Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (20 page)

Now, after more than forty years in Shepperton, after numerous interviews, accounts of deckchair, Delvaux duplicates, overgrown yucca in window, Ballard was unwell. Sick enough to relocate to Claire’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush, in the lee of Westfield. Closer to hospital and oncologist for those unforgiving sessions of chemo, less therapy than stoically borne endurance test. A memoir,
Miracles of Life
, is an elegantly composed realignment, generous in spirit, of the accidents of autobiography, the tricks and tropes of a long career. In organizing so much material, paying tribute to so many dead colleagues and loves, reconciling hurt, dissolving feuds, he crafted the most perfect fiction of them all: the imitation of truth.

A number of Ballard’s favoured restaurants, where he entertained family and friends, were hit hard by the advent of the Westfield monster. And by the strategic relocation of BBC staff to Salford, a banishment many found hard to endure. The Hilton Hotel, close to the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, was a conveniently neutral site for interviews and public debriefings. ‘The biggest problem facing civilization,’ Ballard observed, ‘is finding somewhere to park.’ There was a slot, on the other side of the road, opposite the hotel. The only occasion I can remember when he became a little tetchy and abrupt, suspending his reflex bonhomie, happened in a late-season deluge. A broadsheet portraitist, oblivious of Ballard’s age and frailty, pushed him to pose on the concrete island of the roundabout. You can see the idea: road, rain, film noir mac. ‘One more, just one more.’ The photographer grabbed him by the elbow and thrust the distinguished author into the whip of traffic. Courtesy has its limits. In turning his back, and striding away, Ballard was signalling the final dissolution of human spirit from a topography that could be abandoned to ghosts, developers, image-jockeys and architects who never go into the office.

‘But what is Westfield actually
like
?’ you demand. It’s like everything, as I’ve been struggling to tell you, and it is nothing. Like the stuff we used to call money. Forty minutes, palms sweating, teeth on edge, is my record in the Bluewater quarry. In Westfield, it’s a comfortable two hours before the over-cranked heating system and the low-level electronic hum saps my energy to the point where a jolt from one of the twenty-two coffee outlets won’t mend it. That’s the really disturbing thing, Westfield is like everywhere.

‘Boutique restaurants. Eat anywhere in the world without leaving West London.’

The floating mall is a pristine Dubai air terminal. A motorway university in Uxbridge. The headquarters of Channel 4. A private hospital on the Peterborough ring road. A canalside arts venue in King’s Cross. A David Adjaye Idea Store (ex-library) in Whitechapel. A sleek logistics bunker in Beckton, low enough not to be a hazard to incoming aircraft. Westfield is copywriting made manifest. A template for faux-Ballardian prose. The hype is the truth:
the only secret.
In smoothly curated non-space, you operate below (or above) the level of ordinary human experience. You are inside the art and you are the art. Step on the elevator to retail heaven and you are making a political decision: pro-Olympic Park, blue-sky thinking. You have cast your phone-in vote for politics without alignment. You are a premature coalitionist, as rubber-smooth as Cameronclegg. The only building in London with greater dissociation from the surrounding landscape is the new council property in Hillman Street, Hackney. Westfield has a warmer welcome: they can’t wait to swipe your credit cards.

My journey from Liverpool Street on the Central Line was swift and uneventful. (Which was, in itself, an event.) I took the scatter of white stone eggs at the entrance, where you might expect benches, to be a sculptural gesture, the Brancusi head lice of an aspirational icon: before weary shopper-performers stumbled out of the hangar to straddle them. The stones are exhibits on which to perch, but not sprawl (no vagrants, no readers, no drinking schools). At Westfield, inside is outside and outside is inside. Live green hedges authenticate enclosure, while metallic trees, frosted with silver ball bearings, dress the avenue of approach. The premature gush of a water feature duplicates the wave patterns of an undulating roof.

The proper response, stepping through the mall entrance, is a happy slap of enchantment: a great tree of the world with dancing shadows. Friendly personnel at check-in stations will give you a map if you’re too dumb to operate the touch-screen features. Westfield has an abundance of choice: if you are after handbags or knickers. I have a shopping list with four items. An inkjet for my printer. Contact lens sterilizing solution for my wife. A foodie book by Richard Corrigan for a relative. And one-hour development for the rolls of 35mm analogue film that I’ve been shooting so promiscuously. One out of four isn’t bad. Travelling on to Oxford, I got the rest, in seven minutes, on the High Street. But in the Shepherd’s Bush retail cornucopia? No inkjets (no Ryman). Contact lens fluid only available in bumper packs. Corrigan: not in stock. One branded photo outlet is exclusively digital and the Boots processing counter is unmanned. ‘Our store colleagues are happy to help.’ If you can track them down. I do, eventually, and get my rapid service (but not in the size I request). ‘Do you have a Boots card?’

The Westfield hangar, in which customers do their own harvesting, is themed around an ersatz otherness. Reality is spun like sugar: PR made actual. Kiosks and ‘concierge desks’ soothe the flow of aimless pedestrianism. Comfort stations are plentiful, a lot of space for ablutions, but only three male troughs per unit. My soap dispenser wasn’t working and had been replaced by a self-squeeze plastic bottle. The Ladies’ cubicles, also in groups of three, are in dark wood, and reach to the ceiling. A claustrophobic experience, so I’m told. Theatrical, intimidating, and attended by first-night queues.

With uniformed police walking around in couples, with controlled exits, floors above floors, figures endlessly processing, there is a suggestion of the Panopticon prison. Relieved to be back outside, in the damp air, I rested for a moment on one of the steps. When I arrived home, I found lines of black lead striped across my pale trousers: a penitential metaphor. Every day the narrow trenches on these steps are refilled. You have to be spry to avoid a soaking from the cascade that can suddenly erupt from another ledge under a screen of genuine-fake greenery. Retail athleticism and Westfield are the perfect marriage. The Shepherd’s Bush fortress is a memorial to a humbler event, the 1908 White City Olympics, marketed on heritage postcards as ‘The Great Stadium’.

From 29 July to 14 August 1948, this part of London was the focus for the post-war Olympics, the ‘Austerity Games’. A triumph of bodging and fudging, making do. We were bankrupt anyway. Competitors slept in Nissen huts, camped in RAF barracks, rode on buses. They slogged through mud and clay. The whole flickering black-and-white affair ran like an Ealing Comedy sports day. The human element was visible, unsmothered by corporate interventions. Nothing was torn down, there were no primary strategic objectives, no directions of travel. The city was already in ruins and athletes arriving here from around the world, sharing the lean times, helped to bring London back to life. Athletes were still within the compass of ordinary experience: survivors of war, schoolgirls, housewives, students, factory workers taking time off. The cult of elitism – fat-cat officials, slipstreaming politicians, reserved traffic lanes, Mayfair hotels – was not yet established and endemic. Nobody realized that the presentation of the event was bigger than the event itself: that gold medals were a measure of development potential. That the labouring competitors were tramping the ground flat for Westfield.

As 2012 approached, the GP mindset exhibited itself in a series of funded debates, seminars and ‘Urban Laboratory’ manifestations. I attended several of these, sometimes being invited to perform as a token dissident. The shocking aspect was quite how large the regiment of fixers, puffers, bagmen, and conceptualizers, parasitical upon the Olympics, actually was. Correspondents were appointed years before the stadium started to rise from the radioactive soil. Design for London imagineers. Legacy Masterplan magicians. Parks and Public Realm core philosophers. Leisure space enablers. Sustainable development consultants. Team leaders for integrated solutions. And, worst of all, weasel subversives, such as myself, enjoying their status as sanctioned critics corrupt enough to accept a fee for preaching disaster.

One show trial, under the appropriately resurrectionist title of ‘Growing a New Piece of City: Designing an Olympic Legacy for 21st Century London’, took place in an anatomy theatre. We were under instruction to talk for no more than ten minutes. All of the participants were on the payroll, deeply mortgaged to the vision of the Olympic Park. They were smooth, lean, smart. They didn’t get their hands dirty. They were uncontaminated by any kind of dust. I pictured: open-plan offices, ethically sourced coffee, foldaway bicycles. These were not bad people, they had families, friends. They went out for meals. They talked about war, poverty, music, films, property prices and eco-apocalypse (especially that). But they would not, and could not, do time.

I was convinced that my earlier hunch was right: buried inside the oval of the stadium was a particle accelerator. Relativity, the old Lea Valley space–time mush, was being scrambled. Outside the circuit of the blue fence, voodoo snakes, big-mouth crocodiles and eviscerated chickens were screaming on walls: Berlin ’36. Mexico City ’68. Munich ’72.

Every speaker, words lost as they lisp into a defective sound system, has a laptop presentation. ‘Big ideas delivered in 100 pieces.’ They show the message on a screen. Then read it out. Ten minutes become twenty-five. The same maps, charts, projections. Lavender beds. Water features. No mention of money, toxic waste, dust clouds. The GP bureaucrats are hypnotized by banality, the abdication of content, infinitely obliging statistics. They can’t stop until the computer programme runs out. Nanoseconds expand to deny oxygen to screaming brain cells. Systems closing down. You don’t drift out into a contemplative reverie, seeing the Lea Valley as it once was: the state I achieved by sitting on a chair for the artists of the Eton Mission in Hackney Wick. We die into the inevitability of this horror, looping dead images until we begin to believe them.

People came up afterwards, none of them British, exiles living in Hackney, Tottenham, Walthamstow, with versions of the same question. ‘What can we do?’ ‘How can we stop it?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘The fix is in and it goes all the way. Bear witness. Record and remember.’

The history of contradiction lies in the ground of the body image as a co-ordinate of the written sound-play, so calibrated with signifying exchange that every part offers an assembly ‘in the swim’.

– J. H. Prynne

Ben Watson, who juggled identities as late-punk poet and card-carrying member of the Socialist Workers Party, the SWP, accused me of promoting no values in the contemporary world beyond a belief in poetry. And he was right. Although that ragged umbrella kept the rain out, some of the time, it was never as cunning a device as the tarpaulin hood Ben used to stop himself going blind from the leakage of a stone-crazy theology: Frank Zappa, J. H. Prynne, William Burroughs, Walter Benjamin, free-jazz improvisation, language-hallucination, orthodox and unorthodox Cambridge Marxism, and (of late), with some tenderness, family. Which is to say that whatever knots, ethically, philosophically, you tie in the tongue, it comes down to the pattern of words on the page. The grunt of performance. The shape absence leaves on the landscape. Poets were dying too fast and it hurt.

The secret of Roberto Bolaño’s great literary project, beyond his physical disappearance at the optimum moment, and the spectral record of movement, Chile through Mexico City to Spain, was this: poetry is conspiracy. Poetry is a virus. Poets, sick with pride, chosen and cursed, habitués of the worst bars, the grimmest cafés, nightbirds, defacers of notebooks, feed on the glamour of truth. Immortality postponed. They are owl-heads, hawkers of misremembered quotations. Solitaries jealous of their hard-won obscurity. The Chilean novelist dies in another country, thereby securing his status and, more importantly, the
visibility
of his thick and complex novels. He maps a vagrant territory previously accessed in early Wenders or lethargic single-take sequences from Antonioni’s
The Passenger
. Architectural sets in which death waits, unappeased. The Bolaño template is located in the drinkers’ legends that grew up around the mysterious B. Traven, sitting at the foot of John Huston’s bed, when he came to shoot
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. And in stories of Buñuel, banished to Mexico City to reinvent a fiercer brand of surrealism, and discovering instead the baroque beauty of slums, poverty, violence and fate. White light drumming on a bloody road.

Bolaño exploits apparent flaws, the shifty, unemployed and drifting nature of poets, as a key to unlocking the corruptions of history. A woman poet, a friend of poets, hides in a lavatory stall throughout the invasion of the university, at the time of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. She is sainted: the sole witness. Her unreliable confessions, her visions. Her physicality: how impossible it has become to carry the burden of memory through a rapidly diminishing life. The knowledge of hurt. And the hurt of knowledge. The way Bolaño’s devices and desires, his American Nazis, his decadent European academics, all those readers of forgotten books, zero in on the killing fields of Mexican border towns fouled by ugly international industries, drug wars and the never-ending rapes and mutilations of expendable women. Newsprint fodder for late-rising poets. For the poetry that comes when poetry is over.

Locally, in the dog days of the GP era, between the rabid snarl of Thatcherism and Nude Labour’s yelping corruption of language, poets stood down. Good poets. Poets it was painful to do without: Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Bill Griffiths, Andrew Crozier, Richard Caddel, David Chaloner, R. F. Langley. And now, as I come to write this, Anna Mendelssohn (who was also known as Grace Lake). Peter Riley, a poet and former bookdealer rumoured to spend much of his time in Transylvania, circulated the news. ‘Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, from the effects of a brain tumour. She had been seriously ill and disabled since June.’