By Nick Hancill
Location: Exchange Square, Manchester
Three a.m., the far corner; she fumbles around
while the taxi’s engine hacks and coughs:
A standstill beneath the Co-operative Bank.
Her fingers hunt the deer-hide purse
and part the supple skin at the fold.
A slurred explanation mumbled to her chest
and she’s out of the cab that sits on the curb,
tilted to one side and eyes glazed over.
A man asleep against the hole-in-the-wall,
his hand still open, palm to the clouds.
She prods in her pin, drops her make-up,
the man’s eyes open, off-white as his paper cup.
But he’s used to this kind and disturbance.
The heels drown him out as they clatter home,
he sees the cab driver mouth his thoughts.
‘Sorry love, all I’ve got is change.’
Nick Hancill is a young poet, based in Manchester but originally from the North East. He’s currently studying creative writing on the University of Manchester’s MA programme.
By John Togher
Location: Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester
I meet you
at the statue
on the hour
and think of
the drowning grip
I have on your face.
Your onion seed
eyes are ablaze.
I sigh, watch
the feathered clouds
disconnect above us.
You give a tug
on my sleeve,
“We’re a clumsy version
of a good idea,
like pterodactyls.”
I freeze-frame,
see you entwined
in bringing defeat,
deaf to my melancholy.
I stare at the chip
in your front tooth.
John says: ’28 years old. I am literature co-ordinator of the NXNW Festival. Editor of The Mental Virus Arts Magazine. Been writing for seven years. Published here and there.’
By Emily Josephine McPhillips
Location: BBC Manchester, Oxford Road
Illustration by Abi Milnes - www.abimilnes.com
You noticed her first when her hair was wet, how it glued over her mouth like a moustache. The next time you saw her was on the same bus journey as the first encounter, you’d stepped on her foot as you made your way off the bus, and you’d heard her yell ‘ouch’ and call you an arsehole under her breath, just loud enough for you to hear, but definitely deliberately audible – and you thought she was cool for that.
You smiled at her; a cheap man’s sorry locked in a pearl grin, and she knew it was the best she’d get. You with your Wainwright-style coat and a lugging bag full of chemistry books maybe, physics books definitely, that swung over your shoulder like a threat to all the people you were yet to storm past. She held her breath for them.
You and the moustached girl were both students from smaller towns, both hauling around on the busiest bus route in Europe, trying to make lectures on time, but failing mostly, failing to care too much to change. On these bus journeys you had to expect to get battered around, your feet trodden on from time to time: these events were character building – they were feats of strength, but you didn’t have to like them.
The soundtrack to the Manchester bus journey is the sound of dystopia communicating its presence from a mobile phone. Misery such as this is neatly packaged on a Manchester bus: it is that pressed-up thigh against your leg that you daren’t discover the owner of, it is the entrapment of Primark bags surrounding you (a brown bag dam), and it is also the perishable Megarider that you hope is there in your back pocket and not lost to your fret. The Manchester bus journey, quite like the January sales, is a script of endurance.
To you, her face was a beacon of safety: oval and pale, almost washed out like a mint, and dripping wetly from the spells of rain she’d been caught in. She was someone you thought that you had a better chance of getting on with than most. This impression taken in mental notes of: her glittered shoes, and the way she didn’t mind making that shrieking noise with her nose to stop it from dripping in the full glory of her second cold this winter. She was an inoffensive and beautiful sweetheart that you wanted to provide with a tissue.
By Steve Hunt
Location: St Mary’s Church, Moston
Last night I pissed
Where Cromwell’s feet
Once stood
As he prepared to mount
His mare
Or stud
T’was St Mary’s Church
On St Mary’s Road
Near Nuthurst Park
Off Lightbowne Road
You know the one
With the blue neon cross?
Like the one with the red one
At Brent Cross?
I walked through
The churchyard
Down Memory Lane
On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep
And back again
And remembered the time
When we fell in love..
It was just a song on Radio 1
Played by DJ Alan ‘Fluff’
Freeman
Like the free man
Who pissed on the stair
Where Oliver Cromwell
Mounted his mare
And polished the brass plate
On which it state
Here stood the man
Only four foot eight.
Steve Hunt is North Mancunian born and bred. Sometimes writes, sometimes reads, sometimes makes pictures.
By Daniel Carpenter
Location: The Hilton Hotel, Deansgate
The bridge is encased in a kind of tunnel, this cylindrical fibreglass covering the whole thing. It’s dark brown, the kind of murky colour that everyone in the Seventies thought was fashionable. I can’t see out of the sides, except the odd clear patch where kids have scratched the paint off with keys. I peer through one, and get my first glimpse of the city outside, dark and wet, cars shooting past underneath me.
In my pocket, scrawled handwritten instructions that have got me this far, from the station, to the tunnel, then over the tram track to the hotel. Midway up, red light, and in big capital letters – HARD TO MISS. The note’s been in my pocket for almost a month. Keep asking myself: was it just because I was too poor, couldn’t afford to come here? Or was it something else.
Big capital letters – HARD TO SAY.
I can feel the cold, pushing its way down the tunnel past me, and I pull my coat close to me. Wrinkles on the note from Mondays spent worrying, Thursdays in hope, weekends scrunched up in the bottom of my purse. And in small print at the bottom, written with a pen that didn’t quite work, ‘see you soon’.
Coming out of the tunnel and the wind hits me, the cold air ploughing through my coat, making it billow out. When I breathe in it has that stale bitterness to it and I can see my breath in front of me. It dissipates and rises, and I follow up and up, and that’s when I see it. In front of me, towering over everything in my sight, the hotel, and the mid-section, this red line against the darkness. The outline of the building bleeds into the night sky so effortlessly that it looks as though that red middle floor is on its own, just floating above the city. I make my way over the tram tracks and head towards it.
The girl at the reception desk hasn’t heard of him, ‘I’m new though,’ she says, ‘Don’t think I’ve met everyone, I’ll go fetch someone who might know who he is,’ and off she trots into the bustling restaurant. I look out of the window and all I can see are lights, from streets, cars, flats, shops, restaurants. In the distance a Ferris wheel turns, and beyond that more lights, houses, suburbs.
The girl comes back, this time she’s got a guy with her, in his thirties.
‘So you must be Grace?’
‘That’s me.’ I shake his hand.
‘You know, Steve told me so much about you, feel like I know you already. Look, I got five minutes, you want to get a drink somewhere?’
‘Steve’s not working?’
‘No, not really.’
