By Emily Josephine McPhillips
Location: St Ann’s Square
The church in the centre of town is by the quite fancy shopping district, you’ll pass it and think what lovely stained glass windows it has, but then you’ll look slightly to your right and see a fantastic sale on a pair of boots, in a browny red shade that you so very rarely see. You buy the boots on credit. You really should just be waiting for your friend, but he’s late, and even in the text message he’s sent you to tell you he’s going to be late, he states: punctuality is not my speciality.
On the three low steps by the side of the church, you sit down, you take a book out of your bag, and begin to read it in bites. Many of the book’s pages are folded over in their outer corners, and you are always forgetting what’s just happened in the parts you have newly read, so you read those parts again as you think on how this must be a little like what others call déjà vu, only less dramatic, and less inviting of similar experiences.
A little boy and his mother walk around you. They’re in your vision. They walk from left to right, then back again. You can tell that the little boy is new to this as walking aimlessly excites him terribly. His mother holds her arms out while stooping low to the ground to pick her son up, but the little boy doesn’t enter her arms, instead, he runs off further to the right of the scene, which makes you look up, from your book, to see who he is running to, and it is his father, who unknown to his wife is suffering from anxiety and the desire to find out what it is he really wants to do with his life, because it’s more than this. The father scoops his son up, and the three of them walk, together, connected, a son upon a pair of shoulders, a wife kept in a hand.
It’s too cold really, to read, and if you were to wear gloves it’d be too hard to turn the pages. You sit on a hand for a while and then you exchange it for the other; but you’ll exaggerate how cold you are, because it gives other people more adjectives to describe you with, and you are eager to please them, and eager to help them along.
You breathe a cold envelope of smoke into the air. You pull your hair around your chin. You stuff your scarf into your jacket like a preening gesture of a proud bird. An older couple stand beside you and read a sign that’s nearby. You don’t know what the sign says, and you really want to know now that it has caught the attention of others; their interest is contagious.
By Darren Thomas
Location: Oxford Road
A thousand nameless faces
under which hang
angry clothes
tell a world
what it already knows
not a single smile
just a melody
of melancholy played
through buds which
drift into the saps of youth
and the wood
of huge working men.
Chewing gum stars
inside a pavement’s heavens
shining brightest at night
and every deepest thought
is carried with the weight of sirens
or lost in the flash of city blue.
As God’s rain frowns
complaining that it works
too hard in this city,
resting on each
of those thousand faces
like tears,
leaving
religion’s chime to toll
and the Priest
checking a wrist
and the fading shine
in a lifetime of shoes.
Darren Thomas is a mature student at the University of Manchester. His work has been published in The Mental Virus, in various websites, in and around waiting rooms of Wigan train stations (as part of the NXNW Festival) and is featured in the book The Best of the Manchester Poets, published by Puppywolf in 2010.
By Cathy Bryant
Location: Fallowfield
Hear the laughing barging student’s running feet,
heading hopefully for myriad buses. Smell,
smell those buses and hot food and bustle.
Taste the excitement, the urgency, or
pause
briefly for foaming coffee, fuel for it all.
See so many people, damp waving trees,
clouds rushing by in bus-like packs,
and feel the life, feel the snapshot life.
Cathy Bryant is an award-winning writer who is a regular on the live poetry circuit in and around Manchester, and at events around the country. Her poems and stories have appeared in Poems for Big Kids, Midnight Times, The Ugly Tree, and The Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Cathy lives in Manchester and is passionate about the city, language, politics and passion itself. http://cathybryant.co.uk
By Arthur Chappell
Location: The Bradford Arms, Miles Platting
My mum’s dad, Bill Cavanagh, was the best storyteller in our family. He had a reputation for spinning yarns and tall stories. His friends called him Tom Pepper, a common Manchester nickname for someone who spices stories up out of all proportion, or just tells plain outright lies.
Over the years, I realised three things:
1. His friends completely misjudged him.
2. He knew exactly what effect he was having on them.
3. Many of his stories were actually true.
In the 1970s and 1980s, on a typical Sunday afternoon he’d sit in the Bradford Arms pub close to home in Miles Platting, downing pints, while I had to drink Coke, being too young, and he’d start to reminisce about the 1940s when his horse brought down a Spitfire. Of course, everyone would look at him in disbelief and ask him what he was on about, but he’d change the subject or decide it was time to leave. Most folk would then write his anecdotes off as drunken waffle, but for those who kept at him about it over the next few days and coming months more information was forthcoming. It turned out that the Spitfire incident really happened.
No, his horse was not a Nazi sympathiser able to operate anti-aircraft artillery or fly a Messerschmitt, and in fact the War had ended when the incident happened. The Spitfire was being transported to a Manchester Museum display on the back of an open flatbed truck when Bill Cavanagh’s parcel delivery horse, frustrated and impatient with the crowd lining its normally quiet route, bolted and ran right into the side of the truck, jarring the plane right off its wheel blocks. It toppled onto one of its wings, causing some expensive damage. The horse had indeed brought down a Spitfire.
Bill Cavanagh cheerfully told many such stories, equally cryptically, eager to make an enigma of himself for beer and company. That’s why I found him such good fun, and went with him often as a passenger in his later life work as a Freightliner lorry driver, and just for drives out in his car.
Ah yes, the car, a bottle green Morris Minor of the kind he had driven ever since he moved away from working with horses. He’d gone from equine horse to petrol-driven combustion engine horsepower.
If he passed another Morris Minor he would toot his horn and wave frantically in approval. Before I hit my twentieth birthday I noticed we saw fewer such cars all the time. The species was dying out. Even his Morris was getting less reliable for him. The clutch juddered and screamed when he adjusted it. One windscreen wiper was totally ineffective. The passenger door didn’t open – I got in or out via the driver’s side of the vehicle. After months of this, he finally gave in to nagging from my mother, Alwyn, and his wife, Phyllis to get rid of the car and buy a new one.
By Debbie Brennan
Location: The Midland Hotel, Peter Street
My father concentrates on the keys
when his slender hands
play Delibes, Chopin and Grieg,
transforming cacophonous talk
into hints of whispered trysts;
drinks clink and wink at the Turkish lights.
The man braying into his phone is
silenced, as he imagines his wife
cascade down the stairs with a delicate laugh.
My father’s on board an opulent liner
that carries him off to a far away land
without Manchester rain or traffic jams.
When the guests take their leave
with a nod or a smile, the diaphanous notes
slip out and follow them home.
Debbie Brennan lives in Glossop and teaches at Oldham Sixth Form College. She has just completed an MA in Creative Writing at MMU. She wrote this poem about her dad who played the piano in the foyer of the Midland two evenings a week for twenty years.
