The babble of the room withdrew, was drained away in a retreating surf. Mick stood stock still before the picture like a man paused at the mouth of a wind tunnel and afraid to move. He knew what this was; knew before consulting the identifying label where the pink ink ran out halfway through the second word before resuming in green. This was the Destructor. Seen from overhead, a curving arc down to the lower left was all that told onlookers they were witness to a mercifully incomplete view of a dreadful chimney, limitlessly vast so that no canvas, no imagination, could enclose it. Smouldering impasto streamers of sienna and burnt umber, so thick that they teetered on the brink of sculpture, spiralled out from the industrial crater’s rim towards its unseen centre, the immense vaporous masses turning slowly, an annihilating nebula of shit. As dismal as the curling bands of encrustation were, it was in the gouged chasms trapped between these rills where dread resided. Here were ribbons of flat detail, cringing under towering oil-paint tsunamis as they swirled away to off-screen immolation, brown oblivion. Here were sweetshops, schoolyards and Salvation Army trombones sliding inexorably into a hell of nothing, horse-drawn coal carts with their load on fire and dancehall couples plunged, still bunny-hopping, into an asphyxiating midnight. Hopscotched paving slabs and starched white barbers, monkeys and their organ-grinders, drunks and monks amongst the smashed debris at the perimeter of this relentless junkyard singularity in its attempt to drink the world, or at least that part of the world within its economic reach. In the smog-maelstrom people, animals and their splintered environments were circling detritus, unintelligible suds locked into the decaying orbit of a sink-trap abyss. Pram armadas and pools coupons black with optimistic kisses, florid union banners, cinema seats flensed or pissed on, swans and singlets in a rubble waterfall down cancellation’s smokestack throat. It was the past; a reservoir of fleeting incident, a mode of living that had been made abject and was now cremated, irrecoverably lost to ash in a bonfire of the humiliations. This, then, was the toilet everything had gone down.
It was too big, too unanswerable. It would require another cigarette, as much for punctuation as anything else, which would mean prising back the lighter from his sister. Turning round to look for her he found himself once more confronted by the scaled down district on its tabletop, an ant farm scraping by on aphid subsidies. This prospect from the east yielded a gambler’s fan of miniaturised rooftops, breaking waves of slate descending vanished Silver Street and Bearward Street, emptied into the placid tide-pool of a Mayorhold sleeping off its lunchtime ale through the eternal painted afternoon. A quarter-inch-high Vesper scooter with one wheel off stood in Bullhead Lane propped by a yard-brush, and old men in shirts and braces sat on doorsteps scowling like demoted gargoyles. For all of its manufacturer’s uncertainties, Mick was approaching the conclusion that this was the exhibition’s most compelling and straightforward artefact, ship-in-a-bottle streets which captured and preserved the near-evaporated neighbourhood more perfectly than all of the oblique surrounding canvases. It certainly evoked the air of psychological serenity, the secret, lazy, golden idyll that had been peculiar to places with no status left to lose. It left him with a feeling that the world he could remember was still safe somewhere, the polar opposite of the sensation inculcated in him by the terrible mephitic vortex he now had his back to. Spotting Alma over in the nursery’s northwest corner near the caustic blister painting he was just about to see if he could get his lighter back, perhaps by offering one of his offspring as security, when his glance settled on the strip of paper fastened to the diorama’s edge, approximately opposite the similar tag that he’d noticed on the platform’s further, western side. Whereas that had The Boroughs written on it, which he’d thought to be the model’s title, this scrap was marked with the single word Mansoul. The odd name rang a distant bell, somewhere in the next diesis of remembrance, but otherwise was unfamiliar. Had Alma been unable to decide between two designations and so hedged her bets? Or had she just forgotten she’d already titled it? He’d have to ask her, if only to demonstrate that he was paying close attention.
By the time he’d inched his way back past the last ten or eleven exhibits to where she stood in conversation with Dave Daniels, he’d decided to combine his mention of the reconstructed barrio’s conflicting nomenclature with his crack at getting back the lighter, an unlikely gambit which to his surprise worked like a charm. Far better, even, given that charms never worked at all.
“Look, Warry, there’s a sign on one side of your model where it says The Boroughs. May I have my lighter back? And on the other side it says Mansoul. Perhaps you could explain.”
She grinned and said “Of course I can”, then handed him the lighter and continued talking to Dave Daniels. Making for the door before she realised what she’d done, Mick was delighted. He felt that he’d reached a new level of understanding in his dealings with his sister: when you forced her to be arsey over two things at the same time, her aggression systems couldn’t handle the extended load and would short circuit. If through radioactive accident she should ever become gigantic and embark on a civilisation-threatening rampage, he’d be sure to tell the government and military so that they could bring her down. Still chuckling inappropriately at the thought of his own sister, seventy feet tall and blundering into power cables, he went out triumphant to the bright blue afternoon.
Thumbing the wheel and sparking up he sucked his cigarette’s far end to sullen scarlet life, tipping his head back to expel a Chinese chimera of writhing grey towards the Willow Patter
n duotone above. After confinement with so many laudanum-infused interpretations of the locale, its reality of peeling window-frame and unkempt verge, no matter how impoverished in brick or memory, sang with a bruised and toothless joy. He breathed the postcode’s dandelion-clock atmosphere, the rolled-sleeve license of a spot in forced retirement from geography, the consolations of exclusion in the certain knowledge you were no longer expected to do or be anything. Dust too was a mantle of privilege. Across the way his gaze rolled down the incline of the car-park entrance to where forty years before had stood an alienating Cubist playground and, a decade earlier still, the traffic-free paved entry into justifiably defensive-sounding Fort and Moat streets, under siege by an aggressively forgetful 1960s. That was where his mad great-granddad and his cheerily barbaric Nan had started out, before she’d moved to Green Street after losing her first baby to diphtheria. It would have been down roughly the same passage that the fever-cart had rumbled like bad weather when it called to pick up its slight burden. Sticky strands of his genetic history were still there under several eras’ tarmac skims, pink and black liquorice allsorts strata. That was history, a series of ill-judged resurfacings and random superimpositions. Narrowing his eyes against the sun he flattened different layers of time to an incongruous composite, in which reprieved infant mortalities rode a Picasso concrete horse between the pre-loved autos sleeping in their bays.
Behind him he heard the faint emphysemic wheeze of the day nursery’s door and turned to note Ben Perrit and Bob Goodman, evidently previously acquainted, simultaneously fleeing the externalised interior of Alma’s head. Both men were laughing, probably because the bleary poet had made a cold start from nowhere and the club-faced actor had been unable to keep from joining in. Mick raised a hand in greeting but the gesture fell uncomfortably between the retrospectively racist buffoonery of How! and Hitler’s prototype high five, so halfway through he turned it into smoothing back a lock of hair which hadn’t been there for some time. Still chortling, the most upsetting children’s party double act imaginable made its way across the alopecia turf towards him.
“Alright, Benedict. Alright, Bob. Had enough?”
Ben Perrit’s rolled eyes were those of a bolting horse.
“Aha! If that’s the kind o’ things you see when you stop drinkin’, I don’t fancy it. Ahahaha!”
His thespian companion’s countenance appeared to be attempting to throw itself to the ground from off a stubbly chin, too vexed by human disagreeability to carry on.
“Do you know what she had me do, your fucking sister? She made me go out and dig up all this stuff that she already knew about, just so she’d have a reason to put an insulting picture of me in her show. I tell you, we’re as flies to wanton boys where she’s concerned.”
Nudged out of school for truancy before he’d really got to grips with Shakespeare, Mick was unsure how boys and their flies were relevant to this and merely nodded, as a safety shot. The ambient mania of Ben Perrit, fortunately, flooded in to fill any resultant voids left in the conversation.
“Ahahaha! She’s done me in crayon, at the bottom of the sea. I dunno if she’s saying that I’m not even washed up, or if she means I’m in the drink. Ahaha! ’Ere, Mick, I was going to give ’er this but never got the chance. Will you see as she gets it?”
The frequently barred bard held out a sheet of folded typescript, which Mick solemnly accepted without having any idea what it represented. Poetry stuff, art stuff, something of that nature.
“ ’Course I will, Ben. And don’t be offended, how she drew you. You ask me, you got off light. You saw that one of me where I was just a bag of pimples?”
The disgruntled actor curled a lip that everyone had thought was curled already, shaking his anti-Semitic cartoon of a head in sympathetic disapproval.
“Why d’you think she does the things she does? Is she just trying to start a fight, or what? She can’t be doing it because she needs the money.”
Mick considered this, absently staring at the day-care centre’s window. He could see the two old ladies that he’d noticed earlier, both standing cackling and nudging one another by the picture with the tiles around it. Dragging his attention back to Alma’s motives, he said the first thing that came into his head.
“Perhaps she’s hoping for a dame-hood.”
Goodman scoffed incredulously.
“What, by doing paintings? Dame-hoods, they’re for stage professionals, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Helen Mirren, Dame Diana Rigg. What, so now Alma thinks that she’s an actress, does she?”
“Actually, Bob, I think they’re for women in the arts? There’s Nellie Melba, Edith Sitwell, Vera Lynn; there’s Vivienne Westwood, Barry Humphries. It’s not just for actresses.”
The veteran thug-impersonator, ever the professional, performed the first real double-take that Mick had ever seen and after that stayed silent as if processing this unexpected information. There followed an awkward interlude wherein Ben Perrit asked if Edith Sitwell had invented toast, then laughed uproariously, then said that he’d meant Nellie Melba. It seemed like a natural break, and Mick shook the men by the hand while reassuring Perrit that he’d not forget the folded sheet for Alma. The pair sauntered off past Doddridge Church in the direction of Marefair, the poet laughing and the actor audibly remarking, “Dames! Just when you think you’ve got ’em figured out …” before their outlines came to bits in Chalk Lane’s poppy camouflage.
Experiencing an upsurge of baffled affection, Mick concluded that the area’s nonsense was as vital a component as its love, its drink, its violence. Distant traffic vied with a crow altercation further along Castle Street. Stifling a momentary sense of trespass he unfolded the page that Ben Perrit had entrusted to him, and began to read.
This is a kingdom built from absences
The spaces between buildings, empty air
Where different birds sing now
Its landmarks prominent if nothing’s there