Free Cronix by James Hider Page B

graffiti-scrawled plaques and the metal poles that had once rooted them to the grimy streets of East London. He had lobbied the local council for months to be allowed to put them all up in the locations he had chosen – in a park, outside a secondary school, near a bus stop, anywhere where people might linger: he had saved all his cash from the job in the mental ward (he taken the job after reading about how many successful artists had worked with the mentally ill and had drawn inspiration for their compositions – he had found none, and the pay had been terrible to boot) to be able to print the large metal plates with maps of the area.
    The idea had been for the community to write their own history, to bring the maps to life with anecdotes of the comings and goings of the locals. For months he had battled all the elements: the theft of the pens secured, the disappearance of the laminated sheets explaining the organic community project and inviting people to join in. For weeks, the plaques had stood empty. Glenn would lurk in the park, or nurse a pint at the bar of the Rose and Crown, peering for hours like some dedicated bird-spotter. Miserable, he decided not to look anymore, working on the principle presence might somehow be inhibiting the timid locals from opening up their hearts.
    By a huge effort of will, he stayed away for three weeks, after chaining as many indelible markers as he could to the support poles.
    As the bus pulled up on the day he had marked for his return, his heart leapt. There was writing on the map! Lots of it, too. As soon as the bus doors hissed open, he ran to the first plaque, stopping short as it became clear exactly what the street poets had scrawled on his precious installation.
    “Tracy sucks cock.”
    “Garths a poof”
    “Spurs rule”
    “Fucking spacky”
    “Cuntz”
    Some bright spark had actually used the map, but only to geographically pinpoint his obscenity: “Shanaya and Latoya hore house” read the barely legible direction.
    Glenn's heart sank, but he forced himself to head to the next plaque to see what horrors might have aborted his embryonic masterpiece there. It was covered with a similar smattering of teen hate and helpful hints on which public toilets offered fellatio-friendly facilities. The third sign was gone entirely, cut off and hauled off for scrap: only the one near the school offered some artistic relief, as it was so completely covered in multicolored graffiti that it resembled a Jackson Pollock. A smear of poor quality graffiti tags was the sum of his ‘big idea.’
    Since he had already booked the space at a small gallery in Whitechapel, Glenn went ahead with his short-lived exhibition. He thought nobody had visited it, but the review in the free newspaper handed out at the Tube station had just informed him otherwise. Trashed in a worthless handout that itself would end up discarded on the seats of evening commuter trains, before being dumped in some Essex landfill.
    Such is destiny.
    Glenn was crushed. He ordered another beer, and a whiskey chaser, without checking his wallet to see if he could afford it. As the barman pulled pumps and pressed optics, Glenn pored over the other pages of the magazine, skimming over the world’s misery in an attempt to forget his own: a tale of a failed suicide bomber in Tel Aviv, charred and screaming at a suburban bus stop; an earthquake in Guatemala burying some holy festival; an American murderer who'd shot himself in the head years ago, before being patched at great public expense, had just been sentenced to death; a Korean man who'd played a computer game for days without moving from his chair and died of deep-vein thrombosis. Horrible stories from around the world, yet none seemed capable of piercing the bubble of self-pity that enveloped him.
    An artist , he said out loud. By this point he no longer cared if the barman heard him. Hitler had wanted to be an artist. Instead, he discovered he was a talentless prick and