By Ailsa Cox
Location: Oxford Road
I don’t know where the hell we’re going. I was meant to give directions. Nick’s car blunders through the back streets in the hinterland between Rusholme and Fallowfield, one blind corner rounding into another. I’ll be late for my class. Late and screwed up. Screwed up and late.
Silence between us. Time to draw another weapon. ‘That poster you brought back for me…’
‘Which poster?’
‘Doors of Tunis. You got it for nothing, didn’t you? There’s a logo, ATB Bank, at the bottom.’
‘There you are again,’ Nick says wearily, ‘you’re so cynical sometimes. I spent hours, hours walking round the Medina, looking for something to bring you.’
‘Sorry.’ I touch his thigh, forbidden now.
‘That was a shitty thing to say.’ He pauses dramatically. ‘And one of those doors was open.’
5.51pm, and at last we’ve reached the highway. Now it’s straight down the Curry Mile. Past the Mughli and the Darbar, onto Oxford Road, past the Infirmary and Manchester Uni and Manchester Met and the College of Music, over the edge of the city centre, heading for the finish, on this, the eleventh day of the eleventh month, shortly after the end of British Summer Time, our seventh month together, which turns out to be the last.
I look at him now while I still can, his iron profile hard as the head on a coin. ‘Why do you think I say those things?’
Because you’re afraid. Because you love me.
But the answer he gives is not the right one. And he doesn’t turn to face me, not even for a second, while we’re waiting for the signals to change by Contact Theatre. Heavy traffic. Brake lights shine through the glossy darkness. But there’s not far to go, now he knows where he is. 5.53 – I’ll be early after all. I check again that I’ve packed my notes and handouts, the right DVD. And my glasses.
By Jenn Ashworth
Location: Bus stop outside Piccadilly Train Station
12.35am.
9 bottles of Carlsberg
1 pint Heineken
1 Vodka and Red Bull
1 SFC dinner
6 codeine
0 fags
£8.10 train fare
£5.00 taxi
I don’t even live here, and I don’t want to live here either. But not living here means getting the train in, and, after midnight, the bus home. There’s a cloud of people waiting, jangling jewellery and stinking up my lungs with perfume and fags and kebabs.
I’m going to push right to the front of the queue. There are loads of policemen about. If anyone complains, I will shout out and cry and say ‘grab’ and ‘frotting’.
I am going to sit at the front of the bus and not close my eyes once on the way home. I am going to sit on my feet until the pins and needles go numb.
If you’re northern, it means you’re from Manchester, doesn’t it? I don’t correct them anymore. Which means I’m lying in an attempt to be… what would it be? Metropolitan? I don’t think I’ve ever said that word out loud before.
I make a vow. I will not blink all the way home. I will not sleep. I will make myself travel sick, concentrate on Carlsberg sloshing in my stomach, and never, ever say the word ‘metropolitan’ out loud.
When the bus comes, there’s a shuffle that ripples through the queuing crowd. No-one shouts, no-one pushes, but there is determined edging and some accidental elbows. I want to throw up on someone. It’s not the beer. I think vomiting, in this situation, would be an aggressive action – the first move in a war.
I get on the bus before I can ask a policeman if vomiting on someone’s Roxy trousers and slip-on Vans counts as assault. There would be no way to prove I did it on purpose.
There’s something about the water here. You can tell by the lather on the soap, and the ‘bored’ and ‘ironic’ expressions pasted on wasted faces. I sit down. My shoes hurt. My shoes are in the bottom of my bag and they are still hurting. My shoes are throbbing so much I pull the hinged flap at the top of the window open and throw them out.
I want to watch them bounce along the motorway, but we’re away on the M61 now, ploughing through ‘characteristic’ rain and on the way home.
There are some other words I am not going to say. Some more rules. I’m not going to wear American Apparel or invest in prescription shades. Never allow myself to flirt with emo boys or a wheat/dairy intolerance. I’m not going to say ‘Northern Quarter’ and I’ll pretend not to know where you mean when you tell me you’ll meet me in Cornerhouse.
The bus heads towards Bolton.
Jenn Ashworth is a blogger, short story writer and novelist. Her debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, will be published by Arcadia in spring 2009.
By Socrates Adams-Florou
Location: Chinatown
I live in Chinatown.
Every Sunday there is a wedding and loads of fireworks go off on the pavement opposite my house. Every time I think that we are under attack by terrorists.
The lights in Chinatown are bright and of a number of different lurid colours. They make it look dangerous and seedy. Chinatown makes me feel sexy.
There is a restaurant in Chinatown that I always go to. It is the Happy Emperor restaurant. There is a lovely lady in the Happy Emperor restaurant who gives me free prawn crackers and beer when I go in.
I am grotesquely fat due to all of the free beer and prawn crackers. I have started going to a therapist because I am so fat. I feel like a grease ball.
My therapist is called Arnold Phillips. He makes me feel better by forcing me to eat more Chinese food. If I don’t have something in my mouth I start crying.
I spend all of my money on Chinese food in Chinatown. I go to all of the restaurants on a constant quest for Chinese food. I love the smell of Chinese food. I go into the bakeries and supermarkets, stuffing food into my gob, getting poorer and fatter.
I cannot afford my rent.
I now live in one of the gazebos in Chinatown. I am homeless and fat. I am a drug addict.
Leave me alone.
Socrates Adams-Florou says: ‘I write a blog. I was nominated for the 2008 Manchester Blog Awards. I am a massive disappointment.’
By Elinor Taylor
Location: Jersey Street and towpaths, Ancoats
Water cuts my city in long, slow curves. Here I am again, walking the towpaths behind tall buildings, leaning on the rotting lock, searching my body for pains – bitten nails, shot nerves.
From the palette of the landscape I create you: flesh tones from the factory brickwork, eyes from the blue of a late flower, hair from a stray feather. Now feel the ice on the breeze, the gravel underfoot.
Now let’s act out some scenes. Let the space from here to that far wall be your studio. Make the mercury eye of your mirror from the dark water, the hot white lights from the bright winter sky. The scene’s set. Now the air smells of solvents and the silence ripples with the sound of your brushes on canvas.
I’m a pre-Raphaelite: red-haired, cream-curved, blue-eyed against crimson. All around are the raw materials of the body: gouache, pencil, oil. You pace the floor, sighing, frowning. I count the beams on the ceiling, feeling the time pass.
Three times we went through that performance before you kissed me. I wonder what became of that first painting.
Remember the morning. Make the sunrise from the embers of evening caught up there in the high glass of offices. When you woke you smiled, surprised, narrowing your eyes to focus.
‘This wasn’t supposed to be part of the plot,’ you said.
We fell in love anyway; circling each other until the ground between us disappeared, making looped conversations around shared points: Monet, Mahler, Shelley. Throwing a velvet rope around our territory. We fell in love, and when we stopped falling I knew that love isn’t made but conjured out the night, from smoke and mirrors and spirits, as I’m making you now.
It was summer. I lay stretched in a pool of sunlight while you worked. You were building texturally, from the bones upwards, covering my figure in layers of colour, substance. Wax, paper, heavy oils.
By Matthew David Scott
Location: Rusholme
Illustration by Abi Milnes - www.abimilnes.com
Wilmslow Road bleeds neon into the night. The Curry Mile pinks, blues and yellows are caught in black puddles, quivering between onion skins and thick cabbage leaves. On the other side of the road, two boys share a spliff in the unlit doorway of a closed jewellery store. The shorter of the two boys tucks the joint away in a half-fist to protect it from the drizzle. The roach-end spills smoke through the grazed knees of his middle and index fingers. They call him Full Stop because he’s small and doesn’t say much.
Straddling the crossbar of a silver BMX, he listens as the taller of the two puffs plumes of words out into the night. Both boys are negatives to the synthetic rainbow around them – black tracksuits, black trainers, black hats and black bandanas. The taller of the two calls himself Future.
Full Stop passes the spliff on and sits back on the bike. His fingers roll out a rhythm along the handlebars as he lets out a sticky laugh at the conclusion of Future’s anecdote. ‘Tellin’ you. Dirt mate. Fuckin’ dirt!’
The rest of crew have gone out in town. Future and Full Stop decided to stay and see if any students were about. They used to hit them straight away during freshers week. Duck season. The robbers and thieves, muggers and sex pests, con men and drug dealers of the estates and districts that encircle the city would descend to hunt. Nowadays, people wait. Wait for the students to settle in a bit. Lull them into a false sense of security and then pick them off over the course of the year. It’s a long-term economic strategy.
‘You sure the girls aren’t there?’ Tonight Future and Full Stop are waiting for one particular student – a lad who has recently moved into the area. Full Stop spotted him a couple of weeks ago. The student walked tall past him, unconcerned. Intrigued, Full Stop zigzagged slowly along the other side of the street on his bike.
‘And he’s got no mates over?’ Over the next few weeks Full Stop blended into the background, as his size allowed, and watched the student. He was tall and slim with cropped, sandy hair, always wearing a T-shirt and jeans, always in Adidas trainers and sometimes a denim jacket. Over time Full Stop discovered he lived with four girls, student nurses by the uniforms, narrow-eyed as they took the mornings on through hangovers. They were always out at night but he stayed in.
‘He hasn’t got any mates, just them girls. And they’re out.’ Full Stop is sure. He saw them getting into a taxi earlier with hardly anything on. That’s Full Stop’s job. He watches people, cases houses, keeps dog. He can’t fight, doesn’t even like to carry a knife, and everyone knows he doesn’t have the gift of gab, so he has found use in being the all-seeing eye.
Future takes a final draw of the spliff. ‘You think he’s a faggot?’ He tosses the roach to the ground in the shop doorway.
Full Stop shakes his head. ‘He’s livin’ with four birds.’
Future pauses and shakes his head. ‘You have got a lot to learn little man.’
