By Emma J Lannie
Location: Sunbury Drive, Newton Heath
The newts are good at acrobatics. If you hold them in your hand, their tails cling round your finger and they dangle themselves all circus-like. We are in the shed. I am not allowed to play in the house. My dad doesn’t like having other people around. And so he bought me a shed, as a kind of playhouse. It is six foot by eight foot. It has three windows. I pretend it is a house that only I live in. There are beanbags and stools and a grey telephone that isn’t connected to anything. I spin my fingers in the dial and listen as no one picks up.
A shelf stretches the full length of the shed. I have put the fishbowl with the newts in on the shelf. They are outdoor creatures, I know this, but I like having them around. I don’t give them names. They climb on the miniature bridge and look as if they’re smiling. Under the shelf, a curtain is strung by a wire. It reaches to the floor. It is there to hide the mess. But right now there is no mess. There is just me and you.
On the count of three we kiss. We are using tongues but only a little. Sometimes, your teeth bang mine accidentally. My face often feels a bit too wet. In the cramped world of under-the-shelf, your hands stay against your body. We lean into things, into the doing of them. I’m eleven, and this is how it is. Even our T-shirts stay intact. Even that tracing of jawline doesn’t happen. More down to complication than cliché, this is a lips-only endeavour. I’m dizzy with it.
When we have to swap it’s okay, because she is my best friend. I come out from under the curtain and she ducks under. I see elbows. I hear the count of three.
I prefer it under the shelf. Out here, in the open, the kissing is too spacious. You are the better kisser and I want to be under the shelf kissing you. But it’s no longer my turn. So this is about helium, but not in a good way. My body is full of the stuff, and all this weightlessness is just making me feel sick.
There is no captivated leaning with him. There’s a blunt uprightness. And as he counts one, two… we’re not sure between us whether three is the go, or if it’s three then pause, then go. We tip our heads wrongly and muddle through.
The newts splash water onto the shelf. The curtain is the one that used to be up in my bedroom. I used to watch through the triangle-gap for witches. But I’m grown up now. And there are no gaps. I stop kissing him and pretend I have to breathe. I stand up and eye the newts. Their feet crunch on bright pebbles. My fish always die. Newts are endlessly more entertaining.
You come out from behind the curtain, sensing that the time is up. She wrinkles her nose at the newts. I know she thinks they are disgusting, but she won’t say it in front of you. I pick the smallest one out of the fishbowl and hold it up, let it trick you all into believing it does these somersaults for fun. And she leaves, asking to be walked home, and you don’t offer.
We pass the newt between us, wetting our hands. It feels okay being alone with you. You put the newt back and duck under the shelf, and I follow. And this time when we count to three, we do it in our heads.
Emma J Lannie was born and raised in Manchester, although she doesn’t live there anymore. She blogs at http://garglingwithvimto.blogspot.com and makes books with these people: http://timetravelopportunists.blogspot.com
By Neil Campbell
Location: Ashton Old Road and Audenshaw
I’d swept the walkway clear of fag dimps and gray sands of ash but dust was left in shapes of the brush.
‘I thought I’d told you to sweep up?’ said Alan, the foreman. ‘Do it again and show some heart.’
I pushed the shopping trolley with the bin stuck in it back to where I’d started and pressed down hard and dragged the brush across the floor, wiping out the shapes and putting the dust on the shovel and into the metal bin.
The cool of the summer morning gave way to the heat of the sun that shone in under the shutter doors, and I took my jumper off and hung it on the shopping trolley. My head lolled over the brush as I began to leave patterns of dust again.
The radio with the coat hanger stuck in it played what sounded to me like a self-pitying song by the Smiths. We sat in an assortment of discarded armchairs that, when empty, looked like a line of school kids waiting to get picked. The idiot DJ cut in with some tabloid gossip. I’d not had time for breakfast so though it was only morning break I opened my Tupperware box and took out the ham and stand at ease, and washed it down with coffee from the machine.
‘Eh, Baz, are you going to show this lad how to sweep up properly or what?’ said Alan.
‘It’s not complicated is it, really?’
‘It looks like a fucking wave machine down there.’
‘Laziness, Alan. It’s the youth of today, useless.’
‘We’ve fuck all down here so you can give it another try after break,’ said Alan.
I swept the walkway clean of patterns as the radio played Everybody Hurts by REM, Supersonic by Oasis, Girlfriend in a Coma by the Smiths, Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division, You’re In The Army Now by Status Quo and others I didn’t recognise or catch the names of in among the DJ’s vacant banter.
We played darts, either 301 or round the board. When Chris hit yet another winning double he jumped up and down and laughed in all our faces.
‘It’s not worth getting giddy about is it?’ said Baz. ‘I mean you’ve not won owt.’
‘Pride, Baz. Pride.’
By Anne Beswick
Location: Ripon Street, Moss Side
They gave us the bulbs free at school. With the soil and a bowl as well. All free, for nothing. ‘Are you sure?’ said Mammy, obviously worried about what it might cost if I’d got it wrong – but it was alright because I could say that the others had got one as well, Julie and Ida and Mary, so she could cross reference with the other little girls’ mammies to check that we wouldn’t be owing anything and be ashamed. Probably the boys had got them as well. The Holy Name Junior School in Moss Side, Manchester did have boys in 1960 but they sort of didn’t enter into the consciousness of an eight-year-old girl.
They’d made us clear our desks and put old newspaper over them to keep them clean. Then we had a bowl and some soil and a bulb each. We followed the instructions carefully. Put a broken piece of pot over the hole in the big pot then cover it with the soil to this much then put the bulb in the middle this way up and put in more soil so the top bit just shows like a little nose poking out. I don’t remember any explanations being given for any of this. Like why have a hole in the pot when you then have to cover it with another piece of pot? Or why does the pointy bit of the bulb have to stick out instead of covering it up with soil and what is a bulb anyway?
Some things were obvious, instinctive, like bulbs were alive; you could feel it in the soft density and the perfection of the scruffiness. It was obvious that the roots went downwards because roots grew in the ground and it was obvious that the pointy bit went upwards because that was where the leaves would grow to the sunshine. Obviously you had to water it because it needed to have a drink but not too much or it would drown. You didn’t have to be told these obvious things like you didn’t have to be told to walk on your feet not your hands and that food went in your mouth not your ears.
Other not-so-obvious things that you needed to know you hoped that teachers or other grown-ups would tell you so that you could work things out or at least get to know the rules. They told you the catechism, ‘Who made me?’ ‘God made me’. ‘Why did God make me?’ ‘God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.’ So that was sorted. They told you to look right and left and right again before crossing the road and that right was the hand you write with so just pretend to write something to know which way was which. The poor left-handers must have gone round in circles or got knocked down. And they told you that we had no money for dolls, perhaps Father Christmas would bring one, if you were a good girl. There was bargaining to be done. This was how you knew how the world worked, instinct and instruction, nature and nurture.
Then they told us something truly amazing. We could take the bulbs home. With the pot and the soil and everything. They were for us, to have, not like the pens and pencils and books that we used with gratitude but we knew had to be counted out and counted back in and woe betide the class who lost a nib pen or a Blue Book 2. They would have to stay in until it was found, usually under the seat of some dunce with a runny nose, probably a boy as well. But we didn’t take things home from school.
By Ailsa Cox
Location: Oxford Road
I don’t know where the hell we’re going. I was meant to give directions. Nick’s car blunders through the back streets in the hinterland between Rusholme and Fallowfield, one blind corner rounding into another. I’ll be late for my class. Late and screwed up. Screwed up and late.
Silence between us. Time to draw another weapon. ‘That poster you brought back for me…’
‘Which poster?’
‘Doors of Tunis. You got it for nothing, didn’t you? There’s a logo, ATB Bank, at the bottom.’
‘There you are again,’ Nick says wearily, ‘you’re so cynical sometimes. I spent hours, hours walking round the Medina, looking for something to bring you.’
‘Sorry.’ I touch his thigh, forbidden now.
‘That was a shitty thing to say.’ He pauses dramatically. ‘And one of those doors was open.’
5.51pm, and at last we’ve reached the highway. Now it’s straight down the Curry Mile. Past the Mughli and the Darbar, onto Oxford Road, past the Infirmary and Manchester Uni and Manchester Met and the College of Music, over the edge of the city centre, heading for the finish, on this, the eleventh day of the eleventh month, shortly after the end of British Summer Time, our seventh month together, which turns out to be the last.
I look at him now while I still can, his iron profile hard as the head on a coin. ‘Why do you think I say those things?’
Because you’re afraid. Because you love me.
But the answer he gives is not the right one. And he doesn’t turn to face me, not even for a second, while we’re waiting for the signals to change by Contact Theatre. Heavy traffic. Brake lights shine through the glossy darkness. But there’s not far to go, now he knows where he is. 5.53 – I’ll be early after all. I check again that I’ve packed my notes and handouts, the right DVD. And my glasses.
By Jenn Ashworth
Location: Bus stop outside Piccadilly Train Station
12.35am.
9 bottles of Carlsberg
1 pint Heineken
1 Vodka and Red Bull
1 SFC dinner
6 codeine
0 fags
£8.10 train fare
£5.00 taxi
I don’t even live here, and I don’t want to live here either. But not living here means getting the train in, and, after midnight, the bus home. There’s a cloud of people waiting, jangling jewellery and stinking up my lungs with perfume and fags and kebabs.
I’m going to push right to the front of the queue. There are loads of policemen about. If anyone complains, I will shout out and cry and say ‘grab’ and ‘frotting’.
I am going to sit at the front of the bus and not close my eyes once on the way home. I am going to sit on my feet until the pins and needles go numb.
If you’re northern, it means you’re from Manchester, doesn’t it? I don’t correct them anymore. Which means I’m lying in an attempt to be… what would it be? Metropolitan? I don’t think I’ve ever said that word out loud before.
I make a vow. I will not blink all the way home. I will not sleep. I will make myself travel sick, concentrate on Carlsberg sloshing in my stomach, and never, ever say the word ‘metropolitan’ out loud.
When the bus comes, there’s a shuffle that ripples through the queuing crowd. No-one shouts, no-one pushes, but there is determined edging and some accidental elbows. I want to throw up on someone. It’s not the beer. I think vomiting, in this situation, would be an aggressive action – the first move in a war.
I get on the bus before I can ask a policeman if vomiting on someone’s Roxy trousers and slip-on Vans counts as assault. There would be no way to prove I did it on purpose.
There’s something about the water here. You can tell by the lather on the soap, and the ‘bored’ and ‘ironic’ expressions pasted on wasted faces. I sit down. My shoes hurt. My shoes are in the bottom of my bag and they are still hurting. My shoes are throbbing so much I pull the hinged flap at the top of the window open and throw them out.
I want to watch them bounce along the motorway, but we’re away on the M61 now, ploughing through ‘characteristic’ rain and on the way home.
There are some other words I am not going to say. Some more rules. I’m not going to wear American Apparel or invest in prescription shades. Never allow myself to flirt with emo boys or a wheat/dairy intolerance. I’m not going to say ‘Northern Quarter’ and I’ll pretend not to know where you mean when you tell me you’ll meet me in Cornerhouse.
The bus heads towards Bolton.
Jenn Ashworth is a blogger, short story writer and novelist. Her debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, will be published by Arcadia in spring 2009.
