John cycled everywhere, said it was easier on his feet. I thought it wasn’t bad for someone a year off 90. One day he parked his bike next to another. It was a rare thing, not many people rode bikes in Halifax apparently. The owner of the other bike was an artist called John Capstack. They got chatting and soon became friends.
I was staying with John and, standing in his living room, he told me nobody was interested in Capstack’s art. He was one of the few who’d believed in it. He thought his art was explosive.
“Now…” John stammered, “Where’s that catalogue got to…?” He hobbled off to find it amid the piles of books. There were books everywhere so it was a challenge. They climbed the stairs, covered the floor, and stacked on the overwhelmed bookshelves. There were books about everything. Books on art, economics, history, religion, the body, it was all there. Even Piers Morgan’s autobiography.
“I’m a bibliophile,” John told me as he rooted around, handing me Tim Harford’s book Messiness as if to explain the chaos. It was partly to do with growing up in the war too. He learnt not to throw anything away.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, emerging with an A4 dossier. Inside were tiny thumbnails. The neat rows contrasted with the wildness of the pictures. I looked through it and was amazed. Many were monstrous and shocking, visions from the underside of a nightmare. There were 364 paintings in all, one short of a full year. I liked the portraits, they were visceral, dripping with emotion. They looked something like Freud’s but with Bacon’s horror thrown in. John said they looked like Elisabeth Frink’s sculptures but I thought they were more gruesome and grotesque. They were raw. John thought he was the next Van Gogh.
Capstack’s story was a sad one. He was an impossible character and John said his family had despised him. As a child he’d fight his cousins and siblings, as an adult he’d had nothing to do with them. Once his father had come at him up the stairs with a carving knife. Capstack had kicked him back down.
He was a teenager when he got into drinking and he never stopped. After John met him that day in Halifax he did his best to get him sober. It nearly worked but he relapsed and finally drank himself to death in 2015.
I looked at some of his later self-portraits in the catalogue. They were nothing but swirls and blurs.
John told me again how much he’d believed in his work. In fact, he said, on his deathbed Capstack had agreed to give him the entire collection. John had gone to get a pen but when he came back he was dead. The will was never signed. Now John was in a dispute with a cousin who said it was all faked. She thought John had written the whole thing himself and made it all up. “I can’t blame her,” he told me, “It did look like that.”
He went on. “I don’t know who owned what. Our stuff got mixed up together, you see. I’d lend him a lot of things. I once gave him my best sleeping bag but he set fire to it.” When Capstack moved into his last house there hadn’t been enough room for his art so he threw out the bed and slept on the floor. He was devoted to his art and it was a shame so few others were too. Maybe they will be one day.
I’d met John a few days before in Oxford. He’d offered me a spare bed if ever I wanted to stay. It had taken a few days to get there and now I had to get home. I stayed a night in Halifax and set off early in the morning, into the drizzle. Halifax looked grey, never the best time to see a place. That kind of weather would make anywhere look drab.
Cars sizzled past on the main road out of town. I was nervous about a ride, waiting outside a used car salesman’s. I needn’t have been. A bloke called Gaz screeched to a halt and I leapt in.
“Sorry mate!” He beamed. I’d barely got in the car as we sped away, “I’m late for work.” He was a forklift driver and was a good half hour late. Not that he minded getting told off. He was an easy-going, lighthearted guy. The sort of guy who picks up a hitchhiker when he’s half an hour late.
I said I’d liked Halifax. “Hmm,” he shrugged, “I wanna get out.”
He’d half grown up in Halifax. The other half was in Bridlington on the coast. His Yorkshire accent made it sound like he was saying Brinley. As a kid, he was forever going back and forth between his mum and his dad. As a result, he’d barely had an education.
“I was never at a school for more than about a month,” he told me proudly, “In all, I don’t think I ‘ad more than a year’s education. That’s why I’ve got a shit job!”
I told him I was from Essex. He’d never been but said he knew a girl from Halifax who’d just moved there. She used to be a prison guard in Leeds until she got caught sleeping with the inmates.
“Got caught givin’ em all blowjobs 'n that,” he explained, “But in the end, the inmates grassed her up. You’d think they wouldn’t mind a bit of that!” He thought this was hilarious and laughed away for a while.
“Is she going to prison?” I asked.
“Yeah, she’s getting done.”
“Poor her.”
“Nah, she’ll be in her fuckin’ element!” He threw his head back and laughed again.
Gaz could take me as far as the M60 and chucked me out on the junction. He thought I’d have no problem getting a ride to London from there. Reckoned it would be no more than 10 minutes. He was wrong though. It took 12.
It was a taxi that pulled up, a black Mercedes Benz. The driver was on his way to back home to Birmingham so didn’t mind taking me along.
Mahmoud was a relaxed man, you could tell just from the way he sat. He didn’t like being a taxi driver very much, he found it too stressful. He preferred his old job working in a factory. Once the bell went he didn’t have to think about work anymore.
He told me he quickly had to call his boss to confirm a booking that afternoon at 3:30. The lady down the phone was confused. “3:30 this afternoon? Ohhhh. No it’s 3:30 next Friday. And it’s 3:30 am!” Mahmoud saw the funny side and chuckled, glad all the same to have worked that out.
“See what I mean? Stressful!”
Mahmoud had lived in Birmingham for over 20 years. Originally he was from Kashmir. Though he said he was Pakistani he also said he was actually from the independent part of Kashmir.
I didn’t know much about the region and was interested to learn. He explained Kashmir is divided into four: Pakistan, India, China and itself, though it’s not recognised as an independent state.
He used to live on a small farm by a huge reservoir that’s 90 miles wide. He showed me a picture. Grey-blue skies stretched above grey-brown banks. The dam itself is the 6th biggest in the world. Mahmoud said the Pakistani government struck a deal with the British to build it. The Brits would engineer it in return for Pakistani labour to work the mills of England. Take-up was slow at first but once they offered dual nationality, waves of migrants made their way over. Mahmoud’s uncle had been one of them.
John in Halifax had spoken of the same thing. In the 60s he’d set up an international centre to welcome the new workers and make them feel at home, something many locals did not do. He’d got to know all sorts through it. He told me one went on to become a billionaire. Years later he took John to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. They’d stayed in the Four Seasons on Park Lane.
Mahmoud’s uncle eventually moved back to Pakistan. Mahmoud didn’t think he would go back though. When he was 18 months old his mother had died. Growing up he assumed the domestic duties, helping raise his brother. He’d barely had an education, though it was obvious he was very intelligent. So were his kids. They were at Birmingham uni doing maths and law.
We talked about the floods in Pakistan and about climate change. Mahmoud thought it was unfair that Pakistan had contributed almost nothing to climate change yet it was they that were suffering the consequences, underwater, devastated by a problem they did almost nothing to create. Nevertheless, Mahmoud was sanguine about the whole thing.
Climate change was not the coming apocalypse in his eyes. A devout Muslim, he told me the Quran predicted the world would end when there’d been 50 years of war in the Middle East, and when the world was led by liars.
“Our celebrities should be professors and engineers, not actors, gamers or footballers.” He didn’t mention politicians.
“You see, Jesus in Islam is called Isa,” he went on, “Islam and Christianity and Judaism they are all very close, you know,” he counted them on his fingers. “For us Isa is just a prophet; for Christians, he is the messiah. We believe we are 100% right. You believe you are 100…haha!” He started laughing warmly, suddenly spotting the absurdity. Then he carried on, unperturbed by his own interruption. “But when the world will end, Isa will come back to Syria and rule for 50 years. Then the world will end for good. I was speaking to a friend the other day and we think we maybe have 50 maybe 70, 100, maybe even 200 years, but we are very close. Very, very close.”
By now we were pulling off the motorway into a service station near Birmingham.
“Does it worry you?” I asked. He looked unfazed.
“No,” he replied, delivered with characteristic coolness, “It’s just what is happening.”