by Gordon Burn
The core of the regular workforce arrive a few minutes early, and sit smoking in their cars until eight. At ten, and then at regular intervals, they troop back to their flasks and their papers and individually reclaim their own space.
One man, however, consistently arrives ahead of the others in the mornings and drinks his way through a four-pack of Special Brew before starting work.
The first time I saw him I had been woken by the dog reacting to the unusual pattern of activity on the quay. There had been a storm overnight and the light was forest green. He was sitting at the wheel with a can raised and a cigarette going in the same fist, floating in a river mist as dense as the fog he was trying to disappear into.
He buries the empties in a carrier-bag pushed under the passenger seat, then bins them along with the rest of the day’s intake before setting off for home at night.
The concern with personal privacy has been unexpected. It doesn’t square with my experience of how men generally behave in groups in public. Some time ago I had my way blocked on a pavement in London by a building worker: he slid in front of me on his knees and, with a broom handle for a microphone, started singing ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ while his mates whooped and whistled and egged him on. ‘Top man!’ they shouted as he swaggered back to rejoin them. ‘Top man!’
I’ve followed the progress of the work on the boathouse with interest – seen the fabric heave and shift, grow a turreted addition here, a premium river-view there, until the exterior now more or less conforms to the clean, lightweight lines of the airbrushed brochure drawing.
But, as is usually the case, I have found what has been going on behind the scenes even more absorbing. It has given me the opportunity to trespass on a world which has always been blocked off to me until now.
I never thought of investigating what was happening inside the building until I followed the dog across the small shingle beach and beyond the utility lights on to the site one night.
The similarity to being backstage in the theatre was pronounced. What is usually concealed and tidied away was exposed and available for inspection. I played the flashlight on a jungle of loose wires through which a current would soon be running. I tried unsuccessfully to follow a complex network of plastic pipes through the foundations and up into the rafters to their source.
Bags of cement. U bends. Planes, power saws, wood in vices, plugs plugged into unmade walls. Flora. Sunburst. Westphalian Mortadella (a packet featuring a stylised burgher with thumbs hooked into waistcoat pockets and piebald pale meat for a shirt).
Familiar things looked unfamiliar, like game-show prizes, isolated in the beam of bright light.
Nescafé. Half a loaf, a teaspoon, a knife and a bag of sugar standing on a square of cardboard. A mug: ‘If you can’t be good be real bad’. A set of trowels and other tools lined up scraped and cleaned on a newspaper.
He’s A Hunk page 19
She’s A Tease page 7
He’s A Hero page 5
She’s A Bore page 14
In Timbuktu, I read somewhere once, the houses are built of grey mud. Many of the walls are covered in graffiti, written in the neatest of copybook hands.
Customs and procedures. The underwalls on the boathouse site are covered in pencilled doodles, diagrams, telephone numbers, pricings, elementary additions, dimensions and personalised hieroglyphs.
They lie concealed now, along with the bodgings and rough improvisations (matchstick levers, milk carton wedges, cataracts of custardy glue) behind plasterboard partitions whose own pencilled-in marks and gestures are starting to disappear under coats of paint.
Again what is unexpected is the properness, the propriety – no lewd drawings, swear words, scatological humour; as though they suspect that it is on this evidence, designed to outlast them, that they may one day come to be judged.
Work has advanced. The walls are flush and skimmed. The latest refinements of the wipe aesthetic are in the process of being installed. Tassels of coloured wire await connection, to activate manufacturers’ warranties of de luxe superfry, easy defrost, logic creaseguard, audio cancel, crystaljet.
The water rushing over the weir is as loud as motorway traffic. A pipe leaks drips into a saw-edged can.
Silk Cut. Fisco Unimatic. A ball-headed hammer with insulated handle. A Stanley knife. A scraped-down spade.
There’s a radio with bare wires poking into the wall which, when I begin to apply pressure to the on-off button – it gives me pleasure to feel the tension between resistance and give, to play out the moment between off and on – kicks into life in an unanticipated but welcome way.
The noise that comes out of the radio on this occasion is as abstract as the surrounding night-time outdoor sounds – a barrage of loud click and clack that rattles the plaster and hits me like a rush of reminiscence.
It’s a sound that could be being beamed direct from the days when footballers wore leather studs and baggy bloomers – the sound of wooden counters being shaken in a canvas bag by officials with scaly build-up on the arms of their glasses and grease across the shoulders of their aldermanly suits, making the draw for the next round of the FA Cup.
Newcastle United and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Brighton and Bradford. West Bromwich Albion and Portsmouth. Gillingham and Darlington. Leyton Orient and Middlesbrough. Everton and Port Vale.
The click and clack. And in every rattling a distant crowd-echo, the irradiation of light from webbed lighting stacks silhouetting brick factories and refineries and tanks against the partial darkness of a winter afternoon.
It’s like doodling the beam on the freshly rendered walls and coming across a friendly message or something you scored into the wall yourself very many years before.
Instead of that though, what I see when I play the flashlight in an arc around me is: a Page Three girl with a large-mouthed and brassy vulgarity of expression and her nipples burned out in the picture by the tip of a cigarette.
Then oboe nails scattered in sawdust. Psyche cleaning out the last smearings of a Flora carton. A coffee jar containing viscous black oil. A double-page feature stained with whorls and drips of coffee and headlined (as I see when I remove a plastic sack) THE STOLEN YEARS.
The piece is illustrated with what are clearly victim pictures – pictures uncontaminated by news values or documentary purpose when they were taken, and informed by nothing more than childhood notions of ways of presenting the self.
Pauline Reade was sixteen when she was murdered by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady in 1963, although she appears younger in the picture. She is wearing what is almost certainly her communion dress and a white lace (or possibly crocheted or knitted) mantilla, and dark shoulder-length hair.
Keith Bennett was twelve when he was murdered, also in Manchester, in 1964. He has a basin cut, skewey wire glasses and a disarming gap-toothed grin.
Hindley and Brady denied responsibility for these murders for more than twenty years. The bodies were never found. Now, on the basis of new information provided by Myra Hindley, and using pictures of Hindley and Brady picnicking on or near the graves as a guide to the topography, it is Pauline Reade’s and Keith Bennett’s remains they have reopened the search for on Saddleworth Moor.
But the victim pictures are not the main graphic element of the story: repeated reproduction has stripped them of their pathos and therefore their power to stir the emotions; instructions for a fresh angle have been sent down; money has been spent.
Most of the space has been given over to what look like television images rescreened in newsprint – images with opalescent shirring around the main features; pictures full of temporal-screech and-skid. But pictures with something superadded; something inauthentic.
They are ‘photohoroscopes’; computer composites of what Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett might look like if they were still alive, and aged thirty-nine and thirty-four respectively.
The method, as I understand it, has been to take the pictures of them as they were when they dis
appeared and ‘age’ them using photographs of the family members who most resemble them physically.
All the features are converted into video images and imposed one on the other on a screen before the electronic moulding and pummelling and detailed manipulation (‘warping’) takes place. The putting down of a ‘wrinkle mask’ is the final stage.
Unlike a typical photograph that draws meaning from its connection to a real person’s living hair and skin and clothes, the result is ghost-like accretions of information referring to nothing; phantasms with no organic presence; forms without substance; shadings on a computer memory.
The two sets of pictures are patched on to the page in such a way as to suggest a natural progression, a trajectory: from the innocence of faces that don’t know they’re going to die, to discarnate beings built up from encoded rays and glazes of numerical light.
And in between? The decomposition, the decay, the mulch-down they are trying to pin-point on the vastness of the Moors. Mud in the caves of the eyes; silt and mud in the tunnels of the nose; sheep dung, hoar grass and bracken commemorating the spot where a named individual lies.
Eight
A story, possibly apocryphal (one of hundreds), about Mae West:
She was approached once by an intense young girl, who announced, ‘I saw Diamond Lil last week; it was wonderful.’
‘Didja honey? Wheredja see it?’
‘At the museum. The Modern Museum.’
And a dismayed Mae, seeking shelter in the sassy drawl of her film persona, inquired: ‘Just whaddya mean, honey? A museum?’
*
I thought of the story this morning as I drifted through the connected but separate climate systems of the galleries at the Tate, looking for the portrait Peter Blake painted of me nearly a quarter of a century ago and that I haven’t seen for almost that long.
I could have asked for directions at the information desk just as you come in, but I was hoping to come across myself without warning, to take myself unawares, even if it did mean denying a constant urge to run to the toilet and a banging in my chest like the Deny Apprentice Boys’ parade.
It was early. I was among the first in. There was still the feeling of overhang from the previous day. In addition to dollars and yen and layers of small change, the glass donation boxes were choked with messages posted by school parties – ‘Jo 4 Stuart’, ‘Sharon 4 Cookie’, ‘Homefucking is killing prostitution’, ‘What are you looking at DICKHEAD’, ‘If I wanted to listen to somebody talking out of his arse, I would’ve farted’.
There was the sound of banged metal and spilled cutlery and conversations in iron-curtain accents coming from the kitchens. The attendants were assembled in a group under the rotunda, being assigned their areas of responsibility for the shift – room 10, Rural Naturalism and Social Realism, 1870–1900; room 14, Bloomsbury and Vorticism, 1910–20 – where they would sit and watch the day stack up and listen to the humidity and temperature stabilisers ticking through their programmes.
(Room 28, the chapel-like space containing Rothko’s looming soft-edged stacks of rectangles for the Seagram Building is where I would angle to get placed. It must be the equivalent of a diplomatic posting to Paris or Washington.)
In some galleries it was like being the first to walk on a new snowfall; the air hadn’t been displaced. Room 23, Abstract Expressionism, was like this. The only sign of any life was in the paintings, which were humming with the urgency of mark-making and ‘the liberated unconscious’.
I stood in front of one of de Kooning’s ‘Women’ for at least a minute before I got a bead on the figure embedded in the loops and slashings of paint. Before I lost it again, it reminded me of something I had seen a million times in the mirror: make-up being smeared into waxy swipes and lurid skirls of colour by the application of theatrical remover cream.
Among the information given on the card on the wall was a quotation from the artist: ‘Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented’.
A few galleries on, I stood at the edge of a tour group and listened while the guide filled them in on the background to Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’. ‘You can see the artist sandwiched between the two book-like tombstones at the bottom right-hand comer … You can also see him naked in the centre of the painting … “I don’t want to lose sight of myself,” Spencer once admitted, “for an instant.”’
The students – they were a mature group – wrote this down on their pads. They kept their hands free by wearing the collapsible stools they were carrying over their shoulders or – in the case of most of the men – transversely across the chest, like armour.
The Spencer wasn’t hanging on the wall. It was standing on rubber blocks on the floor, with gallery staff going backwards and forwards with ladders and lengths of wood in front of it as if they were among the resurrected and had just stepped out of the painting.
I continued wandering haphazardly, following no particular plan. Once or twice I thought I saw the picture Peter Blake did of me in the palaeolithic era out of the corner of my eye – something about the scale as I remembered it, the composition, the colour. But when I edged nearer it would turn out to be a still-life of Shelf with Objects, or View of Hackney with Dalston Lane, Evening.
In the end I had to admit defeat and backtracked to Information, where I asked the person on duty if she could point me in the direction of the Peter Blake painting titled Alma Cogan, dated, I thought, 1961–63.
She was an interesting combination of half-prim (cashmere cardigan, pearls) and half-punkette (high-shaved side-panels, gold wire ring in her nose). Acid-green letters started dancing in her tiny glasses as her fingers ran over the keys. Behind and above her, meanwhile, a second display panel spooled out slogans in liquid crystal letters of peony and tangerine.
DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS … DYING AND COMING BACK GIVES YOU CONSIDERABLE PERSPECTIVE … LOVING ANIMALS IS A SUBSTITUTE ACTIVITY … THE HAPPINESS OF BEING ENVIED IS GLAMOUR … PUBLICITY IS THE LIFE OF THIS CULTURE … NOSTALGIA IS A PRODUCT OF DISSATISFACTION AND RAGE … On and on they rolled. Around and around.
‘I’m afraid I can’t access that information,’ the girl said. ‘Alma Cogan is currently on-loan to the VIP Lounge at Heathrow.’ Then a signal from the screen started throbbing in her eye like a nerve. She keyed in another code which supplied her with the information that the painting had recently been returned. I could make an appointment to come in and see it in storage at a later date.
‘Name?’
It occurred to me to quickly make something up. But ‘Cogan,’ I said. ‘A.’
There was a pause, as if the ‘search’ function of the console in front of her was flying through its documents and folders making another match. ‘The … the subject of the work?’ I nodded. She walked to the back of the information area and picked up a phone.
CHASING THE NEW IS DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY … RECLUSES GET WEAK EVEN IF STRONG ORIGINALLY … MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE … LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL … The words trickled over the jagged surface of her isolated island of hair. When she came back I half expected to see the neon colour combed in.
Somebody from conservation would be up to collect me in a few minutes, she said, if I would care to wait. And meanwhile if I would fill in the form, taking care to make sure that the information registered on the carbon duplicates underneath …
The first time I met Peter Blake was when he had just stopped being a student. It was at the all-night party Mike Todd gave at the Battersea Festival Gardens after the London opening of Around the World in 80 Days, which would date it as 1956.
He was working on one of the amusements – rifle-range, coconut shy, tombola, dodgems (they were all free that night of course, along with everything else). He was wearing the bottom half of a boiler suit, the closest you could get at that time in England to American jeans, and a similarly improvised jean jacket.
But what I remember most vividly about him are the seams of blue pucker
ed scars that extended from his mouth to his nose on one side of his face like a hinge and were emphasised rather than hidden by his attempt at a straggly student beard. (Since the mauling I’d witnessed just two years earlier, I had taken a more-than-usual interest in the movement of people’s mouths, the wetness and glitter and the shape of the mouth and the teeth.)
He reminded me of this first meeting the second time we met, at one of my parties, when he was coming into his first fame and I was just starting to be aware of the calm that was waiting round the corner. (It was a phrase Billy Eckstine used, which had caught on. ‘All of a sudden,’ he said, ‘it gets calm.’)
It was on this occasion I think he said he would like to do a painting. I was flattered, of course, but slightly nonplussed when he said he would prefer to use a magazine picture (he seemed to already know which one) than have me come to the studio and sit for him.
But we did have lunch – at Cunningham’s, the champagne and oyster bar then at the height of its fashionability, in Curzon Street. The owner, Owen Cunningham’s, mother had been a maid in the 1920s in a Shepherd’s Market laundry, earning a pittance from scrubbing the mountain of soiled linen sent out from the great Mayfair mansions.
Owney enjoyed a kind of social revenge by screwing the titles and blue-bloods among his regulars, who included the Gerald Legges, the Dockers, Anthony Armstrong-Jones and Olga Deterding, the Shell heiress who eventually threw it all in to go and work for Albert Schweitzer in Africa, while at the same time making sure that his show-business customers always got good value for money.
It was a lively lunch, with few of the longueurs that occur when two people are sitting alone at a table together for the first time. We were almost exactly the same age; Peter Blake had seen me perform on several occasions at the Chiswick Empire and the Chelsea Palace, and had a fan’s knowledge of all departments of the wonderful business we call show.