By Socrates Adams-Florou
Location: Chinatown
I live in Chinatown.
Every Sunday there is a wedding and loads of fireworks go off on the pavement opposite my house. Every time I think that we are under attack by terrorists.
The lights in Chinatown are bright and of a number of different lurid colours. They make it look dangerous and seedy. Chinatown makes me feel sexy.
There is a restaurant in Chinatown that I always go to. It is the Happy Emperor restaurant. There is a lovely lady in the Happy Emperor restaurant who gives me free prawn crackers and beer when I go in.
I am grotesquely fat due to all of the free beer and prawn crackers. I have started going to a therapist because I am so fat. I feel like a grease ball.
My therapist is called Arnold Phillips. He makes me feel better by forcing me to eat more Chinese food. If I don’t have something in my mouth I start crying.
I spend all of my money on Chinese food in Chinatown. I go to all of the restaurants on a constant quest for Chinese food. I love the smell of Chinese food. I go into the bakeries and supermarkets, stuffing food into my gob, getting poorer and fatter.
I cannot afford my rent.
I now live in one of the gazebos in Chinatown. I am homeless and fat. I am a drug addict.
Leave me alone.
Socrates Adams-Florou says: ‘I write a blog. I was nominated for the 2008 Manchester Blog Awards. I am a massive disappointment.’
By Elinor Taylor
Location: Jersey Street and towpaths, Ancoats
Water cuts my city in long, slow curves. Here I am again, walking the towpaths behind tall buildings, leaning on the rotting lock, searching my body for pains – bitten nails, shot nerves.
From the palette of the landscape I create you: flesh tones from the factory brickwork, eyes from the blue of a late flower, hair from a stray feather. Now feel the ice on the breeze, the gravel underfoot.
Now let’s act out some scenes. Let the space from here to that far wall be your studio. Make the mercury eye of your mirror from the dark water, the hot white lights from the bright winter sky. The scene’s set. Now the air smells of solvents and the silence ripples with the sound of your brushes on canvas.
I’m a pre-Raphaelite: red-haired, cream-curved, blue-eyed against crimson. All around are the raw materials of the body: gouache, pencil, oil. You pace the floor, sighing, frowning. I count the beams on the ceiling, feeling the time pass.
Three times we went through that performance before you kissed me. I wonder what became of that first painting.
Remember the morning. Make the sunrise from the embers of evening caught up there in the high glass of offices. When you woke you smiled, surprised, narrowing your eyes to focus.
‘This wasn’t supposed to be part of the plot,’ you said.
We fell in love anyway; circling each other until the ground between us disappeared, making looped conversations around shared points: Monet, Mahler, Shelley. Throwing a velvet rope around our territory. We fell in love, and when we stopped falling I knew that love isn’t made but conjured out the night, from smoke and mirrors and spirits, as I’m making you now.
It was summer. I lay stretched in a pool of sunlight while you worked. You were building texturally, from the bones upwards, covering my figure in layers of colour, substance. Wax, paper, heavy oils.
By Matthew David Scott
Location: Rusholme
Illustration by Abi Milnes - www.abimilnes.com
Wilmslow Road bleeds neon into the night. The Curry Mile pinks, blues and yellows are caught in black puddles, quivering between onion skins and thick cabbage leaves. On the other side of the road, two boys share a spliff in the unlit doorway of a closed jewellery store. The shorter of the two boys tucks the joint away in a half-fist to protect it from the drizzle. The roach-end spills smoke through the grazed knees of his middle and index fingers. They call him Full Stop because he’s small and doesn’t say much.
Straddling the crossbar of a silver BMX, he listens as the taller of the two puffs plumes of words out into the night. Both boys are negatives to the synthetic rainbow around them – black tracksuits, black trainers, black hats and black bandanas. The taller of the two calls himself Future.
Full Stop passes the spliff on and sits back on the bike. His fingers roll out a rhythm along the handlebars as he lets out a sticky laugh at the conclusion of Future’s anecdote. ‘Tellin’ you. Dirt mate. Fuckin’ dirt!’
The rest of crew have gone out in town. Future and Full Stop decided to stay and see if any students were about. They used to hit them straight away during freshers week. Duck season. The robbers and thieves, muggers and sex pests, con men and drug dealers of the estates and districts that encircle the city would descend to hunt. Nowadays, people wait. Wait for the students to settle in a bit. Lull them into a false sense of security and then pick them off over the course of the year. It’s a long-term economic strategy.
‘You sure the girls aren’t there?’ Tonight Future and Full Stop are waiting for one particular student – a lad who has recently moved into the area. Full Stop spotted him a couple of weeks ago. The student walked tall past him, unconcerned. Intrigued, Full Stop zigzagged slowly along the other side of the street on his bike.
‘And he’s got no mates over?’ Over the next few weeks Full Stop blended into the background, as his size allowed, and watched the student. He was tall and slim with cropped, sandy hair, always wearing a T-shirt and jeans, always in Adidas trainers and sometimes a denim jacket. Over time Full Stop discovered he lived with four girls, student nurses by the uniforms, narrow-eyed as they took the mornings on through hangovers. They were always out at night but he stayed in.
‘He hasn’t got any mates, just them girls. And they’re out.’ Full Stop is sure. He saw them getting into a taxi earlier with hardly anything on. That’s Full Stop’s job. He watches people, cases houses, keeps dog. He can’t fight, doesn’t even like to carry a knife, and everyone knows he doesn’t have the gift of gab, so he has found use in being the all-seeing eye.
Future takes a final draw of the spliff. ‘You think he’s a faggot?’ He tosses the roach to the ground in the shop doorway.
Full Stop shakes his head. ‘He’s livin’ with four birds.’
Future pauses and shakes his head. ‘You have got a lot to learn little man.’
By Jackie Kay
Location: Chorlton Ees park
Take yesterday, for example. I came home after being away in the Big Smoke. Nobody calls London the Big Smoke anymore, but I was feeling my age. I was settling my son into his new council flat in East London. We spent a few days bustling about London getting him the things he needed: a desk, a chair, shelves, a duvet, a duvet cover, a kitchen bin, cutlery…We did it in record breaking time, but it was daunting; the traffic, how each neighbourhood in London doesn’t necessarily have the shops you need, and you have to go large distances to get ordinary things. It was all a big, stressful hassle.
So I came back to Chorlton and breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t feel like I live in Manchester; I feel like I live in Chorlton. I can spend happy, glorious days without going into the city at all. Chorlton allows you to be self-sufficient. So yesterday the first thing I did when I got home was walk my dog in Chorlton Ees. I walk to the end of my street, turn left and there it is! It is Manchester’s first nature reserve, part of the Red Rose forest, stretching for thousands of acres, and it is right on my doorstep. If I was energetic enough I could follow the river Mersey all the way to Liverpool, or I could walk to Didsbury along the riverbank, passing the odd statuesque heron. But usually I walk through the woodlands and meadows in any number of different directions. I love how wild it is there, the way that the density of the woods remind me of childhood, or of how the imagination works. There’s something secretive and knowing about the trees, and if you spend enough time in their distinguished company, you actually feel yourself getting better.
Walking a dog is more of a talking point than pushing a pram; people always stop and ask about the breed of my dog and tell me about theirs. ‘We’ve been out since eight thirty,’ an old woman tells me about herself and her dog. ‘Been to the vet. She’s got problems with her kidneys, is on medication, is costing me a fortune, but she’s worth it,’ she says and walks on, her proud bushy dog walking beside her. She looks like the only pennies she has to rub together, she’s spending on her dog. (It moves me how she used the pronoun ‘we’ to describe herself and her dog, like they are an item, a team.)
By Mike Duff
Location: Victoria Station
So I’m walkin down Miller Street headin toward Victoria Station. I’ve had a drink an it’s getting late. I notice a figure swayin in front of me. I recognize immediately the United shirt (it’s one of them green an yella ones brought out to commemorate the centenary an Newton Heath’s part in it). I fuckin hate Newton Heath, fuckin smackheads an women with ‘honey I shrunk the giro’ kinda faces.
As I get alongside him our eyes meet. I look away but he’s seen me.
‘Fuck me with a wooden broomstick an call it the brush off, if it aint me old mate Bobby Doyle,’ he says in a drunken slurred Welsh voice.
‘Right Bernie,’ I say, ‘where you off?’
A gleam comes into his eye an he offers me a can of Stella. ‘Not seen you for a long time Senor. Off to the Press Club, you wanna come?’
An I notice the Welsh voice has mellowed to near Mancunian after thirty years in the City. Quite a few of them spent in Strangeways an other of Her Majesty’s guesthouses.
We walk along together. It’s maybe half two in the mornin.
An me mind gets lost in useless thought as the tangents of time take over an I think about the first time I saw Bernie. We were on a train headin for Victoria Station, just like now, both aged about 14. We’d bin to Blackpool. Davis was with a gang of Miles Plattin lads an I was with me cousin Rafferty. Rafferty knew them all so no hassle.
It was a good laugh at first flingin light bulbs an toilet rolls out of windows, an other kids stuff. The train was one of them old sorts that had a corridor that ran right down the side of the train an you could swap compartments at will. No ticket collector on. So no authority figure to safeguard the interests of Mr. Commuter.
Anyway the train stops at Preston an this suited man gets on. Our compartment is full so he settles down in one about four away. Ten minutes pass by an we get bored. There’s a little Livingstone in even the youngest Mancunian so we go explore. There’s a girl with a good size pair of tits in one carriage but her boyfriends with her an he’s built like Jean Claude Van Damne on steroids, so we leave them well alone.
We move a little farther down an we come across Mr. Suit, an he’s chosen to be alone.
‘Never mind, we’ll relieve the boredom,’ says Davis, who is firmly in charge.
An we all pile in.
‘These seats taken?’ says Rafferty as he climbs on the luggage rack.
The little shithouse. No chance of gettin punched up there. Our host moves a few things for his uninvited guests, puts them in a briefcase, an then commits suicide by speakin.
‘No you’re alright,’ he says.
An I wince; he’s got a Scouse accent, a posh one but Scouse nonetheless. There’s a stunned silence at our end, we’ve caught an enemy spy. ‘Hey who’d you support, our kid?’ says Rafferty as Bernie blocks the door.
