Driver: ‘Off anywhere nice?’
Me: ‘Actually my wife’s just died and I tried to kill myself twice recently because I’m so broken about losing her. Now I’m going to Berlin for my job – we’re filming some of a forthcoming TV programme there – but in truth I also see it as some kind of macabre pilgrimage, because that’s where I proposed to her and that’s where I married her. I have no idea what I’ll do or what I’ll find there.’
Driver: ‘Oh.’
I bought a coffee and stumbled into that weird no-man’s land between the two terminals. I went right up to the window that looks out onto the apron. The heat from the coffee steamed up the glass and blocked my view out towards the runway. Memories of Mum and Dad bringing me to the old terminal – which still sits over on the opposite side of the runway, a fat squatting duck of a building – as a kid to watch the planes taking off. Dad bought me a small model of a BAC 1-11 airliner from the little shop that day in 1974, and it was a toy that I treasured and treated with uncommon amounts of respect. Which made matters all the more unpleasant when the family Labrador, Ringo, choked to death on it almost exactly ten years later on 4 April 1984, the day this very building – Birmingham’s new airport terminal – opened. I was away at uni in Leeds, and my mum phoned to tell me the bad news. Ringo’s last day was also the first day of one of Belinda’s favourite novels – Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Places are often just pictures, points on maps, words, abstract ideas. You only make it to a fraction of them. You understand even fewer – maybe a maximum of ten in a lifetime. Even in today’s globalised world many people still live their whole lives in one city. People like me. Civilised people who nonetheless spend their days and nights in the same place, the same comfortable town. But while you’re curled up on the sofa watching TV with a mug of cocoa and a slice of cake, events are happening elsewhere. They happen in places you’ve never been to, places you can’t comprehend. Places you don’t know. Places with mysterious names. Because you can’t empathise with these events and these places, you ignore them. But when you do finally choose to venture to other places, the airport is the place that allows you to make this leap. It’s nothing less than a secret trapdoor between cities, between countries, between worlds. You walk in through an automatic door in Birmingham and you walk out through an automatic door in Berlin. Airports have this unnatural quality. It’s intoxicating. Airports are ethereal, tantalising. They offer the chance of escape, the dream of the ‘other’. Brum’s airport is like this. Mostly. The departures screens were like adverts for mysterious products that you could buy by simply getting on a plane. Or else these single words were coded messages that only made sense to a few people in the know. After security I headed to the departures lounge. The word Ashgabat turned from white to red and started flashing on all the screens. A man in a suit got up from the seat opposite, folding his paper, grabbing his briefcase and finishing his beer in one gulp. Was he a spy? He looked Russian. He was the exception though. I wished he was a spy. He looked glamorous, unknowable. I quickly surveyed the scene. Almost everyone else was schlepping around with rolling luggage and bright yellow shopping bags; they had bare legs, baggy clothes and tabloid newspapers. They were destined for the Midlands-on-Sea. Spain.
In the newsagents I spun a cylindrical display of books around. It wheeled towards me, offering up a selection of appalling mass-market paperbacks: travel guides, novels about vampires or murders, memoirs penned by reality TV stars. The contraption slowed its spinning until one book arrived right in front of me. Baxter was staring into my eyes. It was a copy of Going Round And Round And Round In Circles Until You Die. Discounted in the sale to 99p. And against all publishing convention it featured a photograph of a blacked-up Baxter on the cover. And when I say blacked-up, I don’t just mean his usual sartorial selection of all-black suit and polo neck; his face was also smeared in a crude tar make-up. Only his pinprick little eyes, those shifty little windows into his mind, were visible. And they were looking straight into my own soul.
*
Going Round And Round And Round In Circles Until You Die
By Baxter Turncastle
Chapter 9. The unending purgatory of the No. 11C Bus: Dying for something different
Still round; still round. Still round. Still. Round. Still going round. Still cuckolded. Sat there thinking, even the seat seemed to be arguing with me – with my arse at least. That bench so hard with its padding so inconsequential.
Some young women boarded, got upstairs, passed by. Walking past. I can’t believe it! Flirting with me like that so openly by brazenly walking past! Maybe it needs to be skoptsy for me. Cachinnation. At the expense of The Narrator, no doubt. Screaming. A frog jumpy jumpy along the floor and up onto my knee. I yelled at the creature, ‘I’m no batrachophagous. Scarper!’ It replied, ‘Rebbit!’ then ‘Fuck you!’ and eventually… hoppy up and out through window.
She was watching me. Oh yeah, she bloody sees me on this bus. She has a periscope in Bradford. She sees The Narrator’s bloody anger. Can’t contain it much longer. Defenestrate my arm up to the wrist but no further. Screaming and giggling from them females at the back.
Bus driver pops his head upstairs. ‘What the bloody ’ell’s goin’ on here? Y’oroight, mate?’ I tell him to piss off and ask who be drive bussy when it still wheels along carriageway without HIM at the controls.
‘Ow shit,’ comes the response. While he ducks back down it’s floccinaucinihilipilification for me, looking at the bus map and wondering which part of fucking Brum we’re in, which part we’re going to. Will this circular journey be my first and last?
A bang, bus wobbles, hearse been hit, coffin slides out, stiff slides out, crunched-up bones and human, red paste go up and all over windows. Fucking girls at the back REALLY screaming now, yelling: ‘Oh my God!!!’ ‘The blood!!!’ ‘Why couldn’t we have waited for the next bus!!!’, rushing downstairs to see what be happening, one of them I hear vomiting all over the stairs. THAT’s an accident waiting to happen.
I STEW. God, I stew. And in writing this encounter up, I wonder. Is it all just a fat case of adoxography?
*
‘Oi.’
I jumped. Bob strode over, proud as pie, brandishing a box in a sealed bag, a bottle of cola and two empty polystyrene cups. ‘Whatcha up to? Not in the mood for perfume shopping?’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘Are you reading… Baxter’s book?’ Bob puffed out his cheeks. ‘I don’t know what to make of this. Not at all. Are you secretly a fan?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘No, you are secretly a fan. Hmmm.’ Bob stared at my forehead. ‘What the fuck is going on in there? Do you want Baxter to like your writing? Do you want him to acknowledge you as an… artist or something? You want him to recognise that you’re as good as… no, a better writer than him, don’t you?’
‘I do not.’
‘Come on then.’
We walked over to some seats by the window and fell into them.
He ripped open the bag, groped at the box like a hungry fox and upended it. A bottle of Scotch slid out like a rat begging to be batted at a church fete. He poured generous measures into each cup and sighed contentedly. Then he sloshed cola into them both and slid one across the low plastic table between the seats. I took a sip, called him a heathen, and told him, ‘You’re not allowed to open bottles from the shop until you land.’
‘Do I look like I give a fuck?’ he said, without even looking at me.
We drank, staring out across the tarmac, our eyes drawn to the planes moving outside.
‘Do you remember when we came to film a sketch here for Welcome To The Masshouse, a few years after the airport had opened?’
‘I’ve tried to forget most of them.’
‘You remember! It was something about a Brummie airline – about how the plane just taxied down the M5… and how they had a new destination for the summer – Weston-super-Mare.’
‘Brum by the sea.’
‘Exactly.’
‘It was shit though, wasn’t it? The show.’
‘Complete shit. Well…? I mean there were… that one time. Well, OK, mostly. At least we had the dosh to make it though. Back then – ooh, 1980s, early ’90s – even then things were getting tight. It’s really a joke today. Do we make anything? Mids TV have been cutting the budgets every single year. The things we used to do – the dramas, the live dramas!’
‘Christ.’
‘Yep, the live dramas always went wrong. Um… the comedies, everything. The serious stuff – current affairs. Arts. Incredible.’
Bob emptied the whisky and cola and poured a refill. ‘You know they’re bulldozing the studios?’
‘Why?’ I suddenly felt angry.
‘Money. They’re building offices and some flats for Brum’s cool new urban hipsters.’
‘Where’s Mids going then? Are we out on our ears?’
‘They can’t get rid of us that easily. They’ll have to rent some offices for us somewhere. We’ll just have to borrow other people’s studio space when we need it. God knows where though – I’m not even sure if there are any other studios left in Brum. The lunchtime chat show’s been axed too. But we’ll stick it out. I’ll give ’em what for when I go down to HQ for this meeting.’
I drank. ‘I don’t know, Bob, all this fucking nostalgia. Was it ever any good? Was it ever any good at the time – the TV or the buildings? I’ve been spending far too much time looking backwards. I sometimes think it’s all rose-tinted glasses and forgetting the bad stuff. At least we’re honest these days; there’s no rules, no rulers, no ideas.’ I drank. ‘Just cash, sex, fun… for some.’
‘It was always shit. There’s just more varieties of shit on the multimedia buffet these days to keep everyone nice ’n’ happy. More shit, more shopping, more booze. It’s all bollocks, always was. Everything.’ He smirked. ‘Bottoms up.’
Ten Brutalist Buildings
By Belinda Schneider
Chapter Ten
The death and dismemberment plan
So it’s almost the end of our story. All these concrete behemoths are being torn apart. Well, maybe they had it coming to them – something else had to die for them to live during the white heat of the 1960s and the fading light of the 1970s. Now death is the answer, death is the end. Death is the end for all of us. I just find it so strange to think that I’ll outlast them all. That when I’m an old woman, with my kids and my grandkids, there won’t be anything left that means anything.
Why do we accept this? Why don’t we care? All those films and TV shows that were shot there – up on the walkways or down in the undercrofts – were priming us for this moment. They were depicting dystopia, when the intention of the original designers was the exact opposite. These artists and architects and planners wanted to create perfect futures. The imperfect present caught up with that task. I wish someone would shoot a rom-com around Birmingham Central Library, rather than a spy thriller or a gangland noir or a kitchen-sink drama or a sci-fi adventure. I wish someone would film a couple meeting and a couple kissing. I wish someone would film a girl reading, and a guy in a chicken costume catching her eye. I wish we could see the avant-garde and the urban as romantic, and not just the classical or the bucolic.
So many people use these places and these spaces to have fun. Yes, just to have fun. People eating their lunch or drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette or chatting to friends, playing football or chasing around. Skaters and free runners have colonised these spaces. They see them as playgrounds. They love the different levels and the ramps and the steps. If it wasn’t for these guys on their skateboards, brutalist complexes would seem a bit quiet, a bit dead. But they go and bring them to life. Why can’t we encourage everyone to go and play, to go and kiss, to go and eat and smoke? Who cares about the noise? Let’s just bring it all to life, bring people in. People are the users of a building and of a space. Without them it’s nothing. Most airports are pretty lousy buildings, but those flows of people, those constant streams, those constant waves – they are exciting. They make a place exciting. Let’s do that with our brutalist buildings – let’s put people in them and bring them to life.
What do you reckon?
*
Could it be that Belinda was trying to tell me something from beyond the grave, I wondered, as I spiked a chunk of sausage slathered in a spicy sauce and finished off with an unapologetic dusting of paprika. I picked up the piece of currywurst and watched it. I blew on it and ate it whole. It tasted hellish at first bite – acrid and acidic, the sauces and spices assaulting the tongue. But then the greasiness and the warm, soft meat that came in the second part of the bite – they were comforting. Could it be that Bel was telling me to eat, to not die? I think that if Belinda was trying to tell me anything, it was to try and live as normal a life as possible. Rather than getting a taxi to the hotel with Bob when we landed at Tegel Airport, I turned right and came to this S-Bahn-themed currywurst stand. Bob said he’d meet me later.
Those five-foot-tall barrel tables they only seem to have in Germany almost lend themselves to pop psychology. There’s something odd about casually leaning over on one, your weight sort of half suspended. They seem designed to make you spill out your fears as you pump sausage and beer back into your gob. They lull you into a false sense of security. There were three of these high table things parked outside the fake S-Bahn carriage, two businessmen at the others – German, I presume – and me. Each of us looking lost in our own world as we ate this children’s food while time was marked by the roars of roguish accelerating engines attached to Airbuses taking off on the runway beyond us every three minutes.
I pushed the final fat disc of sausage around the paper plate to mop up the last of the curry sauce and popped it into my mouth. I twisted round a bit and caught my own reflection in the window of the S-Bahn carriage. I was still as tall as before – 6 foot 2 and hunched over a little, as was usual. I looked drawn, defeated. Like a boxer about to be out for the count. We’d been notching up too many miles doing this shoot. Not enough sleep, not enough vitamins. Too much drinking, especially in London. And I was still heartbroken. This last one was the most problematic of all – when would it end? When would I stop feeling lonely; when would the nightly sadness subside? I needed a haircut as well. Blonde hair was growing down over my ears, down my neck. My cheeks looked a little sallow, and my eyes were pale. Still that bloody pot belly though.
If Belinda was telling me to eat, then who was I to argue? I love the way German words get glued together to make longer German words. The menu was full of them. What should I choose? I played it safe and ordered some fries. I poured ketchup all over them and munched my way through the lot.
I picked up my bag and caught the canary-yellow bus to Alexanderplatz, then switched to the S-Bahn and got off at Warschauer Strasse. I asked a friendly looking man reading an English magazine for directions and he told me straight away. Ten minutes later I was checked in at Hotel Bohm and lying alone on top of the bed in my room, twiddling my thumbs and wondering whether this was such a good idea at all.
I switched on the TV. I couldn’t believe my eyes when the contraption fired up. There was a man in a chicken suit haranguing members of the public in a big square. If it wasn’t for the massive sign reading GALERIA KAUFHOF behind the chicken’s right wing, I’d have sworn it was the same trick that we pulled on Welcome To The Masshouse all those years ago. Either way I made a mental note to call my lawyer on Monday. Not that I had a lawyer, of course, but it felt like the kind of thing someone like me should do at this particular time. It was the correct reaction.
I switched the TV off and pondered. I went to my bag and pulled out a photo of Belinda, sat on the bed and stared at it. I suddenly felt very alone – in the room, in the city, in this world. I felt tears beginning to form in the corners of my eyes. I let a few roll out, just to go through the motions.
I put the photo down, washed my face, put on a clean(ish) shirt
and left the hotel. I felt better the second I was outside and the breeze pricked my cheeks. I bought some cigarettes and smoked one extravagantly as I walked back up to Warschauer Strasse Station. I caught a beige-and-red S-Bahn train to Hackescher Markt and headed straight for the restaurant where I’d proposed to Belinda. I stood outside looking at the table on the square where we had sat, where she said yes. After fifteen minutes of staring I headed off to where we got married.
St Agnes Kirche rose up menacingly, partly shaded by trees which had grown up in front of it substantially since the last time I was here. Some blue bins were lined up outside; they leaned against the tough structure, rubbish spilling from them.
A group of people were standing around speaking English. I knew them well. ‘I get sick of a shoot after about four days now,’ said Bob, blowing a cumulus cloud of smoke over me. ‘But then this isn’t the kind of pissing about we used to get up to, is it? This is serious. And by God I’m gonna make sure the end result is something Bel would be proud of.’ Bob turned to look at Baxter, who sat cross-legged on the ground, apparently lost in some kind of yogic trance. ‘I only wish we had your gorgeous wife doing the pieces to camera rather than this fucking garden gnome.’ Bob yelled at Baxter, ‘ARE YOU DONE YET, MATE?’ and shook his head in my direction, giving me a knowing look. Then he wandered off towards a pile of cables.
The Wall in the Head Page 23
