The Restoration of Otto Laird (11 page)

Some windows were smashed; others boarded up. A large drainage pipe leaked its contents, the greenish water oozing over the concrete like a slug's trail. Dense graffiti covered its lower reaches, including the giant circular columns that held the structure aloft. One of these, Otto noticed, was singed around its base. Charcoal and other debris, the remains of a small fire, lay close against it.

He saw that scaffolding had been erected across the middle storeys, but he struggled to establish its purpose. Perhaps there was some issue with the lifts on this side of the building.

Chloe stepped forward and spoke off-camera.

‘What do you think?'

Otto, who had forgotten momentarily that she was there, glanced at her.

‘It doesn't look good,' he said, composed and thoughtful, but with no great wish to expand further. ‘Not too good at all.'

He set off on a tour of inspection, carefully studying each side of the building in turn. The picture was uniformly grim. He stopped now and then to disturb with his cane the loose piles of litter that surrounded its walls. Burned pieces of tinfoil, cartons, food wrappers; a crumpled copy of a lifestyle magazine, the smiling face of the celebrity on its cover scratched out by a fingernail or coin. Patches of weed sprouted here and there, in an area that had once been carefully landscaped.

Returning once more to his position before the entrance, Otto turned on his heel to survey the whole scene. The gritty breeze tugged at his coat and trousers. From behind one of the columns, a couple of children peered out, their faces half curious and half hostile.

Otto looked over at the one-time sculpture garden in a corner of the grounds. It was clearly no longer a garden, serving instead as a dumping ground for unwanted mattresses and cardboard boxes. It also lacked sculptures. Just two of the original eight remained. They were balletic, humanoid figures in the style of Henry Moore, and their heads had been sawn or broken off with what must have been considerable effort on the part of those responsible.

Having absorbed the picture as best he could, Otto turned to look at Chloe, who was watching him from out of range of the circling camera. He appeared lost.

‘Okay, cut,' she told the film crew. ‘I think we have enough for the establishing shots.'

Chloe walked over to Otto, who was staring up once more at the façade.

‘That was excellent, thank you,' she said.

‘Really?' he asked.

‘Yes, really.'

She was already anticipating the final edit, some plaintive classical music, piano or harpsichord, the circling viewpoint, running counter to the swirling of the litter. Otto, shot from below, his noble face pensive, elegant in his overcoat and homburg, his cane pressed into the ground before him, turning now himself, to a different tempo, and surveying the crumbling ruins of his Utopia.

‘Would you like to take a break?' she asked. ‘There are some chairs in the van, and there's coffee, too, if you would like some.'

‘I would … thank you.'

‘We're just going to set up elsewhere, and then, if you don't mind, I'd like to ask a few questions about your first impressions.'

‘That sounds fine.'

‘We'll then take you up to your flat, but please let me know if you feel tired at any point. We want to make this experience as pleasant as possible for you.'

‘I feel okay at the moment, but if that changes, I'll let you know.'

They were walking towards the van, Chloe with a woollen hat pulled down over her ears. She disappeared inside while someone brought out a chair and a coffee for Otto.

Lowering himself down and warming his hands around the mug, he noticed that several of the film crew were texting or talking on their mobile phones. As someone whose grip on technology had steadily loosened with the years, Otto felt increasingly bewildered by the gadgets he saw around him. With every new development of the past three decades, he had fought an uphill battle to keep pace with all the changes. From microwave ovens and Betamax videos to compact-disc players and digital televisions, each had proved increasingly difficult to master. Finally, he had given up entirely, to the extent that the current generation of gadgets – the ones named after fruits, and such – were objects both of mystery and fear to him.

Just twenty-five years, he thought
,
since Cynthia's passing, yet already it feels like a lifetime – such has been the scale and pace of change.

Cynthia had never owned a mobile phone or used the internet: she long pre-dated the rise of social media. She barely even understood what a personal computer was. So where were the objects through which she communicated with the world? Where was the typewriter on which her fingers had played, the large red telephone on which she spoke to her friends? Such things were now the preserve of museums, as silent as the grave.

When someone dies, you lose them twice – the first time suddenly and the second more slowly. At first the person goes, then the objects and even the ideas that helped define them in life.

And what would Cynthia make of the world today, he asked himself – how would she have coped with all these advances in technology, with the wider changes in society and politics?

I expect she would feel as disorientated by it all as I do, which, I must admit, would be rather comforting to hear.

Otto's thoughts turned to the interview with Chloe. How should he approach this? What were his initial thoughts on being at Marlowe House once again? He was shocked by the level of deterioration, and concerned at the effect this must have upon the lives of the residents. The atmosphere here reminded him in some respects of the London he had encountered when first arriving in 1951. He still remembered vividly the bomb damage, the poverty, the palpable sense of exhaustion, written onto the faces of the people he passed in the narrow streets near his digs.

But then we seemed to be moving beyond all that.

As he looked once more at the desolate scene before him, a cheery and well-spoken voice from an old newsreel returned momentarily to haunt him. It was accompanied by a piece of generic, Swinging Sixties-style music; all twanging guitars and sunny, optimistic chords.

*   *   *

‘The tower block has become a common sight in Britain's cities during recent years. These concrete giants are sprouting up everywhere. But whether you love them or loathe them, you just can't ignore them – not when they come as big as this! Meet Marlowe House, all twenty-seven floors of it, a newly completed tower block in south-east London. One of Europe's largest residential buildings, it is now home to hundreds of local authority tenants.

‘And here we see some of them, pictured this week at the official opening. They look delighted, don't they? Take this young family, for instance – they're positively bursting with pride. And as you can see, they're eager to take us inside for a look around their brand-new home. Oops, mind that step there, young 'un. That's right, Dad, you help him up. Here we are, inside, and just look at what we find. State-of-the-art facilities, central heating, a sparkling new bathroom with hot and cold running water. An inside toilet, too, the first this family has ever had. And how about that lovely new kitchen? No wonder Mum and Dad are looking so pleased…'

*   *   *

Chloe stepped down from the van and walked over to Otto.

‘When you've finished your coffee, would you mind making your way over to that patch of waste ground?'

She pointed to the mattresses and piles of cardboard boxes.

It used to be a sculpture garden, Otto wanted to tell her.

But he couldn't seem to summon up the energy.

*   *   *

The interview did not go well. Otto realised, too late, that he had taken it all too personally. The poor condition of the building, of Cynthia's building, had affected him on several different levels. Physical decay was a sensitive subject with Otto. He was surprised at just how irritated he sounded. The clarity of thought shown a few minutes earlier, while sipping his coffee, disappeared in front of the cameras.

Chloe began, ‘Now you've had some time to think it over, what are your thoughts on the condition of the exterior?'

‘It's a disgrace. An utter disgrace. How on earth was it allowed to deteriorate so badly?'

She seemed to get the wrong end of the stick.

‘You blame the residents?'

‘Of course I don't blame the residents! Why does everybody
always
blame the residents!'

‘The local authorities?'

‘It's not that simple. Maintaining a tower block such as this one is no easy task, given the parameters within which they have to operate. There are complex forces at work here. Social. Economic. Political. The problems are systemic. They always have been. I can't just point the finger at some individuals and tell you it's their bloody fault … much as you would like me to, I'm sure. What I can say is that something has gone badly wrong!'

Chloe looked at him, a little hurt by his brusqueness and patrician tone. He apologised and recovered some of his composure.

‘I'm sorry. I'm tired … I'm not sleeping terribly well. And I'm afraid this whole matter is rather close to the bone for me.'

‘The building?'

‘Yes, but not just the building.'

Chloe said nothing; seeking, through silence, to nudge him towards elaboration. But he wouldn't go any further.

I am not, he thought determinedly, under any circumstances whatsoever, going to mention Cynthia.

‘You said there are complex issues involved. Could you explain that statement further?'

‘I'm not entirely sure I can. How much time have we got?'

She didn't realise he was asking literally, and so didn't reply to his question.

‘Not much time, I imagine,' he continued, thinking aloud. ‘You'll need a soundbite, I suppose. Something short, snappy and quotable. Unfortunately I'm not accustomed to that sort of thing.'

Forty years before, when Otto had been a regular in front of the cameras, television had been a very different beast. Invite some thought-provoking guests into a studio, sit them down around a table and give them a couple of hours to engage in an in-depth discussion. Then broadcast the results to the nation. But no one had the patience for that level of engagement any more: there was no time now for complexity or nuance. One must simplify the argument to the point of banality, or else say nothing at all. What is more, one must do it while perched like an idiot on a burned-out bloody mattress.

He tried to explain.

‘It's hard to condense the arguments, when it comes to economics and politics. It takes a lifetime of study to begin to grasp the detail. Take
Das Kapital,
for instance. It runs to more than a thousand pages. I got about halfway through, but never finished it.'

He smiled.

‘At home, in Hampstead, we used to keep it on a shelf in the downstairs toilet, along with a copy of
Ulysses.
I'm afraid I never finished that, either.'

Otto had lost Chloe completely, not to mention himself. The chance to make an important point was disappearing. Sensing this, he leafed back urgently through the faded pages of his memory. What was it Angelo had said to him a few weeks earlier, when they were speaking on the telephone? Something about used-car lots and a crumbling social fabric. It was pithy and rather good. Just the kind of thing that was needed now, in fact. But he couldn't remember any of it, once the moment of truth had arrived. All thoughts of his own seemed to flee.

They should have asked Angelo to do this, not me.

‘I'm sorry … just a moment … it's my memory, you see – oh, bugger it!' he said.

Chloe raised her eyebrows in response.

Otto felt tired. His stomach was hurting. Worse still, the building looked so bloody awful, gazing out sadly through eyes of fractured glass.

‘I understand you'd like Marlowe House to be given a listing,' Chloe said to him.

He brightened a little and turned once more to face her.

‘Yes, that's right, we would.'

‘It was an important building in its time, wasn't it?'

Otto had spoken eloquently on this subject on many occasions. Now, unfortunately, wasn't one of them.

‘Apparently it
was
important, yes…'

He lapsed once more into silence.

Chloe was surprised at his failure to take her prompt. Otto was shocked himself. This was his moment to state the case for saving Marlowe House: the reason he had travelled to London at all. So why didn't he grasp the opportunity? It was something to do with the state of its fabric. The sight of it had totally knocked the stuffing out of him. And then there were the strained faces of the children, peering out from between the columns. That was the kind of detail he hadn't expected. So when his time came, he felt uncomfortable about singing its praises. How could he argue for saving a building that was leaking its lifeblood before him?

Anyway, a small voice inside him seemed to say, it's all right for you, Otto, you don't have to live here.
You
live in a nice big villa in Switzerland.

With the guilt and confusion pressing down, he found that he couldn't say a word. Instead he stared intently at the ground and twisted the handle of his cane.

Chloe gave him a second chance.

‘It has some innovative features, I understand … architecturally?'

Otto raised his head and looked the façade up and down.

‘Yes,' he said, without great enthusiasm, lifting the cane and pointing upwards. ‘As you can see, it's rather tall.'

Chloe waited, but nothing more came. The silence burned in both their ears.

With a crushing sense of defeat, Otto lowered the cane and placed it beside him on the mattress. Noticing the other tower blocks in the distance, he added as an afterthought: