Bryant & May 04; Ten Second Staircase

“Kingsmere, Brilliant Kingsmere.”

“You’re telling me his name is Brilliant?”

“It was a very popular name once. Way back in Victorian times. And he’s a pretty cool guy. The kids look up to him.”

That was why Luke Tripp had visited the estate. He was in Kingsmere’s exclusive extracurricular set. “Why did the parents pick a teacher from a private school?” asked May.

“There’s been bad feeling between the school and the estate – we heard tell that a few of the private boys were beaten up, some stupid argument about right-of-way to their playing fields. The parents thought it would be a good way to heal the old wounds.”

“Are his groups successful?”

“How can you tell?” Lorraine sighed. “Kids sense when they’re being preached to, no matter how smartly you sweeten the pill.”

“Do you have an attendance list for Kingsmere’s meetings?”

“Don’t need to, Mr May. They’re open to anyone. There’s another meeting tonight. Why don’t you go along?”

Kingsmere. It was odd how many times the teacher’s name had appeared in the investigation. In the absence of any other course of action, May decided it was time to check him out.

? Ten Second Staircase ?

35

Brandalism

“Your chairs are horribly uncomfortable,” complained Arthur Bryant. “I crossed my legs and fell off.”

“They’re Philippe Starck,” said Julio Stamos. “They’re intended as a style statement.”

“If you’re going to keep people waiting for twenty minutes, you could perhaps try making a comfort statement. Treat yourself to some cushions; it wouldn’t compromise your ideals too much.” Bryant brushed himself down irritably.

Stamos usually knew what to expect when the police came calling, but this rumpled old man wrapped in an absurdly large overcoat and a lint-covered green scarf had thrown him. There was a peculiar miasma of herbal tobacco in the air, or perhaps smouldering straw, and he felt sure it was emanating from his visitor.

“You are from the police?” he asked by way of confirming that some moulting tramp hadn’t simply wandered into the offices of GRAF magazine by mistake.

“You spoke to my sergeant,” Bryant confirmed. “I require fifteen minutes of your time, no more.”

Stamos led the way to a graceful white box with free-floating backlit walls and chocolate leather sofas. “Perhaps you’ll find this a little more comfortable.” He indicated a seat partially occupied by Lazarus, his snuffling Vietnamese potbellied pig, a retro-eighties pet accoutrement currently favoured by style gurus all over Hoxton.

“My sergeant tells me you’re the country’s leading expert on graffiti.”

“Street art is a movement with its roots in folklore. It protests against the system and creates beauty from dereliction.”

“It’s also illegal.” Bryant hefted the glossy fat copy of GRAF, flicking past the slick ads for Land Rover, Nike, and Nokia. “I can’t believe this retails at twenty quid a copy.”

Stamos decided he was dealing with an idiot. “It’s bought by art directors, fashion photographers, music video producers – they’re not buying it with their own money.”

“The examples of art in here are very beautiful,” admitted Bryant.

“They fetch high prices, too. Many artists have become highly collectible.”

“But their work is not what I see on the street.”

“No, ninety percent of that is admittedly bad. Tagging, piecing, and bombing over each other on trains and scratching on windows, that’s not the real stuff. Graffiti is about possession and ownership, making a name for yourself.”

“You said this was art from the street, but your magazine shows work in galleries and is full of ads placed by corporations. You’re encouraging kids without training to make the environment even more polluted, threatening, and ugly.”

“Who’s to decide what’s ugly?” said Stamos hotly. “Those seethrough posters for underwear that cover the backs of busses? That’s just corporate crap. Is graffiti any more of an urban blight than advertising? Public spaces are tightly controlled by capitalist interests. Unless you’re rich, access to public walls is blocked, and if you do get into a public space, chances are you have to be selling something. The average London resident is subjected to hundreds of ads every day, and at least ten percent of them are illegally sited. Graffiti is social communication from the heart. It creates folklore because every act of tagging has its own dramatic story of why and how it was sprayed.”

“Yes, I saw what kids did to the Olton Hall,” said Bryant. Graffiti artists had spray-painted several carriages of the elegant old Scarborough-to-York steam train, wrecking it and earning the outraged hatred of the public.

“Yeah, you can’t buy publicity like that.”

“Perhaps not, but your advertisers can discreetly sponsor it in your magazine.”

Stamos sighed. “No-one’s denying that the media is complicit. They see it as shorthand for cool. I presume you didn’t come here to give me a lecture on morality, Mr Bryant.”

“If I gave you a lecture, it would be on hypocrisy, Mr Stamos. Can you identify particular kinds of graffiti?” Bryant opened his scarred leather briefcase and pulled out the photographs Banbury had taken at the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. “I need to understand what these mean.”

“Graffiti means ‘little scratches,’ from the Italian graffiare, but it’s also from the Greek word graphein, meaning ‘to write’,” said Stamos, surveying the pictures. “Examples have been uncovered in Pompeii. Much of it was political, related to specific social events, and usually appeared under authoritarian governments. The state removes such graffiti in order to depoliticise the marginalised. After this, you get personalised graffiti, racial and sexual slurs from men, very little from females. Gang graffiti hit-ups convey identity and territorial supremacy. What you have here is the most common kind of graffiti, tagging, which began at the end of the sixties and is largely associated with hip- hop culture. The idea is to get up in as many places as possible to establish territorial rights. This is from central London, north side of the river, right?” Stamos examined each shot carefully. “Police try to create links between taggers and organised crime, carjacking, drug use, but in truth there are rarely any at all. You’ve got tagging and piecing here.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Tagging only takes a few seconds – it’s about sticking your signature somewhere. Piecing is rarer and altogether more elaborate. You can trace it back to the artist more easily, and it requires a lot more talent. It started within black subcultures but has moved out into a white middle-class arena.”

“Can you identify the gentlemen behind these markings?”

“That’s harder. Artists frequently change their tags. Not that they’re worried about getting caught; it only means a bit of community service, repairing bikes, folding leaflets, or power-jetting walls. But there are some telltale symbols here. What are you expecting to find?”

“My partner has a suspicion that the boys who created these signs may be involved in a number of serious crimes,” Bryant explained.

“I don’t think so. These elaborate arrows here? They indicate territory. These numbers, one eighty-seven, refer to the Californian penal code for murder. The large red-coloured K stands for Killer. Most of this style is just copied from the USA, American gun culture, reused by European wannabes. These drawings, a slice of bread and what looks like a duck and a chicken, are marks of disrespect against rivals who are trying to use the same area. The drawings of hands represent a personal warning. The arrow points to the initials NJ, which stand for ‘New Jerusalem,’ an immaculate Christian city where ‘nothing unclean may enter.’”

“From the Book of Revelation,” said Bryant, intrigued. “Chapter twenty-one, verse twenty-seven, if memory serves.”