"The Man on the Hose Is the First to Look at It Properly"
On the third and last morning of his Deptford mural, Jamal Ridgeway stood in the cold and watched a council crew take a kitchen apart, one chair at a time.
The hose starts at 8:40. By 8:52 the left-hand chair is gone. Jamal Ridgeway stands on the pavement in a parka the colour of wet cardboard, holding a tea he stopped drinking at 8:45.
The mural covers the side wall of a former tyre depot, six metres by nine. It shows a long table laid for supper. Eleven chairs, no people. Under the table, a dog. He painted it over two nights in ochre, bottle green and a pink he named after a bus shelter.
This is day three. For Ridgeway, day three is always the last. He has been painting walls that disappear for years and he has a method. He does not photograph the finished work. He takes one flake from each wall and keeps it in a matchbox, and the matchbox is now very full.
The crew is four people in orange jackets, a van left idling and a hot-water washer the size of a fridge. The crew lead has a clipboard he does not write on. He works from the top down, which Ridgeway approves of. "He's doing it in the order I'd have done it," he says.
Then the hose reaches the table and the crew lead stops. He leans in. He asks his colleague to cut the pressure. He is looking at the plates.
"Three days that wall was up," Ridgeway says quietly. "The man on the hose is the first to look at it properly."
It is not quite fair to the street. People did pass. A woman held her phone up on Tuesday and a cyclist slowed on Monday night. A boy on a scooter shouted that it was nice. But they were looking at a picture of a thing. The crew has to look at the thing, because you cannot remove what you have not read.
The washer goes back on. The pink goes first, then the green. The ochre holds on longest, as ochre does, and for a minute the table is a faint yellow outline, like the place a clock leaves on wallpaper. Ridgeway watches it with his hands in his pockets. He is not angry. He looks like someone at a station seeing off a train he chose to put someone on.
By 9:30 the wall is the grey of a wet Tuesday. The van door slides shut. The crew lead walks over, clipboard under his arm, and asks if the dog had a name.
Ridgeway tells him. The crew lead takes out a pen and, for the first time all morning, writes something down.
