year I’d had a three-week plastering job down in London. My workmates were Cockneys who kept waving rolls of banknotes in my face and spitting to just miss my feet but I only smiled and called them all ‘love’ – it drove them crazy – while setting up a series of little industrial accidents for them. Otherwise I mostly slept in my van in the garage off Malet Street, except for Sundays which I always spent in the National Gallery. I liked those big fleshy Rubenses and the very old ones with dusty wooden doors but after a while I just walked straight past them to gaze at one painting, Rembrandt’s ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’.
I could still recall its every detail: a bowl of nectarines and grapes with a little gold and silver fruit knife, Belshazzar’s gut splitting open his waistcoat, his bitten fingernails, the crown perched absurdly on top of his outrageously tasselled turban. In turning to follow the progress of the glowing hand he upsets his goblet: The spilling wine is yellow, as if he’s pissing himself with fear. His women aren’t looking at the hand but at him, to see how they ought to be reacting. One girl, part-obscured by the others’ plumes, remains oblivious, still playing her recorder, cross-eyed with concentration as she goes for that tricky low D.
The real attraction for me, though, was that Belshazzar looked exactly like Kenny Burns, the fearsome centre-half from Nottingham Forest’s cup-winning team. As a veteran, dropping through the lower division, he’d played for Derby against City in our promotion season. Flabby and pale, with a crosshatched moustache and a layered haircut in need of darning, he cruised his ten square yards of pitch, dead-eyed as a shark. No one dared go near: even Crazy Bobby Campbell wouldn’t take him on. At one-all, late in the game, we brought on our teenage substitute, Don Goodman. ‘Oh God, here comes the headless chicken,’ Dave said. Goodman was lightning-fast but wildly uncoordinated, usually falling over in his sheer excitement whenever the ball went near him. This time, though, receiving his first pass, he managed to stay on his feet – he turned smartly and headed straight towards Burns’ sector. We cringed, awaiting the inevitable terrible impact…then, at full speed, Goodman feinted right and left then, having thus opened Burns’ legs, slipped the ball clean through them and went by him like the wind. In Rembrandt’s picture I relished again Burns’ horrorstruck expression as he’d turned to see Goodman, already twenty yards on, lobbing the keeper for the decisive goal. That win had put us top: we stayed there for the rest of the season.
I used to look at it for hours with the gallery attendants watching me like hawks. They knew that my presence – a man in stained overalls, his hair weirdly full of unmelting snow in mid-July, standing in front of a painting, laughing wildly – must be against all the regulations but – like the coppers with the big graffiti – they couldn’t find anything that covered it. I became aware that I was laughing again now, standing alone in front of my block. Goodman and Burns: it hadn’t been about football or even about how the old fall prey to the young, it had just been a perfect moment…an utterly unexpected intrusion of pattern and grace that had set off simultaneous explosions of somehow sugary warmth in my head, heart and gut, like when I’d stood by my window watching the stitched chevron of those back pockets moving around on that tight white arse far below.
| In this | block |
| there lives | a slag… |
| she’s hurt Him | and now |
| she has | to pay… |
Since the afternoon the words seemed to have slid down the wall as if to create space for further bulletins. I felt that there was something about all this that I wasn’t quite getting, as if it was a code that I couldn’t crack – as if, on some other level, it had nothing to do with blocks and slags at all. When I closed my eyes I found that the letters were still visible on the red field of my lids.
There was a roar of approaching engines and then a loud squealing of brakes from behind me. At first I thought it was the boys in blue returning for a second shot but these three grille-windowed vans were smaller, blue and gold with Graffiti Removal Unit painted on the sides. The dozen men who came spilling out were all wearing balaclava helmets and dark uniforms with epaulettes and what appeared to be cartridge belts. Some of them had thick droopy moustaches like seventies TV detectives. They jogged past in step, in two precise lines, bearing gleaming steel ladders above their heads. Within thirty seconds they were high above me, scrubbing away at the side of the building.
The Council didn’t usually react so quickly – or at all. Most graffiti was just left well alone: my own favourite – WEBBO/VICIOUS/JEDI – still remained on the railway bridge – in its proud but fading letters of dripping scarlet lake – after fifteen years. Someone powerful had obviously found ours – whether because of size or content – unacceptable. Perhaps there were hundreds of such notices all across the city that were being immediately erased, with all reports suppressed, like they do with UFO sightings.
The sprays and brushes couldn’t shift the letters, so the men had to return to the van for their pressure hoses to blast them away. One of the moustaches ran so fast that he overshot and, in trying to turn, tripped and crashed to the ground. I gave him a mocking slow hand-clap and slurped my tongue round my lips. ‘I just love watching men at work,’ I said. He didn’t reply or even react, just strapped on his hose and shot back up his ladder. I was looking for a chance to make off with a bucket or torch, but then realized that a thirteenth man had remained by the vans with a mobile phone, mumbling incomprehensibly to somebody. Aloft, they worked on in total silence, \\ flat out. I couldn’t stand these new model working men. No talking, no tea or toilet breaks, always running, never walking – if the Council had tried that on when I started on the bins twenty years ago we’d have had the whole city out on strike. We used to work at half the speed for half as long: did we think the world owed us a living? – No, we knew it did. For working on Friday, after midnight, this lot were probably getting only time-and-a-half, at best.
Some of them were working inwards:
| n this | bl |
| ves | a s |
– While the others worked outwards:
| she’s h | ow |
| she | ay… |
Although I knew that they shared a shabby Canal Road hut with the dog-wardens and pest-controllers. it appeared that the GRU wasn’t merely another council department but something sinister, even supernatural. As I watched, it seemed as if they were ruthlessly wiping the words from my memory, as if I’d awakened in the middle of the night to discover them standing around my bed, sandblasting away my dreams, I felt sick and giddy, as when I’d once rested against the electric fence at the edge of a field of cows and thought it had been God’s hand that had struck me down. There was a strange ticking sound that I finally decided could have only been the knocking of my knees. Up until that moment I’d thought this to be merely a figure of speech: maybe my hair would have been standing on end as well, if my head hadn’t been shaved – or rather, bald.
Even when they finished the men didn’t relax, marching silently and expressionlessly back to their vans without looking at each other or at me. I didn’t turn around to watch them go, just continued staring at the empty wall. I was pleased to see that, in their haste, they’d missed the final dot, bottom right. I hoped that the words might also begin to reconstitute themselves but nothing further appeared. I’d always thought that my block was grey but now there was a golden, star-shaped patch where the letters had been. At least our prison had been built of the finest Yorkshire Sandstone. I realized that I was able to recall the words in two halves, by concentrating on the rusting drainpipe and shutting first the left eye:
| In this |
|
