Concrete
James Blackstock was a man who spent a lot of time in underground car parks. He considered them a refuge: a place where time stands still. Time, he said, had no interest in hollow, vacant, in-between places., and that this was especially true of underground car parks and their multi-story siblings. They were not, as movies would have us believe, magnets for high-speed chases, or crime scenes waiting to happen, but empty non-places, made only for the temporary housing of machines. Their cold, naked concrete kept the hours at bay and drowned out the ticking of the clock. James said that whenever he needed to think, he would look for a car park. There, he felt like an insect suspended in amber, while outside everything was happening all at once. He did not own a car, nor could he drive.
James had studied architecture at the University of Sheffield during the nineties, before becoming an architect himself. His thesis had been a long lamentation on the death of modernism and the brutalist movement, and his unfashionable passion for all things concrete had made him a figure of fun amongst his peers. James' apartment was littered with sketches of boxy grey structures and buildings that could only be described as bunkers that had been wrenched from the earth to be given new life above ground.
When I last went into the city with James, we had gone to see the new lights being switched on for the first time at the Moore Street electricity sub-station. This was by far his favourite of Sheffield's architectural landmarks, and the news of an attempt to make the building more attractive to those that had to drive past it every night had given him cause to worry. He viewed the sub-station as a monument to the importance of brutalism in the development of the city, and the prospect of making alterations to please the architecturally ignorant had filled him with dread.
When the switch was flipped and the sub-station's angular bulk illuminated in neon blue and yellow, James became incensed, claiming that the building had been robbed of its timelessness. The longer we stood amongst the modest crowd, most of whom appeared to be more interested in the activities of the Look North reporter than the structure in question, the more vocal his protests became, until he had to be lead away before he decided to do something rash.
We flagged down a taxi and retreated to the Red Deer, an old haunt from his university days, where we spent several hours discussing the evils of the modern penchant for sticking garish lights on everything. He said this had been the worst thing to happen to Sheffield since the Tinsley cooling towers were demolished: an event that James had attempted to put a stop to by repeatedly phoning the city council and claiming that he would fling himself from the top of the viaduct during the demolition. He did not..
Following the Moore Street excursion, I did not hear from James for months until he called me, out of the blue, at 2:45am one Monday morning. He told me that he had visited his childhood home, a cul-de-sac in Waterthorpe on the outskirts of Sheffield, in an attempt to re-connect. I could tell by the grave tone of his voice that it had not gone as expected.
He had stood outside his old house for as long as his fear of curtain-twitchers allowed. The door was white, rather than the royal blue he remembered, but otherwise the house was exactly the same as he had left it all those years ago. I thought he would have taken some comfort in the place having gone largely untouched by time, but he insisted that he had no interest in the house. The real reason he had made the journey there was the walk. At the end of the cul-de-sac, the houses parted to a small wooded area and a path which wound down through it and up to the Crystal Peaks shopping centre in the distance. It was a walk that James had taken often during his childhood, and it was a memory that he always considered to be concrete, experienced so many times that there could be no doubt as to its reliability.
The path flowed between the trees, a trickle of tarmac beneath a green canopy that left it dappled with light, leading down to open out into a small playground. There, the swings still stood, rigid but tired, the thin layer of red paint covering the frame having flaked away to reveal bare iron and rust. The roundabout lay immobile, its partitions and worn wooden base covered in graffiti. ‘Sean 4 Lindsay’ and ‘Ryan is gay’: the only evidence that anyone else had ever been there. The fact that he could not remember any children besides himself playing there troubled James, as if he needed witnesses to corroborate his version of events. He said the playground looked like a post-apocalyptic landscape: a rusted relic amongst aggressive, overgrown weeds. He could no longer remember it being any other way.
Further still, the path straightened and sloped off down a hill. As a child, its end had seemed so distant, but James found that age and height had done nothing to change this. Instead, the distance had spread, so that even the ground beneath his feet seemed far away, dislocated. He said it felt like the place had forgotten itself during his absence. As if, torn between the idyll of suburbia and the surrogate chunk of city centre that was Crystal Peaks, it could find no middle ground between the two, and had resigned itself to wasteland.
At the bottom of the hill, the path swung right and into a tunnel, lined with corrugated iron, over which the traffic flowed in and out of the shopping centre. At the mouth of the tunnel, he stopped. James spoke of having run through it a great many times as a child, playing with the echoes that bounced off the metal: echoes which seemed to linger still. He tried to describe being gripped by a fear that if he were to go in, he would lose either his memories or himself, but couldn’t quite find the words, and soon grew silent.
Before he hung up, James stated that time had abandoned him. I was left with the distinct impression that I may never hear from him again.
Curiosity soon drew me to the place James had described so vividly, and I found that leafy path at the end of a cul-de-sac. However, it opened out not to a playground, but to an empty patch of land. Blotches of tarmac marked the spots where structures may have stood. Perhaps this had once been a playground; perhaps not.
Faced with this discrepancy, I soon found that very little of the geography of James' narrative made any sense. There was no long path beyond the clearing, nor was there a hill for it to stretch down and, far from being the distant goal at the end of a journey, Crystal Peaks was practically next door to his childhood home. And yet, this was the only place that came anywhere close to fitting the wasteland gap he described.
Eventually, I found the tunnel. It was nowhere near where it was supposed to have been, yet its appearance was just as James had described. I had foolishly harboured the notion that I might understand him better if I stared into that tunnel. That I might see what it was that had left him so shaken. There were no revelations to be had: it was merely a tunnel. This was where his journey had ended, though, and so I decided I should go no further. Before returning home, I felt compelled to shout a goodbye into the blackness. The roar of overhead traffic snatched the word from the air the moment it left my lips.
Peter Dorey
