Signs

A woman looks to her left as a man kisses her right cheek. That will be the signal. Sam watches, looks around. Which woman, which man? No-one knows, just keep watching, it will happen. And then? It will happen.

They’ve chosen a busy place again. Not too far from the last time. It doesn’t bother you. Makes it more interesting this way. Sam wanders off towards the racks of blouses, starts fingering them. You wouldn’t have thought they were Sam’s thing, really, but you never can tell these days. It takes all sorts.

You remember the time you first met them all. Not long off the flight in from Dublin, one of those twin-engined planes that brought you to Blackpool airport of all places. Not even Manchester. Still, the security there wasn’t up to much. Just one over-tanned, over-lacquered blonde in her 20s. The noughties’ version of her sixties’ grandmother and her eighties’ mother.

You’d caught the train from Squire’s Gate straight down to Preston and into The Railway pub. Someone had bought you a pint and a hot steak sandwich with twister fries. Twister fries for god’s sake. It was all in the details.

Sam had been there, the first one you’d noticed. Small and dark and classically Mancunian. Scrawny, sharp-eyed and shrewd with one of those timeless, ageless faces. Either young and careworn or old and not doing too badly.

Sam is heading up the escalator now, into menswear. More Sam’s thing, you believe. T-shirts, jeans, jumpers. But still not quite Sam’s thing. Not here, not this shop. Not over the walkway, either. Certainly not over the walkway.

After that meeting in the pub, you’d spent a week in a safe house in Fulwood, up near the hospital and the college. Leafy Fulwood, with its detached houses set back from the road. Privacy in curtain-twitching suburbia. Houses built for merchants and paid for with the sweat of your people. England’s whores, shipped over for their skills in digging and their willingness to work for next to nothing.

You realise that you ought to follow Sam. The shoppers obstruct your progress. You don’t have Sam’s knack for weaving through the crowds or side-stepping the stalled middle-aged women wondering if that shiny black satin thing is right for the Golf Club Dinner. You ride up the escalator and pause at the top, ignoring the tuts and sighs of the shoppers wanting to get past you. You scan the department for Sam’s whereabouts. Over by the café. Then you realise. Toilet. You loiter by the jackets. It wouldn’t be good form to follow.

A woman, a Doreen or a Barbara or a Brenda, thickening waist, slackening jaw line, squeezes unnecessarily past you. You stand your ground, watching for Sam’s return. The woman sighs, “Excuse me!” She’s desperate to look at the jackets you’re standing by. Let her wait. Won’t be long now before she doesn’t need to worry about whether the sage or the taupe will suit George or Basil or Brian better.

Sam’s heading back, wiping hands on jeans. You nod your head, attracting Sam’s attention. Everything okay? Yeah sure. Bit nervous. Dunno why. Never done one of these before. Yours a statement, not a question. Nah, comes the reply, Sam suddenly, clearly, young and careworn.

You head back down the escalator together. It hasn’t happened yet. You know for sure it hasn’t. No signal, no response.

You wonder who’s going to make the phone call this time, claiming responsibility, giving the police 5 minutes’ warning. Last time it was Michael, but Michael isn’t around this time.

After your week in leafy Fulwood, you’d been moved to your own flat in Northenden, near the Tesco and the dual carriageway up into Manchester. You didn’t see anyone else, but you knew Sam was along Palatine Road in West Didsbury, Niall further up in Withington, Ray at Mauldeth Road by the station, and Franny just outside Chorlton. There were others, but it didn’t do to know too many names, too many locations, just in case.

You spent month after month in Northenden, wandering along Palatine Road, looking in the shops, drinking in the pub on Longley Lane. You managed to find work at the Golf Club, in the bar, chatting up the middle-aged and middle-class, charming them with your Irish accent. Bored out of your head, marking time, biding your time, brooding and waiting.

You’d been given a car. A navy blue Fiesta. You parked it on the street, then on the driveway on special days. Days when they came round to tell you a bit more about the plan.

The months dragged on. You knew Northenden as intimately as your own skin. You knew the Princess Parkway/Princess Road like it was one of your own arteries, Palatine/Wilmslow/Oxford Road as though it were a vein. Manchester the heart, Northenden the lungs, you carrying the stuff the plan needed to survive.

You click back to the present, to the plan in action. Sam is restless, sweating slightly, watching, hand in pocket, ready. Sam’s the one who will trigger this, in a way. Sam has the radio detonator for the semtex packed into the cars parked directly beneath this store. Your navy blue Fiesta, Franny’s white Cherry, Niall’s dark green 205. Three cars parked in a triangle. Three cars waiting to explode.

And you. You have your own surprise. You smile at Sam, your hand in your pocket, like a mirror of Sam’s. Sam smiles back, still nervous. Still no sign, no signal, though Sam keeps watching. Looking for the man, the woman.

You remember the day you made the suggestion, your addition to the plan. You remember their raised eyebrows, their reluctance. You’d explained calmly, all the middle-eastern groups were doing it now. The government over here wouldn’t expect it. They weren’t sure. No-one had ever wanted to before. This was a political war, not a holy one, for all its mask of religion. It wasn’t how they saw the fight being fought. The fight, you’d explained, still calmly, wasn’t working. It was time to try something new. The peace process was a joke. Sinn Fein had lost their balls. People were waiting, hoping, wanting something to happen.

It took you a couple of meetings to persuade them. You’d asked to speak to Sam. Sam was the only other one like you. No family, no ties, no long-term future. The way you’d explained it, Sam didn’t know your secret. Sam just knew you would both be in the building when the semtex exploded. But Sam believed in the fight, understood it had to go this way, understood that lives of the faithful would have to be lost.

Sam is getting agitated now, but it’s too late. The detonator is in Sam’s pocket. Sam has to be here to see the signal. You can see in Sam’s face that reality is dawning. Sam is going to die. Sam doesn’t want to die. You smile, lean towards Sam and kiss her on the right cheek. She is looking to her left, looking for the signal. You whisper in her ear. Press the button now Sam. She looks at you, horror mixed with realisation. Your right hand is in your pocket, ready. She isn’t pressing the detonator, her hand is out of her pocket. You put your left hand into her right pocket, press both buttons at once. The explosives packed around your body go off first, taking out the entire first floor of M&S, then the cars in the underground car park explode.

There is a sort of silence in that corner of central Manchester, underpinning the sound of alarms and the creaking of buckled steel. The sort of silence that tells you, by the absence of weeping, that no human life survived. The people shopping on the other streets haven’t made it down there yet, to gawk at the destruction, to begin the weeping. The police were unprepared. No-one made a phone call. The underpinning silence stretches on, like the cloud of dust still blanketing the rubble.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

Subvert Normality

Brenda Mulvaney was 62 years old. She liked Seabrook’s ready salted crisps, the smell of the shampoo her hairdresser used, and the occasional Bacardi Breezer.

Brenda had lived all her life in the leafy end of Chadderton. She had grown up knowing fields and farms, and slowly seen the suburbs creep out from Oldham, across from Middleton and up from Failsworth.

Brenda was trying to embrace technology. She had a computer in the bedroom of one of her long-flown children. She had been on a CLAIT course and surprised herself daily by what she almost remembered. Her children had clubbed together to buy her a mobile phone – for just in case. Just in case what she was not really sure, but she thought it might have something to do with long car journeys to reach the places her far-flung children now lived.

So Brenda knew what it was that she found that day on the train into Manchester. She had boarded at Mills Hill station. The carriage was empty but for one other person, sitting way down on the right. Brenda chose a seat not too far from the doors. These local trains with seats like buses. She missed the proper trains of her youth, with doors you could only open with the outside handle, and luggage racks above the springy seats. Proper trains pulled by proper engines. She sighed to herself. She sounded like her mother. Her mother had been dead goodness knows how many years. Brenda could no longer remember.

As she sat down, she saw it, sleek and discreet and smaller than her own, but a mobile phone none the less.

She picked it up and looked at it. It was one of those dinky flip-top ones. She’d liked the look of them when she’d been choosing her own, but her kids had said, “Nokia 3310 is the best for you, Mum.” The sales assistant had agreed. He hadn’t quite said idiot-proof, but that was what he had meant.

Brenda wondered what to do with the phone. The ticket man came along the aisle. Brenda flashed her pass, received her discount, accepted her ticket and asked him about the phone.

“Hand it in when you get to Victoria, love,” he told her, walking on down the aisle. “Tickets from Rochdale, Castleton, Mills Hill, please,” he bellowed to the other occupant of the carriage.

Brenda opened her bag and dropped the phone in. Instantly it began to ring. At least, she assumed it was ringing. It emitted a curious burbling bubbling sound. She pulled it from her bag and flipped it open, looking for the equivalent button to press to pick up the call. It looked so much different to hers. She found a tiny green phone symbol and pressed that.

“Hello?” she said, cautiously. “Who’s that?” She hunched forward slightly, as though trying to elicit a confidence from the person on the other end, who might be shy of speaking to a stranger.

“Where’s Terry?” said a sharp male voice.

“Oh,” said Brenda, with relief, sitting back in her seat. “Is this Terry’s phone? Only I’ve just found it on the train, you see, and I was wondering how – “

“What are you doing with this phone?” the male voice interrupted, curtly.

“Well, you see, dear, I was just trying to explain all that, but you interrupted. I found it, on the train. I’m going to hand it in at the station.”

“Which station?” the man’s voice rapped.

“Victoria, love. Victoria Station, in Manchester.” The man sounded southern, so Brenda thought she had better be clear she didn’t mean the other Victoria. The one in London.

“Manchester? What are you doing in Manchester?” The man was beginning to sound really very annoyed. She wondered what sort of stress he had in his life. Southern people seemed always to be suffering from some sort of stress. Her eldest was working in London now. She was always stressed when Brenda spoke to her on the phone. As though Brenda was making a huge interruption of her busy life

“Well,” she said now, patiently, thinking she must handle him the way she handled her daughter. “I’m not in Manchester yet, love. I’m just on my way there now. Coming in from Mills Hill.”

“Where the fuck is that?” said the man.

“Now there’s no need for language like that, you know.” Brenda was shocked. She didn’t like bad language. She snapped the phone shut. Swearing at her like that when she was only trying to explain. The phone emitted its strange burbling bubbling sound again. Brenda decided to ignore it. It rang and rang and rang, and she ignored it. She would hand it in at Victoria and the train people could sort it out.

Eventually the phone stopped ringing. Brenda looked at it, silent in her hand. She began to think. Maybe Terry or whoever owned the phone had put his home number in the phone book, like she had, just in case someone found it somewhere. She flipped the phone open and pressed a button that looked like it might call up the menu. She pressed a few other buttons, trying to find the phone book. A couple of times the phone started to dial, and she had to quickly cancel the call.

Suddenly, she was there, scrolling through a list of names. She looked out of the train window to check her progress. Moston Station. Almost there. She had better be quick. Armstrong, Beckett, Blair, Blunkett, Boateng, Brown, Clarke, Darling, Hewitt, Home, Hoon. Home. She scrolled back. The other names seemed familiar. Home. That must be it. Terry’s home number. She stored her home number as Home. It was the sensible thing to do.

She pressed the green phone button and the phone began to dial. It seemed to be a central London number. It rang for a while, then an officious voice came on the line.

“Number 50 Queen Anne’s Gate.”

Funny way to answer the phone, thought Brenda, keeping an eye, through the window, on the train’s progress through the suburbs of north Manchester.

“Hello, love. Could I speak to Terry please?” she said.

There was a pause.

“Do you have a surname, please?”

“No, my love, I don’t. It’s just, I’ve found his phone on the train. I spoke to one of his friends but he was a bit rude, then I thought, you know, maybe his home number was on here, and I found this number under Home, so I rang it.” She took a breath. There was silence on the other end of the line. “Is this Terry’s home number?” she asked.

The silence continued briefly, then the officious voice spoke.

“This is the Home Office, madam.”

The line went dead. Brenda looked at the phone. Those names. No wonder they seemed so familiar. They were names of people in the government, that New Labour lot she’d helped to elect and what for? They were no better than the Tories, that Tony Blair was a sly one. You’d only to take one look at him and his grinning wife to know something was up there. She had half a mind to ring that number, Blair, and tell him what she thought of his precious New Labour.

The train was pulling into Victoria. She slipped the phone into her bag. She wouldn’t hand it in just yet. What was that phrase her grandson used? Subvert normality, or something. She could subvert some normality for Mr Tony Blair with this phone, she knew that. She felt a shiver of delight in her stomach. She hadn’t been this naughty since she was 13 and they had put drawing pins on the French teacher’s chair at school.

She alighted from the train and walked up from the station to Exchange Square, thinking about the phone in her bag and all the things she might say to Mr Blair. Brenda supposed that it would be his secretary that answered if she rang him. It wouldn’t be a direct line to Mr Blair.

Brenda popped into Marks & Spencer for a quick look round. It wasn’t the same since they had made half the store into Selfridge’s. Those footballers and their tarty wives were supposed to shop in there, but Brenda had never seen them. They certainly hadn’t been using the revolving doors any time she had been there.

Manchester was changing now, doing its best to be all glitzy and cosmopolitan. All because of Posh Spice. You wouldn’t recognise the old warehouse district up round Oldham Street. New fancy name they’d given that, as well. The Northern Quarter. Her grandson and his mates shopped round there, she knew. Her youngest daughter had been looking to move back up north, into a flat in the Northern Quarter. A flat, mind you, not a house. A flat in an old warehouse. When she’d heard the price of this flat, Brenda had nearly dropped cork-legged.

There was nothing to tempt her in M & S, so she headed over to Albert Square. She sat on a bench near the statue of Richard Cobden. Sitting in the shadow of the old reformer, Brenda decided now was the time and place to give Mr Tony Blair a quick call. She wasn’t entirely sure what this subverting normality actually entailed. Her grandson had told her once, but it all seemed a little bit like breaking the law to her mind.

She pulled the phone from her bag and flipped it open. She stared at it for a few seconds, trying to remember how she had found the phone book last time. She began to press buttons and, after a few attempts, there she was. And there he was. Blair. Black typeface on a glowing orange screen. Blair.

Brenda pressed the green phone button.

“Terry!” said a familiarly bright voice. “I’ve been waiting for you to call all morning. Alistair said that you’d apparently gone AWOL.”

“This isn’t Terry,” said Brenda. She didn’t intend her voice to sound so menacing. Perhaps nerves had made her lower her tone and speak so monotonously.

There was silence. Then the familiar voice, not so bright now Brenda noticed, said, “Who is this and how did you obtain this number.”

“You don’t need to know who I am,” said Brenda in her new found menacing voice. She quite liked it, actually. Gave her a certain air of, well, menace, she supposed. “You just need to listen.”

“How did you obtain this number? Where did you acquire the phone you are using?”

“Terry left it on a train,” Brenda said.

“Then I advise you to hand it in to the police, madam, before you get into serious trouble.”

“Mr Blair,” said Brenda, “you need to stop speaking for a moment and listen.”

Brenda was pleased to hear silence coming through the phone. Now she had to think of something to say. She was doing menacing quite well, but she didn’t really know what people with menacing voices said to the Prime Minister.

“Mr Blair,” she continued, “I helped to elect you and your government twice. I haven’t seen very much return for my faith in your promises.”

Blair obviously clicked that this was just another disgruntled member of the electorate, and not someone he needed to bother about, because he told Brenda, “I’m a very busy man, I don’t have time for this.” Then he rang off.

Brenda rang back.

“Mr Blair, I think you do have time for this. We the people who elected you,” Brenda paused, pleased with that phrase. “We the people. Who elected you. Are growing weary of your empty promises, your posturing, your dodging of the issues.”

The phone went dead again before Brenda could complete her sentence. She rang back.

“Your dodging of the issues, Mr Blair, and your failure to heed what the people who voted for you are trying to tell you.”

Blair spoke, an icy edge to his voice. “Look. Madam. I don’t know who you are, or how you got hold of the phone you are using, but I advise you very strongly to hand the phone in to the police so that it can be returned to its rightful owner. And if you have an issue with the government, then there are proper channels for you to follow. Starting with a visit to your local MP’s next Surgery.”

The phone went dead a third time. Brenda Mulvaney rang the number again. She listened to the ringing tone for quite a while, then disconnected the call.

She scrolled down. Blunkett. No, he wasn’t worth bothering with. Boateng. She did not have the faintest idea who that was, even if he was a member of the government. Brown. She knew who he was, and what he had done to her pension. She told the phone to dial.

“Hello. Gordon Brown.”

“Mr Brown?” She tried to sound menacing again, but was losing her confidence.

“Who is this?”

“That’s not important, Mr Brown.”

“How did you get this number?”

“I’m using Terry’s phone,” Brenda said, thinking that, really, politicians weren’t as smart as they were made out to be.

“How did you get Terry’s phone?”

“I found it.”

“You found it?”

“Yes.”

Brenda heard voices in the background. She wondered if it were at all possible for her location to be identified. She knew from films that they could tap landlines and have a crack team of snipers round your house in no time, if they didn’t like what you were doing. She didn’t know whether mobile phones worked the same. Mind you, she reminded herself, they had proved that that Christine Hamilton had been where she said she was from her mobile phone. But that was after.

Brown was speaking to her. “Where did you find Terry’s phone?”

“On a train. Look, I want to say a few things to you, Mr Brown.”

“I’m sure you do. Where was the train you found Terry’s phone on?”

He was like a dog with a bone, Brenda thought. Just like he came across on the telly.

“That’s not important. I’m a pensioner, Mr Brown. I voted to elect your party to government because I believed you would do right by pensioners.”

Brown interrupted her. “Yes, I’m sure you did, but I’m afraid I have more important matters to deal with now. If you have an issue, I advise you to take it up with your MP.” He hung up.

Brenda reluctantly flipped the phone shut. She wondered whether she should have phoned Blunkett after all. He always seemed good natured and well-meaning on the telly. Maybe he would have listened to her for longer than those other two.

She decided that she wasn’t very good at this subverting normality business.

She was unaware of the furore she had caused in Whitehall, however. Civil Servants were being called into offices and the whereabouts of Terry were being investigated. How had he lost his phone, why had no-one heard from him for three days? Why had no-one mentioned that he had even gone missing until this morning, when the Prime Minister asked Alistair Darling why Terry hadn’t phoned in lately?

Terry sat on a bench not far away from Brenda Mulvaney, watching her use his phone. He was sick and tired of working for this government. He was sick and tired of scurrying around, feeding stories here, leaking information there. He was sick and tired of setting up the decent ministers and back-benchers for a fall, just because Tony and Gordon were at their playground spats again.

He was a bit irritated that the phone had been found by a pensioner, though. He had been hoping, as he got on the train in Rochdale, that some bright young thing, someone like he had once been, would find the phone, work out what was on it, put it to good use. He wasn’t against a little subversion of normality. He had become too much of a corporate whore for his own liking. Believing in the Party and working for the Party were two different things, he had discovered. All his naïve idealism had evaporated in the 6 years since the Party was first elected to govern. What a day that had been.

He rubbed his face with his hands, then looked across to the woman in possession of his phone.

Brenda Mulvaney was phoning her grandson, who was at university just round the corner. UMIST. Doing computers. He had told her once, but it had been a bit complicated so he had told her to just think of it as “doing computers”.

“You found a phone, Grandma, with the personal numbers of members of the Cabinet?” he was saying to her, incredulously.

“Yes, Tom.”

“Seriously, Grandma? And you’re asking me what to do with it?”

“Yes. I spoke to Mr Blair, and to Mr Brown, and they were very unhelpful.”

“Jeez, Grandma, sorry to swear and all, but – bloody hell fire!”

She smiled at the way he toned down his language for her benefit.

“Where are you now?” he asked her.

“I’m in Albert Square.”

“I’m on my way. 10 minutes.”

Brenda sat back on the bench. She noticed there was a young man across the square from her, head bowed on a bench. He looked weary. Probably an office worker from the Town Hall. They all looked weary. He was late to be out, though. She looked up at the clock. Far too late for him to be on his lunch.

True to his word, 10 minutes later a slightly breathless Tom was sitting beside her on the bench, scrolling excitedly through the names in the phone book of Terry’s flip top phone.

“Grandma, this is amazing.”

“I was going to hand it in at Victoria Station,” Brenda explained, “but everyone I’ve spoken to on it was so rude, I decided I’d try to subvert normality. I wasn’t very good.”

Tom grinned at her.

Across the square, Terry was watching this new development with interest. He recognised the lad sitting with the woman. He was on one of the lists of known student activists. Tom somebody. Maybe the phone had fallen into the right hands after all.

Terry sat up casually and crossed his legs, putting one arm across the back of the bench, and angling his body slightly away from the pair across the square from him. He watched them from the corner of his eye.

“Subvert normality, eh?” Tom was saying to his grandmother. “I didn’t think you paid attention to half the things I said and did, Gran.”

“Tom, you’re my grandson. I might not understand half the things you say and do, but I like to take an interest, you know.”

Tom held the phone up. Across the square Terry wondered what they were talking about. The lad, the activist, was looking excited. Terry knew he was going to keep the phone, put it to use.

“Can I keep this?” Tom asked his grandmother.

Brenda Mulvaney shrugged. “I suppose,” she said. “They deserve what’s coming to them.”

Tom grinned again. “Subvert normality, Grandma.” He winked.

“Subvert normality, Tom,” she replied.

Then he was off, to do who knows what with the numbers in that phone. She hoped he didn’t tell her. She hoped he didn’t get caught. But it was true, what she’d just said. That bloody New Labour lot did deserve what was coming to them.

Across the square, soon-to-be former Civil Servant and ex-employee of the Home Office, Terry Wade, had a good idea of what the young activist was going to do with the contents of his phone. And the government, he was certain, deserved exactly what was coming to them.

He stood up, smiled across the square at the woman who had found his phone, and made his way to Piccadilly Station, where he caught the InterCity and composed his letter of resignation on the way back down to London.

He would leave it a few weeks, then maybe ring his old mobile phone number, or get hold of that activist some other way, and offer him and his activist mates his services.

Brenda Mulvaney saw the weary young man smile at her from across the square. She smiled back. She hoped he was soon less weary than he appeared. People his age shouldn’t be worn out so quickly. Something about the way this world had turned out since her youth was very very wrong.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

Bird

Bird. That’s what they called her. That’s what the voice said now, when she answered the phone.

“Bird.”

“Yes?”

“You okay? You sound different.”

She was different. She felt different. Funny how he could tell it just from the way she said yes.

She listened to him talking into her ear, a disembodied voice, as she sat on the back doorstep, skirt hitched up so her legs could catch the sun. The floor was silvered by the long wings of fat flying ants. She peered at them, their black shiny bodies. Hard bodies that surprised her with their impact when they flew into her, crashing against her arms, her legs. Bird. If she really were a bird, she would want to eat these fat black shiny things. One crawled slowly up her leg. Maybe she should eat it. She wondered if its shell, its carapace, would crack audibly when she bit into it.

The voice in her ear burbled on. Her distracted, ant-inspecting silence apparently didn’t matter. She placed a finger in front of the ant. It paused, then clambered up onto the digit. She could raise her hand to her mouth now, she could place her finger and the ant inside her mouth. The wings were so long and sleek. The wings put her off. She thought they would tickle on the way down. She opened her mouth and blew. The ant suddenly found itself airborne.

She looked up into the sky, squinting, one eye closed against the brightness of the sun. She felt the warmth of it against her face and remembered another day like this. Warm sun on face, sitting on a back doorstep. She had tipped off her shoes that day and stretched out her legs. She did the same again today.

His voice was still pouring words into her ear. She looked at her feet, the whiteness of the skin, the blueness of the veins, so close to the surface, so fat and full of blood. She thought of the blood they held, thick and red and metallic. It would taste good in her mouth, that blood. Thick and round. The veins in her wrists were fat and blue today, too, just beneath the covering of skin that seemed paper thin.

She found suddenly that she wanted to say something. She waited for a moment, to be sure. She did not want to waste any of her words. She knew it didn’t pay to be profligate. Then the sun hid behind a cloud and the moment passed.

He, however, was still thriftlessly pouring words into her ear. This was what he liked about her, she knew. That she sat silent and let him talk. It was like the sea washing over her, the same tidal flow, back and forth, back and forth. She sat there, sometimes seditiously, sometimes passive, hardly ever listening. Like a member of a junta, happy to be there, patiently waiting.

“Bird?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, you are still there then.”

“Yes.”

Bird. Such a name. Such a strange choice, and yet it suited her. It was what they all called her. Most of them had forgotten her real name, a turn of events that it suited her not to change.

Bird. Big Bird. Baby Bird. Ladybird. The sun peeped around the cloud, then went back in again. Bye bye Blackbird. Blackbird singing in the dead of night. Bird singing in the sycamore tree. Say nightie night and kiss me.

That was where this began, in the middle of a kiss. A kiss goodbye, a see-you-later, see-you-again, see-you-soon kiss that lingered on the edge of luscious before hurtling down to say nightie night and kiss me again. A standing kiss, like a standing order, a kiss to be paid same time, same place, but then that kiss hurtled them down. She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip at the memory. 32 days ago, more than a month ago, but maybe that meant nothing.

The sun came out again. She squinted at the sky and saw, as though it were a lesson newly learned, that the sun did not come out at all. The clouds withdrew their comfort.

She looked down. Fat black shiny bodies, long iridescent wings. One day the bugs would inherit the earth.

“When will you be home?”

She spoke almost without realising it, broke into his monologue, a tiny eddy in his ceaseless torrent of words.

“Another week yet, darling, why?”

“No reason.”

32 days ago, more than a month ago, a meeting, a greeting, a morning of more words, more talking, but not a river, not an unabashed outpouring from the mouth of one into the mind of another.

A meeting on Bridgewater Street. A walk to a pub where she used to go with a violinist from the Hallé when she was 17 and he old enough to know better. A lunchtime drink, a kiss goodbye, a change of plan. A drive in a car not her own to a back doorstep not her own. Hot afternoon sun, her shoes tipped off, her skirt hitched up, a cold ice-filled glass pressed into the back of her neck, making her shudder with illicit pleasure, his hand holding her hair away, and a kiss that led to this by way of that. Her skirt hitched up, accommodating little minx. Her skirt hitched up and him, unlike all the rest, a surprise, calling her by her name, speaking it into her ear in rhythms as hot as the sun beating down on his back.

Birds singing in the sycamore tree and kiss me again.

Sun-kissed. That’s what she was. Sun-kissed and 32 days older. There were tiny freckles on her shoulders, but they were not what made her different. The cold ice-filled glass pressed into the back of her neck was what made her different. That shudder of illicit pleasure and him, unlike all the others, calling her by name.

Mr Chatterbox, him, this one here, did not even notice that she came home smelling of him. She could smell him, warm all over her body, tangy where her skirt hitched up. She could smell him and did not want him to go away.

32 days older, and now he knew she was different. The city knew she was different too. The city claimed her as its own. She walked along the streets and knew herself to be in the pavements, the bricks, the glass, the steel.

She had closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again and he had been looking at her, his eyes looking directly into hers. He had been a revelation that day. A waking dream, a glimpse of the future.

She okayed-to-end and sat on the back doorstep, skirt hitched up, silent phone in hand, the words that had flowed into her ear now ebbing from her head, leaving nothing behind. She smiled.

32 days older. A bird who had all but flown from her cage.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

Missing (1)

“Regret nothing,” you told me. But I am full of regret, and the wish that I could somehow have done things differently. This regret seduces me, is irresisitible and relentless in its persuasion.

I run things round my head daily, hourly, minute by minute by second by infinitely small fragments of time. I turn it and look at it from every angle, but it never comes out any different.

“What are you waiting for?” was another thing you used to say. What was I waiting for? For the moment that never came? The moment it would be right? The moment I could speak the truth? What was it that I was waiting for, that never arrived? The thing that would have let me say, “I love you.”

I’m walking across the grass in Piccadilly Gardens, walking from Portland Street, past the concrete wall, the crush of my feet causing the scent of the grass to rise up and fill my nostrils. I’m walking down Moseley Street, past fast food outlets with the waft of hot scorched cardboard, past the banks, the closed sandwich shop with its pickled fruit in the window, past the uniform shop, the Art Gallery; the smell of the street is metallic, dry and dusty, but the scent of the grass stays with me, reminding me.

I reach the library, the vents at street level by the Town Hall extension pumping out the old musty smell of books, of leather bindings slowly being eaten away, the sweet acidic tang of decay. I feel it bite against my tongue, the taste of the smell, a pillow of air, fat in my mouth.

I skirt round the library and stop, facing Oxford Road, looking towards The Cornerhouse. I can’t move, people surge around me like water dividing round a rock, flowing on, pouring away. I’m looking towards The Cornerhouse and half expecting to see you walking in my direction, checking your watch, phone in your hand, your other hand firmly in the pocket of your blue chinos.

Is that how you were that day? I will never know. I didn’t stand here on that day hoping to see how it was you walked up from The Cornerhouse.

I was sitting in the park, looking at the sun through the rippling cover of a tree. I remember how the sun made coronas round the leaves as they moved in the breeze, now a bright spot, now a darkened patch. I remember the smell of the grass, freshly cut, crushed beneath the feet of passing people, as I sat with my back to the tree trunk, looking up at the sun through the rippling cover of its branches.

I wasn’t there to see you walk up from The Cornerhouse towards The Midland Hotel, heading for Peter Street. I didn’t see if you held your phone in your hand as you turned your wrist to check your watch, if your other hand was in its familiar place in the pocket of your blue chinos.

I was somewhere else. Always somewhere else. “What are you waiting for?” you said.

I came home late that afternoon, after my day spent lazing in the park with my walkman on, my copy of City Life, my book because you can never take too much to read. I came home and then it was your turn to be somewhere else.

I’m standing here now, looking at the place you were. Thoughts tripping through my head. Still wondering, like Nick Cook on Crimewatch UK, my questions run dispssionately through my mind. Did you meet someone that day, as you walked up from The Cornerhouse, one hand in the pocket of your chinos, the other hand holding your phone, as you checked your watch in that familiar movement? Did someone greet you there in the street? Did you go somewhere together? Some pub down a side street, somewhere we used to go together? Were you tempted to stray, so strongly you could not resist, so strongly you missed the meeting you were supposed to have? Did you meet someone else and leave me behind?

I didn’t know to wonder those things as you continued to be somewhere else that night. What was I waiting for? I have wondered them many times since, though. Just as I have wondered whether you simply started to walk and kept on walking. I wondered briefly whether you stayed on the train from the Crescent and down to the airport, until I saw the cctv at Oxford Road Station. You walked, hand in pocket, it had to be you, you walking, down Station Approach to The Cornerhouse.

What happened to you then, as I sat not so very far away in Peel Park, turning the pages of my book? Did you turn right instead of left? Away from Peter Street and your meeting with a client in the Life Café? Did you instead walk down Oxford Road, catch a bus, go south of the city? Were you not walking at all, one hand in your pocket, the other holding your phone as you checked the time on your watch?

This is worse than a death. I grieve without a body. I mourn the lack of your presence without a grave.

I was somewhere else that day. Regretting nothing, not even aware that I was waiting for something. Not even aware that you had gone.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

Lost on Tib Street

She caught the number 42 into town, from the stop by Tesco. She sat next to a window and looked at the cars queuing to leave the Tesco car park, blocked in their escape by the labouring, lingering bus. Closing her eyes, she felt the vibrations of the bus’s clapped out engine pulsing through her body, vibrations that failed to move her.

A man got up from the seat across the aisle from her, leaning over her with his sweat-smelling shirt close to her nose.

“Excuse me, love, do you mind if I just...?” He reached to open the vent at the top of her window.

“No, go ahead,” she said, trying not to breathe in his stale odour, turning her head towards the window, away from him.

He sat back down, and she continued to sit looking out of the window. The bus finally pulled away and began its long asthmatic trundle along Wilmslow Road, north to the city centre, past Withington and Fallowfield, Whitworth Park, along Oxford Road and up to the bus station at Piccadilly Gardens. She gazed through the window, but she did not take in the things she was seeing: the mothers pushing prams along the pavement in Withington, gazing through the shop windows at goods they would never buy, their babies enjoying the sunshine; the students hurrying to catch the bus to University and lectures they would not take in; the midday drinkers sitting outside Kro2 in the hot sunshine, shaded by the canopies over the tables.

She left the bus at the bus station and walked across the gardens, past the newly installed fountains. It was a working day, there were no children playing in the water, getting drenched by the spray, just the odd office worker on their lunch, and the usual drunks and homeless sprawled on the concrete steps, idling on the grass, some of them snoring, reminding her of the bus she had just left.

She skirted to the left of the Costa Café and up along Tib Street. It was hot. The sunlight dazzled her, making her squint, bouncing back from buildings, road and pavement. Blossom was falling from the cherry trees by the junction with Church Street. The breeze whipped the blossom and the dust of the day into bouncing eddies, lifting it occasionally to blind her further.

Tib Street. Spring. A hot day in Manchester. She wandered along the pavement, ignoring Lemn Sissay’s words beneath her feet, past the ginnel through to the back of The King.

As she passed it, she had a flash of memory. That place for loiterers, tryst-keepers, deal-makers. That place that stood to the past of her, where he had stolen the last of her and left her hollow and old before her time.

The ceramic birds that nested on the ledges of the buildings watched her as she hurried in the hot spring sun. She was late. She knew what he was like when people kept him waiting. She remembered too well. The bruises on her flesh had faded, but those in her memory had yet to dull.

She turned left into Dorsey Street, west, as the white on blue of the tileware could have told her if she had only raised her eyes, and stopped at Cord Bar. Her phone rang. She pushed her fringe out of her eyes and dug it out of her bag, careful not to disturb the cloth wrapped object she was here to deliver.

“Hello?”

“Are you here yet?”

“Yes, I’m just outside.” She looked in through the window, but as ever the interior was too dark to be able to tell if he was there on the ground floor, or downstairs in the other bar. “I’ll come and find you.”

She rang off before he had chance to answer. She pulled open the door into the bar. She scanned the booth in the window then walked to the back of the upstairs room, looking into each booth along the way. He was not there. The booths were all full of people chattering and laughing, and she wondered why they were not out in the sunshine chattering instead. She wondered why they were not walking the blossom-strewn streets of Manchester, enjoying this rare spring heat.

She went downstairs, feeling her bag bounce against her back, aware of its contents, aware of what she had to do with it. He was sitting on the banquette opposite the stairs. He was staring at her, bouncing his leg, agitated, coiled. She stood at the foot of the stairs. The downstairs bar was quiet, just one member of staff, wiping the counter. She felt as though she had stepped into a scene in East Enders.

“Have you brought it?” he asked.

She nodded, feeling the weight of it in her bag.

He sat forward, both legs now still, feet planted firmly on the floor, and held out a hand to her.

“Give us it, then,” he said, calmly, as though it was a book she was lending him, or a pound of potatoes, or something mundane.

She stepped towards him. ‘Give us it, then.’ She heard the echo of his words in her head. ‘Give us it, then.’ She put her hand into the bag, dislodging the piece of cloth it was wrapped in, and curled her fingers around the cool steel of the pistol. A Beretta M92FS 9mm. Almost one kilo of steel, fully loaded, ready to use. The same weight as a bag of sugar. ‘Give us it, then,’ he had said, and she was tempted.

She lifted it carefully from her bag, checking that the bar person was not looking at them. She held it out to him.

“Jesus, you could have wrapped it or something,” he hissed. “F’fuck’s sake!”

She smiled. Irony, she thought, don’t you love it?

He took it from her hand and inspected it down between his legs, down where the low table would obscure the vision of anyone who might be looking their way or come downstairs and see.

She stood, hovering, uncertain, while he checked the gun.

“Have you got the money?” she asked.

He grunted and nodded his head.

“Can I have it please?”

He nodded his head over to where a brown paper bag was sitting on the banquette beside him. This was all so clichéd, she thought. This didn’t happen in Cord Bar. There was a burst of laughter from upstairs. She picked up the paper bag and stashed it in her own bag.

He pushed the pistol into his jacket pocket.

“So how are you?” he asked, pulling a packet of B&H out of his other pocket.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Yeah, you look it.” He lit up, drawing deeply on the cigarette then eyeing her through his exhaled smoke. “You had much work lately?”

“Enough.” She was still standing just in front of him. She was remembering the first time, in that ginnel leading to the back door of The King, by the blue plastic dumpster. Sent there by him to close the deal. Sent there by him with the threat of a beating, which she had received anyway. Sixteen years old and petrified of what might happen if she screwed up.

“You got yourself a bloke?” He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue, not looking at her. She did not reply.

He drained the glass that had been sitting on the table in front of him, then stood up. She took a step backwards to let him pass. He paused at the foot of the stairs.

“Send my best to your mother, will you?” Then he was gone.

She slung her bag back over her shoulder, feeling the weight of it settle into the small of her back, less heavy now the gun was gone, the strap crossing her body. Then she turned and followed her father up the stairs and out into the bright spring sunshine again.

© J R Hargreaves 2003