By Steve Garside
Location: Drive-through car wash, Molesworth Street, Rochdale, OL16 1TS
I’m waiting in the queue for the car wash again. I come here almost every week. There are four car wash options on offer. There’s the one-seventy, which amounts to a sharp blast of jet water on your wheels and a fat manky brush across your windscreens before the main wash, the two-sixty, which is roughly the same as the one-seventy, and the other two, which I never use, because at four quid and five twenty they are a bit pricey for me. Besides, all they seem to include above the other two cheaper options are more suds and more pre-wash elbow from the young lads who work the car wash. And they are almost always supervised by the sharp lingering hint of cheap spliff smoke.
As far as I know, this drive-through has been here for about ten years and owned by the world’s biggest car wash company. When it was new, the shiny glint off the eye-catching fascia boards and the assorted border planting delivered me to another time.
On the road side of the car wash, about midway down its length is an obelisk-shaped stone that juts up from the ground about three and a half feet. The mounted legend records this as the site where the wartime singer and actress Gracie Fields once lived.
The first time I ever went through a car wash was with my stepdad in his gold-coloured Vauxhall Viva. I remember the soft nudge of the thick chain loop as it lugged in behind the front tyre. With the handbrake off, gear in neutral – and the engine killed at the key – the deliberate ride began; filling me with all the anticipation of the fairground (with the windows wound all the way up of course). Waiting, watching, as the soft brushes surrounded the car, scuffing and buffing the enclosed Viva back to cleanliness, back to shininess, back as far as when it was almost new.
He loved that cigarette-smelling car. As a family, we drove everywhere in it, conquered steep hills in Devon and figured through mist in Scotland. But the car, the age, the man are all gone now, and I am left here in my own car, with the CD player on, at the mercy of the tug of the chain as it draws me inexorably on, through the first smudge of suds as the brushes whip up into their preset positions, and I pass through the parlour of Dame Gracie Fields, again.
Steve Garside is a self-taught visual artist, poet and writer, who has performed his poetry many times and has recently read his work on BBC Radio Manchester. http://stevegarside.co.uk
By Ian D Smith
Location: Fog Lane Park, Burnage
He always did what Jamie Oliver told him to because Jamie Oliver was cool. Jamie told him to freeze blackcurrants because they were delicious when they were frozen and it was quicker than making a sorbet.
‘Sorbet,’ he repeated. ‘Sorbet, sorbet, sorbet!’
He liked the sound of the word sorbet.
On the hottest day of the year he went out to Fog Lane Park and made his fingers purple picking a bagful of blackcurrants. He slammed them in the freezer and washed his hands. ‘Sorbet! Sorbet, sorbet, sorbet!’
He pushed the sofa into the front garden, opened a beer and waited for the blackcurrants to freeze.’Sorbet! Sorbet, sorbet, sorbet!’
He went inside for another beer and then he forgot about the sorbet. He went to bed and he slept and he forgot about the sofa.
It rained a lot in Burnage and by morning the sofa was soaked through. It was too wet to bring indoors, so he left it out to dry. He left it through August and September. He left it through autumn and all the way into December.
Christmas Day came and on Christmas Day he always did what Jamie Oliver told him to because Jamie Oliver was cool. ‘Sorbet!’ he cried. ‘Sorbet, sorbet, sorbet!’
He remembered the blackcurrants and took them out of the freezer. He opened a beer and went outside and sat down on the frozen sofa. He ate the frozen blackcurrants and he reckoned Jamie was right, they were tasty and it was far quicker than fussing around but it was a bit bloody cold, too bloody cold for sorbet. ‘Jamie bloody Oliver,’ he said shivering. ‘I’ll give him a bloody sorbet.’
Ian D Smith was born and raised in Stockport, and now lives in Wiltshire. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmith’s University of London, and has published many stories. http://www.iandsmith.com
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 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.’
By Natalie Bradbury
Location: The Ashton Canal, Ancoats
Castles in fairytales are usually magical, awe-inspiring fortresses surrounded by cruel rocks and wild seas, over which the hero and heroine have to make their escape from the clutches of a dastardly step-parent. The castle in this tale is rather less imposing. In fact, it’s not really a castle at all.
The castles of folklore conjure up images of rugged grey buildings, in which every flint brick is enchanted. This one is red brick and grubby, and actually looks more like a prosaic Victorian warehouse to the casual observer.
Instead of being protected by a moat or tumultuous sea, it stands amidst tall weeds and barbed wire on the bank of the Ashton Canal, a stretch of water that’s brown-green and impassive and breaks a ripple only in the windiest of weather. The only thing about the Ashton Canal that implies danger is the amount of rubbish floating in it, which suggests anyone who falls in will be struck down by some kind of horrible waterborne disease.
Those who choose to live their lives on the waterways have usually opted to live a slower pace of life, in the company of ducks and geese, and are the not the type of people whom excitement follows. It was a bargeman, however, making his leisurely way through the canals of north Manchester with plenty of time to develop an overactive imagination, who noticed the building’s intriguing resemblance to a castle (or at least the type of stereotypical toy castle a child would make out of Lego). The building was a solid, impenetrable-looking block flanked by strong towers topped with battlements in a sand-coloured stone.
As his houseboat cruised by, the bargeman noticed a flickering light in one of the towers and an open window high up one of the walls. Otherwise, the building seemed to be deserted, like the rows of boarded up houses nearby, awaiting demolition to make way for regeneration of the area. Like the shells of warehouses around it, it was crumbling and its cracked windows laid it open to the elements.
After deciding to moor for the night, the bargeman became more and more intrigued. Seeing as there isn’t much in the way of entertainment on a houseboat, he decided it wouldn’t hurt to have a look around. So, in the dead of night, he scrambled onto a muddy bank, strewn with rubble from warehouses that had already been knocked down. He could see no way to scale the smooth walls of the castle to reach the open window, but the rather more ordinary building next door had several smashed windows through which it was possible to climb, if he was careful not to cut himself.
It was pitch black when he dropped down inside, and he couldn’t see anything. His other senses overcompensated and he was overwhelmed by a cold mustiness that chilled him to the bone. When his eyes acclimatised, he started walking through huge rooms full of machinery, when he heard the distant strains of a female singing. He was surprised, thinking the building must be inhabited and he became afraid he would be caught trespassing.
