i arrived at the crypt barefoot, which i always am, because shoes are a border and i do not recognise borders. it was a wednesday, and the crypt smelt of damp hymn books and the ghost of a thousand lukewarm teas. dolores pinfold, a 58-year-old former lollipop lady from dewsbury, was performing a twelve-minute spoken-word piece called ‘the roof tile speaks of empire’. the piece requires her to strike a reclaimed yorkshire roof tile with the flat of her right hand, forty times, once for each year of the miners’ strike. the tile is from a demolished pit cottage in barnsley and was donated by a man called kevin.
at the eleventh strike, an usher named baz quigley, who also teaches karate on tuesdays at the leisure centre, shouted, ‘that is a karate chop, that is not art.’ thirty-two people heard him.
ilhan omar was in the third row, wearing a lanyard, having attended as a visiting fellow at the university’s school of media and communication. i am not wearing shoes. i want to state that again because it is evidence of my seriousness.
the witnesses, and what they say they saw
the crypt holds 120 people and was full. of the thirty-two witnesses, twenty-nine signed a statement organised by a retired registrar called pauline hedley. the statement says ms omar rose from her seat, took off her jacket, and performed ‘a sequence of downward strikes’ on the tile for four minutes and eleven seconds, while ms pinfold held it steady. a video exists. it is nine seconds long, vertical, and shows the back of someone’s head.
the crypt’s sound engineer, a man called gareth who records everything, says the audio file is corrupted but contains the word ‘hiya’. i asked gareth what he meant by corrupted. he said, ‘it just is.’ i had to sit down on the cold stone floor for a moment. the floor was honest. gareth looked at me as if i were a woman unravelling, which i was, briefly, because the word ‘hiya’ contains all the loneliness of the north.
‘she did not strike the tile so much as converse with it,’ said pauline hedley, retired registrar and self-appointed archivist of the crypt’s open-mic nights. ‘the conversation was in karate.’
ms omar’s office says she was asleep in her hotel by 9.15pm, watching a documentary about the pennine way. the crypt has no clock. the hotel has no record of her key card being used, because the key card system has been broken since june. i thought about all of this and my mind went, as it always does, to borscht. the beetroot does not lie. the beetroot has never needed a key card.
a denial issued from a rented office above a vape shop
the denial came from a rented office above a vape shop on woodhouse lane. it was read out by a press officer named callum riddell, 26, who kept his coat on. he said ms omar has never practised karate, does not know what karate is, and was in any case ‘jet-lagged from a flight that landed at 4pm’.
‘karate is a broad church,’ said callum riddell, press officer and keeper of the laminated sheet. ‘so is jet lag. the two have been conflated.’
asked why ms omar had been photographed at the open-mic holding a roof tile, mr riddell said the photograph was ‘a greeting’. asked why the greeting lasted four minutes, he said, ‘some greetings are longer than others.’ he then handed out a laminated sheet titled ‘context’, which listed ms omar’s committee memberships and a recipe for banana bread.
i read the recipe twice. i do not eat banana bread. i eat borscht. the vape shop below sells a flavour called ‘blue slush’. it is £4.99. i wanted to lie down on the pavement outside and let the blue slush wash over me like a wave of forgetting, but instead i asked mr riddell if he had ever held a roof tile. he said, ‘no comment.’
the tile is taken into care in wakefield
on thursday morning, leeds city council’s arts committee met for eleven minutes and voted to reclassify the tile as a protected cultural object, citing its ‘provenance, patina and recent visibility’. the tile was wrapped in a moving blanket and driven to a storage facility in wakefield by two men in a ford transit. it is now insured for £40,000. a spokesperson for the facility, a woman called janice ambler, said the tile is ‘settling in well’ and has been given its own shelf.
janice showed me the shelf. it is a good shelf. the tile sits on it facing a wall, and the wall is beige, and the beige is the colour of every committee that has ever decided anything. i said to janice, ‘does it not long for the roof it came from?’ and janice said, ‘it’s a tile.’ i thought about the men in the ford transit, and how they will die, and how the tile will not, unless someone drops it, and i hoped, quietly, in the same voice i use to ask for soup, that the someone would be careful. then i asked where the toilets were.
‘it has its own shelf and a humidity reading,’ said janice ambler, facilities coordinator at the wakefield storage facility. ‘that is more than most of us get.’
it has been nominated for a turnaround award by the institute of recycled heritage, which is based in a business park in swindon and has three employees. ms pinfold has been told she can visit the tile by appointment, on tuesdays, for twenty minutes. twenty minutes is not enough. twenty minutes is a prison visit.
the roof tile has not commented, but its solicitor has
the tile’s solicitor, a man called nigel thrush of thrush, thrush and pemberton in wakefield, said his client ‘has no memory of the events of wednesday evening and does not wish to relitigate them’. he confirmed the tile will not be appearing at the edinburgh fringe, despite an offer of £600 and a slot at midday.
‘my client is a flat red root of a thing,’ said nigel thrush, solicitor. ‘like a potato that has seen war. it does not perform. it endures.’
ms pinfold has begun a new piece about a breeze block. baz quigley has been asked to leave the crypt’s volunteer rota and has written a letter to the yorkshire post. in it he says, ‘i have taught karate for nineteen years and i know a karate chop when i see one.’ the letter is 340 words long. the yorkshire post has not printed it.
the tile remains in wakefield, on its shelf, facing a wall. i am still not wearing shoes. i walked back to the station through the business park and the tarmac was cold and the tarmac was honest and i thought about how every empire is just a roof tile that has been taken into care. then i thought about borscht, and i felt better, and i caught the 18.42 to leeds.
