News Where You Are

14

He sat in his parked car and looked across at the banner declaring the grand opening. It described it as an exciting new leisure development. What that amounted to was a casino with a gym on top. Black and silver balloons bobbed frantically in the sharp wind. A few women with straightened blonde hair and suntans were dressed as bunny girls to lend glamour to the occasion. They clustered shivering in the shelter of the entrance. Stretched behind them he saw the pink ribbon that he would soon cut. The letter ‘o’ in the neon sign above the casino door was a roulette wheel. Above the glare of the sign, discreetly carved into the stone portico, were the words: Royal Children’s Hospital.

The Regal Casino was the latest and perhaps most audacious in a series of reimaginings of city landmarks. Birmingham was trying to change its reputation for the way it treated its architectural heritage: the famous lack of sentimentality that bordered on self-harm. The city now adopted a more sensitive approach to its Victorian heritage. Those notable examples that had managed to survive the post-war purges were protected and cherished.

One of the consequences of the current doctrine was a drive to find new uses for Victorian buildings. Many had stood empty for years, their original remit expired, obsolete or transferred to newer facilities. Now private development companies with names like Urban Heritage, Regeneris and New Concept were finding new ways to use old spaces.

Frank looked at the small crowd now assembling over the road. He always donated his PA fees to charity and that made him feel guilty for rejecting lucrative offers. He’d agreed to open the casino as a favour to an old colleague of his father’s whose son now owned Regeneris, but he couldn’t suppress his distaste for the development. He’d felt ambivalent in the past about some of the strange reinventions of old buildings. The eye hospital that became a luxury hotel, the imposing hilltop edifice of the Victorian mental hospital turned into apartments. He could never pass the grand driveway to the gated condominiums without remembering walking past as a boy and seeing the patients standing behind the chain-link fence shouting strange words and asking for fags. He wondered who would choose to live in a place of former suffering. What level of hubris was required to feel so utterly undaunted by the past?

Of them all, though, he found something particularly hard to take about the metamorphosis of a children’s hospital into a casino. It seemed to aspire to a new level of inappropriateness. The hospital had moved to larger premises five years earlier, but Frank always thought of it in its former home. He’d been there as a child to have his appendix out, and again as a panic-stricken father when Mo had fallen downstairs as a toddler. He’d also covered many stories there. In particular he remembered Lucy Smallwood, a ten-year-old with leukaemia who had spent her time in hospital engaged in one sponsored event after another, raising funds for other sick children. There was regular coverage of her attempts on the programme and in the local press and Frank would always remember the silence in the newsroom on the day she died.

He gazed at the images of dice and chips hanging in the windows and wondered who could feel lucky in such a place. Looking at his watch he saw there were still another ten minutes to go. He spent much of his life killing small blocks of time. It was a consequence of his punctuality. He wasn’t sure that punctuality was the right way to describe it: he was always early, which was, he supposed, as unpunctual as always being late, but he inconvenienced only himself and not others.

He’d been brought up to arrive fifteen minutes ahead of any appointment, but people didn’t want personalities to arrive early; they expected to be kept waiting. Now, after twenty years, he was able to recognize the unease that the public experienced when they saw celebrities — even of his minor variety — out of certain clearly defined realms. They understood that celebrities existed primarily in the spotlight — shuffling papers officiously as the intro music faded out, emerging from behind curtains, smiling on a sofa behind a pile of unread magazines. They understood also that celebrities had a ‘real life’. But this was a certain type of real life glimpsed only in photos in magazines with short one-word titles. Celebrities with no make-up on, with strange scars visible and shameful rolls of fat falling over expensive bikini bottoms. It was understood that celebrities existed in these separate and clearly defined realms, but the PA — the charity dinner, the restaurant opening — blurred these lines. The exotic and the mundane came together for a short while and it was essential that the celebrity balanced perfectly on the fine line between the two.

Frank used to arrive whilst the photographers were still setting up, quite happy to wait a few moments and exchange pleasantries with the staff of the shop or restaurant he was opening. He’d be there in his role as celebrity, but not quite ‘on’ yet. Eventually it was a restaurant manager who spelled it out to him. Frank had arrived ten minutes early and the manager whisked him off to the staff changing area to wait. ‘They don’t want to see you like that,’ he’d said, and for a moment Frank thought he’d spilled something down his suit, but then he realized what he meant. He had to emerge, fully formed and glistening, at the appointed hour, not hover awkwardly for ten minutes beforehand.

And so Frank had become practised at a form of invisibility. He had no control over his early arrival — it wasn’t something, at his time of life, that he had any power to change — but he did seem able to manage his visibility, to choose to be seen or unseen. He’d kill time in nearby shops, or read a newspaper in his car, and no one would notice him until he switched on his beam and stepped up to the ribbon. He remembered when he was a boy that he had written a list of superpowers on a piece of paper ranked in order of how much he craved them. He could only think of a few now, the obvious things: the ability to fly and to travel through time. He recalled clearly, though, that top of the list had been the gift of invisibility. Sometimes at night he’d pretend that he was wearing magic invisible pyjamas. He’d lie alone in his bed and be sure that no one could see him. He’d will his mother or father to come in the room and panic at his apparent absence, just so he could have proof of his invisibility. He’d lie and wait and the longer he waited the more he wondered if he really was invisible. He would start to worry about how he could know he was visible, that he even existed, if there was no one to see him. He’d fall asleep in a state of confusion unsure about himself, his imagination and his pyjamas.

He got out of the car now and walked purposefully towards the man he had identified as the owner. He was a fleshy figure, pigeon-chested with no neck, attempting some kind of Miami Vice look that Frank didn’t think suited him or the bitter weather. Frank reached out to shake his hand and as the man turned and recognized him Frank noticed the brief look that crossed his face. A momentary flash of amusement as if Frank had just been the subject of some humorous conversation. It was a look he was used to. After a few introductions, Frank stood up at the ribbon and gave the speech he’d been asked to give — combining an upbeat economic forecast for the area with corny jokes. He gave his best cheese-eating grin as he cut the ribbon and the cameras flashed.

Afterwards he drank tasteless cava and chatted to an investor in the development called Eddy and the generically glamorous woman at his side who was not introduced by name.

‘There seem to be casinos cropping up all over the city now,’ Frank ventured.

‘Yeah, well, there’s only so many tits a city can take,’ said Eddy. ‘Did you know Birmingham has more gentlemen’s clubs per capita than anywhere else in Europe?’

‘Really?’ said Frank.

‘Thing is that women’s bodies are being devalued.’ Frank was momentarily wrong-footed, before Eddy made his meaning clear. ‘Some of the skanks these clubs employ, they cheapen the experience, put the punters off. I run five lap-dancing establishments, but they’re classy. The girls keep themselves nice and spruce-looking. But it’s all too available now. A man should feel special that he has the currency to pay a beautiful woman to dance for him, but there’s nothing special about it now. It’s lost the glamour and the magic. The punters feel sordid.’

Frank had always assumed that was the point.

‘But casinos, Frank, that’s a different game. They have that glamour and magic and they have it in spades. People think of casinos and they think of James Bond, they think of George Clooney and Sharon Stone. They think of all these things and, while they think, they are pouring money on those tables faster than we can bank it. Course, I could’ve done without the recession, but you never know; desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures — like putting it all on red.’

Eddy continued to speak, but Frank drifted off. He looked around distractedly at the faces around him. He wondered how many of them had been in the hospital as children, or had maybe brought their own children there, running every red light in the empty night-time streets. His attention was caught by a figure with a shopping trolley making his way along the pavement towards them. The man was tall, perhaps in his fifties, wearing an anorak covered in badges and a Boyzone baseball cap. He stopped to look at the spectacle before him. After a moment he dragged his trolley up to one of the bunny girls and Frank heard him ask: ‘Is the kiddies coming back, love?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The kiddies. The hospital. Is them opening it again?’

‘The hospital?’ She was speaking loudly as if the man was deaf. ‘Is that what you’re asking? The hospital’s moved now … This isn’t the hospital any more,’ she added slowly.

The man looked at her as if she was simple. ‘I know that, love. I remember it closing. I thought they wuz reopening it like. What’s happening, then? What’s all this in aid of?’

‘It’s a new casino opening today.’

The man frowned at her. ‘A casino? Here? You joking, bab?’ And then he started to laugh. He laughed so much that one by one the conversations began to trail off until eventually everyone had stopped speaking and all eyes were turned on the laughing man with the trolley in their midst.