UrbEx part I

The orphan girl was sat at a table eating porridge.  Her grubby, thin ankles were manacled to black iron rings set into the floorboards, and though she could stand up and move a little way away, she was restricted to an ellipse with a major axis of about six feet.  Her hair was limp, grey, and hadn’t been washed for over two weeks, and her face had little dried patches of porridge spotted here and there.  The porridge she was eating now was cold, as Geraldinium was worried about her trying to wear hot porridge and burning herself.  The orphan finished eating, put the spoon down, and put the bowl on her head.  A small amount of beige porridge dribbled down her temples.

Geraldinium came out of her enrobing room and saw the orphan sitting there, porridge-bowl-bedecked and staring vacantly into the long space of the attic room and sighed very faintly.  She’d only taken the girl back under pressure from the courts who had insisted that she was the closest thing the girl had to a real guardian.  There was now a social-worker who came round twice a week to check on the orphan, and Geraldinium suspected the pretty young woman with the earnest demeanour and arthritic fingers of having her own agenda.

“Take the bowl off your head,” she said, snapping her fingers to make sure that she got the orphan’s attention.  For a moment there was no reaction, and then her eyes slowly slid inwards and she blinked.

“But it’s art,” she said, her voice whiny and slightly nasal.

“It isn’t,” said Geraldinium.  “I should know.  I did something similar, but more original, for my A-level art studies and photographed it.  I had a row of my teachers lined up wearing bowls of custard, porridge, tapioca and wallpaper paste.  The bowls were all copper, and had cables running from them, as though there were hooked up to an electric chair.  I called it Does justice require intelligence? and my examiners wept when they saw the picture.  That was art.  What you are doing is retarded.”

“My hat is cold,” said the orphan, her voice sing-song and her eyes starting to diverge again.  Geraldinium snapped her fingers at her, and the orphan’s eyes stopped moving.

“Take the bowl off,” she said.  “I am going out, and you can either have crayons and paper circles while I’m gone, or you can be tied back down to the bed of your own making.”

The orphan shuddered a little, and as she pulled the bowl from her head with shaking hands her head turned slowly so that she could see the bed in the far corner.  “Not the bed,” she whispered, and Geraldinium wasn’t completely certain that she’d heard her.  “Where are you going?” she asked in a slightly louder voice.

“Out,” said Geraldinium.  She adjusted her straps: she was wearing a blue denim shirt and jeans with a utility tool belt strapped around her waist.  Her brown jacket was canvas and covered in pockets and straps.  Out of a side pocket poked an A-Z of London, and on the other side balancing that was an A5 sketchbook and a couple of pencils.  A tiny camera dangled from one strap and a water-bottle was held firmly in webbing at the back of the jacket.  She looked a little like a survivalist caught out in the city.  “I have a mausoleum-hospital to photograph.”

The mausoleum-hospital was in fact an abandoned hospital out in the East of London, slowly falling apart behind the high walls that had once made sure that the patients were kept in, but to Geraldinium’s mind its steady architectural senescence made it tomb-like, a mausoleum for the ghosts of lives that had been lived there.  She had stumbled across it mostly accidentally while researching UrbEx, wondering if there was art to be made out of the assault on the dangerously-abandoned and things only interesting because they were forbidden.  When she’d seen the first pictures on the website, taken by a 14-year old UrbEx – Urban Explorer – her imagination had been captivated.

She grabbed a slim transparent plastic wallet from a wormy dresser and dumped in on the table in front of the orphan.  Inside were white circles of soft paper and some crayons.  The primary colours looked almost new, while the autumnal colours were worn over half-way down, in some cases almost to stubs.

“And no more self-portraits,” she said.  “You’re not Batman, and drawing yourself as such is pure cargo cult.”  The expression on the orphan’s face was so blank Geraldinium found herself expecting the girl to moo.  “I’ll be back,” she said.  “Try not to get hungry before then.”

Angst

“But is it art?”  Geraldinium screamed at the top of her lungs.  Her chest heaved as though she’d been running a marathon, and the three sets of pearl-strands she was wearing clattered and shivered as they were thrown around.  “Is it ART?  IS.  IT.  ART?”  Her voice echoed around the workshop, a vast attic space that ran the length of an entire terrace of houses, coming back to her at different times from different angles until it seemed as though there were a chorus of sycophants questioning right alongside her.

The orphan, released from hospital into Geraldinium’s very reluctant care, was tied by her ankles and wrists to a sheetless bed in the corner of the attic.  Her head turned from side to side, almost as though she was trying to escape the myriad mingling of voice and echoes.  Geraldinium ignored her though, as she’d ignored her mewling cries and her pleading for food.  A camera on a tripod was set up at the foot of the bed, and a silver reflector sat like an umbrella left out to dry nearby.

“Is it art?” said Geraldinium, much more quietly now.  She looked along the attic to her sculpture park wondering for a moment if she should go and rage at the unfeeling stone, but the thought of walking that far deterred her.  She loved the space, for all that she had no idea how anyone could think that a room the length of a street was a good idea.  It took four minutes to walk from one end to the other and she’d been able to set up areas dedicated to most contemporary art forms and still have space for the kitten-press, three-hundred china cups of undrunk tea, and a small still cunningly disguised as a tailor’s dummy.  The exact locations weren’t based on availability of light, relative heating or even how often she used them; instead she put them over the houses of her downstairs neighbours who’d done things to annoy her.  Right at the moment the sculpture park was making her floorboards (and hence his ceiling) groan intermittently over number 35, whose owner had asked her three days ago about the orphan.

“Are you a paedophile, then?” he’d said, inwardly telling himself that he was the kind of a man who called a spade a spade.  Geraldinium, who was the kind of woman who called men like him bigoted racists half-smiled and told him that the Daily Mail depended on his readership.

“Is that a yes then?” he’d demanded, his little, piggish eyes screwing up tightly in his sweaty, shiny face.

“No,” said Geraldinium.  “She’s an orphan, remanded into my care by the courts.  I’m her saviour, in a very real way.  So keep away from her, or I’ll have the police round and your picture in your favourite newspaper before you can pronounce my name properly.”

The orphan’s bed was over number 72 because the couple who lived there were both stone-deaf and shouted a lot at each other.  Geraldinium would sometimes sit on the floor above them and listen to their conversations, lines of thought bedevilled by their joint inability to hear what the other was saying.   She wrote down what they said, gathering the most interesting pieces together for an exhibition: she planned to write them out calligraphically on parchment ribbons and hang from the ceiling as guide-points through an ill-lit maze.  At the centre of the maze would be ancient and modern hearing-aids in a glass case polished to the point of invisibility so that the audience could reach for them but not touch.  Finally, the exit from the maze would be short, a brisk walk through a corridor lined with the accoutrements of the grave.

The ant farm, which she’d been preparing for an exhibition on the worthlessness of indentured labour, was on the floor over number 2, but the ants had all escaped last week and were probably ruining either a home or a garden.  Geraldinium just set up an easel and started to paint the scene, seeing a perfect continuation of her theme in the departure of the slave labour for more hospitable climes.

“It is art,” she said, nodding her head.  She turned to look at the orphan, whose heavy-lidded eyes rolled a little in her direction.  “You are art,” she said.  “You suffer, and that is just because art is all about suffering.  You mostly suffer because you are deluded and believe that you are Batman, despite the obvious gender discrepancy and your plummet from the roof of this building three months earlier.  But you also suffer because you are tied to this bed, which you constructed from an IKEA flatpack during your first morning back here so that I can legitimately say that it is a bed of your own making, without food or succour so that I may photograph you over a three day period and showcase the folding-in of the human soul on itself.”

The orphan whimpered a little, but in her tiny, mad mind where her thoughts fizzed like sodium cast carelessly into water she barely heard a word Geraldinium said.  She was, in her dreams, prowling darkened rooftops dressed in too much leather and not enough warm clothes, hunting for imbalances to redress.

“This, too, is art,” she said, her arm describing cavernous attic around them.  Everything I do is art, everything has worth, and nothing exists until I show it.  What kind of life is led, unlived until the spotlight falls upon it, then only to be scrutinised by people who envy and fear it?  What life is this the artist conveys, suffering in silence, brought to animation in brief bursts like angels caught in strobe lights?  Is this art?”

The orphan whimpered again, her wide-pupilled eyes blind to everything but the images of violent, blood-stained retribution playing on the inner cinema of her mind.  Geraldinium stared at her for a moment, then ran to the camera and took a staccato burst of photographs.  Behind her, the floor creaked beneath the sculptures, and fine plaster dust rained down from the ceiling beneath onto a middle-aged man sitting up in bed, the Daily Mail crossword in his lap.

Superheroine

Geraldinium Holmes hummed quietly to herself. She was past her kitten phase, as she now liked to think of it, and the hate mail was dying down to just one or two sacks a week. On her desk, next to a stack of hate-mail she was replying to, was a cup of herbal tea that she had the orphan-girl make for her hourly. It was a simple tisane with an herbal extract added; Geraldinium made the extract herself using ethanol and window-box-grown herbs. It was both delicious and refreshing, but she found that she wasn't get a whole lot of work done after mid-afternoon and was considering going back to coffee. She rubbed the inside of her elbow absently as she thought that.
She picked up a strip of synthetic cat fur, dipped it in the bloody juices from a slice of freshly-cut liver and put it in an envelope to send to the next hate-mailer in the pile. Then she put a slip of paper in there with it, on which she'd neatly written "Adolphus, aged 3. Bled out." She had plans for making a collage of any replies she got.
"Miss Holmes?" The orphan-girl behind her sounded sad and plaintive. Geraldinium sighed.
"Orphan-girl," she said firmly without looking round. "What have I told you about speaking?"
"Er, there's been a couple of things actually," said the orphan-girl. "You've told me only to speak when you've said something interesting that needs acknowledging, not to speak unless the pan's about to boil dry and ruin a new artwork, and if I have to speak then always to sound so happy that people want to kill me."
"The last one," said Geraldinium licking the envelope and sealing it. She licked her lips and made a moue, liver juice had dripped on the glue-strip.
"Miss Holmes!" The orphan-girl sounded bright and lively, the kind of person who's enthusiastic at stupid-o'clock and trying to be helpful to people who are just feeling murderous.
"Yes... oh, my." Geraldinium turned round this time, and her words died on her lips. The orphan-girl had found some leather and plastic from somewhere and put together what she could only hope was supposed to be a super-hero costume. It didn't fit well, and generally covered those parts that super-heros traditionally exposed while not covering those parts that any decent person would want covered up.
"Oh... my." said Geraldinium again, wondering if English actually had any words suitable for this occasion.
"I'm Batman," said the orphan-girl. "I'm going to be a superheroine."
"Bats...," said Geraldinium slowly. "How? I mean... how?"
"Well, Batman's parents were killed when he was young," said the orphan girl, a leather strip uncoiling around her leg and falling around her ankle. "And he lived a strange life alone except for the help and was incredibly clever, and when I thought about it, that's just like me."
"You thought?" murmured Geraldinium who had killed the orphan-girl's parents in order to acquire an orphaned servant girl.
"I've put together the costume, and now I'm going to go around saving animals and avenging them!"
"And who am I in all of this?" said Geraldinium.
"The help, silly! You're Alfred, Alfred."
"I think you should go and check on the animal cages in case there are any trapped animals," said Geraldinium, still mesmerized by seeing all the wrong bits of her servant girl.
"Oh!" The orphan girl turned and tried to run, tripping over the loose leather strap, getting tangled up in the rest of her mess of a costume, and banging her head on the floor.
"Some Batman," said Geraldinium, not unkindly. Then, remembering that she was supposed to be Alfred, she got up and kicked the girl in the kidneys.