UrbEx part III

Geraldinium’s footsteps were squelches on the concrete floor and even tiptoeing didn’t help, so she walked normally and listened hard in case there was anyone else in there.  There were doors at regular intervals; some plain wooden doors with blistered round handles, some had frosted glass windows through which dim light fell, and some were made of metal.  Geraldinium tried the handle of the first metal door she came to, but the door was locked again.  She rattled it a little against the frame, wondering if she should try to force it open, and decided she would only if she couldn’t find anything to inspire her elsewhere.  She walked further along the corridor until she saw a door with frosted windows that was already ajar, and she pushed it further open and went inside.

The room was mostly empty save for a padded plastic couch on a thin metal frame pushed up against a wall.  There were deep rips in the padding exposing yellowing foam that spilled out like pus infecting a wound.  Against the other wall was a rotting wooden leg, seemingly all that remained of a desk that had been there at sometime.  Geraldinium pulled her camera free again, and snapped a couple of pictures, moving around the room to vary her angles.  The lack of a desk intrigued her more than the examination couch, but she took pictures of both.

Further along the corridor she found another door ajar, and stepping through this one found herself in another, shorter corridor that opened out into a lobby where the lifts where.  There were four sets of doors all in the one wall, and each of them had long black streaks running down.  Looking up, Geraldinium saw holes in the ceiling where lumps of plaster had dropped out, and that the black streaks all started there.  Staring for a moment she thought the streaks were moving, writhing, and then her vision resolved like staring at an optical illusion and she realised that the rainwater from outside was running down the walls and doors now, carrying the black muck from the ceiling to the floor.  Her camera was back out again, and she snapped more shots, smiling to herself as she did so.  Assigning a name to this room and creating a history for it would be easy.

She couldn’t resist pushing the lift-call button, but nothing responded, as she’d expected.  There was another way out of the lift-lobby so she walked that way.  The lumps of plaster that must have fallen from the ceiling were scattered on the floor of the corridor that way, which puzzled her slightly.  Why would anyone move them?  Another short corridor opened out into a long corridor running at right-angles, and she realised that the basic layout of the hospital must be roughly H-shaped.  She turned right, heading back the way she’d come but on the new corridor, and this time tried the handle of the first door she came to.  Slightly to her surprise it opened at a touch, revealing what was once a private room.

The wallpaper was peeling off from the bottom of the wall and there was a musty, mouldy smell like the room hadn’t been aired.  Which, Geraldinium thought, was probably true.  The bed frame, a white-painted metal contraption that looked more like it was for confinement than rest, was underneath a barred window.  It was divided into several small squares, three of which were broken.  The plaster around an electrical socket was exposed and gouged as though something had been dragged from it,  Pages from a magazine, yellowing and torn, were scattered beneath the bed frame, growing steadily damper from the rain blown in through the broken window.  Geraldinium hissed with delight, taking more pictures again, the digital clicking of the imaginary shutter a counterpoint to her joy.

UrbEx part II

It was raining gently; the sky was a dark grey promising heavier rain to come.  Geraldinium ignored it and concentrated on the high walls surrounding the hospital.  Traffic was quiet on the road that ran around it, but there was still a car coming by every minute or so, making it difficult to scale a nine-foot high wall unseen.  She carried on walking, paying close attention to the wall, looking for footholds or handholds, or even a convenient tree or post-box that she could use to gain some height.  She wondered briefly if she should have brought the orphan-girl along to use as a step up, but then dismissed the idea.  Far better to have made the orphan-girl bring a step-ladder along and then take it away again.

She stopped at last at a green-painted, slightly rusted junction box, the kind the telecoms companies used to route cables and wires to provide internet and phone connections to the street.  It seemed a little out of place on this side of the road, but it gave her four feet off the ground, and that would be enough for her to get her hands to the top of the wall.  She looked around: there were actually three cars coming, two from one direction and the third from the other.  She frowned and glared at the traffic until it went past, oblivious to her anger.  Then she leapt athletically up onto the junction box, discovering at that moment that the top wasn’t flat but was angled.  Clearly the engineers didn’t want people standing on it.  Ignoring that, she jumped at the wall and grabbed the top of it easily, then flexed her arms and shoulders and pulled herself up.  Swinging her hips, she pulled her legs over, and let herself drop over the other side, pleased that no cars had gone past while she was climbing the wall, and a second later let out a hiss of breath as she hit the ground.  She looked up: the wall was nearly eleven feet high on this side.  Perhaps the landscapers had dug the ground out to make the wall more of a challenge.

As she climbed a wet, slippery slope to a lawn that approached the hospital she realised that that was exactly what had happened.  The lawn was, if anything, more slippery still, and there were patches that had succumbed to the invasion of clover and other ground cover which shed water from its leaves onto her feet and made her shoes wetter still.  As she slipped and slid her way across, she looked over at the hospital, and suddenly realised that she was clearly visible to anyone inside.  Was there security in this place?  She didn’t recall reading about any, but she wasn’t being cautious enough.  Without another thought she dropped to the ground, and slithered along like a snake instead.

The hospital was a pre-war construction, faced with a yellow-brown stone and ornamented with towers at either end and a clock-tower above the main hall in the middle.  The clock-tower was built in three stages, with the main hall building being the first, then an octagonal room above that being the second.  The third stage was the actual tower surmounted by a clock and stretched fifteen feet up in its own right.  Looking up at it, and blinking every few seconds as another cold raindrop landed in her eye, Geraldinium wondered if there was art to be made from that view.  She felt for her camera, and took a few shots, the digital clicking sounding loud despite the patter of the rain.  Then she looked at the doors to the main hall.  They were closed, and looked locked.

Geraldinium stood up again now that she was near the building, and checked around her.  There was no-one in sight, and by hugging the walls she could stay relatively hidden.  Her clothes, now wet through, stuck to her and were cold, but she decided that she could ignore that in the interests of finding something for her next exhibition piece.  She tried the main doors without much hope, and was rewarded with the dull clunk of a lock preventing the door knobs from turning.  She shrugged and started walking around the walls, her shoes squelching now with each step.

The windows on the ground floor had already been panelled over with sheet steel so there was no way in that way, though Geraldinium did notice that what she’d first thought was graffiti was in fact the signatures of previous UrbExers.  She snapped a picture of that too, a half-thought in her mind about connecting each name with a room in the hospital and creating a fictional life of people in there after the hospital closed.  About a third of the way round she found a stone urn, a planter now empty of everything save for smears of moss, standing a little way away from the building, and scratches on the paving flags nearby that suggested it had been moved at some point.  She almost walked past, then she looked up.  A little above her a first-floor window was very slightly open; if she’d not been stood in the right place she wouldn’t even have noticed it.  She wiped the rain off her face, and dragged the planter over.

The window was easier to get through than the wall had been to get over, and Geraldinium remembered to bend her knees this time as she dropped over the windowsill.  The floor was a far more reasonable foot and a half below the window.  She straightened and looked about.  She was in a corridor that stretched away into the distance in both directions, reminding her of her attic studio only shorter and smaller.  The walls were a mint-green colour that she remembered from her childhood, and she felt disoriented for a moment until she realised that she was expecting to smell disinfectant and instead she had only the damp, impersonal smell of wet concrete and undertones of mildew.  She took a step, and started giggling, the sudden euphoria of knowing that she’d successfully broken into this abandoned hospital and was now stepping where only a small army of UrbExers had stepped before her.

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.”