Lunarhampton
(i)
The city was tugging at her elbow.
It felt like that, as if the fumes, litter and rain were conspiring to irritate her. She liked cities, but this one mistrusted her. Flyovers clapped hands above, falling away in exhausted parabolas, shadowing her car but doing nothing to keep the elements at bay. The convertible was a bad idea, she realised, as she changed lanes to avoid an ancient tanker, windows tinted like a blind man’s glasses, which kicked up whole puddles of oily water to baptise her anew.
On the edge of her vision, she was aware of addicts skulking in the shadows of tenements, needles catching her headlamps and signalling like heliographs. Was there substance in these messages, ironic insights from beings who shut down veins like television channels? She passed a huddle of towers and a figure lurched onto the road before her, syringe impaled in a wrist, clutching something in a clawed hand. He seemed to tread on the pools, feet gripping the surface-tension. Swerving to avoid him, catching his disappointed wail, Melissa Sting wondered if this was not a junky but a patient from some eviscerated asylum, saturated with so much lithium he was lighter than water.
In her mirror, she watched the man dance between the vehicles. His movements were jerky as he lunged at speeding windscreens. With a start, she recognised his weapon as a sponge: he was a squeegee merchant. She awaited the collision with an abstract pity, but it did not come; he was too agile. Soon her view was blocked by other drivers: a sedan attempted to overtake her on the inside, losing its exhaust as it glanced off the safety barriers. Brown smoke merged with the drizzle and was beaten into dead rainbows in the choked gutter. A second car struck the exhaust and flipped it into the air. It curved over Melissa and landed on the grassy embankment between pavement and road.
A depression, the first of the day, enveloped her as she approached the city centre. It was nearly noon, but still dark. Though this was her first visit to Birmingham, myths of its soullessness had filtered into her sceptical consciousness. Now she had to acknowledge the truth of the stories. The environment was self-parodic, and thus essentially baroque, with tangled junctions crumbling like plaster scrolls, effluents in the canals swirling into complicated filigrees. From above, the megalopolis surely resembled a shattered portico to an extravagant tomb. Once inside it was difficult to avoid the reek of putrefaction, the taste of bruised faith. The grandeur was a stamping boot.
Only when architects allowed children to scribble on their designs, she reflected, would they understand what they were producing. Modernism tries to oppose nature, a futile battle. Lines which are clean on a page turn dirty on a street, walls succumb to graffiti, glass collects grime. Without constant attention, reality and theory divorce and it is always reality which wins custody of the populace. Architecture must work with decay rather than against it, improving with neglect. Living in a fake Gaudi house, Melissa had verified the adaptive qualities of the organic aesthetic by refusing to make repairs.
When she was feeling in a didactic mood with herself, it generally boded ill for the remainder of the day. She turned onto potholed Digbeth High Street and accelerated past the Coach Station. If Birmingham really was a tomb, then this was the actual site of the corpse: a heaving jelly of decomposing humanity, a gateway between this unsatisfactory world and the comparable hells of Wolverhampton and Coventry. As if lying in wait, a bus pulled out and tried to block her path, but she roared ahead. Like Charon ferrying souls, the driver was a bony fellow, long teeth grinding in frustration as he missed his target. His debased passengers stared at her diminishing form, tarnished coins for eyes. And for an instant, she had a metallic taste on her tongue.
(ii)
She skirted the giant Bull Ring, where cattle had once been tortured to improve the flavour of the meat. Now shoppers were baited in their place by the commercial hooks of shoddy goods and pseudo-bargains. Beyond this monstrous precinct, the Rotunda kicked the grey sky like a broken femur. She cruised down New Street, proceeding as far as Victoria Square, where she stopped on a shattered pavement below the library, which she mistook for a multi-storey car-park. A guard came to escort her into the Council House, which had somehow lost part of its dome. The interior was filthy, strewn with old papers and cigarette filters. The guard ushered her into a room full of charred furniture. Holes in the roof allowed the rains to tumble in, slicking the mosaic floor.
A council official sat behind a desk in a corner of the office. The guard bowed stiffly and departed, leaving Melissa to pick a route among blocks of fallen masonry. The official shifted uncertainly, as if he had forgotten the appropriate greeting. He began to stand, thought better of it and offered a limp handshake. Behind him, nailed to the wall, dripped the new city flag, a tricolour composed of various shades of grey. Under his shirt something bulged and rustled.
