Untitled, mixed media (mostly oil-based ink) on card. (20x18cm approx).
I prefer to use the side street, come around the back of the apartment building past the bins, and take the filthy stairwell down to the first level. It’s more immediate than taking the sloping concrete spiral that cars must follow. Diving, rather than wading.
There are always a few cars on the first level. I think of them as alive, like beetles, keeping to the shadows. I feel like I’m being watched when I pass them. At one end there’s a little room of sorts, with tall walls, open to the sky except for a metal grating. It’s a triangular annex that leads to another stairwell, never used. The door doesn’t open, but there’s a gap, just wide enough for me to slip through. I like this little room, I find it inexplicably welcoming and peaceful, despite the cold and the wet. Despite the veils of green algae clinging to the concrete and the strange sounds.
I hear things down here. The air conditioning, I suppose. Or just natural air currents, rattling the gratings. A skittish sound, like someone approaching from a long way off with a shopping trolley. Occasional distant booms. A car door slamming somewhere. Industrial humming. Are those footsteps, or is something dripping? Is that someone in the stairwell? I can’t tell, everything echoes. Sounds bleed into one another. Ambient noises I barely noticed at first emerge and overlap and aggregate, escalate, into a cacophony. So many textures I can’t unravel, can’t place.
Down the ramp is another world entirely. It’s only the second level of four but it feels darkest here, I cannot explain it. There are strange puddles everywhere that seem to bear no logical relationship to the terrain. I don’t know where the water is coming from. Ground beneath grated vents open to the grey sky remains dry, while patches of level flooring, sheltered by unbroken concrete, are submerged beneath treacherous pools, undetected in the pitch dark until disturbed by my unwary feet. The air is dense and strangely warm, as if the walls themselves were breathing. Smashed lights, broken glass and shards of plastic gleam in the dark. What little light seeps in only makes the blackness richer, pillars reflecting in apparently fathomless pools. No horizon anywhere, I am suspended in deep space, I can’t find my feet, there is only this glittering abyss. Now and again, a sudden, sharp, violent sound, like a whip cracking, or like the slithering of some electric creature.
Down another level. There is so much water here. It drips and trickles from the ceiling. It oozes from the walls, it rushes in unseen drains and pipes; it seems to well up from the floor, forming illogical lakes. Rain beating on discarded bottles, plastic sheeting, battered signs creates a living rhythm, eccentric as a heartbeat. A palace of water. Listen, closed eyes, and I can feel it being built, this architecture of sound, layer after layer, til it feels like drowning. (My girls are here.)
Down another level. The very depths. Is the ceiling really lower here or is it just the encroaching awareness of so much concrete stacked up overhead? Vault a rib-high wall or get wet feet, those are the options. This terrain makes demands. There are stubs of candles everywhere down here. Scribbles on the walls. Old props, improvised musical instruments, a pipe, a traffic cone. Recurring, purposeful visits by friends and friends-of-friends have given this little cavern a lived-in aspect, some of the menace has rubbed off, as a dim light will do to the darkness. But at the very bottom, where the floor is flooded wall to wall, it’s hard to shake the terrifying idea that the water is bottomless. It’s only a couple of inches, demonstrably safe, but even when standing in the very middle of it it feels precarious, as if one were perched on a hidden sandbank, surrounded by the deepest, blackest sea.
I think I begin to understand why lovers come here. I feel everything twice as keenly in this place. When I feel fear, it’s a pure, animal fear, untempered by embarrassment or anger. My stomach is in knots. Sadness comes distilled and clear; unadulterated sadness, triple-malt sadness. I don’t feel anything else at that moment, there’s no room. Likewise, when I’m happy down here it’s a clear, giddy sort of joy. Everything other than joy is momentarily purged from my body, every facet of my identity not joyous in nature is deleted. Any memory not forged in a moment of pure happiness vanishes – which, of course, is most of them, so I become a mere fraction of a human being, a tenth of a person, but that tenth consisting of immaculate joy.
Imagine experiencing desire that raw, love that vivid.
Imagine a desire unfettered; divorced from every qualm, from the tempering influence of rational judgment (such as ew, no, I don’t want broken glass in my thighs and I just saw a mould colony the size of a Furby, this is not romantic). Imagine honestly not giving a fuck about anything except your own two bodies, tangled in the dark.
Imagine feeling love that purely. Just fierce and hungry: no compassion, no reservations, no selfishness and no fear. This place must seem to them to blaze with love. It must seem like a huge, cavernous cathedral of love, where the wind and the water are the choir singing some limitless, transcendental hymn, and the dark itself is as thrilling and transformative as the brightest scalding white light of any heaven.
Which would be nice, but actually I suspect it’s mostly prostitutes and their clients that come here.
A friend of mine has made a series of radio programmes/podcasts based on recordings from this place, and he describes it much more eloquently than I can, not least through sound. I am in his debt for many things he’s shown me, but I’m particularly grateful to him for bringing me here, and for leaving me here, and occasionally texting me to check I’m not dead.
