Wrapped Town

first published in Eildon Tree

The first inkling that something was afoot was the appearance of a new couple in the town. He was small and skinny and spectacled – very much in the mould of Woody Allen. She was exotic, with hair so thick and long it stuck out behind her in the wind like an orange flag. They were bound to be noticed.
The word passed along the grapevine that the visitors had unusual, American-type accents but not quite, that they had just arrived in the area, and that they were artists. It then emerged that they were artists who specialised in wrapping things, including bridges, buildings and trees, and that they were looking for a town to wrap.
Why they came to Hawick at all became clear only much later on. They had never wrapped anything in Scotland before, and in the normal run of things they would probably have turned their attention to much better advertised places. The Scott Monument, say, or the isle of Muck, or the Forth Railway Bridge – places on the tourist trail which already had a large fan base, and where the civic leaders could be relied on to do a professional, cooperative job.
More locally, too, there were plenty far more obvious candidates. Leaderfoot Viaduct, the Eildon Hills or Jedburgh Abbey would have been just the job, and used up far less material. And there were a good few statues around that would have been quick and easy to wrap, including the chunky red sandstone William Wallace at Bemersyde, which would’ve been much improved with a bag over its head.
As it turned out, the supermarket manager’s young daughter Eileen had seen a picture of the Wrapped Reichstag in a book at school. She didn’t know what a Reichstag was, but to her, it looked like an impossibly large, exciting present.
Her imagination went wild savouring the nuances of receiving such a delicious surprise. She found herself dreaming about it - its rattle, its rustle, its squelch and smell, the mysterious points and edges that strained the wrapping into folds. Above all, she dreamt about opening it: feeling the hidden bulges, guessing the shapes, gnawing the knots with her teeth, lifting a corner for clues.
And in her dream she’d shut her eyes and stop, just at the cusp between desire and disappointment, a deep breath held inside her, her heart thumping in the moment. Then, with a shudder, she’d fall on the rustling stuff and rip it away - and wake up. Always. Just in time, before the surprise could turn into ordinariness.
The dream became something of an obsession. Eileen emailed the artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in the hope of finding out more. They emailed back to explain that the Reichstag was a building and something of a one-off. Far from daunted, Eileen said she loved it and that if they were wrapping anything in the area, be sure to let her know.
Her inquiry came at a good time. Christo had pretty well exhausted that line of inspiration, and was toying with the idea of random wrapping. What could be more random, he thought, than an out-of-the-blue something that offered itself on a plate? He decided that it was at least worth taking a look.
On their arrival in Hawick, the couple were immediately struck by the shape of the town. It flowed along a narrow valley. The houses crawled up each side, but not so far up that they spilled over the edges. Standing up on the surrounding hills, Christo and Jeanne-Claude saw that it would be perfectly feasible to wrap the lot. It would have to be a blanket wrap rather than a complete figure-hugging knotted job. The material would be laid across the valley, suspended on thick steel wires. It would come to a point at each end, just outside the 30-mile limits. The finished work would be best viewed from up on the hill, where it would look like a vast inundating river, or a bank of descended cloud.
Nothing more was heard till a year or so later, when the council received a planning application. It was accompanied by detailed sketches, full measurements and timescales. The pictures showed Hawick hidden by a shimmering veil of palest blue. The valley looked as though it was flooded by a lake – a still lake, flat enough to mirror a clear spring sky.
The whole thing was far too bizarre to contemplate. But, as the council had to admit, the accompanying CV was highly impressive. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had been wrapping for years, and were the acknowledged experts. They’d wrapped deserts in California, bridges in Paris, a parliament in Berlin, a complete park of trees in Switzerland and assorted islands and gorges all over the world.
The council divided into two camps on the issue – one very large, and one very small. The large camp said it was a piece of nonsense and they had more important things to be dealing with, such as the forthcoming by-election in Gordon and the site for the new drive-in burger bar.
The small camp consisted only of Councillor Brown, who was widely travelled and had a fondness for things that lightened up his day. He decided to make a stand just for the hell of it. He pointed out that the German Bundestag had held a similar debate on the wrapping of the Reichstag, and that Scottish Borders Council shouldn’t waste time reinventing the wheel. He emphasized that the wrapping was free, and what did you get for nothing nowadays? And for good measure, he underlined his killer point – that the Christos had never once considered offering to wrap Kelso, or Selkirk, and certainly not Galashiels, and that since Hawick was being singled out for special treatment, they’d be wise to take up the offer.
That swung it. A couple of weeks later, the town became host to the diverse crew of engineers, technicians, steeplejacks, seamstresses and art students that specialise in large-scale wrapping. The whole operation was overseen by the two artists, and it took just ten days to hoist the specially woven fabric onto the poles, joists and trusses erected across the town. Section by section, it went fluttering up into the sky, and was soon stretched tight across the frame until the whole valley was covered by a billowing tent of nearly blue.
It was an artistic sensation. Critics and connoisseurs and the plain curious travelled for miles to see it. The path up the hillside to the TV mast wore away from the constant tread of footsteps. The hilltop was crowded with sightseers camped out from morning till night, in all weathers, because it was impossible to appreciate the full impact of the work in a single short visit.
The changing light and clouds cast wonderful patterns across the ambiguous silver-blue. The long, low shadows of dawn shrivelled across it as the sun lifted off into the sky. By midday, the canvas bleached to the brilliant white of swans’ wings, yellowing through the afternoon into crisp vellum. By evening, it had darkened to inky blue shot through with phosphorus stars that shone faintly up from below.
Christo refused to be drawn on what the work actually meant. The critics had theories in abundance, and he was happy to let them thrash it out while he got on with enjoying the view.
It seemed the Wrapped Town, as it became known, meant different things to different people - and even to the same people at different times. To the fishermen it meant a river in full spate and the promise of hidden salmon. To the mill workers, it suggested a full-tilt production line. To the shopkeepers, it was a flow of traffic bringing opportunities their way. To the cynics, it was a bank of featureless fog that clouded everyone’s judgement but their own.
The practical thought about the practicalities, the dreamers about their dreams, the reactionaries were outraged and the revolutionaries inspired, the old pondered their childhoods and the young their futures, while those in between sat and wondered where they’d got to and where they were heading, depending on the light. The poets spouted metaphors and the critics coughed up bile, the poor pondered the cost and the rich how to cash in. The godly thought of salvation and the devilish of doom. The secretive saw mystery, the open saw revelation, the sick saw survival and the healthy saw joy.
The Wrapped Town could conceal, reveal, exclude, embrace, deny, confront and otherwise soak up just about any resonance anyone cared to transmit. That was why it was so widely loved.
Councillor Brown loved it because it lightened up his day.
The supermarket manager’s young daughter Eileen loved it because here, right in her own steep, grey valley, was the biggest, shiniest present she’d ever seen.
She sat all day on the hill and watched the pale sheet billow. At night, she shut her eyes and found she’d dreamt her way under the wrapping. It was dark. She could feel hard things, soft things, straight and squint and curved things that gave and shifted under her hands. She woke sticky with sweat and lay there, too troubled to sleep.
Meanwhile, in the town, life went on as usual. Traffic restrictions had been put in place to prevent the build-up of smog under the blue canopy. The weather was warm, so coal fires weren’t needed, and any rainy spells were diverted by the layer of industrial polyester a few yards above the highest rooftops.
The local paper tried to stir up a bit of reaction with its usual ploy: an anonymous letter penned by the senior reporter.
‘Outrageous!’ it fumed. ‘What a waste of money! It would be much better spent on clamping down on dog owners. These artists should be taken out and shot at dawn. Who do they think they are? They’re certainly not local. A Concerned Patriot.’
The reporter’s friends and relations rallied round as usual with supportive noises. But not one of them replied to the paper, even for the guaranteed pleasure of seeing their names in print. However much the reporter wheedled, the letter page remained staunchly in favour of the Wrapped Town. He was forced to write a reply of his own to redress the balance.
‘The Concerned Patriot is right,’ it said. ‘All that flammable material is only putting temptation in the vandals’ way. Who can blame them if they put a match to the entire lot? A Local Hero.’
But even the local vandals refused to be incited by this obvious bit of preemptive newsgathering. They were far too busy sitting out on the hillside, slashing the tyres of TV crews who dared to criticize the wrapping and, by implication, their town.
Down below the canopy, everything was fine. The clock chimed the hour as usual, its jaunty tune muffling high into the folds of the canvas. No one was troubled by the overcast days. They enjoyed the weather’s new predictability, and the freedom of walking without an umbrella.
Neither did the lack of direct sunlight bother them, since the sun now filtered down with a gauzy, flattering sheen. It was a strange light, but they got used to it. They liked the way it gave a mysterious silver glow to the High Street, and turned the sun into a luminous smear that floated above their heads.
What’s more, they found each other more interesting with a touch of alien blue about them. Even the same old faces they knew so well from their bathroom mirrors offered something new to see. There was a brightness to their eyes, an upturn to their mouths. A softer focus, maybe, thought Eileen, wondering at the transformation in her own face.
Every night, when the traffic thinned, she heard faint noises high above: the low, slow flap of the canvas, the jangle of clips on metal poles, and the wild harmonies of steel wires grating the wind.
It was a good time. A growing time.

The problems began when it came to unwrapping the town.
It was inevitable. It was a condition of the project that the whole woven edifice came down after four months in the air. Christo was adamant about this. It came down to aesthetic considerations. After that, the fabric would start to look tatty and fray at the edges. It would lose its baby blue sheen and accrue a stiffening layer of bird droppings. Its luminosity, its translucence, and all its resonances would be buried under overtones of opacity and filth. The meaning of the work would change.
There was a mutiny. The council held a meeting attended by pretty well the whole town. The town hall was stowed out. Everyone had become fond of the canopy, and felt it now belonged to them. And behind it all lay a desperate wish to defend the things the work had come to represent – their river, their clouds, their billowing fog, their hopes, their fears, their future.
A motion was unanimously carried that Hawick should stay wrapped, and that any attempt to unpeel it should be resisted. When Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived back at the 30-mile limit near the fire station with their army of engineers, technicians, steeplejacks and art students, ready to dismantle the work and dispose of the fabric, they found an electric sheep fence Behind it stood a crowd of well-drilled volunteers from all over town. At their head was Eileen, tall and straight, with a 12-bore shotgun in her hands and wild determination in her eyes.
The townsfolk camped in shifts. All night the braziers burned and threw extravagant shadows against the flapping sky. Like giants, they were, or demons, or big black restless bears against the gold. The smell of smoke hung heavy in everyone’s clothes.
It was a time for reflection, the burial of animosities, the renewal of old friendships that had died for want of nurture. The townsfolk were united in their stand. It was their artwork and they weren’t going to let anyone come along and destroy it, even the artists. Especially not the artists, who had subjected them to all the inconvenience in the first place and couldn’t just expect to walk away and pretend nothing had happened.
They hired a solicitor to scour the contract and found a loophole that suggested they had a case. The army, which was standing by with tear gas, withdrew. Christo shrugged and decided to move on to his next piece - a wrapped synchronised swimming team. As he climbed into his taxi, he turned and waved. Eileen stared, the shotgun tight under her arm, her heart hurting with a new excitement.
Hawick was left wrapped.
For a while, it was fine.
The stream of visitors continued. Each night, crowds camped out on the hill and watched the light dim slowly on the rippling sheet below. And each morning, the people below woke to the alien shine on their neighbours’ faces and were startled anew.
But in time, they got used to it. The blue canvas became less interesting as the days and months wore on. The joie de vivre the people had gained from its presence evaporated. It stopped surprising them. It became simply part of the landscape. They took it for granted and forgot about it entirely.
They even began to forget how things had been before. They forgot what the sky looked like, and eventually forgot that there even was one. They began to believe the canopy had been there for ever, and were furious when others suggested that was not the case.
The months turned into years. Plop. Plop. Plop. The overhead birds flung their thickening cast of droppings on the canvas. Missile by missile, it hardened into a black, sludgy crust. The canopy began to sag in the middle. The steel poles started to creak, the wires to stretch under the extra weight.
The people grew pale and stretched, like light-starved plants. Year by year, they woke to ever-darker days. Their faces grew dull and overcast, the ends of their mouths turned southward.
The numbers on the hillside fell away, died, forgot.
And now, only a solitary sitter remained, waiting and watching, her rusty gun heavy in her stiff old hands. Any day now. Any moment.
She shut her eyes. The dark shapes were spiking and bucking under their wrapping, like wild tethered horses. The darkness was lifting. She began to make out edges, shadows, bony outlines. She smiled, savouring the rising thud of her heartbeat.
Below, the tattering canvas drooped deeper onto the town. At its lowest sag, it scratched the jagged flag shaft wielded by the statue in the middle of the high street – a man on horseback marking some long past battle.
She heaved herself upright and laid down her shotgun, dusting the grass from her clothes.
Inch by inch, creak by groan, the canopy shifted under its load of stiffened sludge.
She sighed. It was a long way down. She toed the edge of the wrapping, and watched as a thin crack scuttled across the crust. She shuddered. Anticipation. The sweetest taste. The one she’d tasted all her life.
Below, the metal spear jabbed against the awning. Any moment, she thought. Any moment now.