Northern Feedback

This is five-thousand words: so kind of long: part of the ongoing text I’m doing: a copy-&-paste of fiction-as-memory: of when what is known as The Miracle of Istanbul: a football match: the European final between AC Milan-Liverpool: when this epic-of-epics occurred: 25th of May, 2005: meaning this could be a northern chronicle right?

Side 1

Match prep yeah

Knocked-off at half-four and walked south in oblivion for a bit but eventually got a Stagecoach and stood in more oblivion on the crowded bus until I debarked outside NATWEST (Withington) where down to the right of two cashpoints a man sat with a layer of cardboard between his backside and the grey pavement. All of this in fact feels grey. The hoodie, the paraboots, the baggy jeans he wore: like his face and eyes, his long hair. Grey almost too were the tones of our voices as we asked: How’s it goin? 

Football’s on later, I said. Liverpool-AC innit?

Don’t know, he said. 

Sat further up the street by SPAR was another man cross-legged on a folded up sleeping bag. He spoke to somebody passing who shook their no-no-sorry head. Grafting they call it, what he was doing, grinding and surviving as in asking strangers for money and though I’m yet unaware of what that life entails I’d look at him and the first man, at others who’d sit in the same begging spots: or pitches. I’d see them daily and think: Shall I?

My answer was nah: the match is on and. I turned down Copson into GATEWAY or was it SOMERFIELD or had it become a CO-OP by then? It’s irrelevant. Like revealing that I once photographed the fruit shelves in this GATEWAY or SOMERFIELD or CO-OP and then later I used my home computer to change the filters on the image so four bunches of bananas and a pyramid of oranges all became black as if decayed, as if apocalyptic I thought but anyway, after getting off the bus from work, I went in this supermarket. A bit jittery. 

A bit too jittery. From downing since nine a.m. roundabout six espressos. I grabbed a shopping-basket and the veg was there so I snatched (or picked up) I simply picked up a carton of cherry tomatoes: okay for the heart-strings: and put them in the bask. I walked sharp down the first aisle, dodging two trolleys and from one of the refrigerators I got a box of six chicken drumsticks from another I got a Brie: a triangle of. And I tried being quick. People so slow though, like cows on tranquillisers to the bread where I found a (by now stale) baguette. Yeah this is dull life stuff. Last before checkout, the booze section and it took ages to find this okay red Chilean, wine-wine-wine-wine, I’d buy it loads, about three quid a pop so two bottles tonight. Something to glug down the hatch watching Liverpool who I’d supported as a kid.

Back in my unholy bedsit I said hi love or hi mate to the kitchen wall. 

One pinpoint was within ten of arriving I’d turned the oven on. It was gas, which is more irrelevance I enjoy to recall. When a tiny orange light on the stove’s panel went off to say it’d reached two-hundred I put all the drumsticks in a glass dish I’d oiled and preheated and it spat twice at my chest before I sprinkled the skin, like my skin, the white dots around my calves, covered with loads of paprika and chilli powder, bit of salt, black pepper, a clove of garlic I’d chopped like toes. Something to line the belly man. From the cold tap I added a drip of water, with a spatula mushing it all around. Red and tasty it looked. Then, a tea-towel protecting my fingertips, I slid the hot dish into the oven: top shelf. Yeah dull-kitchen-realism. A Swiss Army knife I owned is now lost but I must’ve used its corkscrew to open a bottle so the wine could breathe in and out, a lung, whatever that does. 

Damn. Evenings after work are kind of strangling. You cook, eat and then all you can do is vegetate, as they say, in front of a screen. So boring. But the legs roasted while I checked emails and Martin Parr had replied saying yes he’ll do an interview, telephone him on this number and I was like good shit, ask about his aesthetic! Life can be okay sometimes: I poured a mug of wine. Quickly logged into YAHOO Chat and typing the news I said he’s my fave photographer to Ruxpin_27UK who I pictured driving, radio on, humming to The Coral.

I like their song (don’t ask me to sing it) but the chorus goes on about the morning and there’s a little tinkle of xylophone, she once said: which is kind of yokel to this text.

Glued t’t television

Chicken skin, spiced, flamed to a crunch, tastes the best. Bababababa. Eating drumsticks, sipping the grease down with redwine, I was parked in this wooden chair that rubbed my arsebones and I had this big twenty inch MAC monitor on the table to my left and a wheeled stand to my right bore the chunky TV. So two screens as I’m munching. So my froglet eyes kept going from my dinner to YAHOO Chat (waiting for Ruxpin_27UK’s reply) and back to the food on the plate and over to the Champions League Final preview now starting on telly from Istanbul. I forget who’d have been a pundit in those days. ITV broadcast though, free-to-air. You could just switch on your shitty old box and watch the first half, Milan knocking in three, Kundera nil and my gaze was on the computer not the television as the teams walked off the pitch at half-time. Ruxpin_27UK typed: I’m sorry Chat Twat. She knew I was marginally gutted. Three-nil down. I poured another mug of which muddies the lips I saw in the bathroom mirror and then peed, thinking: Typical English-clubs-in-Europe, totally out-cultured.

Wow though, in the second-half, when to the wonder of millions it exploded. Captain Gerrard connected with Riise’s cross arching a header past Dida for an early goal and it was like: hello? We knew something big was happening when Liverpool’s Šmicer then bounded a shot into Dida’s bottom left for goal number two. Soon after that, (the what was by now machine-on-fire) Gerrard ran for Baros’s layoff and was tripped by Gattuso in Milan’s box. The ref blew his whistle and pointed to the penalty spot, making it three-all potentially, making it historic, an epic in Istan: yet I forget. For most of the match I was drunk, typing on my clunky home computer (bababababa dialogue) to Ruxpin_27UK. At least I know I’d have watched pinned as Alonso took that initial pen. Which Dida I think saved. Alonso missed anyway but when on the rebound he scored I know for sure I sprang off that chair shouting words like fucking-yes-man-yes-god-fuckin-jesusin-wow. The street outside would’ve heard me ecstatic. 

Coming from three-nil down Liverpool made it three-all and after a goalless extra-time they won three-two on penalties.

Postmatch analytics drone

A squish of the inflow was after the match in that bone-rubbing chair, I felt bombed from disbelief. Red wine glowed in my belly. And wasn’t long before the mobile flashed a call from Ruxpin_27UK  (her name’s Ross) who from something she said which I forget she expected me to be cheerier about Liverpool winning but we talked about the goalkeeper Dudek wobbling his legs like old Grobbelaar, a massive philosophical statement she said and I laughed. That’s the first time she’d heard me laugh, she observed. Then we spoke the usual bababababa but in a subpart of my mind I was resenting her remark about it being the first time she heard us cos I only laugh at stuff that makes us, I thought as we talked about what else? The Coral. Tea-towels. Princess Anne. The Coral write kind of psychedelic sea shanties and my tea-towels need washing or I’ll catch impetigo, which gives you weepy scabs on the chin, impetigo does and Princess Anne? I stood on the forecourt wall when she opened Jawbone fire-station. So close I could’ve karate-kicked her. In the chops. 

Chatting so long the nerves in my lower back throbbed from that wooden chair and twice on the phone a car went beeping on Burton Road going bee-bee-bee-bee-bee-beep, celebrating the result, Scousers trolling South Mancs. 

And don’t know how we squirmed right into this next situation. Around three a.m. and peckish I sliced Brie and tomatoes and put them in the last of that French stick after I’d dripped water over the crust, warming it in the oven, so it was like fresh again, fluffy bread and sat back in the bone chair, I wanted to dive into my snack and watch a bit of telly. The thing was Ross was still on the phoneline.

Rest your mobile on the arm of the chair but don’t hang up, she said. Let me listen to you eating.

Nah, I said and laughed.  

It was the skinniest end of the night, about half an hour before the birds began chirping. She cut me off or I her. Whatever.

Dirty skazz realism

Up on the ceiling a louse watched me in my sleep until a quart-to-eight: eyes open, I groaned and stank (of sweat, cigs and booze) even before farting vile: cos of the two bottles I’d drank. Least my head felt clearish as I put on jeans, made coffee and sat in the bone listening to Alan Brazil say the Liverpool team are due late afternoon for an open-top bus ride through the city. I might go: no hangover: the bread soaked up the wine and yeah I might go, I considered. And left the house to became part of a summer morning, so to speak. And it’ll be a beaut day, I decided at the bus-stop from where a 42 single-decker with only ten or twenty passengers carried us up the petrol chamber of Wilmslow Road. Sunny and blue. A few clouds of wool floated up there but the temperature was whatever, warm, nice on the chickeny skin. Outside of Detroit House I had the ritual cig and met Axel who said: Utterly astonishing. 

Nobody had said that to me before so it stuck in my ear.  

A thing about the TNS office, a very dull or actual thing is until about eleven on clear days sunlight would gleam through the windows. Maybe not in winter but when I arrived before nine to an empty call-centre of cubicles and beige 1980s-era comps, all of it glowed with a blonded texture I see faintly now, too much so, too washed and static, but still bright as I shut my eyes and press the keys (k and e and y and s) and see Julie open (there was) a pine door the main door glowing into and out of the office and I half-smiled and found my eyes tracking the rhythm of her rump swaying in tight black jeans as she walked simply to her top desk. We stood about five meters apart, my brain dancing with the zzazz of a chrome ballbearing going ping-ping any-which-way, when I said: Julie, is it okay to leave early so I can go to Liverpool?

For the parade you mean?

Yeah.

Well the radio’s saying it starts at six, so you’ll have plenty of time.

Ah okay cool, I said and my attitude was if you’ve got legs you’ve gotta rise off your backside some time or other.

The shift ended half-four. Straight outside I sparked up, saying see-yah-bye to TNS people and I walked alone to Piccadilly trains. 

Side 2

Arpeggioness

Platform 13, in the citrus spun-light it was rammed. Loads of people, lots of chatter. Many collars and blouses were commuting back from office jobs but many Liverpool jerseys stood in groups talking, laughing and a man started that L I V, E R P, double O L chant and another booed. Skylarking, I thought making a cig. And fuck buying a train ticket. When I lit up an old woman, hair shaped like a box-kite, looked flustered at me and turned to a no smoking sign and looked flustered at me again. She’d ruined that cig so I flicked the butt to the railtracks. A bottle smashed. Sounded accidental. Excited by breaking glass though, men whooped like men like boisterous chimpanzees.

Some poxy little regional type of train then pulls up, just four wagons and a panic was we’d be unable to climb on cos every window showed a carnage of heads and chests and luggage but I waited for a man in front, he took ages for a person before him to pile aboard and yet we all squeezed into this vestibule. Pure crammed. Near a toilet door I leaned, armpits sweating, a cold drip-drip. 

A group of men and a woman all roughly my age talked about the Liverpool team Kenny managed, when a generation of us started following the club, hunting glory. I remember one of the guys referred to John Barnes. I remember his breath, the smell was shocking. Not shocking. Each time he spoke, the woman coughed I noticed. And it ain’t me who stinks, said the toilet door with cruel relish but by the time we’d paused at Warrington I felt sorry for the man cos he sounded okay while his friends were too gabby. Like when he went into the toilet cubicle, one of the men whispered: Hope he’s brushing his teeth. And they laughed evilly. Beforehand, though, on stepping inside the loo, the guy and his breath, he’d squeezed next to me and said sorry so I got a headier whiff and coughed: an involuntary move at which I cringed, kind of guilty.

Yeah and I had a Northern Feedback Experience, which is an idea to feeling that groove in Dig It when he says Matt Busby and then dig it, dig it, dig it. By this I mean as the train braked into Liverpool I’d found a seat and texted Ross and was looking through the window with a Fall live tape I’d recorded on earphones but can’t recall, it was crackly, the percussion driving like classic kraut and a hundred or so meters before Lime Street you go into endless shadow for this black-bricked wall beyond fifty meters high like a castle an escarpment and the railtrack goes on and on and while the train slowly halts for the platform I remember, embedded inside this massive wall was an abandoned room, a doorway with no door, a window no glass and I pictured in layers Lennon before he was famous, Echo and the Bunnymen fans in 1983, ravers returning to the grey from nights in 1992. They’d have seen that which is a cave now,  soot covered. 

Anyway, as my body moved through this space: between one and the next: there was a kind of click-northerly-click in my brain. It’s impossible to describe cos the clarity soon vanished. You might be tapping bollocks too, I thought.

Liverpool is in Mercyside.

Bows of burning redness, arrows of

Mooching out of the trainstation onto Lime Street I became one of three-hundred-thousand in an epic shebang. Over the road stood St George’s Hall. The plateau. The stone columns I could see but not the stairs for so much spewing of red and white clad bodies, innumerable flags bearing faces of Shankly-Paisley-Fagan, of five European Cups, five stars. Thousands chanted. Thousands of voices moved with the swirl of how sound floats in warmer weather. Myriad, I thought and is there another word for sun? There is: wheel-o-fire. Silverplated. Whose glow span down on us, a girl said as hot as Ibiza and the pavement full of heads, mainly happy people, countless in Liverpool jerseys like the old TOSHIBA and CANDY kits and the now CARLSBERG. I walked. Or tried to. Pressed-together bodies like seawater I thought as we more or less rippled along the pavement. 

A woman with iron-grey hair in a bun, she leaned into my orbit and opened her mouth as if to drink the solar rays. A red-white chequered banner (to my mind a Liverpool FC quilt cover) lay draped over a statue of a knight on a lashed horse. A cider-drinking guy pushed a supermarket trolley and inside the main basket lay another pissed-up-looking man, he was flaunting this placard of a loveheart between the words WE and SIR RAFA B.

Then I stood by this litterbin for a bit. Then walked again within this constant circle of moving people until I found another spot where I could stand, look at my phone and Ross had texted: You’re on TV. So I typed: Bababababa x. When I’d hit send though it said: You Have Zero Credit. Yeah. Some bald chap had a stall flogging LFC bootleg stuff: Gerrard posters, bucket hats with the club crest, loads of new printed Istanbul 2005 t-shirts, sweatbands, badges, teddybears, a poster saying Justice for the 96 and a few wimpels: kind of rosettes but triangular. 

From a Paul’s Newsagents out of the fridge I grabbed two cans of RED STRIPE and asked a man behind the counter who looked like a Paul cos he had the kind of pale face and brown helmet of hair I’d associate with a Paul, I asked him for a small pack of GOLDEN VIRGINIA. He asked where I was from. 

You don’t sound like Manchester, he said. 

It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at, is an old-school proverb I liked to think. 

Maybe for about forty minutes, near this carpark, I sat on a brickwall. I took biggish swigs of the Jamaican lager, which is weakish and sweet and I soon cracked open the second and had a cig and another while noticing the sky gradually go orange in the west and in the east almost emerald. Getting bored I reread Ross’s text and imagined a TV camera filming, broadcasting a two second headshot of me exhaling a smoke live on SKY Sports and then cut to the studio: ad break. Eventually I returned to Paul’s and bought four more cans, three of which I put in my rucksack. A rucksack yeah: dirty and red: logoed with the Norway flag. I looked for elsewhere to chill.

Loads are saying the team’s delayed, a passing voice said. 

The busies are flippin clueless, I also heard.

Running two hours behind, said a woman.

Steel barriers had been erected so the road was clear. I had a meander and found an unoccupied bench on which I rolled a ciggy and opened more beer and then I returned to the crowd and stood seven deep from the kerb. People yelled and talked but I wasn’t listening. I wanted a seat again and drinking that third I badly needed a pee. After my smoke it was I dodged around a throng’s edge to find an alleyway where the memory is of aiming into a small drainhole while my nose picked up a tasty smell of Chinese cooking. Hungry, no mood for eating though, I went back to wait on the street. Every cop or busy as they’re called in this city, every busy I saw and we’re talking hundreds, all the men had bright pink faces and thick shining necks and this woman nearby was saying phwaor about one of them with fuck-me-eyes she said to her companion who had a pair of breasts. I glanced: lizard to the fly. Then I remember the spark of a man’s cheeks as he wept, holding to an ear this same type of NOKIA I used to own. 

He said something like: Sod off yer mardy fat fuckin sack of bitter blue shite, yerra divvy, yerra bitter blue div is what you are. 

Another man, pensioner in a tweed cap, stood outside a betting shop cos a display photo of a sprinting greyhound lay above in the window, he said: The bus is passing Anfield, it’s been significantly delayed but shouldn’t be much longer.

The roar increased, an exploding gas in the darkening air. One kid had climbed halfway up a lamppost. REEBOK on his dangling feet, he perched on a street sign. Deeper into the haze other young lads in trackies-n-trainers had climbed other lampposts, standing, also perching. About ten or so mingled on a bus-shelter roof. Chanting flowed richer then, more absorbed, more coordinated with You’ll Never Walk Alone rising and falling into my ear via some PA speakers as my head swirled from the beer, my gut empty. Just below the crest of a hill in the gone nine p.m. street-lighting the crowd’s pulse went a drumbeat higher cos from a bend in the road about an acre away the blur of a double-decker appeared. If I squinted it became crisper. Otherwise it was fuzzy cos my eyesight was bad as it watched the bus escorted by outriders, by fluorescent pigs on horses ever so slowly drive between the mass of ecstatic bodies and the screams and yelps and horns, the blowing whistles, crying of yes god yes, this city’s waited twenty years to be back here.

Right then I felt like weeping. Tingles in fact rose to the back of my neck and a few teardrops slid down my cheeks while people danced in all kinds of shapes to the team rolling by with that big-eared silver trophy. The European Champion Clubs’ Cup.

If I was an encyclopedic bastard it’d be a matter of naming the entire squad, players and backroom staff celebrating on that open-top decker. I’m unencyclopedic though, born legitimately. And when Dudek, Finnan, Carragher, Hyypia, Traore, Hamann, Alonso, Baros, Garcia, the captain Gerrard and Rafa the picaro manager, when they’d rolled up the street the swell in the crowd seemed to follow the ripped current towards Saint George’s Hall.

Needing another pee, I mooched into a street with more space. 

A sign among the void said Mersey Tunnel.

Melville saw this sky, I said to myself.

Cash was low but I wanted a hit of proper beer in a busy pub. And it was wandering through a back plaza, with the old port in mind, I found the Hunted Fox whose bar was buzzing full. Celebratory people everywhere. I looked for toilets first. The gents are downstairs, said a man. And it was beautiful, the piss I had, long and satisfying, out of my bladder, down the urinal as my eye was caught from the corner by graffiti. Writ black in that classic breakbeat hand a white ceramic tile said: Misunderstood Vision 1983. The artist is twenty-two, I calculated and then wanting beer I saw: choices on tap: STELLA, CARLSBERG, FOSTERS, GUINNESS. After what felt like ten minutes, the barman being well busy, I asked for a pint of the stout. It’d line my stomach but took ages to pour of course, giving us time to check the seating in this gaff. There were booths, wooden like pine but anyway.

A cosy spot appeared free so I asked a woman: Excuse me, is it okay to?

Yes sit yourself down, she said with a nice twinkle about her. 

Twinkle, I dunno. Moby Dick’s ghost swims in the Mersey was a thought I had when freshly parked in the seat. The GUINNESS tasted and smelled a bit soily, the turf of a Dublin bog. It was okay though, I liked and listened to the lady speak of a Janet who’s out of hospital and her Lee had mended his car exhaust but he was now selling the vehicle. Four swigs and a few puffs of later, I myself got the disease called talking, I said to her: You’re from here, sounds by your accent, did you ever see Liverpool play in the 1980s or the 70s, I’m not saying you look old sorry?

I’m sixty-three and yes, my husband and I have had season tickets for years.

Did you ever see a match with Shankly?

No but he did, she said looking at three men all polo-shirted.

That’s amazing, I said to the one of them who looked at me like uh? and I asked her: What sort of years did you start going to see them

I started going to home games when Bob Paisley was manager.

So you’ve seen history.

Like today, she said.

Once I had this weird dream where Bob Paisley was smiling affectionately at my mum and she was smiling in the same way back at him.

The lady’s body language stiffened, as if thinking: Yes, what is this fella on about? So I shut it and when an inch remained of my drink I stuffed a finger in that tiny coin pouch of my jeans. Checking my last fiver’s there. In the bigger pocket below I felt a two pound coin and shrapnel and it was pointless using my debitcard. 

Due to the fog of destroyed memory, I forget saying: Bye it’s been nice talking to you.

Postmortem effects: ghosts for thoughts

Moments, as I squint far back, seem to flicker like the outline of a bearded visitant would flicker into and out of transparency for less than a second as I walked along an unknown path opposite a line of railway arches. It was getting chilly, windier. Must’ve gone half-ten. Traffic hissed and voices echoed from the centre but nobody was around on this corner other than a whitehaired man on a chair next to three tall trestles of Liverpool merch. 

Red and white scarves, a price said: £5.

Is there any chance I can give you two-fifty for a scarf please?

They’re five quid, he said.

Come on man, as an end-of-day deal.

Five quid mate.

How about say three?

Nope a fiver.

Oh well.

The theme is about staying alive and by now I was mashed. Knackered. Skint. Drained low in juice. I likely wobbled a few of the eight-hundred steps to Lime Street, to the point I recall a macadam road in the terminus having never thought about it before, this hundred metre stretch of tarmac, might be destroyed now, lying at the side of a rail platform that I didn’t care was spotted in pigeon guano, I sat my ass on one of the curbstones. Wishing the train would come. To get home to bed. A woman nearby glanced and from an invisible change in her face I heard her thinking: See him on the floor the tramp! When the train arrived I found a carriage, underpopulated, a double seat in which I slept during the stuffy warm few minutes it seemed to take to. One spaced-flash was after Warrington I woke to a fly like a mosquito settled on the end of my nose and I could see it four times, a quirk of vision with it being so close and there were dozens of blue-green nodules. Then I blew it away and dreamed of it. The fly. 

I climbed off at Oxford Road. Carefully man, falling down that gap between the vestibule’s doorstep and the track, getting my head crushed by steel, I’d pictured a few times. I was safe back in Manchester, though, stinking and tired.

Stationary, outside of the Palace, was a Fingland’s decker, a 42 I read and dashed cos the driver revved, about to go. He saw us wave and the doors unfolded so I stepped on saying thanks, Withington please and dealt the small amount, I forget how much a single was. But a night-bus, nobody around on the front bottom deck I sat and slept deeply. When I jerked awake in slobber, I saw, through the bus windscreen a motorway bridge in the dark, Northenden, a ten minute ride south of my room. 

Missing-my-stop had made the journey cyclical, however. Cos the instant I staggered to the front of the bus, to tell the driver next stop, right then we were crossing the river. She who stretches from east of here and ends at Liverpool Bay. 

The Mercy, a holy stretch of water, I think.

Perhaps I waited for another night-bus or walked north up Palatine with the sky a black glaze and vacants of space at my dragging feet. No memory, though, apart from my body was drained of zap. I would’ve not prayed for bed, but.

Bet you’re really tired, said Axel after seven hours had passed and we were in the TNS office. 

A bit, I said.

Man, I’d be utterly exhausted if I was you.

Surprisingly I feel alright.

I did.

After clocking-off later I found myself among the I, I, I, I, I, I shapes, of pedestrians waiting to cross near Portland Street MCDONALD’S. Passing cars-cars, a couple of buses and this shit white limo pumped fumes into the muggy heat and I was shattered. The overcast, the power of the sun bleached the sky silver. And everyone going exciting places, it felt. One man to my right had the side and the back of his head shaved, a tuft on the top waxed in a brown quiff. Three earrings dangled from his left lobule. John Robb, I saw. It’s him. A face you’d see around and on telly: I Love 1989, 100 Greatest Pop Videos. He dressed in a psychobilly way. Nothing to do with him but a gloom started to rise shortly after our eyes met with his drilling through and out the other side of mine and my eyes doing the same maybe to his. When the traffic cleared and I strolled south, a route done countlessly until footsore and I’d get the bus, when I strolled that day a feeling of pissed-offness began building. 

Let’s say oceanic pissed-offness: not exactly but almost. I remember a couple of very clouded images. 

Home was my room where I logged on and messaged Ross: My phone’s out of credits sorry and I’m too tired to speak tonight, bababababa. And that evening, what’s it matter: I lay atop of the bed. In fact there was just a mattress and no bed upon which I read not many pages of a slim novel as it got greyer: full on melancholy in every pore. 

Next day was sweet, I scored a couple of bags of.