By Max Dunbar
Location: Withington Village
In which our hero hits Fuel, Withington on a slow Monday evening to check out a show. What was happening was some kind of art installation night aimed at (according to the fliers) creating ‘new, autonomous social spaces, as opposed to commercial “social”’ spaces like pubs and clubs’. These revolutionary spaces were to contain vegetarian cafes and prayer rooms. Best put a bar in there, Anderson thought, or else the whole thing will never get off the ground.
The show itself consisted of a five-minute soundscape followed by a raucous pub quiz. Anderson spent the entire time drawing with felt pens on a sheet of A1 set aside for this advertised purpose. He drew a pair of monkeys watching the sunset, an image he’d had in his head for years. Then downstairs for more drink, at some point a long discussion with the high-functioning autistic who hung out here, complaining that all the men in her Northenden support group kept hitting on her. Then it was time to leave the soul kitchen for another night, for some reason this C & W song from the Mad Men soundtrack in his head:
Some say a man is made out a mud/A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood…
For some reason the far lane of Wilmslow Road had been replaced by a rich green bayou. The OneStop and Canadian Charcoal Pit were only just visible in its shimmering mist. Anderson thought what the fuck, what the fuck, I can’t be that drunk – but he couldn’t remember his last straight day. You could even smell the illusion, something coppery and organic.
Ignore it, he thought, move on, you load sixteen tons, what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt, so he set his face ahead against this new river and reached the station by Withington library. There were already a gaggle of rough-looking women at the bus stop. A 42 drew up, precluding conversation.
By Benjamin Judge
Location: High Street, Northern Quarter
‘All I’m saying is it was a bloody stupid idea.’
‘But it has done wonders for tourism, Geoffrey. Skiing on Urbis, husky trekking down Deansgate, not to mention the tours to the top of the dome.’
‘I was late for work this morning because of a bloody mammoth!’
‘Well…’
‘A mammoth! I wish I’d never got that transfer.’
*
Outside, the snow drifted across High Street and down toward the Arndale Centre. A raven pecked forlornly at a half-eaten pizza that was partly buried in the snow. In the distance you could hear the organising howls of wolves as they steadily entrapped one of the caribou that grazed the tundra of Platt Fields. All this took place within the dome, miles across, that covered all of Greater Manchester and controlled the weather. The two professors sat in the Northern Quarter but all Manchester was northerly now. Manchester, and its impossibly huge dome, had redefined the word northern. Manchester was a new arctic. It was the home of the new Ice Age. It was the snowy city.
*
‘And where did they get the mammoths anyway?’
‘Oh, the Science Department have been working on this for decades.’
‘Well I’m not Science, Kevin. I am Modern Languages. And frankly I can’t see how an influx of American tourists will help me to get funding for a new translation of Rimbaud’s juvenilia.’
‘But Geoffrey…’
‘Don’t try to convince me. Seven of my students didn’t turn up to a seminar last week because of rumours going around that a sabre-toothed tiger had been spotted in the Living Sciences Quadrant. Can that be right, Kevin? A sabre-toothed tiger?’
*
It was right. Professor Kevin Fould knew all about them. He was Head of Biology and was one of the godfathers of the new fauna. There were sabre-toothed cats and mammoths. There were herds of giant elk that roamed across Burnage and Didsbury. Stoats danced among strewn litter in their ermine coats. Sea eagles soared over Beetham Tower. Kevin’s favourites were the woolly hippos that would sometimes smash the ice from the top of the ship canal with their mighty front feet so they could wallow in the in the lush, icy silt below.
His life, which he thought was over when Mary left and took the children with her, brought a new wonder with each dawn. While Mary and the kids sat in her mother’s flat in Rotherham watching soap operas and game shows he was watching evolution dancing an old but favourite waltz. Every day was like an incredible dream. To live in an Ice Age! Yes, he missed his girls and yes, he spent most evenings justifying the project to the less enthusiastic members of faculty but for God’s sake, this was a miracle of science and human endeavour.
*
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 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.
