By Emma Hardy
Location: Alexandra Road South, Whalley Range
I’m putting out the rubbish. She is loitering by the communal bins, next to the two clapped-out fridges nobody has phoned the council to have collected.
‘I thought there was a back door,’ she tells me, ‘just there.’ She points at the old convent building, converted in a manner befitting the style of the original building and now offering professional tenants 21st-century comfort and convenience.
I smile, mouth ‘oh’ and raise my eyebrows.
‘How do you get in?’
‘Round the front,’ I tell her.
‘But there’s no sign?’
I haven’t got time for this. People always get confused. It says 28 on the front gate. There are three blocks with different names. We end up with each other’s post.
‘Where are the nuns?’
It’s the first time anyone’s asked me that.
‘I need to speak with them.’
I want to explain, to tell her they left long ago.
‘Where are the nuns?’ she asks me again.
A driver beeps a horn on the main road outside; her car is blocking the entrance gate.
***
By Aiden Clarkson
Location: The Victoria Baths, Hathersage Road
Illustration by Abi Milnes - www.abimilnes.com
This is something I remember. We’d come out of the house, got to the top of Welby Street, crossed over Hathersage Road heading left towards the junction with Upper Brook Street. But we were going past that, down to Oxford Road. We were on the pavement outside The Victoria Baths, being sunshone on. The Victoria Baths is an old building, and one that I liked, and still like, living almost opposite.
Internet research now tells me that it was opened in 1906, stayed open for 86 years, contained private baths, Turkish baths, three swimming pools. I have never been in, but I have walked past and admired it hundreds of times. Anyway, we were pretty much directly outside The Victoria Baths when we saw a man hit another man in the face with a Mountain Bike.
I remember when The Victoria Baths had lights spelling out ‘100 YEARS’ on it. I remember sitting on the wall outside it 5am one morning some time two years ago very high on pills. I remember wondering what it was, if it was classy flats. It is The Victoria Baths.
So we were walking past The Victoria Baths. We were going to the shop to buy cigarettes to smoke in the sunshine then cross Upper Brook Street and then down past the hospital on our side of the road, the diabetes clinic on the other, where we would make our usual diabetes jokes, then we would be on Oxford Road, where we would turn right heading to Big Hands, and light another cigarette each and make more diabetes jokes. But, like I said, our progress was momentarily arrested by seeing one man hit another man in the face with a Mountain Bike.
According to the very informative The Victoria Baths website, it was the first bathhouse in England to have an Aerotone bath installed – what we now call today a Jacuzzi. The Aerotone bath was very popular, and was prized for its therapeutic qualities.
The ingenuity of the design of that first Aerotone bath was matched, in my opinion, with the ingenuity of the method the man we saw hit another man in the face with a Mountain Bike used to hit the man in the face with the Mountain Bike.
He dismounted, picked the bike up, straight vertical in the air, front wheel pointing summer skywards, and he bounced it down on its rear wheel, hard, and he let the pneumatic suspension force the bike back up again, so all he had to do was steer it into the other man’s face. All this happened over a very short period of time, so the other man barely had a chance to react to the bike being lifted before the front tire was hitting him around the brow line.
By Craig Melville
Location: The railway arch on Pomona Strand
This story was the winner of our Rainy City Love Stories competition
Ged could feel her angry grip, clawing his face and wringing the air from his lungs.
Each burst of coughing returned some memories. There had been a house in Crumpsall. Thick curtains admitted the palest spectrum of dusty light. A tenner was enough, though the dealer sniffed at the sweaty handful of smash. Brown splotched mattresses had long replaced any other furnishing. Snow was falling as he staggered back to the city. He had caught a flake in his mouth and let it dissolve on his tongue. Solmonath, Helmiku, Hornung, Intercalaris. He would soon know all her names.
There was something unusual about today. It was bitter but there were more people on the streets. December was cold but was tempered by Christmas, and January delivered its afterbirth, the reflected warmth of sales, calorific guilt and unwanted gifts. Men and women were walking hand in hand, crowding restaurants and bars. The merriment seemed forced. The laughter empty and conversation tinged with desperation. It was a special day but Ged had long forgotten its meaning. Slumped in the sheltered hollow outside McDonalds, he gazed helplessly at the citizens as he drifted.
The sores on his leg had broken. Had he a knife, he would have cut out the flaking, itchy flesh – just like he had done at the café, taking out the grey-green spots from the joints of meat. The rest was good to eat. Last week, that Scottish guy went to the Royal and had his leg cut off. No, no, no. Don’t shoot below. He would avoid hospital at any costs. Once, he had been forced to go. The cold blade had entered skin, fat and veins, settling itself in his soft kidney. Nurses and doctors turned their noses like he was a piece of shit. The sharp bite of spirits on open flesh. Bloody council, leaving that railing lying around. Lucky I don’t sue. I’m sure you really don’t give a fuck about it anyway. You can do without the paperwork and that suits me just fine.
The first two months had been the hardest. The second more than the first because after the initial excitement of life on the street comes the sober realisation of all it entails. That didn’t mean to say that Ged had been raped. When strangers had offered him a room, the meaning had always been implied and the conditions non-negotiable. When love entered his life these days, it was normally of the quick physical variety. Not much time for foreplay when you’re freezing your bollocks off. Her touch burned trees, car windows and other stricken faces. She was unfaithful but Ged did not mind. Her bitter breath was a reminder that he was alive.
By Christina Stenhoff
Location: Blenheim Avenue, Whalley Range
This poem was a finalist in our Rainy City Love Stories competition
Every morning the grasses weep
and chant your royal name.
Foretold perhaps in the frenzy of
your midday, honey-drunk dance, yet
all afternoon I searched the
entire scorching garden for a trace.
The orchids gave nothing away.
I should have known as much.
I wanted to cry, but my face was hot,
tight, unrelenting, a dumb mask.
I returned to the broodless hive
and it was then that I knew.
We’d watched the whole colony
collapse around our feet.
Then we flew, triple speed, to other hives,
found nothing, no-one.
The cells, empty alveoli of a dead lung.
We remembered our purpose.
I shuddered inside of you
feeling the weight of creation upon us.
Our bodies taught, tessellate.
Your hum, a Vedic hymn; I miss it.
Christina Stenhoff is in the final year of a creative writing MA at Manchester Metropolitan University.
By Claire Massey
Location: Clyde Road, West Didsbury
This story was a finalist for the Rainy City Love Stories Competition
I like sitting in her toilet, she keeps it clean.
I can feel her singing in the shower from here. Beautiful voice.
She always keeps the toilet lid down. She doesn’t know I’m here.
I met her at a barbecue in the summer, Mouseman was handing me round, everyone wanted a squeeze but the way she touched me was different, so gentle. I had a little lick. I knew she was the one.
When Mouseman got kicked out of the flats I decided to stay and find her. I didn’t know which number she lived in so I worked my way up and down the pipes. It was a process of elimination. I knew she wouldn’t put fags out in her toilet. Or leave it full of crap.
The rats have kept me going, when things have gotten dark. That and imagining her touch again.
I only ventured out of the building’s pipes once. I had the munchies. I couldn’t resist a quick trip to Kwik Save. I worked my way through two packs of assorted chicken pieces. Couldn’t stay away for long though, had to get back to be close to her.
Since I found her, Flat 4, I’ve sat here most days, planning how to show myself, imagining her reaction, going over it again and again. Will she take me in her arms? Will she kiss me?
Tonight I felt a male voice in the bathroom. He lifted the lid in the dark. Threw his old skin in at me. She’s found someone else. My life is over.
I should have bitten him.
I’ve led in the pipes for weeks now, not moving, not eating. I should have shown myself sooner. She could have been mine.
I swam through shit for her and this is the thanks I get. She’s abandoned me.
I should have bitten her.
I give up, I’ve given myself up. I’m stretched out on the floor, waiting for the lad in number 3 to find me. I want them to lock me up. She’s broken my heart, there’s nothing left for me here now.
*** Keith the snake was captured in a block of flats on Clyde Road, West Didsbury in October 2005. He was thought to have been abandoned by a previous tenant who had been evicted for rent arrears in August 2005. A spokesman for Greater Manchester Fire Service said: ‘An occupier of a flat found the snake in his bathroom, placed a plastic bin on its side and the snake called Keith climbed in. A lid was placed on the bin and it was handed over to the RSPCA.’ ***
Claire Massey lived in West Didsbury for two happy years in a tiny and ridiculously expensive bedsit with no central heating and a noisy nutter next door. She usually writes fairy tales and stories for children and is the founder and editor of the online magazine New Fairy Tales – www.newfairytales.co.uk
