,’ I admitted.

  Marija said, ‘Wow, you know it? Really?’ She kneeled down and pulled out a canvas as large as a coffee table, straining to lift it. ‘What about this one?’ I helped and we placed it on the bed. She pulled tissue paper away to reveal the image.

  ‘Birmingham Central Library. My favourite building. My muse!’ She giggled.

  ‘Belinda’s too.’ It was a sort of pop-art re-imaging of the library, arch pencil and ink lines jutting in and out, squaring off with each other, looking jagged and aggressive. A hypnotic whole when you stood back, almost enough to make you go cross-eyed. ‘It’s very good. We saw your work displayed inside this building, inside the Central Library.’

  ‘That’s amazing. And I’m so glad you like them.’ She turned to me. ‘You know, a lot of young artists are inspired by this stuff. Belinda’s name, and her book, they were both well known in art college. I, well, I grew up with this kind of architecture around me. My friends, my family, they were not… impressed by it. But to me it spoke. It sang! Skopje is a strange place. Belinda mentioned in the book she went there once.’

  ‘She did go. I remember she was taken with it. I didn’t even really know where it was, Marija, I’m sorry.’

  ‘No one does. My hope is that Skopje will be known for its architecture and its art. Maybe I can help that. I think there are so many underdogs, they deserve to be celebrated. That’s what I want my art to do. To take the invisible or the… misunderstood. To make people look at it in different ways. I only wish Belinda was here to look at it too.’

  ‘She loved your work too, Marija. She made me stare at your paintings and taught me about how to see.’

  ‘I should be so happy about knowing that fact, but all I can feel is sad.’ Marija sighed, head bowed; a long and pitiful sound squeezed from the back of her throat. A sigh which said there was some tragedy, something hidden in her own past perhaps. She moved closer and spontaneously hugged me. That hug provoked a strange feeling of both warmth and dislocation. She backed away and looked up at me, puppy-dog-eyed. ‘A drink for the guest?’ She looked bashful. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Love one.’

  The beeping horn of a van suddenly filled the air. It was incessant. I went over to the window and looked down to see Janusz hitting the steering wheel and laughing, and Bob waving up to me. Baxter stood on the pavement, stationary, smoking. It took me a good five minutes to work out how to open Marija’s bedroom window.

  Bob yelled up, ‘What the fuck have you been up to for the last 24 hours?’

  ‘Scouting!’ I replied, half-heartedly.

  He shook his head. ‘Well are we going to film this bit or not?’

  A voice behind me. ‘Who’s that?’ I turned to see Marija carrying two steaming mugs back into the bedroom.

  ‘My television colleagues,’ I offered. And after a pause, ‘My friends. Did I mention we’re making a film? About Bel’s books, about Bel’s buildings.’

  Marija’s sadness evaporated like water on a scorching day. ‘Here? Wow.’

  *

  I’d received an email from one of the programmers at the Barbican. They were running an event celebrating brutalist architecture. They’d heard about us making the Ten Brutalist Buildings film for Mids TV. Would I come and talk? If things weren’t too raw – and they completely understood if they were. After thinking it over I decided to do it. Bel would have loved the thought of me speaking about this stuff. It would have made her giggle. Some more information was supplied to me in advance of the evening. The programmer would meet me out in the gardens and take me through to the theatre where the event was to happen.

  I walked round the Barbican, which was impressively clean and modern, not a crime-ridden estate of the type you read about in the papers, but that’s probably because so many rich people live here. It didn’t test me like Thamesmead. Which was good as I still felt jittery from the previous night’s antics. In a corner a young artist was growing herbs and asked me if I’d like a herbal tea. She was about twenty or twenty-five maybe, and her smile was so wide and innocent. I watched her picking herbs and brewing teas for people and suddenly I realised that she’d only been going round to ask those she considered to be old folk. I held up my hands and stared at the wrinkles that were becoming more pronounced with every passing year. The skin losing its elasticity and wobbling like tripe. I plucked at the skin on my hand and watched with horror as this human jelly rippled. I drank a lemon thyme tea overlooking the water gardens. It was serene.

  ‘Donald?’ A woman in her fifties wearing a kind face and a floral dress approached me.

  She introduced herself as Eleanor, and told me that she had organised this event, that we’d been emailing. She chirruped that the theatre had sold out and she was very much looking forward to things. We walked through to the theatre, and I was fitted with a microphone by a guy with long, greasy hair and a black polo shirt on. Eleanor told me that there were two other speakers – an architect and a novelist. My role was simply to talk about Bel and her legacy, and to let the audience know about the documentary we were making, which, ‘A lot of our audience will be very excited about, me included!’

  As Eleanor chatted, I nodded and sipped a glass of white wine that had been handed to me, while not making it too obvious that it was very necessary for me to finish the wine to ameliorate my frayed nerves before the event began.

  A crowd of 200 people filed into the theatre, observing the group of us on stage. I finished the wine, the final gulp a greedy one.

  The lights went up and the evening began.r />
  ‘Good evening. My name’s Eleanor and I work here at the Barbican. Thank you all for coming. Tonight we’ll be exploring the world of brutalist architecture. And of course, we think this is not a bad place to do that.’

  The audience tittered.

  ‘Tonight we are very lucky to have three excellent speakers in conversation. Djende Mariosco is an architect who both refurbishes brutalist buildings to protect their legacy, and designs new buildings which evoke that brutalist spirit of excitement and utopia which I know we all love so much. And Aliana Wills is a young writer who has written a new novel which will be published by Discrepancy Publishing later this year and whose main theme is brutalism – and as far as I know, that’s a first! And perhaps – who knows – a last!’ Some mild laughter from the cheap seats. ‘Both Aliana and Djende were huge fans of Belinda Schneider and her amazing book Ten Brutalist Buildings – a book I loved and I’m sure you all did too. The news of Belinda’s death hit a lot of us very hard and it’s an incredible shame that she’s not here tonight. We are very lucky, though, to have Belinda’s husband, Donald, with us, and I really can’t say how happy we all are to have you along, Donald, to keep Belinda’s spirit alive. Now not all of you will know this, but Donald is actually in London filming a documentary about Belinda’s book – which will be transmitted in the next few months. So you’ll all be able to watch it. It really—’

  ‘If you live in the Midlands.’

  ‘Sorry, Donald, what was that?’

  ‘You’ll only be able to watch it if you live in the Midlands. It’s only on Mids TV, not any of the other regional channels.’

  ‘Well, that really is a shame. It should be on everywhere. I guess maybe it’ll be online later… or else we’ll all need to book train tickets to Birmingham to watch it when we find out—’

  ‘Northampton. You only need to go as far as Northampton; you can watch it from there.’

  ‘That’s very helpful of you to point out, Donald, thanks.’

  ‘Or Leamington Spa.’

  ‘Thanks… thanks so much again for being here. So I’d like to ask you to start, if that’s OK? Just by speaking about Belinda really, and what she hoped to achieve. Was she trying to… almost change the world? And do you think that the film – the documentary you’re making, that is – will help us to remember some of the things she did in her life and in her work… her work advocating that we save and love these buildings?’

  My heart began to race. I was nervous about speaking. It was the audience. The racks of seats ran up high above my normal field of vision. Almost all were occupied. A person sat in nearly every one, each with feelings, each made of tissue and hot blood. What did they think of me? The scene was a mass of blurring shapes, but if you sat still and stared, the lines arranged themselves into forms, and the forms arranged themselves into intricate faces, each completely unique, with their own sets of twitching features. There were old ladies with white hair, teenagers chewing gum, thirty-something men in round-framed glasses clutching their programmes to their chests.

  ‘Donald…?’

  A great cluster of people of people of people of people, a mass of humanity. I stroked my palms with my fingers. They were clammy. Did I mention my acting career was short-liv—

  ‘Donald…?’

  Right at the back. What the fuck? I squinted upwards. Right at the back. Two men stared down at me. One was old, the other middle-aged. The old one yelled.

  ‘Come on, old chap! We’ll be here all night.’

  ‘Mr Benedetti, I don’t think there’s any need for that. He’ll speak in his own time.’

  I was aware of some mumbling coming from the front rows of the crowd.

  I looked around the crowd again for some comfort. I coughed. I saw a blonde woman take a seat in one of the rows on the extreme right. She looked familiar.

  ‘Donald…?’

  The novelist, Aliana, put her hand on my knee and looked softly into my eyes. She mouthed, ‘Are you alright?’ The architect, Djende, shot me a puzzled glance.

  The doors to the theatre creaked open and two women walked in. One middle-aged, one much younger. They looked familiar. They both waved. The older one of them mimed ‘Hi’ and blew me a kiss. Kate and Marija. They hustled along a row near the back and found a pair of seats together. I stared at Kate. That calmed me. I cleared my throat, took a swig of water from a tumbler placed on the table in front of us, and began to speak about Belinda. The tension in the room started to lift; the pressure slowly exited like a balloon that had just been deflated. People listened. Kate gave me a thumbs-up gesture.

  After the event, the audience filed out. I went straight down to the press bar and poured as much white wine as I could fit into a glass – much to the bafflement and slight consternation of the barman, who told me, ‘It’s free, sir. Just ask and I’ll pour it.’ I exhaled, a great heaving, heavy sigh, and glugged the wine down in three desperate gasps. The alcohol hit me like a train and I felt woozy, hot and cold at the same time, calmed yet perky.

  ‘Donald.’ A voice behind me, approaching. ‘That was a very impressive bit of speaking.’ Only now did I notice just how beautiful Aliana was. She had a dusky skin tone and over-pronounced each word; each syllable was spoken with the utmost care. I was a lazy orator in comparison, oafish.

  ‘Thanks. Would you like a drink?’

  ‘That would be delightful, thank you.’

  I winked at the barman and he poured us two glasses of wine. I sipped in a civilised manner this time.

  ‘Belinda’s work… Belinda’s book. It touched me. It made me want to write. I just wanted to say how much her work meant to me, how much her writing meant to me. She’ll be very sadly missed.’

  Djende appeared too. He caught the end of what Aliana was saying and added, ‘I completely agree. Belinda’s book energised me too. It galvanised what I wanted to build, to design. My aim has always been to do justice to that wave of brutalism. To try and design buildings which had the same rigorous ethics and aesthetics as those 1960s brutalist buildings. I always knew I liked them, but I couldn’t find a way to say why I did. To justify what I felt, and I felt that there was something special there that most people didn’t or couldn’t understand. But Belinda, she expressed everything so perfectly. She was inspirational.’

  Aliana was nodding and smiling. ‘Djende put it so perfectly. She was inspiring. She saw something, and her work was so much about… feelings. It seemed impossible to me that you could mix this rationality: the cold, hard, rigour of concrete and brick and drawings on a board, with love and loss and human interaction with a space. But she did that. People say these places and these buildings are dehumanising, but Belinda was the lone voice saying “That’s not true”. Saying these are places where life flourishes, where people flourish. I never dreamed that I could write a novel where all the locations would be brutalist buildings and the characters would discuss the philosophies of architecture and love together! But Belinda’s book made it all seem possible. Belinda helped me to understand my place, my history too. My family lived in Chandigarh when I was young. My father was a civil servant with the regional government; my mother was a charity co-ordinator. The place was a mystery to me but also a fascination. You know it?’

  ‘I remember Bel talked about wanting to go, but she never made it. It’s in India, right? In the north?’

  ‘Exactly. In the Punjab. Between Delhi and Amritsar. It’s cold sometimes! Not how one imagines India. And the city is not how one imagines an Indian city either. Concrete palaces for the people, straight streets and brutalist blocks of flats. The most striking aspect is the public art everywhere – the giant open-palmed hands set into heavy, hard bases. They are a potent symbol of a city, I think. The districts of the city don’t have names like “Stoke Newington” or “Dalston”; they’re called Sector 8 or Sector 15. Very sci-fi in a way. I had to make sense of that, and even though Belinda didn’t mention Chandigarh specifically in her book, the ideas she talked about re
sonated with me once I’d moved back to Britain. I could imagine her writing about the place.’

  ‘I’m glad you liked it. I’m glad you both liked it.’

  ‘She must have been a wonderful person,’ said Djende, before smiling and slipping off to talk to a journalist who was standing nearby, holding a tape recorder.

  ‘Perhaps we could… talk more?’ said Aliana, leaving a gap which filled me with an odd mixture of emotions. Was I right to reply, after a pause, ‘I’d like that,’ and to watch Aliana’s eyes as they opened just a fraction more than they had before? It was hard to know the rules of this odd new game I was reluctantly playing.

  Aliana reached into her handbag, pulled out a card. It said:

  Aliana Wills

  Author

  07690_________

  a.wills@________

  ‘Why don’t you drop me a line and we could meet… for a coffee?’

  I considered for a moment. ‘I… will.’

  ‘Perfect.’ Aliana beamed. ‘Please excuse me, I must be going. I have to finish a book review for this weekend’s paper; it’s due in tomorrow. Might be a rather long night at the typewriter. It was lovely to meet you, Donald.’

  ‘You too. And I completely understand. I have to get up early to get the train back to Birmingham, and then we’re off to Berlin the following day to film the last part of Ten Brutalist Buildings.’

  ‘I hope it goes well.’

  I kissed her on the cheek. Her skin felt cool on my lips. ‘Thanks.’

  When I got off the train at New Street Station I felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder. I turned round to see New Street signal box. It looked like a crinkle-cut concrete chip. It made me remember Bel, made me remember her pointing it out to me when we were waiting to take our first train together from Brum to London. A text arrived at that moment from Aliana Wills. The signal box’s tinted windows winked at me, egging me on to read it. I didn’t though. Not yet.

  33

  I was woken by the shrill nagging of the alarm clock. I showered and put on cords, a shirt and a V-neck jumper. My stomach bulged inside the jumper. I possessed an old man’s paunch despite not eating properly for ages. How could that be? Beer perhaps? Outside, the air was frosty, and I didn’t know if I was shaking with the chill or with apprehension. I deliberately sat in silence in the back seat of the taxi, not making any eye contact as the driver threaded a back way through Tyseley then Yardley then on through Sheldon. He had his foot to the floor as if there was some kind of prize going for the first taxi to make it to the airport today. We took off as we crossed the railway tracks on the humpback bridge at Spring Road. Were we in a rally where I just couldn’t see the other competitors? My heart was in my mouth, but my mouth was closed. I wanted the driver to concentrate on the bloody road. I also didn’t want a conversation that went like this: