Embedded Files
20
Adlington is polishing the Mini. It is Sarah's car of choice, her baby, the one she drives herself and she has used it a lot since her parents died. It was her mother's 'dinky little run-around' and, considering it is now Sarah's idea of travelling incognito, the decoration - by her mother's own fair hand - is fairly conspicuous.
The Union Jack on the roof is conventional enough, but the psychedelic pink and purple daisies on the sides do make it one of the more prominent vehicles on Cattle Market Day as the regulation Land Rovers drive in from the surrounding countryside and disgorge acres of flat tweed caps and serious, ruddy-skinned faces. I tend to avoid that part of town on such a day, as walking through their stout throng is like pushing through a bowling alley with scores of Colin-The-Gardener skittles in your way.
However, it turns out that Sarah loves it for that very reason (it also gives her a chance to catch all her tenants and neighbours in one place). She also makes it the one day she never wears tweed, as everyone else is in them and where would the fun be in that?
Sarah is, with deliberate perverseness, in chain-store jeans and a chain-store sweatshirt. Sarah is also in Converse baseball boots and a dark blue waterproof. I examine her closely and there is - once she steps away from the car - nothing weird about her at all, not even details like the earrings, the bag, her makeup. No matter how hard I look there is no chink in her armour of anonymity, no little anything that would make people stare and think 'Ah, yes, I thought so - not as normal as she first appears!'
Mind you, that in itself is pretty weird.
The chief reason we are here is to pick up some clothes from my flat. As I show Sarah up the stairs, I am acutely aware that everything is close - claustrophobic, even. There is seldom any awkwardness at Burnleigh Hall because people can retreat a few metres from each other in a room and still not look as if they are avoiding each other. Here, you only have to step back and it looks as if you've created some kind of diplomatic gulf. Sarah is either oblivious to this unfamiliar pokiness or just very tactful.
When somebody else is in your home, the room you think of as cosy is suddenly cramped. The walls that could do with a lick of paint sometime in the future now look like a tenement slum and the small, neat pile of newspapers on a chair look like a huge, slovenly heap of apathy.
I don't have many clothes and half of what I do have once belonged to the Sixth Marquis. They were fun at Burnleigh Hall but wearing them round here just looks plain daft. As I pack my rucksack, I watch Sarah through the crack in the door. She is moving slowly round the room and checking out my books (generally nodding in approval), my taste in CDs (generally shaking her head), and the designs I am working on that are pinned on the wall by my drawing table. She spends most time looking at John Flander's photos of Charlotte at the factory and the family pictures on the wall. She addresses the wall, but is talking to me.
"Who took those pictures of Charlotte?"
"A guy called John Flanders." Sarah pauses to digest this information and her voice hardens slightly.
"Her boyfriend?"
"I doubt it - mid-fifties, I should think." I grab some tee shirts from a drawer. "And happily married. I went to dinner with him and his wife last week. He's the project manager on the shopping centre site." That hostility to the idea of Charlotte having a boyfriend - of course, jealousy. The monocle, the men's suits, the lack of a man around... I have been batting off stereotyping Sarah as a lesbian because it would be a too-obvious manhole to fall down. Mind, the fact she fits a convenient stereotype doesn’t mean she isn’t a lesbian, either. Sarah picks up a framed photograph from on top of a bookcase.
"That chap with the piercing eyes and the fireman’s uniform. That's your dad, the one you did the sculpture for?"
"Yes, that's the dad I dedicated the sculpture to. I didn't think my other dads deserved the attention." Sarah turns. She is smiling at the jokey exchange. Here, in the gloom of my pokey little flat we stand still, just grinning and totally understanding each other. Nothing else is said, no further 'smart’ comments are needed to clarify.
After a few moments, an embarrassed Sarah coughs and fumbles in her pocket for her keys.
"So... This, er, flyer on the door, this 'Maisie's'... What's it like for lunch? Do we need the car to get there?"
"I'm not sure -"
"Oh, come on, it can't be that bad. And I'm starving!"
Maisie recognises Sarah and, despite her left-wing revolutionary tendencies, is a little flustered at suddenly having a member of the aristocracy sit down right here in her café. Shuffling nervously from one foot to another, Maisie waits as we look at the ‘specials’ board and weigh up the merits of a brown rice and lentil bake (with brown rice) against those of a vegan macrobiotic burger (with fries). Years of placard-waving and dreaming of lining up the House of Lords (just the hereditary ones) and shooting them (in a pacifistic way of course, but she's never quite resolved that one) go out of the window as she holds out the sides of her 'Fucking Fuck The Fucking Rich Fuckers' t-shirt and curtsies to Her Ladyship.
Sarah nudges my foot, mutters something vague about it being a bit soon after breakfast to eat and then giggles once Maisie has disappeared behind the counter to get our herbal tea.
“That tee shirt of hers… Well, that’s me stuffed come The Revolution. Mind, I’m always nice to animals so with any luck they’ll let me off with a life sentence.” After looking around, Sarah’s smile vanishes and she leans over to me.
"Actually, I’m bloody starving. Do they have a menu?"
"That was it."
"Ah... Right." Sarah looks round at the select number of clientele and looks almost relieved as a normal-looking man in a tweed jacket walks in. Now it's my turn to lean across and whisper.
"That's him, the guy who took the photos. I didn't think this was his kind of place anymore."
"Anymore? You mean it was once?" I point at the picture on the wall of Johnny B. Damned desperately thrashing his guitar in exchange for a cappuccino but not looking remotely in need of any further stimulant.
"That's him."
"Bloody hell." Sarah manages to muster a cautious smile as he comes to our table and announces himself. Like a lot of eccentrics, she is suspicious of other eccentrics and happily oblivious to the fact that, when it comes to judging people by their strange appearances, she skates on very thin ice. My new friend introduces himself.
"John Flanders. Sorry to disturb you both but I just saw this young man through the window and I have something for him." Sarah, glad to see someone so outwardly normal, indicates a chair with a gesture approaching desperation.
"Please, join us!" I open my mouth to introduce her and out comes:
"John, this is Lady -" It is the kick under the table that checks me.
"Sarah, it’s just plain Sarah. Will you gentlemen excuse me for a minute?" She gets up, following a hard stare with a smile... Or is it a grimace?
"So," smiles John, watching as Sarah disappears to the loo. "Not-So-Plain Sarah, I'd say. You've done ok there, old chap!"
"Oh, we're just -" John taps the side of his nose and nods slyly. Perhaps someone round here will let me get a full sentence out in a minute.
"It's ok; Flanders here knows the meaning of 'stumm'!"
Sarah is on her way back and has stopped at the Wall of Destiny. John Flanders slaps his forehead.
"Oh my, it's the profile - I knew I'd seen her before!" As Sarah sits down, she gives a little round of applause at my inclusion on the Wall. John isn't bowing to the aristocrat as she sits at Maisie's humble table, but he isn't far off.
"Your Ladyship, please forgive me for not recognising you!" Sensing I’m very near to being burnt alive by merely being looked at, I slip down in my chair and examine the plastic tablecloth with a new-found fascination. Aristocrats looking daggers is worse than anyone else's - it is a skill learnt at a very early age and honed to perfection by puberty. John is sensitive enough to know what is going on, but there again nobody could have misinterpreted Sarah's expression. Even me.
"No your ladyship, he didn't say a word. It's your profile I recognised."
"You mean my great conk?" Flanders blushes. Sarah pats his sleeve. “‘Sarah’ will do fine. I don't wear my ermin and coronet on market day - too much cow poo. No, I'm in camouflage. Anyway, the Mayor is scared enough of me as it is. This is my 'trying not to be an oddball' outfit... It's about as normal as I get." John plucks his tweed sleeve.
"Oh, some of us have made a lifetime's study of looking normal, blending in. Not that I blend in here much - I'm like a History teacher at the school disco." Sarah gets up again and gently pushes me back into my seat as I get up to pay.
"No, my treat. Having experienced this place, I use that term in its loosest sense." She stands at the counter and waits for Maisie to finally re-emerge from her makeshift smoking den between the bins. John leans over to me.
"Hiding is easy in this country. You just get behind a National Trust tie or a 'Meat is Murder' tee shirt." He throws me a mischievous smile. "Anyway, got to go as underground car parks wait for no one. We've just hit an area of rock the size of a three bedroom semi and I'll need to hold their collective hand. Bring your friend to have a look too, if she is interested. Perhaps not today though; we're having English-Portuguese communication problems at the moment and this is the morning some bright spark chose to drop twenty tonnes of quick-set concrete in the wrong hole." Sarah gets back to the table and shakes hands with John, who now looks very earnest.
"I hope your, er… Sarah, I mean… I hope you will remember that, when battling with officialdom in general - and the Mayor in particular - I'm a bit of a dab hand with planning regulations." Sarah is appreciative but guarded.
"Thank you, Mister Flanders. And if you get the job of building that monstrosity on my doorstep? A conflict of interests, possibly?"
"Let's cross that one if and when." John hands me a large envelope with prints in, smiles a 'not at all' when I thank him and he takes his leave. I can tell that Sarah is also very keen to go and she looks round the cafe in much the same way she looked at the hot dog stalls when I first saw her walk across the town square.
"Right young man, let's go and find somewhere for lunch!"
We compromise with a safer - if blander - option. It is Maisie's nemesis, the Devil Incarnate, a MegaCoffeeCorps establishment which emphasises how hand-reared everything is and how, with every one of its chocolate muffins you buy, you will stop global warming for a month; all this, one suspects, from bulk produce that arrives at the door in a big truck. The decor is Sophisticated New York meets Colombian Peasant, Corporate Sackcloth And Ashes with any residual feelings of guilt being expunged by the hand-reared background music of a fey, youthful voice singing feelingly – and feebly - to an acoustic guitar and a pair of bongos.
"So", muses Sarah, only vaguely familiar with corporate dining as opposed to dining in a corporate place, "what you see on the menu is what you get and there is a choice of more than two options? Amazing."
"Maisie's used to be really good."
"Sorry. I'm not knocking her, she just needs to find a milieu she is a little more suited for, perhaps something like a bar where it all arrives factory-sealed and hasn't a chance of being tampered with apart from those few precarious seconds between the staff popping the lid and the customer taking the bottle."
The coffee house is not the normal type of stamping-ground for Sarah, who was brought up in an environment where corporate logos were an anathema, where even most of her childhood clothes were hand-tailored with ne'er a manufacturer's label in sight. Food and cleaning products are either divorced from their packaging long before she appreciates their benefit or she never ends up seeing the goods at all because it is not she who uses them.
Everything having the same logo on is quite foreign to Sarah... Apart from, of course, her factories where the name 'Burnleigh' adorns all, from the smallest button to the largest XXXL football supporter's shirt. Even Sarah is not immune to favourite brands, however, and these, according to Nicky, include Chanel (her bathroom), Marks and Spencers (most of her underwear drawers, such high street labels having a novelty value only appreciated by either the hideously poor or the hideously wealthy) and Apple (her office).
Even on market days, Sarah is immune to global brands as she usually gets back home before lunch, the only sustenance during her trip to Planet Normal being a cup of Earl Grey tea she brews in a porcelain mug with a heater that plugs into the car’s already overworked cigarette lighter. Sarah's tea ritual is always an adventure for her and, if one lives such a cushioned life, it must seem tantamount to the cleansing deprivation of a camping trip.
So, the coffee bar is a bit of a novelty for Sarah and a little piece of urban chic for me. Leaning back in the brown leather(ette) armchair, the caffeine gives me a buzz of optimism, the feeling that I am lucky to be here in this town, in this country, in this opulent cafe drinking delicious coffee. Of course, that is what I am supposed to feel after paying so much for the luxury but I feel a moment of ease with Sarah, as if in a place where, at last, we are truly equals. There is still a touch of feudalism at Burnleigh Hall and I in turn was afforded a brief moment of territorial ownership when we both visited my flat, but here we are on neutral ground.
And there he is, looking in at the window, a man I saw in a photograph in Sarah's little flat. The dreadlocks are unmistakable, as is the shirt that looks as if it is made from a badly-printed potato sack. The whole outfit of shirt, sandals, surfing shorts, courier bag and tan are no doubt supposed to say 'Much-Travelled Alternative Type With A Caring Sharing Side', but I'm finding it hard to shake off ‘Just Been Slumming It With The Poor Little Natives'.
Sarah is suddenly animated. Sarah has lost her calm expression of pleasure and replaced it with one of desire, albeit an emotion she is trying to keep in check. Have I have been kidding myself that I have had a special connection, a kinship like the one she now feels with the man who has come in and pushed his way over to our little intimate corner, wedging himself between us and studiously ignoring me as he concentrates his attention on her? But here I am I'm behaving like a spoilt brat again. I prepare myself for the moment when he turns to me and says 'Hi!" of his own volition, but that moment doesn't come. I can't see Sarah any more, just a broad back in its ethnic wrapping. Sure it's broad but it's lean, too: yes, I am in reasonably good shape but fat is a banned substance in his land, a Resident Evil to be run, surfed, meditated and swum out of town until completely eradicated.
I wait for the back to turn and for him – whoever he might be – to introduce himself. After a while I cough, but still I wait. Although I can't see Sarah, I can hear her laugh and it's a laugh that I haven't heard before, a laugh that wants to please, a laugh that has never come my way. But then, why should it? It's not as if we are partners, lovers.
Sarah can sense I am put out, leans round and pats me on the knee.
"Well here they are, my two favourite guys!" Even her language is accommodating towards him - she would never say 'guy' in a million years. Her physical language is clumsy as well and it is with a mixture of apology, embarrassment and regret that her awkward body watches me rise from the table. Does she think that my moment with her has been unjustly usurped, or has she come to the conclusion that I am childish and behaving like a spoilt brat? Whichever one, it’s immaterial as I just want to go.
"Hey man!" He is Essence Of Hippy, but his accent is even posher than Sarah's. "I say, don't go on my account." He may come across as a luxuriant palm tree trussed up in sacking for the winter but it would appear that sheer blue pinstripe runs through his veins.
"I'd better. I have to get back to the flat -"
"The flat? Right, dude…“ Nomad nods with a ‘How quaint!’ smile, satisfied that Sarah has introduced his name with what he is convinced is reverence and satisfied also that, despite his beads and his trappings of unworldliness, I obviously have less in the material stakes than he does. He turns to Sarah and grins. Sarah's eyes dart from the broad, brown chest under the printed red lizards and palm trees to the frayed bag strap across my lint-infested army greatcoat, her gaze not wishing to meet mine as it suddenly finds something ever so extremely interesting on the table that hovers by our knees. I wave cheerily from the door and call across the noisy, chattering heads between us.
"Bye Sarah, I'll be in touch. See you, Nomad... Nice to meet you!" As I peer back through the window, Nomad is leaning towards Sarah and Sarah is leaning towards Nomad. Her wave to me through the window is vigorous, but more for show and it slows down when she pulls an apologetic face.
It is at that moment Sarah hesitates and her expression freezes: it’s as if she realises, for the first time, that I actually feel very slighted. A few seconds later, though, she is responding (reluctantly… not reluctantly… don’t know) to Nomad's insistent presence and my final view of Sarah is her glancing at me through the coffee cup motifs on the plate glass. It is a glance of apology and pity, but it is also a glance that shows me that this, yet again, is perhaps not the time and place.
I go back to Maisie's.
21
I'm not one for moping.
Back at the flat, I look in the mirror and try to study myself dispassionately. Sarah seems to tolerate me for a while and then it's as if she remembers my place, no doubt hoping that I will too. I never really fitted in at Burnleigh Hall - nor her life - but it seems that just about every other man Jack - even the Hessian Hippy - has more in common with her world than I do. How did I surmise that from such a short encounter? I just know - I can sense it.
But why should all that matter so much to me? I stare out of the window and peer in the distance as I imagine the twisty, narrow road that leads to the village of Burnleigh where Sarah and Nomad are, at this very moment, probably…
Oh, bloody hell.
I stare in the direction of the road again, get up and put the kettle on.
Right, I’ve had my little moment of self-pity and now it’s time to put things in perspective. The best way of doing that is a list. Lists are not merely appetisers for action, but whole meals in themselves, a good way of kidding yourself you have done something. Lists are agenda and minutes all in one and, like a meeting, help you avoid making a decision there and then.
This particular list is about putting my thoughts in some semblance of order, as if I am a Sergeant Major taking the remnants of a decimated platoon and putting them in smart rank and file to make the situation look better than it is.
Right, you ‘orrible little lot…
Bullet points in a straight column… And quickly now, ‘cause we ‘aven’t got all day!
‘Ten…
Don’t anticipate lad, don’t anticipate... ‘Ten…
SHUN!
Actually, if anything is lacking in my life at the moment, it is order, but at least I can kid myself by writing the feeble little column of platitudes. In short:
It was a great experience
I got a lot of source material from it
I saw a world I never knew existed
I met some lovely people
I got to know Sarah more
Sarah liked me
Sarah was very generous to me
All of that is true, and yet...
Sterile.
This declaration of anything positive kind of works but it's not enough to make me want to keep the picture on view, the picture of her and me on top of the hill. I’m not going to chuck it – no, I’ll just hide it down the side of the wardrobe. Taking the box and the gold tissue paper from its place of reverence on my drawing table, I scrunch it into the recycling bin.
"Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of My Life". I look at the tired aphorism on Annabel’s card and realise, at last, its potency.
Annabel… I wonder if she’s still got the same number? Clicking on her name, my thumbs hover over the keypad on my phone.
And then they hover some more.
Nah, bad idea. Anyway, she’ll have found her own ‘Nomad’ by now.
Back in the land of the sane, I put my phone down and consider my situation. I am going to cut all ties with Sarah, I am going to throw out those damn ridiculous tweeds and I am going to get a trim.
So much for just a little trim. While in the barber’s chair I realise it is much better value if I have a lot off in one go but it’s not until I come out and see my haircut in a shop window that I realise its true severity. Running a hand up the back of my neck my fingers go against the grain of the short, stiff hairs and it feels exciting – erotic, even. I am, from the neck up, a clean-cut all-modern man. Now I just have to deal with the other five foot six.
I am inspired by the way John Flanders covered his tracks, but he would be amused at his current elevation to Life Guru. First, I decide to ditch the khaki and denim blue and buy into having no colour at all, consequently ending up with a surprisingly good black suit from a charity shop and a white shirt bought me by my mother and never worn. I decide against a white dinner jacket as 1) it is not truly white, 2) it is not normal enough for The New Me and 3) what do I do when it gets dirty? The thin, meagre black tie is from a cheap clothes shop and the kind of cut-price apology that is worn once at a funeral and then banished to the bottom of a drawer, but it suits my current purposes.
Charlotte would be proud of Mr. Monochrome.
Ah, yes, Charlotte...
I need, of course, to try out the new me and, as I am being given less and less work, it is time for this new man of action to pay his employer a visit.
Although I have been designing for PHB for two years now, I haven't been to the Design Department once since meeting Sarah, so there is every excuse to have never made a connection between 'Pinke-Burnleigh' and the 'P' and the 'B' in 'PHB Corporation’’. Bloody hell, is there no way of escaping this woman? I sit in the Design Head's office and listen to some bull about dwindling opportunities because of design being out-sourced to ‘Their Place’ in China, but not a lot goes in as I stare at the large, gold-framed picture of the company head with her bob haircut, monocle and aquiline profile. So, what's to choose between her and her cousin the Mayor? I never realised a huge ego was so genetic. Mr. Berkley the Head of Design notices me looking at it and he is grateful for an opportunity to shoehorn her into the conversation.
"She, my boy, is a remarkable woman!"
"Oh… Really?"
"Yes indeed! Lady Pinke-Burnleigh is an enigma known only to the very, very privileged few."
"Oh, really? Actually, I'm beginning to believe it." He leans back in his leather executive chair, nods an affirmation and swivels in his throne as if to broadcast some kind of scent to mark his territory.
"Well, not wishing to brag young man, but you are sitting in the presence of someone who has sat next to her at dinner!"
"Gosh. You don't say?" He nods slowly and watches my reaction, gratified that I manage to look suitably impressed. "Only a few times of course but, yes, there are a favoured few of us, of whom I'm one!"
Yes, I gathered that.
Mr. Berkley beams as he forgets the reason for my visit - nay, forgets my very presence - and tilts his head back as if to emphasise that nothing must sully the momentary recall of that pivotal moment in his career.
"Me? I just held her hand as we watched our friend die, merely held her close to me on the way back from the hospital, both of us too grief-stricken to speak. She and I stood all alone in the dark and cried together - I even carried her to her room that same night when I found her unconscious on the stairs with an empty wine bottle in her hand." But I do not divulge such secrets and he wouldn't believe me, even if I wanted to betray her trust.
Which I don't.
Even now.
22
This is incredible. John Flanders and I have donned hard hats (so cool) and are in the belly of an anaesthetised, steel-framed monster, its matt grey carcass yet to receive a glossy skin and the many glowing eyes of its shop fronts. Concrete ribs and floors are chalked with mysterious signs and words to be interpreted by hard-hatted minions with either a tie and a master's degree or a tee-shirt and a drill. The local church which, in my youth, became a convenient imaginary castle, was but a minute ancestor, a mere prototype for this slumbering beast whose bowels are not filled with prayer, incense and a comforting smell of damp but shouts and hammering, pipes for its lifeblood and a complex nervous system of cables.
I can feel a bizarre thought coming on involving a battle between a couple of dinosaurs, except that one is huge and concrete with glass scales and the other is old, slight and cracked with a rough stone skin and stained glass eyes. This, however, is the new efficient me and, whereas in the past I would daydream the outcome of this scenario, Mr. Efficiency hasn’t the time for such unproductive thought.
I may be in a hard hat and high visibility waistcoat, but I am also in my black suit. I am also, after much deliberation, in my black suit without a tie. I am not (in my own opinion) mundane enough for neck wear and yet wish to distance myself from others here who are also slaving for the common goal. The glory of my sleek (yet totally impractical) suit is short-lived as it is soon covered in dust and I feel a little stupid, but then I convince myself I don't mind because the cement dust is the badge of my new, exciting life as a commissioned artist.
John rolls out my designs for the centrepiece of a restaurant wall. They are to be translated by craftspeople into fields of sparkling gold and black mosaic. The foreman of the little team, an Italian, draws a rough approximation of my design on a wall with a piece of chalk and my heart jumps with excitement at the sheer scale of it.
"You're kidding? That big?" John smiles, amused at my surprise. The foreman looks dubiously at John; does this English clown in the dusty black suit know nothing? Why, the fool can't even dress right for a building site! But soon the Italian nods, a smile breaking out as he looks first at my designs and then me, finally connecting me in his mind with my creation on the paper. Shaking my hand, he gesticulates and says something that sounds very beautiful but is totally unintelligible. To a failed almost-speaker of broken French, John's mastery of the language of music, pasta and motor scooters is impressive. He just shrugs.
"He likes your designs... And he thinks he will like you". John shrugs again, embarrassed at my admiration when he replies to the man in fluent Italian. "Evening class level, that's all. On a good day I can order two beers and ask for the toilets. Valerie and I have a little place near Urbino.” He clocks my puzzled look. “Northern Italy. You must come over with us some time."
‘`A little place’… 'Come over with us some time'... To a wider world that Sarah never seems to want to even lift her telescope to, let alone visit. She gave me something very special, the wonderful period dress and the memory of the quaint four-poster with an exquisite view of knights and antique Chinese wallpaper, but that was while her factory was knocking out its own version of quaint Olde Worlde designs on polycotton duvet covers and receiving something else from China, namely tens of thousands of XXXL nylon-plastic football supporters' shirts for those who, no doubt in her opinion, are XXXL beer-swilling rowdies with XXXL voices who down yet another lager and shout at the XXXL screen on the wall of the pub. Of course, Burnleighworld – merely her own version of fantasy and escapism - is funded by these, the very people she detests.
A number of those XXXL personalities are here and I have got to know some of them by name. I am getting there, but I'm still like a member of the English Defence League who has got to like the people who run the curry house down the road but is yet stalwart in his protestation that, although he has nothing against immigrants, they would surely be so much happier in their own country?
But I'm the foreigner in this sovereign territory that is now almost a shopping centre. Yes, I am the one being regarded suspiciously by the locals in the ties, by those in the tees and even by recently-imported foreman Luciano and his team as they start to lay out the mosaic for the near-finished upstairs restaurant.
Indeed, it is not until the mosaic is half-done that the ties and the tee shirts stop to talk to me or even stop to joke with the Italian men and flirt with the Italian women who are putting the mosaic terazzi on a table, the gorgeous women who are producing the dazzling pattern that I - yes, goodness, I - dreamt up. It is not until my pattern emerges under the Mediterranean gods' and goddesses' skilled fingers that the ties and the tees stop to wonder at the beauty of the small, glistening pieces and, one by one, claim ownership of a piece of concrete floor or of a beautifully smooth plaster ceiling, each man desperate to be credited with aiding a work of such magnificence.
And I get to know Nigel, Grant, Jamie and Piotr and they get to know that I have one sugar in my coffee and I get to know that some local schools are 'shite' and that Garth, an electrician, has thus sent his children to private school and that Tom is on the list for another house as soon as one comes up in a better catchment area. I may have lost the Victorian factories and their evocative world but I am now gaining something new and learning, slowly, to trust it.
Troy the town hall security guard sometimes doubles as the Mayor's chauffeur and it is said Troy and Magenta who are walking with Hettie, Mayoral Consort, as she inspects the nearly-finished top floor of the shopping centre with the Mayor. The Mayor is a little distance in front, the other three dutifully walking a few steps behind. If anyone gets close to the Mayor on such trips it is Magenta, clipboard at the ready (except that she is never required to write in it). No, she just has to be nearer the Mayor than the other two. I reckon her role - not that she knows it - is to put in the public's mind the possibility that the Mayor may be sleeping with her. This has, no doubt – in his mind - the double advantage of making other men jealous and suggesting to women that he might be a good shag.
I ponder Hettie as 'Lady Mayoress’.
I am guessing the title contains everything she both despises and loves, that it’s merely a single, convenient one-stop-shop where one buys respect and law-bending perks, the rewards for putting up with inconvenient patronising, sexist chauvinism and feudal hierarchy.
'Lady Mayoress'. Yes, there is, in that title, everything she probably knows a right-on person should be fighting to eradicate, but she is her late thirties now and she has no pension, let alone the career prospects to start one (and let alone her own roof over her head), so I imagine her allowing herself the compromise of being chauffeured to functions in the Mayoral car from the modern house with the black and gold gates that open electronically between the reconstituted stone lions. I can see Hettie wincing as the car exits the fake cobblestone drive of the 'executive five bedroom mansionette' that is higher up the hill than the Flanders' house, and I can see her cowering as the limousine passes through the ornate gates that are so large they promise more than they deliver as they stand in front of a house that is a large brick box with two fibreglass pillars where an enclosed porch would be far more useful.
And what lies beyond that ‘impressive’ portal? Goodness knows. Ah, but if only the Mayor had been left Burnleigh Hall... Now, there's a house fit for her new life. She could really have done something with that place, unlike her husband’s ‘miserable excuse for a cousin, ‘that dyke with the suits’.
It is in their usual formation that the gang of four appear at the upper-floor restaurant with the Mayor clicking his fingers and Magenta scuttling to his side. If the Mayor is eyeing up the Italian women bending over the jumble of mosaic pieces, then Hettie has her eye on a man.
Me.
But not in a good way.
The Lady Mayoress nods at the mosaic artists as they sort the pieces of stone before drilling me with her manic eyes and interrogating me.
"So, which one's yours? “Hettie twitches her head towards Concetta, a kneeling girl with long dark hair and an hourglass figure half wearing a top that is at least a couple of sizes too small, thus releasing a spoiler of the gifts that Nature has been bestowed upon her. The Italian Beauty’s reflective waistcoat and hard hat are a mere nod to regulation as the former is twisted small to the size of a bikini back and the latter worn at a such a tilted angle that the only thing it – and her sensual smile - protects her from is ejection from the site. "How about her? I bet she's your type. Oh, I forgot - you like them more virginal." An allusion to Charlotte: definitely off-limits but I somehow manage to swallow a bitter mix of grief and rage.
"I don't have a type, actually. And none of them are mine… I don't have a 'mine'."
"Ditch you did she, that butch 'Thirties throwback with the monocle?"
"Look, when will it sink in: we were never together. Anyway, what's it to you if we were?"
"There, I knew it - you WERE an item!"
"WE WERE SO FUCKING NOT!" The whole room of around twenty people goes silent at my shouting and instantly polarises into those who want to pretend there is no drama and those who are staring at us and hoping for something even better.
"So", interjects the Mayor desperately, aware that the reporter's interest has now re-entered the room, the news man's mind having latterly been no doubt on his meal/sex/booze last night/tonight... And the Mayor is also aware that the photographer and the woman with the camera from the local news channel are now training their lenses on the ceremonial couple.
The Mayor has no doubt seen the write-up of his messy divorce from Wife Number Two and, no doubt, winced at the unfortunately well-focused picture of Wife Number Three (Hettie) and him snapped as she cried in the back of the limousine… but he is also relieved that his connections at least managed to get his son off with a non-custodial sentence and driving ban.
At the moment, though, he seems in no doubt that a diversion is needed. Clearing his throat, he stammers his faltering one-man publicity engine into life.
"Of - er - of course, this superb shopping centre here isn't the only regeneration planned for our town. No, let us not forget the new development for our valued rural community in the shape of a state-of-the-art industrial complex to be built on the outskirts." A council suit appears from nowhere and the Mayor grins at me as said suit sweeps a carefully sorted pile of mosaic pieces from a trestle table with an arm and props up a large piece of board with an artist's impression of the development on Sarah's land, an image far more detailed than the aerial view of superimposed coloured rectangles they initially showed on television - and far more real. If the former television announcement had been a shot across the bows, then this is a pretty direct hit.
Later, as I sit in my tatty armchair with a bowl of spaghetti hoops (and ponder the setback caused by the whole team of Italian workers having to stop work and pick out stray mosaic pieces scattered onto wet cement before it set), I turn on the news.
And there we all are in the shopping centre.
What the camera doesn't show is the Gucci loafer stepping in front of my shoe: what it does show, however, is a shot of me tripping up and falling against a half-complete mural, a thousand sharp little corners of gold and black denting me from my temple down to my knee, with one half of my face covered in cement with the odd chip of stone stuck to my head.
Yes, I suppose if I were a TV producer I would want to show that again as well, possibly also not being able to resist the slow motion replay which takes an agonisingly long time to finish before it cuts back to the laughing Miss and Mister at the studio news desk. Instead of averting my eyes, though, I look more closely. I even wind it back and play it again, over and over. There, in the background, is the Italian girl, Concetta. Is that her being concerned for me? It's all too out of focus to be sure. The silver lining is that it's a nice shot of her and the slow motion makes it last all the longer.
The mural designs are pinned to the wall behind my desk. They incorporate the factory chimneys that were there before and the shopping trolley (along with the brick and the clay pipe I found in the stream) are in the design. My new income from embellishing the shopping centre is considerably better than a stocking designer’s, so it is with gratitude to John and the commissions for murals and sculptures he has pushed my way that I check my new tablet for messages and fire up my swanky new computer to print off pictures of the mosaics, photographs of the restaurant and views of the shopping centre as a whole.
Soon I am also working on a sculpture for the wall of the shopping centre and, after dismissing a whole sheaf of drawings of chimneys, factory buildings and Victorian grandeur, I have now abandoned these and am aiming to produce an abstract work that will be made up as I go along. I am tucked away in a corner of the site and have been given a couple of Portakabins to operate in, not just to keep it all out of the weather but to have somewhere private and to cushion it - and me - from the jibes from the workmen. John managed to find out where a lot of the old factory debris went and it was with no small feeling of excitement (and new-found power) that I arrived at the scrap yard with a huge truck.
Metal roof trusses, gear wheels, steel signs and even cables - all sent away to be stripped before coming back home a few days later. Nude of its paint, most of the debris was rusty but some, surprisingly, was shiny. An assistant and I soon got to work with electric wire brushes and removed any loose fragments, only then reckoning it safe to assume that what doesn't come off with a power tool's ruthless purging is not likely to drop on someone's darling little child.
Yes, I now have an assistant, a truck, a large studio and a benefactor who seems totally sympathetic with what I am trying to do. Of course, I wouldn't say that to Lady Pinke-Burnleigh - and I am already beating myself up for such ungrateful thoughts - but this feels like the right time, that I’m truly coming alive with the excitement of it all. Burnleigh Hall was opportune but it’s obvious it was merely the warm-up act for this moment.
The sculpture is getting large now and I am dubious about the weight. I suggest to John that it goes over one of the fountains: in the extremely unlikely event of bitts dropping off, they will simply fall into the water below.
"Ok, go for it - pretty much what I was thinking myself. I'll see if they'll let us stick it over the pool in the main entrance."
And that is how I am here now with someone from Municipal Planning, the architect and some guy from the council's Health and Safety Executive who is determined to yank bits off as he swings his considerable bulk on the weak spots. He is not totally convinced.
"So tell me Michelangelo, what else is going onto this, er, masterpiece?"
"We're not sure yet." Brendan (my new assistant) looks at me in wonder when he hears the word 'we'. Indeed, he still can't quite believe the level of his involvement in this sculpture. 'We'? Brendan has been making a voyage of discovery to match his namesake’s and Brendan has even been making the occasional artistic decision, the first he has consciously made since giving up Art in the third year at school so he could do a GCSE that involved his one great love, Metal.
Having been dragged kicking and screaming from the macho eyrie of the roof where he was fixing immaculately white steel joists together, Brendan is now welding rusting pieces of scrap to a sculpture's surface. Whereas he used to fix preordained joists together and work to a common plan, he is now taking random pieces of debris, turning them over and over, holding them up to the growing assemblage and welding them on.
And then taking them off.
And then welding them on again.
He is, it is true, mainly checking my welding and merely adding surface decoration but even that small concession freaked him out to begin with, as there has been no one definitive drawing, no correct sequence of procedures, no foreman telling him to take it off and start again. He didn't exactly enter the task with unalloyed, whole-hearted enthusiasm, yet he has suffered, with good nature, the daily taunts and teasing of his mates. Indeed, Brendan has put up with jibes and speculation regarding what we get up to in our Portakabin, and he has gone to the pub of an evening knowing that he is surrounded by PROPER men who have done another day's PROPER metalwork while he has been pissing about with bits of rusty tut.
And he's born to it.
The Health and Safety man shakes his head and looks at the new Brendan as if the welder has suddenly sprouted pink and sparkly wings through his high visibility waistcoat. Bending his head towards Brendan's, he looks at me as he mumbles in his ear.
"No ta", says Brendan. "I like it here... This is foockin' great! Anyway, that's their foockin' problem." Health and Safety shrugs and smiles at me.
"Seems like you've got a convert here, lad." Tapping his biro on a sprouting piece of ex metal railing, he grins at the sculpture's echoing ring. Giving a protruding Victorian gear wheel one last yank he nods, slowly. "This is fine. You guys have done okay. Goodness knows what the fuck it is, but it passes. So, see you Michelangelo." He pats Brendan on the back and whispers loudly. "See you too, son. You do know Michelangelo was a poof, don't you? Better leave that door open so we can keep an eye on you or we'll be reckoning you guys are having too much fun in here!"
And people start to drift slowly in, just as they did with the mosaic artists. This is different, though: the decorated wall won them over because it is useful and it earns its keep; the wall is an everyday object and the mural just one of a dozen different ways of covering the rough concrete substratum that flows through the shopping centre. This sculpture is seen as a threat, something mysterious to make a man feel inadequate. It speaks in riddles and the best way of deflecting its power is to belittle it.
And then I realise that they are right. This is not a place to provoke, to make people feel uneasy, this is a place to cosset and pamper, to make the public feel superior as they pick out their expensive sunglasses and cut-price jeans. The workmen are so right that I tap Brendan on the shoulder and make a long-overdue announcement.
"We're changing it. A lot." Brendan flips up is welding mask and looks at me in disbelief. He is more used to doing a job and ticking it off the list, so the artist's habit of scrapping the occasional bit that looks finished is something he is only just getting used to. It has happened a few times in the last week and a hard-won enthusiasm for his new role of Fine Artist is taking yet another hit.
"You gotta be -" Brendan shuts up and, with great willpower, dismisses a stream of invective that has been loitering in the wings and waiting for its big moment. "Okay, boss."
"We've got to make it less abstract, more accessible."
"You mean it's got to foockin’ look like something?" He says this to me as if a parent who has held back, as if an adult who has waited patiently for a child to come to an obvious conclusion in its own good time. I nod. Brendan wipes his hands on his tee shirt and sifts through the grubby pile of drawings on a table in the corner. "How about this one?" He pulls out a random-looking factory with chimneys and clouds of smoke, a version I dismissed very early on as cutesy and too figurative. "It's perfect. You could do some nice swirls in the sky and -" Brendan looks at me apologetically.
"Sorry, your call. I was forgetting myself there a minute." It is not with sarcasm that he says this but with a feeling that he has stepped over the mark.
"No, no, you are a co-creator here." Damn - that looked so much better in the script. If it sounds patronising, then Brendan is either being too polite to say so (unlikely), or he just hasn't chosen to pick it up.
As soon as Brendan has a hammer back in his hand his spirits pick up again and he sings loudly above the din as he hacks, bashes and burns large chunks off the sculpture. He has drawn a rough approximation of the swirls that are destined to come out of the tall columns he has salvaged from the old attempt. Stopping, he turns to me and pushes up his visor.
"So, do I get me name on it?"
I haven't thought about this one.
"Sure, why not?"
“Ooh, and look at me, now – I’m an Arteeest!” Brendan talks into a spanner. “And who’s this then? Ah, it’s a Paddy mincing along with his pet poodle in a beret and a little pointy beard. This can only mean one thing, that it’s the sensational one and only-”
“Sorry, did you just say a poodle with a goatee? Hey, why not?”
“Apologies to the viewers, it seems we have a feckin’ comedian in our midst. Now, no heckling, sir…Can’t you see I’m on BBC 2 and it’s all dead serious and totally intellectual?” Brendan raises his eyes to the ceiling in mock despair and shakes his head. “Yes folks, this is the man we’ve all been queuing up to interview, the sensational new sculptor Brendan McGuire!”
It is a week later that the sculpture is covered in an old tarpaulin and wheeled out to an open area. We have left it with the bottom part showing, just enough to let the workforce know that it promises more. The final touch is a scribbled notice on it with the time of the unveiling. Four o’ clock arrives at last and as soon as we have enough people gathered round we stand either side of it as if to execute an official unveiling. John has gamely agreed to turn up to the 'spontaneous' event that has only become a possibility now this new version of the sculpture has been approved by him, the architect, the Health and Safety Executive and the town council.
Brendan is pleased to discover he has a new respect now, this helped in part by the fact that his colleagues have heard the manly bangings that have come out of our studio, seen the various injuries he has sustained in doing honourable battle with the metal, witnessed the dirtiness of his clothes and picked up his widely broadcast news of a five thousand pound bonus which has apparently 'wiped the smirks off their smug, foockin' faces.'
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