Theo’s front wheel collides with the weight of an obstacle. His body tips forward and is thrown up into the air. The impact of the ground punches. Theo’s winded puff breaks the silence. Stunned he lies there. Then he panics. Is he hurt? He checks himself. Does a quick body scan, he’s ok. ‘Get up’ he tells himself, ‘move. Now’, and moves, pulls himself up, rubs his muddy trousers, dusts away the wet from his arms, turns around looking for his bike and finds himself looking standing in front at of two suited bodies lying on the ground, a concrete block between them.

There’s quite a lot that goes through a mind with an encounter such as this. Firstly, you might begin by questioning yourself. That actually, whatever it was you collided with had caused a cerebral short-circuit and the concussion was making you hallucinate. You might try to think about what triggered your brain to imagine two older men, of about seventy in age, wearing shiny silvery green suits, white shirts, khaki green ties, orange brogues, lying in the middle of London Fields their feet very neatly positioned toward the Lido, their heads facing toward the exit. Secondly, it is not so unusual to find men,, lying in parks. Quite often, that’s how parks are used. People lie in them. But that’s not really anyone’s business. What is extra-ordinary however is to encounter two men, older and suited, lying prostrate, their arms handcuffed inside a cylinder hole carved through a concrete block. The block is the signifier that makes one start to doubt what one is seeing. The block invites the cerebral short-circuit as a possible explanation. The block stops the brain blocking out what it thinks it is imagining. The block persists.

Theo could not make sense of it. He couldn’t place himself. In that split second, when his face met theirs, he considered whether or not to circle the ‘thing’ as one would do with an exhibit in a gallery. Theo didn’t want to appear stupid. It could be one of those performance pieces he’d heard about on Radio 4, like those silly ‘sound sculptures’ on that god awful Saturday morning show. ‘It’s a poor replacement for Home Truths’ Theo grumbled to his wife. Susanna was very good at rolling her eyes at just the right moment. Over the years she perfected her ability to sense literally a second before Theo, his launch into a lengthy monologue about some failing aspect of the country’s infrastructure, and bring him to an abrupt halt. ‘Let. Me. Just. Stop. You. Right. There’ she would say. And Theo would stop, because occasionally she would let him go on. If he was being captured on film by a bunch of pretentious art students behind a tree, Theo didn’t want to lose face and appear like some bad sport. After all, just because he was a paper shuffler by training, didn’t mean he wasn’t receptive to new ideas.

Theo started to encircle the block with a half-hearted purposeful stroll. He wanted to give off the impression that he was also looking for something, perhaps an important file from out of his briefcase, or one of his luminous bicycle clips. In case it wasn’t a work of art. This resulted in a kind of ambling limp. Theo thought it better to stop moving. ‘Perhaps’ he thought, ‘I should really begin with an introduction’. But, how to introduce oneself to a ‘thing’ that one doesn’t even know how to name? ‘Do I address the block or the men?’ Theo asked himself. ‘And even then, how does one approach two suited men on either side of a piece of concrete?’ He saw very clearly the dilemma before him. It was impossible to make eye contact with both of them, unless he stood at quite a distance, but retreating at this stage, was really not an option. If he only made eye contact with one of them, it would seem unfair, but also biased in the eyes of the camera crew. Theo imagined black polo neck jumpers and skinny legs behind the large Oak tree to the left of him. Trying to address the two suited men at the same time would make him look as if he were affirmatively shaking his head with a ‘no, no, no’, valuing the work according to his good or bad judgment. That could turn out to be embarrassing. He was uneasy about being read by the art students, if of course, they were behind that tree. One must be careful with these kinds of encounters. ‘Hello there’, wasn’t really appropriate. ‘Excuse me’, seemed rather daft. Theo decided to address the block instead. He began with ‘Well’. And then, ‘I wasn’t really expecting this’.

The block seemed to respond.

‘A man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end’. The voices coming from the suits sounded eloquent, quietly reserved, slightly foreign.

‘Pardon?’ said Theo, not quite catching the line.

‘Someone has seen a thousand adult men’.

This time Theo heard. He laughed politely but felt very uneasy. There was silence. The two men were still. Theo tried again.

‘I can see how this might be rather interesting’.

The voices chanted in holy prayer ‘Finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and then wrist and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and in fact, of everything to everything else’.

Theo started to panic again. He heard the hum of the traffic in the distance. He was getting cold. He wanted to go home and forget this nonsense. But he didn’t know how to leave. He felt he was missing out on something.

Theo suddenly alighted on a different idea. Maybe it wasn’t a bunch of art students but Hackney Council instead. So stupid of them to install an installation and neglect to tell anyone about it. ‘In that case’, Theo surmised, with growing irritation in his belly, ‘I’m perfectly within my rights to demand some kind of compensation for my bike’. The bike was a mess. The front wheel had distorted into an unfamiliar shape, the rubber tyre half hanging off the frame, which was now more of a lopsided triangle than a circle. Theo felt better. Now he had reason to hold a conversation, and with some more direct questioning, perhaps he could get an answer that was affirmative and not so speculative.

‘No, seriously, I’m sure it’s going to be very interesting in daylight. Are you planning to be showing for long?’ Theo wasn’t sure that ‘showing’ was the right word, but settled on it. ‘I will of course, have to take your number, with regard to the cost for a replacement wheel, or would you prefer me to contact Hackney Council directly?’

He looked at their hands, thinking that it was indeed possible to write down a phone number with one free hand, but wondered if this would compromise the performance? He didn’t want to tamper. I mean, all those sculptures in the Victoria and Albert Museum, even the plaster cast ones, you can’t touch.

‘The arrangement of ‘shapes’ which have hitherto appeared differs from the way they appeared in their own order.’

Theo felt like crying. Their connected hands inside the concrete block were sinister. He saw a wired bomb in his mind, a kind of time bomb protest. Maybe they were suicide bombers and not artists? He started to panic again. It was time to call Susanna.

‘Are they Gilbert and George?’

‘Who are Gilbert and George?’

‘Oh Theo, for goodness sake, you know, those performance artists, the “living sculptures”? Don’t you remember Underneath the Arches?’

‘No.’

‘Well ask them then’

‘Ask them what?’

‘ASK them if they are Gilbert and George’.

Theo moved the phone away from his ear and half cupping his hand over the mouthpiece, bent down and said in a kind of hushed and slightly apologetic tone ‘You don’t happen to be Gilbert and George do you?’

‘We have a plastic figure which is universal rather than a real individual’.

Theo could hear Susanna yelling down the phone.

‘Sorry. What?’

‘What did they say?’

‘Erm...they didn’t really give much of a straight answer. Something about having a plastic figure.’

‘Well perhaps they can’t really reveal their identities when they are actually living, sculpturally, if you know what I mean’

‘I guess so’ said Theo, confused.

‘Just wheel your bike home Theo. You can chase up the compensation stuff tomorrow. They go to that Turkish restaurant I hear, down the road, same time, every night, so you can go and ask them when they aren’t performing...in a park’.

Theo wasn’t convinced.

‘Are you sure they are Gilbert and George? I mean, how do we really know who they are?’
‘Theo’ Susanna softly warned ‘Stop worrying and come home’.

‘Alright’ Theo said, slightly relieved that someone else was making all the decisions now.

The next day, Theo avoided going home through the park. He took the long route on foot. The previous evening was bothering him. He spent his lunch hour trying to find the right department at Hackney Council. Cultural services seemed the most obvious choice but he was put on hold. Eventually Theo gave up, re-wrapped his half eaten cheese and tomato sandwich and put it back into his lunch box. He had lost his appetite. The whole situation was very upsetting.. Susanna didn’t seem to be listening. to Theo, thought Theo. She left that morning in such a rush, depositing the name and address of the Turkish restaurant ‘Mangal II, 4 Stoke Newington Road’ on the shelf in the hallway, yelling out before slamming the door behind her ‘I’LL SEE YOU ABOUT NINE’ then mumbling something Theo couldn’t hear, followed by ‘ADDRESS IS ON THE TABLE...MAKE SURE TO GET THERE BEFORE SEVEN’. Slam. Quiet. Theo looks into the bathroom mirror. ‘She’s not going to come with me’ he sighed and then starts to imagine all kinds of humiliations. They’d once been to Turkey for a holiday. Theo hated it, all that sitting around in the heat. He spent his time in the shade feigning sleep behind his sunglasses while Susanna helped the Turkish women pick vibrant green cucumbers, squatting down with them outside the kitchen, communicating with smiles and giggles. He’d liked the yoghurt and honey. That was probably the best bit .

‘It’s not us’ Gilbert and George say in unison ‘But we can see the resemblance’.

The weekend brought sunshine. Susanna agreed to head to the park with Theo to see the legendary installation and to pin the mysterious couple down. At breakfast Theo recounted his experience at Mangal II.

‘I had a rather nice charcoal grilled lamb kebab and some of that rice with bits of vermicelli in it. The grill is called an Ocakbasi’.

Susanna poured some museli into a bowl.

‘What did Gilbert and George have?’

‘I think they were eating chicken’

‘Really? I always imagined they were vegetarians’

‘Why?’ asked Theo, recalling his awkward encounter with them.

‘I’m not sure’.

Theo hated the way Susanna jumped to conclusions and provided no apparent reason for them. She believed that instinct was a guiding force for making decisions. Like the times she would follow her gut and not a map in areas she thought she had already visited. Theo would follow Susanna sensing her way down unfamiliar streets turning alien landmarks into signals of familiarity. ‘I’ve seen this before’ she would murmur unconvincingly. Theo wished she would just stick to the map. Maps were reliable.

‘So did they know about the installation then?’

‘No. They were very polite about it. I don’t think they minded me disturbing their meal’.
Theo cringed. In actuality, he rather thought they had minded. It took him some time to explain what he had encountered in the park and became increasingly more flustered as the waiter hovered by him waiting to intervene. Gilbert and George sat patiently, their expectant faces turned toward Theo. In the end, he drew them a technical diagram of what he had seen, mapping out how his bike had collided with the ‘thing’.

Later on at home, Theo looked up Gilbert and George on the internet. He found a clip of ‘Underneath the Arches’ and watched it a couple of times. He wondered what singing sculptures had to do with Flanagan and Allen. And why did they have a manifesto for life that preached smart dress and being friendly and polite? Or making the world believe in you but paying heartily for the privilege? Theo admitted that they were polite to him. But he knew there was something intrinsically different about these men in the park. Whatever it was that was coming out of their mouths was laden with a weight. The delivery of those strange sentences was mechanical and foreboding. Gilbert and George were very pleasant.
Susanna started laughing.

‘It’s great’ she said ‘Really funny’.

She acted as if the two men were deaf and couldn’t hear her at all.

‘What about my bike?’ Theo said looking at the block. Susanna was bending down peering at their feet.

‘Those orange brogues are fantastic. I wonder where they got them from. Looks like an Oxford wingtip but I’ve never seen them in bright orange’.

‘Ask them a question or something’.

Susanna stood up. ‘Where will I be in ten years time?’

‘There is a right physical size for every idea ’

‘How prophetic’ Susanna mocked ‘With age comes an extra pound or two’.

‘I’m not sure that’s what they meant’ Theo deplored.

They walked home via Ridley Road market to pick up some vegetables. At the stall Theo looked at bunches of coriander and thought about his bike. Susanna was filling up the string bag with spinach. If he couldn’t pin down the ‘thing’ to an owner how was he going to get his bike mended? He stood taking in the green of the coriander leaves and thought about filling in compensation forms. Theo was a very good paper shuffler. Administration was not intrinsically boring. Over the years he had found satisfaction in his job. He had quickly realised that there was something comforting about the generic character of the forms he would process. Just himself, the computer screen and a pile of forms waiting to be filtered and administered, catalogued and filed into a database. Theo was part of an information data assembly line, a small database interlinked in a chain of other similar databases. His colleagues personalised their desks with photographs of small children and bright pink post-it notes, but Theo preferred to have very little beside him, just a pile of forms in his in-out tray and the satisfaction of inputting words and numbers into spreadsheet boxes. When people asked him what he did, he often felt like saying ‘I’m making virtual paper trails’ but usually settled on ‘application processing for on-line distribution channels’, which was as close as he could get to what he did, although he couldn’t be too sure.