By Annabel Wigoder
Location: Starbucks, Deansgate
This story was a finalist for our Rainy City Love Stories competition
Michael’s new girlfriend went by the name of Wonder Woman. She was a freckly Londoner who worked in Starbucks, and the first of Michael’s girlfriends to let him have full-blown penetrative sex.
Michael was queuing for coffee when he caught her eye over the counter. Two Japanese businessmen turned and glared as she beckoned him to the front, and a large American talking into a headset pretended not to realise he was blocking the way.
‘Sorry,’ said Michael. ‘Coming through!’ He squeezed to the front of the queue and had to stand sideways between a pushchair and a woman with two dogs who refused to make room for him. Michael manoeuvred an elbow on to the counter.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Thanks! Can I get, uh, one medium coffee to go?’
‘Sugar?’ asked Wonder Woman. She scrawled something on a paper cup and passed it to the man at the hot drinks machine. Then she leant forward and said something to Michael that he couldn’t hear over the noise of the milk steamer.
‘Sorry,’ said Michael. ‘I didn’t catch that.’
‘I said you look a bit like Bruce Wayne.’ It wasn’t quite what he’d been expecting.
‘Bruce Wayne?’
‘Yeah.’
‘As in Batman?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Crime-fighter, billionaire, international playboy?’
Wonder Woman checked over her shoulder and indicated that Michael should come closer. She undid the top two buttons of her shirt.
‘I get off at six,’ she murmured. Wonder Woman was wearing something under her Starbucks apron that glittered red and gold in the lights.
‘Meet me outside,’ she told him, re-doing her shirt with the fingers of one hand. ‘Mr Wayne.’ Then she turned to the rest of the queue and shouted: ‘OK! Who’s next?’
The woman with two dogs shouldered Michael out of the way. He bent down to pat the smaller dog and let it lick his fingers. It was 9.32am. Michael picked up his coffee, went to work, and spent the day researching Batman on the internet.
By David Griffiths
Location: Hare and Hounds pub, Shudehill
The Northern Rail rattler to Stalyvegas is late again and I’m early, so I decide to squeeze in a swifty at the Hare and Hounds.
I’m ordering a Holts at the bar when I notice this old fella staring at me. No change there – I’ve got one of those faces. People think I’m someone else, people think they recognise me.
But the funny thing is, I think I recognise him. He’s about six foot, with slicked black hair. His eyebrows and sideburns are grey and out-of-control like shabby Brillo pads. He appears to be smartly dressed, but when I look closer his suit is far too big for him – you could shoplift turkeys in it.
He lurches over from the other side of the pub as if we’re on the Good Ship Venus in a Force 10, his eyes fixed on mine. Is he pal of my dad’s? An old workmate gone to seed?
I try to catch the barmaid’s eye for an early warning nutter alert but she’s giving nothing away.
He stands next to me, reaches inside his jacket pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper.
‘Do you know the actors who played the Magnificent Seven?’ he asks me in an accent that appears to be both Manc and German.
I’m thrilled. I’ve been waiting for this. Ever since I lost a pub quiz tie-breaker on this very question, I’ve been dying to answer it again – in a pub quiz, on a quiz machine, even from an old fella with a piece of paper.
He says, ‘I’ve been going round the pubs asking everyone this question for the past few weeks. Everyone’s got involved.’
Quiz me daddio, quiz me. Yes, he may be drunk, he may be a nutter, but this is just what I need when I’m trying to get the buzz of work out of my head. Quiz me daddio!
By Gill James
Location: Chapeltown Road, Radcliffe
‘I saw some geese today,’ says Joe. ‘Flying across over the hills there. Beautiful they were. They fly in a V, you know.’
It’s worked then, giving Joe the big room with the en suite and making his armchair face the window. From his chair he can see the Pennines in the distance, with the wind turbines, and a vast expanse of sky. And if he stands up – he can stand for a short while – he can see the comings and goings on the street.
We’ve been here just over six weeks. Joe can get around the house quite well now. The first two weeks were great. He must have been tired out from the respite week in the care home while we moved. Perhaps his nights were disturbed there. The journey up here from Southampton took it out of him a bit as well. So, he went to bed just before eight and slept through until just after eight the next morning. It was like having a baby in the house all over again.
Recent weeks have been a bit more fraught. I’m a light sleeper and his en suite backs on to our bedroom. Plus he’s been taking something to counteract the constipation the iron tablets he’s on cause. It always seems to work in the middle of the night. Fortunately, I don’t hear the details, but I do hear the clop shuffle of a man who walks with a stick (stroke three years ago) and I can’t settle again until I hear the toilet flush and evidence that he has safely returned to bed.
Then one evening something really peculiar happens. Mark and I are just getting ready for bed. We’re just about to put our lights off and we hear Joe make his way down the stairs. Clop shuffle. Clop shuffle. Click, click as the lights go on one by one.
‘You’d better go and see what he’s up to,’ I whisper to Mark. I don’t know why I whisper. Joe can’t hear a thing. We have to write everything down for him.
Joe makes his way through our Tudor-style house – one room leads to another. He goes down the stairs, across the hall, into the lounge, through the dining area and then the kitchen and finally into the utility room. He rattles the back door. Then he shakes his head.
He turns, and shuffle clops his way back – through the kitchen, the dining area, the lounge, the hallway and up the stairs. The landing light snaps off.
By David Gaffney
Location: Manchester Art Gallery
Art galleries are perfect for picking up women, a fact surprising to Warren whose entire working life had been in art galleries, and he’d had no idea. He’d met his wife Georgina in a gallery – that’s where they had both worked – but the notion of chatting up a strange woman in a gallery struck him as disrespectful.
The fact that men and women used Warren’s carefully curated spaces to feed explosive, untiring sex lives appalled him. His efforts to excite and delight the public, to waken the soul with the tender strokes of art, had been wasted. Years of registering, ticketing, cataloguing, placing, interpreting, caring, protecting meant nothing. The public didn’t want his art. They wanted secret nooks for fleshy encounters. Soft chairs, heavy curtains, peepholes – tissues even. His art gallery was a pick-up joint and Warren, a pimp.
But Georgina had run away. With a wedding photographer. And although he’d tried the bachelor life for a few weeks, without her, without Georgina, without a woman, his life was dingy and meaningless. He had decided to do something about it. Georgina’s last email spurred him to action. Your vacuous chimp-scrawl makes my eyes vomit, she had pounded out in fat capitals, You can mop the jam from between Satan’s toes for all I care.
Where had she learned this language? It can’t have come from Vernon, the quiet wedding photographer, who specialised in novelty poses for his couples (his New Avengers, Pulp Fiction, and Bonnie and Clyde set-ups were all very popular). Warren had no bad feelings towards Vernon. He’d never met him, but he’d walked past the man’s studio a few times and once glimpsed him arranging a family portrait and using a puppet to make the children laugh.
Warren wanted to stop doing furtive, obsessive things like watching Vernon using puppets to make children laugh. Warren wanted forward movement, and a new woman would give him this. And if Warren couldn’t pick up a woman in a gallery then who could? Manchester Art Gallery’s revival of the Art Treasures of the UK exhibition from 1857 seemed an appropriate popularist choice; many single, available women would be wandering unsupervised. All he needed was the nerve and the blood.
By Michelle Green
Location: On the A676 (Wigan Road) leading into Bolton
six thirty pm
and the remains of the most expensive cheese sandwich I’ve
ever eaten
cling to the crevasses
of my slowly dissolving
back teeth
the baby at the rear of the bus
fusses
and frets
over her drink box
as her father’s tattooed hand follows his soft voice
smoothing her into a seated position
You can sit next to me and drink your drink
the sun keeps its winter eye trained on the horizon
we move forward
a blur of last week’s magazines
and mobile phone threats from the man
with no van
and no plan
I’ll have ye fer dinner ye cunt!
and in perfect unison we all move
particles of water
away
from the spit of hot oil in the fourth row from the back
he bellows into his phone
I’ll have yeeee
and the sweet sour smell of afternoon sick
and drinking
clings to the edges of the chairs and pulls itself
slowly up the aisle
