*
This is a dream:
I’m watching TV. That big bloody goofy M is spinning round. Round and round. What’s powering it? Why does it never stop? It spins above an image of the skyline of Brum. Just round and round. I feel like I’m being hypnotised. But suddenly… it breaks free from its anchorage and moves upwards. Then it turns a little, shifts into a diagonal position, and starts to fly above the city like a spaceship or something, making this sickening ‘GRNNNN’ sound. I have no clue what’s happening. I rub my eyes but it doesn’t get rid of the scene. The M does a low fly over Brum and, out of nowhere, starts to fire lasers from its legs. The lasers hit the Rotunda, and the Rotunda bursts into flames. Incredible. Quick as a flash, without any warning, the M dives right out of the screen and starts flying round my living room. Then it disappears through the window and I hear some whooshing noises, followed by the sound of a laser being fired, then again, and again, and then the screams of women coupled with huge explosions. I run out of the house into the street to see huge plumes of grey smoke rising into the sky above St Mary’s Church. Then flashes of ochre and red as laser beams coming from the vengeful giant M spew out and hit houses and people and blow them both to smithereens and Baxter is there and he shouts out to Belinda and she runs towards him and they are squatting down behind a gravestone and he has his hand on her cheek and now the noise is so loud and dust is in my nose and shit is this really happening or is…
*
‘This one never changes, does it? Whadda place.’ That was some serious mid-Atlantic drawling there. Did you hear it?
‘I know. The good old Bride. Shit as ever. Still love it though. Closest boozer to my house as well.’
‘Not true. In the taxi I saw some new upscale bar – what are they called now? Gastropubs? Yeah, one of those had opened up. Right on the crossroads in Moseley Village. Loads of wankers stood outside drinking cocktails.’ Charlie sipped his pint of Birmingham Bitter.
‘You know what? That’s right. I just always ignore that one. I figure if I go in, I’ll be charged more than my mortgage for a drink, and also… I’ll become an arsehole.’
Charlie looked amused. ‘Too late for that…’
‘How’s LA?’
‘Whadda you think? Sunny. Girls. Food. No one drinks. Paradise. In a way. You get lots done. When you’re not in the car.’
‘But I can think of somewhere else in the world it takes a bloody long time to drive from one end of to the other… somewhere else with a lot of roads and a lot of suburbs.’
Charlie seemed to like that. ‘Good point. Maybe Brum should market itself as the British LA. So look, mate, I was thinking. As I’m back. Did Bel have a charity or anything she loved? We’re doing this one-off show. In Priory Square.’
‘Priory Square?’
‘Yeah exactly, they’re knocking it down too. Final show there. Not our final show, I mean the final show there – we’ll be the last band to play that tatty venue. I thought we could, you know, say how much we missed her. Give ten grand to charity or something. Or more. Whatever you reckon really.’
‘I remember seeing you lot there. A good few years ago.’
‘Yeah, Bob was there, right? Rat-arsed as usual. And your wife. Looking hot. Whaddya know. I thought, “That’s a fit bird.” And then her fuckin’ boyfriend walks in wearing a jumper. And I realised it was the Hail To The Brummies guy. The big-shot TV writer! Total loser though.’
‘You remembered it right.’ I sipped. ‘Can you be a small shot?’
He laughed. ‘So this new TV thing you’re doing. You wanna use the music on that? Be my guest.’
‘Yeah, that would be brilliant. I think it would be perfect to have “Elizabeth Anderson” as the closing titles music.’
‘Tell me about the film. It’s a documentary, right? About Brum?’
‘Yeah, a documentary, but not just about Brum. Bel’s book was called Ten Brutalist Buildings, and she looked at ten – or so, because she always managed to cram in more stuff that she loved – buildings and places. So we really tried to bring the book to life. To make it accessible to TV viewers, to teach people about that architecture that Bel loved – uncompromising, concrete…’
‘Ugly? I love those ugly buildings, love ’em.’
‘Yeah? Good. But she saw beauty in it. Even in the ugliness. It really came out in the book. I wanted to write a script for the film to do it justice. We went and filmed it in Leeds, Sheffield, London and Berlin. And in Brum of course.’
‘Good old Brum. I honestly never thought people would be mourning all those freew— motorways, I mean. And parking structures, and all those 1960s blocks. I like ’em. But hey, what do I know? I just write about love.’
‘So did Bel. In a different way, but still.’
‘Good for her.’
‘Good for her.’ We chinked drinks.
‘I’d love to see the film.’
‘We’re doing a screening. At the Mids building. It might be the last chance you get to go there. I keep hearing whispers they’re knocking that down too. Maybe I’ll get the chop one day soon. They’ve already let half the staff go.’
‘No way? I think our first interview was there. On that fucking terrible lunchtime chat show. Remember it?’
I nodded.
‘We were supposed to play during the closing titles. Of course, in those days they used backing tracks, and the dim bastards set off the backing track before we were even ready. It was a sodding disaster. We just stood there, looking around, while our bloody song played out. Compete bunch of jokers. It just seemed funnier to stand there doing nothing, to be honest. Not even to move. We all joked about it afterwards. The host went rhubarb!’
‘Typical Mids.’
‘So whaddya going to do? If they… ya know?’ Charlie ran his index finger across his throat.
‘I have absolutely no idea.’ I drank. One gutsy draught. ‘Move to LA and write screenplays?’
‘Exactly. Come to LA! We can hang out. Write a film set in Brum. There haven’t been any. Flog it in Hollywood to some movie exec.’
‘Oh, there have. You just haven’t seen them. And believe me, you don’t want to.’
‘Which?’
‘I’ll tell you some other time.’
‘Let’s go for a smoke.’
‘Yup.’
As we stepped outside, a white van drove past with a huge poster attached to its side. It had a giant photo of a woman in lingerie, and the text read: SCANDALZ Gentlemen’s Club – Brum’s sexiest nite out. Open every evening from 9p.m.to 3a.m. Come and get SCANDALOUZ with Brum’s hottest girls.
Charlie pointed at it. ‘I wouldn’t mind getting scandalouz.’
‘You’re not missing anything. Believe me.’ I paused. Turned to Charlie. ‘I always wanted to know…’ I lit both our cigarettes.
‘Yup?’
‘“Elizabeth Anderson”. What was the story? Your ex, right? That’s what Bel reckoned.’
Charlie laughed. ‘Mate, I’m going to have to let you down here. It’s a band joke, I’m afraid. She’s not real.’
‘Really? But…’
‘I know, in interviews and stuff… well, it’s boring sometimes to justify everything. So I lied. Hands up. There is no Elizabeth Anderson. Never had my heart broke.’ Charlie smoked. ‘Though… there was a girl from Stirchley once. Worked weekends in a bakery in that shopping centre above New Street Station. She was called… Tricia? Something like that. Or maybe Tina. But no Miss Anderson. Sorry.’
‘Bel really thought she was real.’ I shook my head. ‘I mean, she really did.’
‘Not everything’s as real as you think it is. That’s just the way it is. Surprises everywhere, my friend, surprises everywhere.’
‘What are you up to later?’
‘Seeing my parents. Mum’s cooking up a roast. Can’t wait. You can’t get a Yorkshire pudding in LA, believe me.’
‘I do.’
A woman in her forties emerged through the door and into
the evening air, then casually asked Charlie for a light without really looking at him. But when she handed it back she looked up at him. And kept looking. ‘Bloody hell. You’re famous, aren’t you?’
‘We both are,’ said Charlie, which I liked.
The woman didn’t look at me though. ‘You’re in that band. I know… it’s on the tip of my tongue. My husband loves you lot.’ She reversed to the door, pulled it open and ostentatiously yelled inside so the entire Bride of Bescot could hear, ‘OI, LAURIE. WHAT’S THAT BAND YOU LIKE, LOVE? COS THE SINGER’S OUT ’ERE. COME AND ’AVE A LOOK.’ She came back over, index finger tapping her lips. Her face lit up in a moment of instant recognition. ‘I know it! The Receptionists!’
*
[Presenter] ‘Today on The Obituary Show, we look at the life of the writer and architecture lecturer Belinda Schneider, and the impact she had on the way we think about buildings – especially concrete ones from the 1960s. Schneider was born in communist East Berlin but adopted Birmingham as her home town after studying at the city’s university. Schneider’s degree was in architecture, but it was her writing that made her name, as the author Aliana Wills remembers.’
[Aliana Wills] ‘I remember seeing Ten Brutalist Buildings in the bookshop in the small seaside town where I lived at the time. I bought it immediately and I adored it. I’d always loved architecture but I couldn’t find writing that did it justice. It is after all a visual medium, yet one which is also about philosophy and ideas. But very few people seemed able to transmute any of that into writing that wasn’t full of jargon. Belinda could do it though. It was amazing. Magical.’
[Presenter] ‘Inspired by Belinda’s book, Wills went on to write a novel which used brutalist architecture as its theme – a style of architecture which a lot of people in the 1980s and ’90s had been wary of, or in some cases openly hostile to – as architect Djende Mariosco explains.’
[Djende Mariosco] ‘Brutalism was a product of the 1950s and ’60s, and the ’70s. It was so closely tied up with the ideas from the time, ideas about utopia and social democracy and big bureaucracies and grandiosity and free-form sculpture, that it really aged quite badly – in some ways. Certainly the 1980s and ’90s, and even the 2000s, were not a great time for the style and really not a great time for architecture either – this was when we were harking back with silly neo-Georgian houses and supermarkets shaped like barns and terrible business parks. Belinda’s book marked a complete reappraisal of brutalism – a chance to look again at the best of it. And when we opened our eyes – when Belinda opened our eyes for us – we saw just how good this stuff could be, with its exuberant shapes and its merging of interior and exterior spaces. We began to see things we hadn’t seen before. Certainly a lot of young architects I was at college with were dismissive of it; they saw it as “failed” and “eccentric”. But a few of us wanted to challenge that and show how brutalism actually had a lot going for it, and Belinda’s book provided a language for us to do that, for us to defend what we could see was good but other people perhaps couldn’t.’
[Presenter] ‘Belinda taught a module about brutalism to Birmingham’s architecture students and lectured around the world, and it’s something she enjoyed doing on top of her writing for architecture journals and magazines. She was known as a popular teacher and speaker, but it was her writing that was particularly praised, as Wills notes.’
[Aliana Wills] ‘Belinda was a gifted writer because she was trying to show us something more than the cliched dystopian view of brutalism that had developed. That idea that you shot sci-fi or crime films around these buildings, that they were scary, that they were troubling, that they were inhuman. Belinda said, “Look again. Look at the utopian ideals, look at the avant-garde design. This is beautiful.” She also encouraged readers to see buildings as places where things happen: nice things, romantic things even. She talked about her own experiences in these buildings, about sunny days and people having fun, about bringing up families and falling in love. I know, for example, that she met her husband outside Birmingham Central Library, which was probably her favourite building of all anyway, and because of that chance encounter, it became absolutely sacrosanct to her.’
[Presenter] ‘Belinda did meet her husband, the writer Donald [tape is inaudible for a second here], outside the brutalist library in the centre of Birmingham. He wrote the scripts for little-known television shows produced in the Midlands TV region, like the game show I Love My Dog!, a sitcom set in a planners’ office called Big Plans and a celebration of working-class culture called Hail To The Brummies. Belinda told Aliana Wills that Donald was filming for a regional late-night comedy and variety series called Welcome To The Masshouse the day they first met.’
[Aliana Wills] ‘Belinda laughed about the fact Donald was dressed as – can you believe this – a chicken when they first met. He was a writer on this show, a kind of post-pub thing – only ever shown in the Midlands. He’d interviewed her for a skit on the programme, and he later went into the library to track her down. She said she found it hilarious to watch him from the balcony, walking up and down each floor, looking for her. Of course she was studying back then and he must have completely ruined her concentration that day. But anyway, they got on, he asked her out and she said yes, they fell in love, got married and lived together very happily in Birmingham.’
[Presenter] ‘Another fan was the artist Marija Trajkovski, who was born in Macedonia.’
[Marija Trajkovski] ‘Belinda’s writing, it was something I cherished. My art is all about… responses to brutalism, and her writing was too. We were linked somehow, I felt.’
[Presenter] ‘It was Belinda’s warm personality that many people dwelt on. Marija Trajkovski:’
[Marija Trajkovski] ‘She was wonderfully friendly when I met her, and she was a very kind person. I met her husband after she died, and he was the same, very warm-hearted, and personable. I think he loved her very much; he idolised her, in fact. A lot of us did. She was out of the ordinary, very talented. It’s so sad that she’s not here anymore. But her writing and her spirit will definitely live on, I think.’
[Presenter] ‘Belinda Schneider was born on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall and, appropriately perhaps, reached her eighteenth birthday in the year the wall fell – 1989. She went straight to Birmingham to study, and fell in love with the city as well as the university, discovering an affection for many of Birmingham’s maligned mega-structures and 1960s planning – at the time that those things were falling from fashion. She returned to Berlin to marry Donald at St Agnes Kirche, Kreuzberg, which was itself an austere brutalist building. Her legacy is not just a book, but also a forthcoming television film, as sometime Mids TV producer, and now programme controller, Bob [inaudible section of tape here] explains.’
[Bob] ‘Belinda was one in a million. I don’t actually remember that first day me and Donald met her, but he does! Don and I worked on lots more programmes together – him writing the scripts and me presenting or producing, and Bel became a great friend. When I basically became the man in charge at Mids TV in Birmingham, which was due to everyone else having been laid off as much as anything, I commissioned a film where Belinda would talk about the buildings she’d written about in the book, about the Birmingham she loved and the brutalism she loved. It was all ready to go when tragedy struck, and well… well I’m just so pleased that Don agreed to write the new script, to continue Bel’s legacy. I think the documentary we’ve produced posthumously stays true to Bel’s wishes, and ultimately the most important thing about it is that it captures all these buildings she loved before many of them succumb to the wrecking ball. We’ll all miss her horrendously, Don more than anyone, of course. But we’ve got to remember what an incredible talent she was. A real gem. I’ll miss that German accent and that cheeky smile the most. She was too young. Too young. So much more to give.’
[Presenter] ‘Belinda was a keen cyclist who navigated the legendarily car-filled roads of Birmingham with a confidence tha
t not everyone could muster. But the traffic-choked streets of the Second City were eventually to prove her downfall. She was cycling from her home to Birmingham University when she was mown down by a truck making a left turn on a busy road. Belinda died instantly. But it’s not Belinda’s death she’ll be remembered for, it’s her life – and particularly her contribution to architectural criticism.’
[Presenter] ‘Belinda Schneider, who’s died, aged 37.’
*
Bob gave me a bear hug, and as he did it he made a sort of ‘Hurgh’ noise.
‘Bloody hell, watch my ribs!’
‘Always complaining, you are.’
‘What’s the verdict?’ I asked. My voice echoed around the empty bar, the only bit of Mids TV I’d really miss – the only bit anyone would really miss.
He looked at his feet. ‘We’ve been shafted. It’s over. I’ve walked straight up from New Street, got the train back as soon as he said his piece. Fucking headquarters. Fucking money-grabbing bastards. Fucking Mackenzie.’ Bob’s voice echoed around the bar. I noticed how grubby the windows had become, how some of the chairs had been knocked over, the stains on the carpets, the cigarette burns on the curtains, the smell.
‘What did they say?’
‘Mackenzie. He says it’s just not sustainable anymore. Mids is haemorrhaging cash like a Villa striker in a strip club. Advertising is drying up, staff costs are unsustainable, viewing figures going down quicker than a barmaid on a first date, plus these buildings’ – Bob hammered against the glass and it wobbled with a deep trembling timbre – ‘are buggered. They need millions to do them up. They’re as old as you, son; you can’t get to that age and not need some TLC. Who said everyone wants to build but no one wants to maintain?’
‘Vonnegut.’
‘Right.’
The Wall in the Head Page 28