Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  I can’t blame Steve for being seduced by the possibility of realizing funds for more sympathetic projects, or for wanting to present his work on an epic scale. Mallworld is where the money is, if you are not the kind of marquee name to underwrite the regeneration of a landfill site down the A13, a mining operation outside Doncaster, or a maritime City of Culture. And if, bollock naked, you are not allowed to bestride the Alps like Hannibal.

  Dilworth was one of those who made the China trip. With the architects, politicians, car salesmen and poets. Renchi, when he travelled, favoured the high country: Nepal, the American Northwest, Peru. Trail-walking, camping, sketching, taking part in spiritual exercises and native ceremonies. Steve, inspecting stone-carving operations for one of his commissioned public sculptures, was a mid-air Sinologist, shuttling between past and future Olympic venues.

  We listened to the stories of his adventures, the meals eaten, the craftsmen encountered in a south-eastern Chinese city given over to the production of white stone lions for restaurants in Hull and Peterborough. A few weeks later, when he had gone back to Harris, Dilworth was generous enough to present me with the handwritten journal of his trip to a tourist city in the Fujian Province.

  Friday 30th March 2007. Well, here I am, my first full day in China. Still jet lagged, couldn’t sleep for the electric buzzing, cotton wool stuffed in my ears.

  About to be picked up to be taken to the stone yard, to inspect the work. First impressions – big city, funny start. Cathy met me at the airport, flagged down a taxi and jumped the queue. Police stopped taxi, told off driver for taking us. Taxi nearly crashed, oil in the road. Pleased my credit card is recognized by hotel, worried when phone on plane, and in airport, didn’t work.

  Driver came unstuck on the bridge coming back into Xiamen, cut up a car. No real damage, but the other party wanted to call the police, lots of shouting. Police took photos. The driver had a habit of noisily clearing his throat every 20 minutes and spitting out of the window. He came with me to have noodles. Every time he had a sip of beer he insisted on clinking glasses. Taught him to say ‘sláinte’.

  The stone yard looked impressive and the work force gathered round. Took their pictures and drank cups of tea, then off to restaurant, private room and seafood lunch. Dried fish, a kind of small whelk, two types of fish, squid, soy bean stalks, chilli sauce, rice. Prawns. Too much to finish.

  On the drive out the pollution combined with fog was dispiriting, all that crap in the air. On the way back the sun was yellow-orange in the sky, doing its best to get through.

  Saturday evening, 31st March. Everything seems either to be under construction or from the late Sixties – People’s Revolution? Bought a couple of dried sea slugs, some dried pipe fish, dried cockles (I think). Photos of odd fish, crabs, frogs, in front of a restaurant. Tempted to step inside and ask for a live frog to go.

  A museum of freak animals, two-headed sheep, a live dove with 2 extra deformed legs and a tortoise that needed space. Animal husbandry is not a big priority in China. Felt really sorry for the squirrel turning aimlessly in a cage. Cage was locked. I couldn’t release it, without ending up in gaol.

  Back on the mainland island of Xiamen (the ferry shuttles back and forth), then off for a foot massage. It was like getting beaten up (by a young woman, about 20 maybe). God, I felt the pressure points, but after an hour completely relaxed: when she left the room, I didn’t notice. Cost 28 CNY (about £2), ridiculously cheap. I felt relaxed at last. All paid for by Cathy.

  Monday 2nd April. Yesterday I went to the Buddhist temple. Beggars gather here. A young boy with seriously deformed skull. A girl playing on a stringed instrument looked blind, skin tight, ear almost gone. Others with lumps for feet. No social security. Sink or swim. Rather sink if it were me. Living in the hotel in the lap of luxury and seeing abject poverty is odd, can’t do anything about it, give a few yen.

  Afternoon: watching TV in hotel. Thunderstorm outside, quite cold. Off to restaurant at six for wedding celebration. First, get some flowers for the bride.

  Meal made up for everything. Rice spirit is strong. Wine a bit rough. Food kept coming, this was the final bash after weeks of celebrating. Each day different.

  Started with sweet soup, then every kind of sea food. Jellied sea worm, jelly fish. Clams in shells, big crayfish, fish steamed. Black chicken soup. Just kept going. Chestnuts and broccoli. Ending with sweet soup. Lots of toasts and clinking of glasses. They wanted to see if I drank. Years of living on Harris came into its own.

  Wandered into a bookshop and bought a drawing pad and a book of Chinese blessings. A tea shop. A Chinese guy sat down and introduced himself – Michael – retired from running a restaurant in San Francisco. Spends half his time in Xiamen, the winter in America. Drank so much tea. Oddly enough, tea is very expensive, even by western standards. Shops specialize in one type of tea only. As it gets older, so it gets more expensive.

  Wednesday 4th April. To the stone yard, to see the progress. Knocked out by the work, just polishing stage to complete.

  Struck by the amount of sculpture, every 50 yards, both sides of 6-lane road into town. Something for everyone, classic Chinese humour to contemporary art.

  An old lady was attempting to cross the 6-lane road with a cow in front of her. My driver used his horn, instead of slowing down. People pull straight into the road in front of on-coming traffic. Zebra crossings are killing zones.

  Beggars in the market. I’m an easy and obvious target. Guy with no arms, thalidomide type, got a dollar. So did another poor soul. Don’t know what to do, maybe check out the university gallery.

  Friday 5th April. Checked my emails. Joan tells me that there is just £800 left on the credit card. Did the hotel help themselves when they swiped it? Or has there been some other sort of fraud? Asked Joan to give me a call, while I try to figure out what the score is. My worst nightmare. Trying not to panic. Thinking about worst case scenarios.

  Back from a long walk into the old market. Caught again by beggars, three of them. I gave one a dollar to help my karma! Stopped at least twice by gaggles of girls wanting to have photographs taken with me. Bought a CD of Chinese music and a sable brush. Still stressing. I’m not sure I will sleep at all, but I’m too tired to care.

  There are various possibilities

  a. Get the collector to pay direct.

  b. Get my dealer to pay in lieu of money from show.

  c. Kill myself.

  d. Get my brother to pay.

  It’s 2am in Britain and I will miss my flight if I’m held up in any way.

  Came back to find them in the middle of cleaning the room, so went out for another walk. Thought I’d have a foot massage. Should have guessed there was something not quite right. Shown into a room with maybe sixty or seventy reclining chairs. Started to take off my boots and socks. Guy came in and said, ‘No foot massage’. Another guy offered girl for sex, so I left.

  Phone call from Joan at 5am. £800 has disappeared from the credit card account but there is still enough left to pay bill. Big relief. Will find out what the score is on my return. Obviously some fraud going on.

  Last night playing pool with Cathy’s boyfriend. Big upstairs hall, maybe eighty tables. Pint glasses of cold tea. Back at hotel about 11.30. Had a beer and listened to the cabaret, two Chinese girls singing something that sounded like it came from the Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves film.

  Tried to find the new city art museum – vast, but still being built. Great sculptures of sails. I find the ‘can do’ quality very impressive and inspiring, when I think of the commissioning process back in the UK. You might as well not bother. Serious money is needed to do anything on a reasonable scale. All that ‘community’ rubbish and hand-wringing arty social workers.

  Had an attack of balance disturbance, floor like a boat. A bit worried, but I won’t dwell on it. Took one of the pills the doctor gave me the last time it happened.

  Back to the tea shop to meet up with Michael – who didn’t show. Ha
d an entertaining time drinking green tea and learning Chinese. Going to karaoke tonight.

  The sculpture yard town is by the sea, although I didn’t realize this until my last visit. Six-lane road, loads of statues, some Christian things. A bit like Basingstoke or maybe Slough. Evidence of new building everywhere.

  Sore throat. Down at the stone yard, dusty as hell. Work is fine. Talk about transport. They seem to know what they’re doing. Everything should be fine. Home tomorrow.

  I don’t suppose I’m that different from most Brits who have never been to China but have fixed opinions about human rights, dog eating, military dictatorships.

  I remember talking to some guys in a stone yard in Aberdeen. Most of their work being done ‘out in China, for a bowl of rice a day’. I’ll have to tell them now, it ain’t like that.

  There is something genuine in this experience, the mid-air cultural tourism. But I don’t, from Steve’s journal, know quite what it is. The food, the massage, the beggars, the fraud: they are all available on Bethnal Green Road. And the dust. Yellow sun behind the fug of development. Dilworth’s relish for the fish and the tea and the museums. His exposure to beggars, cripples, caged animals. His apparent lack of interest in the totality of the landscape, how this city connects with the river, the port, the rest of China. It becomes overwhelming, those days waiting for your soul to catch up. The flash-memories of wife, daughters, home.

  I remember a television documentary taking Jim Ballard back to Shanghai, the family house like a Surrey stockbroker’s villa where another life might have unfolded. How it required extraordinary feats of self-interrogation to contrive a valid response to the accidents of biography.

  A man, at Ballard’s Tate Modern memorial tribute, introduced himself as the second-biggest collector in the world. He had one of about fifteen copies in existence of the pulped Doubleday edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. Very recently he had acquired a prize item: a single authenticated brick from the now-demolished school, adapted by war into the Lunghua camp, the cave of memory in which Ballard was interned for those formative years that made him a writer.

  Westfield Wonderland

  To cheat the future and find out what was coming to Stratford, I headed further west: to Shepherd’s Bush. A giant Westfield mall had now opened, with the approval of Ken Livingstone, central government, style magazines, and anyone else with a weakness for the sublimely ridiculous. The madness to which we were terminally mortgaged had arrived in the disguise of a sleek, vanity-project swimming pool, looking as if it were there to demonstrate the readiness of some ambitious provincial city to welcome the Commonwealth Games (circa late 1950s, early 1960s). A chlorine-green block, brand identity in italicized script, rising out of one of those nuisance clumps of urban wilderness that occupy grunge nowheres between busy feeder roads. Doing nothing, up for grabs. The excuse for a traffic-jammed ramp. Westfield, this post-architectural storage shed, giving nothing away as to form or function, is both a beacon statement and a portal to the underexploited west of old suburbs and dormitory clusters. Vanished railway towns. Villages waiting for the canals to revive. The planning thesis being to free up congestion by taking more cars off the road: they will all be stacked (at a price) in Westfield’s limitless parking bays. You can connect, from the revamped Shepherd’s Bush station, with Croydon and Brighton. And if the journey ahead is fearsome enough, you’ll be in no hurry to leave. Westfield is a metaphor for eternity, as a waiting room, a zone you can’t escape, never having properly arrived.

  When I fall into conversation with one of the dozens of photographers roaming this winter wonderland, he is astonished to learn that there will very soon be another Westfield, a duplicate of the duplicate: out east, in Stratford. This definitive non-space, a managed illusion, is nothing more than a rehearsal for the grandest project of them all, the zillion-pound consumer hive that is the only guaranteed legacy of the 2012 Olympics. The final solution, the great theory of everything, has achieved resolution: Westfield. Where art meets aspiration. A toy box constructed to look as if it had been put on earth to star in a disaster movie. To straddle a fault in the earth’s crust. To go up in flames. To come apart in waterfalls of tumbling, slow-motion glass.

  No question about it, the funny-money retail cathedral is New Labour’s response to the meltdown of the financial markets. A spectator sport for those who can no longer afford to service the debt on their debt. Shops are strictly for browsing. The profit is in the car park. In coffee rewards. And fast-food pit stops for low-ranking BBC personnel taking any excuse to get out of White City: for a glimpse of sky, between studio labyrinth and this enclosed and airless city of non-penetrative consensual consumption.

  Current political dogma chimes with Westfield’s philosophy, as revealed in a set of lavish promotional brochures, so self-important that you expect them to appear soon in some dealer’s rare-book catalogue: ‘Being and Buying. Lifestyle, not just product.’ Jean-Paul Sartre-lite for shopaholics. Walter Benjamin doing Saatchi-speak. A dying political regime, having presided over a shitstorm of mounting hysteria and unpoliced greed, lets us understand that it is our civic duty to shop until we drop. The twin Westfield estates, subsidized traffic islands, are the contemporary equivalent of the baroque churches Nicholas Hawksmoor thumped down in lawless riverbank regions of East London. Goodbye six-inch nails, mousetraps, brown paper, bottles of ink, sugar buns, evening newspapers. The anarchic horizontal pedestrianism of the Bush is superseded by the verticality of the secure monolith. Exclusion zones with parking for 4,500 cars. The selling point of Westfield is that it’s easy to get away, to go somewhere else. New station, new connections, new roads: when you are here, you are not here. It is barely worth struggling out of the car. Turn straight round, after that compulsory coffee hit, and you might beat the rush hour.

  What my new photographer friend doesn’t get, the thing that makes him so nervous he needs help to secure his tripod, is the fact that he’s been snapping away for an hour and he hasn’t been arrested. There’s plenty of visible security, but they behave like Photoshop clones: other-worldly, have-a-nice-day smiles, open-handed waves. Retail parks of the old school, Lakeside or Bluewater, are defined by a total prohibition on freelance imagery. Lift a camera, as I once did, in the car park of Ikea at Thurrock, and you’ll get an insight into what the Berlin Wall was about. Try coming up with a coherent explanation of why it’s worth recording the pattern of lines on the grid of parking bays or the colours on the trolley of the Kwik Fit squeegee operatives. When they allow you to photograph anything that takes your fancy, you know something is out of kilter. You’ve accessed a whole new game. When there is nothing to hide, you are in the wrong place.

  ‘Roads surrounding the 23-acre mall were in chaos last night with up to mile-long tailbacks,’ reported the Evening Standard. ‘Motorists complained of half-hour queues to travel just a few hundred yards.’ And this despite a £200-million upgrade on the traffic infrastructure (closures, eternal road works). The major jam is in reaching the jam, escaping the low-ceilinged short-term-Heathrow parking bays. It’s a form of a reality TV endurance test, played out on 680 CCTV cameras. ‘I’m a consumer, get me out of here.’

  Journos and puffers eager to take on any excursion that gets them out of the house came to a near unanimous verdict on the Westfield experience: wow! They loved it, almost as much as they once loved the Millennium Dome. ‘Never had occasion to go near such a thing before, but it’s rather jolly. The food, you can eat it.’ Tame hacks suspend reflexes conditioned by dismal expectations of motorway service stations and airport holding pens to deliver their tributes to bling enterprise, strictly-come-shopping frivolity. Blizzards of top-dollar PR – ‘think try-out zones, pop-up stores’ – launch the vast permafrost barn like a James Bond film premiere. Like the Turner Prize on ice. A complimentary champagne bar soliciting thank-you notes in the form of column inches.

  The western suburbs are parasitical on Heathrow, not Kensington or Knightsbridge. The new Shepherd�
��s Bush mall (twenty minutes by cab from check-in) is a duty-free zone, an improved and extended version of the downtime limbo of waiting-for-your-flight-to-be-called. More shopping, less flying. It’s as if they took the former West London Terminal at Cromwell Road and filled it with discounted Harrods stock for a year-long sale. Then reassigned upbeat hostesses in combat make-up, heels and name tags to point out the nearest exits. Heathrow is as much a period piece as J. G. Ballard’s favoured emporium, the Bentall Centre in Kingston-upon-Thames. The model for his fundamentalist mall in Kingdom Come. Airports are so solipsistic these days, so embarrassed about their role as bucket-shop service stations, less glamorous than the Watford Gap, that they have taken to hiring philosophers to make them sound more interesting. Like prisons, oil rigs and Championship football clubs, Heathrow made a play for our sympathies by signing a writer in residence. Hoping that, in a flush of positive media coverage, we would forget about the mountains of lost luggage somewhere in Italy and the escalators that refused to escalate. Ballard reckoned that airport roads are the same everywhere: sheds, generic hotels, car lots, pharmaceutical companies. And a vague sense of dread. Will Self, a literalist, examined the thesis by walking it.