Tiles. Always tiles. Ever since her nanna had left Layla alone in the Italian tile shop at the bottom of Rosebery Avenue in Saffron Hill with an orange lipstick, a pack of crayons and a jumbo bag of gummy bears. There was a scene with the owner, Mrs Acerbi. Flailing arms and screaming and the police arriving.
Put her in handcuffs the crazy little dame, shouted Mrs Acerbi. Layla, aged seven and small for her age, shook her red plait and held out her wrists with a trembling lip and knees bare all a quiver. The three officers of the law backed off and stood in an orderly line to inspect Layla’s masterpiece on the Calacactta Gold Premium marble tiles – a sticky lipstick wax crayon fresco of Michelangelo’s The First Day of Creation, with Big Bird in the centre and Dougal, Ermintrude, Dylan and Zebedee as the supporting cast.
Where was her nanna, Mrs Hodge, who’d taken her there? Mrs Hodge didn’t rescue her. Mrs Hodge wasn’t with the officers of the law and the howling Mrs Acerbi or the crowd who’d stopped to peer at the fuss and were making bets with Mr Fattore on what would crack first, Mrs Acerbi’s glutinous make-up or the shop front window.
Was this just a naughty prank, a little girl going mad with crayons? Or was there something else more invidious? We can’t glean much from the notes her father Frank took during a series of medical appointments after the third graffiti display episode in as many years.
When I interviewed him some years ago, Frank told me that after fifteen years in the gravel pits on the excavators with no ear protection, he struggled to recall instructions if he didn’t write them down. He frowned, patting his ears when I spoke. It’s just one of those things, he said, as he handed me the notes. He was circumspect when talking about his wife. Maureen, he admitted, couldn’t write, was always working and sent Frank to school meetings, medical appointments, and anything else where Maureen’s shame might out itself. Frank, I’ve come to realise over the two decades I’ve followed this story, is a man who wants to do what’s right, but doesn’t try beyond what fate sets out for him.
Layla, according to one doctor, had developed a marked disinhibition for inhibition. A tick, Frank wrote, keep an eye – come to nothing – talented – danger – don’t leave strangers – avoid temptation – healthy diet. Some of Frank’s words were indecipherable, even to Frank. His pen petered out at critical junctures. Words rose at the end of lines, giving themselves up as hanging chads.
Following the doctor’s advice, Frank permitted Layla to desecrate one bedroom wall (he tiled it with Arabescato Vagli marble using molar pearl grout after a week of tears and smashed plates), forbade her to enter shops and galleries alone, and cajoled her into eating greens, oranges, and yellows. Maureen banned the Saturday trips with her nanna and forbade her, her own mother, to visit the family unannounced. Layla spent her weekends creating and destroying frescos, carving impassive friends out of the candle ends Maureen brought home from work, and thumbing through the art magazines that arrived from an anonymous donor.
In her first term at secondary school, Layla wanted to draw big, spread her arms, go beyond full-size into giant. Her art teacher forbade it. Stick to your pad, Layla Carlaw, Mr Williams told her every time she reached for the sky. If I let you do it, they’ll all want to and then where will be be? And try something other than Sesame Street and the Magic Roundabout.
Emma, then a plump girl in wire-rimmed spectacles who won school art competitions for her miniatures of fairies, fungi, and frogspawn, would lean across and squeeze Layla’s hand. Layla’s other hand would scratch and fret the eczema on her scalp until Mr Williams moved on to someone else. Layla didn’t or couldn’t give up trying. The sores on her scalp oozed and spread.
Years wore on.
Layla developed a susurrant sacrament, laying her hands and left cheek on the mute mineral wall in her bedroom after her morning shower, tracing the veins with her fingertips, burbling incantations.
Frank continued his extra shifts for the never-ending payment damages cycle to the Acerbis. His headaches spasmed and bellowed.
Layla’s nanna, Mrs Hodge, continued arriving at the door with large boxes and heavy paper bags and continued being sent away by the scolds of her daughter or the urgent mutterings of her son in law, her trembling arms still full of whatever she had for Layla.
The blue pencil lines on the hall wall marking out Layla’s height continued upwards in an orderly fashion, stuttered, and stagnated to a level well short of average.
Maureen stooped and sighed, continued to stroke the growing bulge under her right arm between cleaning shifts at the Premier Inn and scrubbing the bathroom tiles whenever Layla went off-piste with a gold pastel or a black kohl eyeliner.
In the community centre at the end of the street, neighbours pursed lips and tutted over the Carlaw’s shrill shouting and door slamming. That Carlaw family always smelled of turps, they said to me when I popped into one of their coffee mornings last year to ask about Layla. Mavis Brown, the elderly coordinator, serving tea and Victoria sponge with more clatter than was necessary, was content to go on the record. That generation of women be damned, she said. Someone should have stopped them breeding. (The cake, I must say, although a touch on the dry side, was delicious.)
Layla was sixteen, according to Emma, when rooting through her nanna’s lavender-scented lace garters and blush-nude fishnets in the cabinet beside the coal skuttle, she discovered the truth in a newspaper cutting. There, on page three, under a lurid photograph of Layla’s original tiled artistic triumph, was the story of her nanna. According to two anonymous witnesses, Mrs Shirley Hodge, aged fifty-seven, a widow with two sons, a daughter, and one grandchild, had been out the back of Mármol Italiano del Sr. Acerbi in the cement store, knickers at half-mast, with Sr. Acerbi’s large Italian hands firm on her flaccid buttocks.
Emma is sure that no one in the family had mentioned the humiliation to Layla before then, even when Mrs Hodge, never one to miss a commercial opportunity, had gone on to set up a lucrative hot-line business as an agony aunt for women seeking the thrills of both straying and getting caught. Mr Hodge, known by everyone as Granda, who’d spent much of his life digging graves and what was left of it tending Multiflora petunias, retained a dignified silence in his beige plastic urn on the Carlaw’s mantlepiece. What did Layla make of this? You’ll need to interpret her diary entry for yourself – a line drawing of a woman in a polka-dot bikini, her back kyphotic and her belly concertinaed, a walking stick in one hand, a packet of condoms in the other.
I digress.
After being expelled from school in her final year for lacerating the underpass with bloody renditions of Bert, Oscar, and Clementine, Layla did a combination course at the local higher education college in construction and fine art. Emma was on the art course, too. The reparation bond her father was forced to post to the college was lost following damage incurred in both departments in her first year. Psychologists were hired. Mentors provided. Professionals came and saw and left. The staff room was, one senior lecturer said later, abuzz for the first time in a decade as the pro-Layla freedom camp and the anti-Layla conservation camp went head to glorious head.
The college provided a security detail for Layla, ‘to keep her safe’. While on campus, she was followed at an indiscrete distance by two stout women in navy polyester until the student union threatened the management team with a human rights challenge. Layla didn’t seem to care. She attended classes, achieved decent grades, developed her own adaptive fresco techniques, ate her meals alone or with Emma, and spent most of her spare time at the brutalist fountain in the quadrangle or in the washrooms, studying grout imperfections.
When she wasn’t at college or making and crafting, Layla sat in her bedroom at home on a low stool holding the stiff hand of her life-size wax boyfriend, David. Emma believes it took Layla at least six months to sculpt him. David stood, brooding and biblical, by the end of her bed, staring unseeing at the fallen oak in the abandoned children’s playpark across the road. David was naked unless Emma was visiting.
As Emma, by her own admission, was not one for the flagrant display of male genitalia, Layla wrapped her companion from the waist down in a yellow-checked towel, securing his modesty with an iridescent fish-scale brooch she’d lifted from her nanna’s drawer. This was typical of her, Emma said later in an interview with Art Monthly following her own successful miniaturist exhibition in the Hague, she was always so careful of my feelings.
Maureen died when the lump overcame her. Or maybe it was Layla’s inability to ‘stop her spoiling’ that finished her off. Frank, without Maureen to defend and preserve, ebbed into a fog of fretful mourning and hasn’t spoken to Layla or his mother-in-law since. Neither parent attended her graduation. Mrs Hodge turned up to the amphitheatre with a polaroid camera and a pink fascinator, sat in the second to front row, and stood up for several seconds too long clicking and shouting and cheering well after Layla had left the stage.
A scurrilous two-page article in the local paper the following week slammed the college for allowing a wanton vandal to graduate. It included a previously unseen picture of Layla aged six, her red plait tied with a yellow ribbon, hunched over a drawing paper on the floor by a Victorian fireplace with pink and cream tulip tiles. The source of the photograph is unknown, but I’ve been told Mrs Hodge had a fireplace like that at the time.
Eight years after Maureen’s death, unemployed with a string of sackings and three police cautions behind her, and still living with her silent foundering father, Layla came into money. The source was never clear. Premium bonds or the lottery or a series of lucky flutters at the greyhounds with her nanna or some cumulative mix of them all. Previously absent aunts and uncles were suddenly attentive. Inglorious liggers proffered safe-keeping advice and pyramid investment schemes. Layla listened only to her nanna. Design your own destination, Mrs Hodge said. Carve out what you love.
Layla, sucking a strawberry gummy bear, wrote a list on the back of a paper plate:
Lipstick, Crayons, Pig’s blog, Marble, Sesame Street, Grout, Screwdrivers, Claw hammers, Torsos, Garters, Candle wax, Drawing, ReImagining, ReCreation, ReDestruction, Nanna, Magic Roundabout, David, InDependent, Michelangelo
On the front of the plate, she wrote, ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’ That paper plate, protected in a toughened glass case, is now on permanent display in the Design Museum in the Layla Carlaw Room.
Layla launched LC ReDestruction with a tap-dancing drag queen, a display by the local car crusher (electric SUV, darling), and a graffiti competition for the over seventies on the newly tiled exterior rear wall of her premises. The Acerbis, all agog and ancient, were the first to arrive. The brass band was valiant in its blistering efforts on Tosca, Emma handed out flutes of peach bellinis, and Mrs Hodge, now reliant on a walking frame, conducted the speeches from a smashed up wooden dais. Layla remained out of sight, reportedly etching Grover out of the Crystal White marble tiles in the disabled toilet with a Philips screwdriver and pigment pots of hematite and azurite.
As Mrs Hodge explained to the invited guests, the concept was simple. Walk into the expansive gallery. Provide your credit card details. Select a panel of Italian marble tiles from twenty options. Put on an apron, choose your make-up, art product, tool, and sticky sweet, and get to work. Once you’ve finished your creation, LC ReDestruction recreates the effect on the wall of your choice in your home. Layla, Mrs Hodge promised, would personally seal a signature gummy bear in the upper right-hand corner of every finished work to guarantee its authenticity.
Readers – as you all know, it took off. It started with a tweet here and there by those at the opening. Not by Layla. Layla was not one for public relations or marketing, preferring, as Mrs Hodge said in her speech, to let the redestructors do the talking. From Twitter it moved to Instagram. Hollywood A Listers did redestruction selfies with Bianco Perlino bathroom panels or Bardiglio Imperiale kitchens. YouTubers got in on the act, strutting viewers through their daubings, scratchings and simperings with vacuous smiles and decorated teeth, hurling fake pig’s blood onto fake marble panels. Tenors and sopranos popped up out of retirement offering ‘sung for your pleasure’ backing vocals for #SeeMeSeeMyReDestruction. Those that couldn’t afford the divas ripped off DIY sea shanties from TikTok. Marble-cracking hammers with spangle-laminate handles sold out at B & Q. Pseudo-Defecated grout could be bought by the ten-kilo bag at Aldi, with the genuine article available at every Waitrose in the UK beside the potted plant sections.
Fawning features appeared in Home and Garden, Country Life, and Cosmopolitan. Grand Designs devoted an entire series to ReDestruction, as middle-aged high-income couples with big hair and matching fawn slacks allowed wrecker artists into their homes. Teary-eyed by the end of the episode, they stared straight to camera, gushing about their spiritual redemolishments and incorporeal sabotage. Layla, who refused all interviews and guest appearances, was rarefied as a prophet, a visionary, a god. Statues of her rose in Milton Keynes, Skelmersdale and Peterlee. A chalk cutting of her face in profile turned up on a hillside a mile from the Uffington Chalk Horse.
At some point in amongst this, under cover of darkness, Layla moved out of her father’s home. Commentators said she’d gone to Brixton, Milan, or New York. Or she’d taken up with the homeless under Tower Bridge. Or she was in an old miner’s cottage in Wales, happily wrecking. Occasionally she was snapped on a bicycle near her small office in Saffron Hill, London, her dark red plait now the length of her back, her signature white anorak always too big and too loose over her small frame.
A rumour, started by the Mail Online, surfaced about Maureen’s ashes. A cleaner swore he’d seen Layla pouring ashes from a crematorium bag into the grout mix when she was installing her new interactive exhibition in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. Layla had been crying, he said, and hadn’t let him comfort her. Told him to f*ck off when he’d approached. The Tate would not comment on the story, except to say they’d fire the cleaner if they identified him. I have been unable to ascertain whether the family ever picked up Maureen’s ashes from the funeral directors.
Investigative reporters with more resources than this humble journalist followed the money. Mrs Hodge, the Times alleged, was building an empire around LC ReDestruction.TM Luxury peregrinations (coach, train, or walking), pre-chipped homeware, shredded clothing, mineral art products, even ReDestruction cakes and bakes all had the gummy bear seal. There was talk of shell companies and bitcoin. A limited-edition (500) of platinum hammer-proof watches with pre-shattered faces for £35k each sold out in twenty-four hours. Mrs Hodge was papped in the Four Seasons Hotel in Moscow, the Cayman Islands Yacht Club, and Annabel’s in London. Each time she had a walking frame more whimsical than the last and a rump of rowdy rinsed middle-aged men at her heel. She was never with Layla.
The backlash, when it finally thundered in, was graphite and pre-Raphaelite. Greenpeace hit out at the ‘wanton destruction of a precious natural resource that took millions of years to form’. #LaylaPlanetHater trended off and on for several weeks. The art critics, always one bend behind the curve, sniffed and censured and told everyone to move on, they’d said from the start it was plebetariat nonsense. BBC Radio 4’s the Moral Maze asked if ReDestruction could ever be Art with the clear intention that the answer was Certainly Not. One female panellist made an impassioned plea against misogyny but was cut off in mid flow as ‘off-topic’. Enough of this, Middle England shouted. Enough of this, the Far Left agreed.
Emma and I got engaged. She proposed and I accepted. Say what you want about the age difference, it makes no odds to me. I stopped thinking about Layla, stopped following the odd story about redestruction and focussed on other projects. We moved to the country. We had a baby. She, Cleo, turned one. We invited Layla to celebrate with us, an intimate party, just for close friends. She declined. And that would have been that had Mrs Hodge not gone viral. Again.
Mrs Hodge organised a live feed statement, In Defence of Layla’s Realm, from the shade of an umbrella palm, cardboard or genuine I couldn’t tell. She kicked off by telling us, the world, that Layla was left-handed, like all creative types, and that’s why she, her loving nanna, had encouraged and protected her from the start. And then, she said, dropping her eyelids, there was that incident.
Layla had just turned seven and Mrs Hodge was babysitting. The pair were walking back to the family home, when at the other end of the street, a bus stopped outside estate entrance. A woman got out, staggered, tripped, and pawed at her stomach. The back of her coat was stained red, and red was smeared around her stockings. The woman was trying to cover the red with her bag of shopping. She struggled across the road causing some drivers to swerve and brake. Just as Mrs Hodge recognised her daughter, Maureen, Layla shouted Mum, Mum! Mrs Hodge grabbed the little girl’s hand, turned her around, and ran.
Mrs Hodge, breathing heavily, her eyes damp, her slumping cheeks high pink, stepped closer in to the camera. She had to protect Layla, she said, and had taken her to the community centre, asked the team there to watch her for a few hours while she hurried to the house to help Maureen. There was an exhibition about Michelangelo, and a space for children to draw on paper pinned to the walls. Layla spent a couple of hours there and was taken home by the community coordinator for the night while Mrs Hodge did what needed to be done. She’s sensitive, went on Mrs Hodge, an only child with a tragic past. You can see this in her creations, her conceptions, her sculptures. She paused to clear her throat.
I implore the critics, the greenies, all of you, she said, to leave her alone. Snobs and hypocrites. Misogynists. Bullying her because she was brought up in a council house. What do they know? They’ve never picked up a hammer in their lives. The public loves her work. Every exhibition sold out. If you support Layla, bring your redestruction plans to me. I’ll see you right. And with a teary wink, the feed went dead.
Days after this live feed, a group calling themselves ReDestruction Sisters and Sinners flash mobbed several London underground stations, rendering the original tilework ruined with anti-capitalist pigment and a jack hammer. All wore Layla masks over scarlet balaclavas. The Turkish Baths in Harrogate were graffitied with lude images of savaged male genitalia and signed off with gummy bears. As the CCTV system was sabotaged on the night of the incident, no one has as ever been charged for the offence.
Soon, at least according to the Daily Mail and that rag the Express, half the country was running amok, going the whole hog, despoiling their houses, moving on to their neighbours’ relatives’ and even colleagues’. Anything with tiles was fair game. Georgian council offices, Victorian schools, city fountains, even the snake house in Whipsnade Zoo. Politicians called on Layla to proclaim a cease and desist, to apologise for the pillaging mobs, to pay compensation, to take the blame. Layla stayed in the shadows. Kept redestructing. Mrs Hodge presided over the openings of new LC REDESTRUCTION branches in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Cardiff. The V & A hosted a pop up for three weeks in Dundee. The police kettled protestors and the pop up was shut down a week early, only to reopen again when the police were distracted by similar events in Aberfoyle and Leeds.
When Layla was finally tracked down and detained under what many human rights organisations claimed to be trumped up charges, and two years later found guilty at a trial without a jury, the foreign media referred to it as a kangaroo court. You all know what the British media said.
There are no tiles in Layla’s cell. According to a Ministry of Justice tweet it was a condition of her incarceration. A further tweet with a photograph shows the cell as elephant grey, the light scant, with a square window that looks out onto a concrete yard and a discrete electric fence. The glass is smeared on the outside with the remnants of Atlantic storms. There’s a built-in single bed with grey linen, and two white shelves above the pillow. In the right-hand corner of the photograph, we see the rear of a woman’s head and her back, the crinkled red hair in an orderly plait. The woman is wearing thick khaki canvas. Is this really Layla’s prison? Is this really Layla? We have no way of knowing.
Layla has been denied requests for lipsticks, crayons, and pencils by the Ministry of Justice. Further requests for Play-Doh and water colours have also been refused. Even paper plates. The Sun reports that Layla tried rubbing mashed swede onto her cell wall, which, had it stuck, would have been a milky pale umber. It didn’t stick, didn’t even stain. Later, one prison guard has claimed, she tried mushy peas, the fading green svelte of abandoned summers. It didn’t stick either. Anti-food art prison paint. Peak 2022.
Frank Carlaw has never been to visit. Neither has Mrs Hodge. Emma is the only non-family member with prison access rights. She doesn’t want the details of her visits made public. She has crowd-funded two legal challenges without success to get Layla out. But whoever detained and charged Layla, first under the Mental Health Act, and later under public order regulations and anti-terror legislation, knew what they were about.
Layla has never done an interview or spoken in public beyond speaking to her clients. We must assume that Layla Carlaw means for her art to stand for itself. We, those of us that have followed her career, want her out of there. Alas, it looks like we’ll be waiting for decades to come. It was the institutions that got her in the end. Put at end to her art because she was putting an end to them.
Or was she?
SANDERLINGS 