By Joanne Green
Location: Stockport shopping precinct
Today is Saturday, a rainy winter’s day, though not dreary. I spend Saturdays with my Aunty Gaynor who has long, black, wavy hair. I live with her and my extended family. Finally Gaynor, or Aunty Granny as I affectionately call her, is ready to leave. I call her Aunty Granny to irritate her as she is only six years older than me. Gaynor isn’t fazed by her pet name.
We walk for twenty minutes into Stockport. It’s an interesting route passing the River Mersey and its red sandstone rocks that line the road. The travel money we’ve saved will be spent at Silvio’s Cafe. We like Silvio’s, a raised cafe bridging the precinct, having windows on both sides from which to peer down on shoppers. We buy cakes and a pot of tea.
Today Stockport looks like a gigantic puddle. The underground toilets have flooded again. The toilets are tiled from floor to ceiling; the stairs are steep and too narrow for two-way traffic. Each time the toilets flood there are rumours that women shoppers see rats in them. Stopfordian rats reside along the river bank the shopping arcade was built upon.
At home rats enter our kitchen late in the evening. They make me jump and scream when I open a cupboard and one runs into the kitchen. When this happens I have to be brave and calmly open the back door and usher the rat out of the house.
When Gaynor and I walk around the shops it feels great and we laugh and joke the entire time. We return home on the bus, whose journey takes us through Edgeley and its heavily congested road.
Joanne Green is a mature BSc Environmental Management student reading at the University of Salford. She attended Rainy City Stories’ recent Writing About Place workshop in Stockport, with Nicholas Royle.
By Michael Carl-David Healey
Location: Church Street West, Radcliffe
‘I’ll take you for breakfast,’ said my dad one Saturday morning when he picked my brother, my sister and me up from Mum’s. ‘Bab’s Caf’ (missing either an ‘e’ or an ‘f’) is where we arrived. It was a proper greasy spoon, the type we all love, whereby the chef can fry eggs with a fag in his mouth and nobody minds.
There were a scattering of regulars, the type you’d expect to find. A bloke picking horses from a tea-stained newspaper with the kind of face that told a million stories that all ended in the same way. Under the table he was feeding bits of toast to a dog that looked as though it was long overdue a telegram from the Queen.
Two women from the market sat nattering in the corner about how Jean’s eldest, Simon, moved down to Brighton and came back ‘one of them’ but praising him on how polite and wonderful he was. Then there was the chef, if ever there was a theory that man was related to ape here lay the proof, a big lumbering man with a sloping forehead, grazed knuckles and an expression that translated as ‘I don’t love anybody’.
It’s not the type of place you’d see in Hollywood, nor is it the sort of place you’d take someone on a first date, but you can’t knock it for its character.
‘Y’alright love, what yer ‘avin?’ the waitress asked, wiping her nose, obviously full of a cold.
‘Er, four full English brekkies please,’ my dad replied.
Now I must point out that at this moment in time I had been daydreaming about my dad’s current situation. I was unsure whether he’d quit his job and found a new one or not but for reasons I can’t answer, just as the waitress asked us if we’d like any drinks, it came out as: ‘Are you still on the dole dad?’
My sister, only eight years old, looked at the waitress and said with a sigh, ‘I’ll just have water.’
My dad was dumbfounded. ‘Eh? What, no! Have what you want, coke or tea…’ he began, and the waitress gave a sympathetic squeeze of his on his shoulder and said in a moment of solidarity, ‘you’ll be alright love’.
And she was off to get the drinks. I could feel his eyes burning into me, more out of confusion than anything else.
By Belinda Johnston
Location: Upper Lloyd Street
When I saw you last week in your tired flat
With the heating full on and Tom the cat
Bent over in pain at your kitchen sink:
It made me think
How much time had passed and I’d forgot to
Pick up the phone and say ”Hello Auntie”
When I saw you last week in your tired flat.
I bet you never thought I’d be like this
Trying to be brave, I gave you a kiss
We stood together at your kitchen sink
It made me think
Of how you used to be – fiery, trouble
Double the size in weight, you’d lost two stone
When I saw you last week in your tired flat
The stories you told and the books you read
I’ll have to lie down, will you help me to bed
We walked through your kitchen, what next?
Think, think.
Look Auntie, please… let me make you some tea
We watched the Somali boys playing football
From your kitchen sink, seeing you last week
Well, it made me think.
Belinda Johnston has been writing for two years, mostly poetry, and performs her poems in and around Manchester. She travelled to Japan in 2008 and returned to Manchester last November.
By Gill James
Location: Outwood Park, Radcliffe
It was the swan that clinched it. The house was pleasant enough – the right size, clean and bright, in a nice enough area but not all that exciting. True, better than many we’d seen but it still wasn’t quite right.
‘Come and look at the lake,’ the estate agent said. He must have seen the glaze in the eyes, the shadow of disappointment as I took in the all-too-conventional-end-of century-four-bed-detached.
And there she was. White, graceful. Shiningly glorious. It was almost as if she knew we were coming. The swan glided over towards us, made herself the focal point of my golden-segment-seeking eye lens.
I knew it was a she because the estate agent knew. I don’t know how he knew.
‘Beautiful isn’t she?’ said Simon. ‘Shame though. Lost her mate a couple of months ago. Just disappeared.’ He looked at me expectantly then looked at the ground.
I thought he was bracing himself for my negative response about the house.
‘Oh, look. She’s left you a gift,’ he said. He bent down and picked up a bright white feather.
He handed it to me. There was a question in his eyes.
‘We’ll take it,’ I said.
Simon grinned.
By Adrian Slatcher
Location: Ikea, Ashton-under-Lyne
In all the time he’d lived in the town, moving, bit by bit, down a ladder that he didn’t even know was there, Ray had remained oblivious to his surroundings. Northern towns were uniform in their design; the rows of terraced houses, the Sixties tower blocks, the one-way system with its graffiti-covered piss-smelling underpasses; the old town market in the shadow of the Victorian town hall’s flaking grandeur.
Once he’d slipped out of the manual work that was the only thing he’d been qualified for, and the doctor had accepted his cocktail of ills – a respiratory disease not helped by that manual work, nor by his continued smoking of roll-ups; a weak heart and poor circulation, not helped any by his habitual afternoon drinking; even the few mental episodes that had come on him after his wife had left – it had been the easiest thing to slip further down. The council flat had given way to a workers’ B&B, the B&B to a men’s hostel, the hostel to the park bench and the underpass. Ray had fallen slowly, so that every step down was hardly noticeable.
He would look up every now and then, and be surprised there was still some sky there. But this was Ashton, and whatever the season, the sky was likely to be this grey. After a while, you chose not to look up at all.
Nothing new ever came to town. There would be an occasional billboard proclaiming that some part of the centre was now a ‘regeneration zone’, but it would soon go the way of everything else in the town. So when they began building the new retail development, Ray hardly noticed. Its steel frame grew above the town, reminding Ray of nothing so much as the giant spiders in the Dr Who episode that had sent him scurrying behind the sofa as a child, where Jon Pertwee had been replaced by Tom Baker.
Ray had come into a little money, an inheritance from an uncle who had no children but plenty of nephews and nieces. The few hundred pound wasn’t much to any of them, but to Ray it had been an incredible pot of gold. With it, he’d been able to get a place in a housing association block, with a furniture pack from the Methodists. For the first time in years his days included such unfamiliar activities as cooking and shopping.
It had been Ray’s bad luck that the fire that ripped down the market had spread a plume of smoke as far as his block, and they’d been evacuated for days and weeks as structural checks were made. The return to the B&Bs and hostels he’d accepted as inevitable, and when he’d at last been let back into his flat, he could only look at the smoke-stained furniture with dismay. He handed in the keys the next week, mumbling to the social worker that he’d stay with a sister in Scarborough.
He went to Scarborough for a few days. You could draw your dole there as well as anywhere, and out of season you could get a room without much money. But the sea hadn’t suited him. The pubs weren’t the ones he knew. He’d only gone to get away from the questions he might get asked. ‘Go to Yorkshire and nobody in the North West will bother you anymore,’ an old lag had once told him and the advice had stuck.
