bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonn...

Side 1

Match prep yeah

Clocked-off at 4:32pm 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, the bank in Withington where a man to the right of two cashpoints 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 and hair. Grey almost too were the tones of our voices as we asked: How’s it going?

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

Don’t know, he said. 

Sat further up the street by SPAR was another, a man, cross-legged on a folded up sleeping bag and he spoke to somebody passing who shook their no-no-sorry head. Grafting they call it, 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: they call them pitches. But 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 became a CO-OP by then? I know it’s irrelevant. Like revealing that I once took a photograph of the fruit shelves in this GATEWAY or SOMERFIELD or CO-OP and when I went back to my room 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. From downing since 9am 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 it in the basket. I walked sharp down the first aisle, dodging two trolleys and from one of the refrigerators I got a box of six chicken drumsticks and from another I got a Brie: a triangle of. And I tried being quick. People so slow though, walking dumb cattle, cows on tranquillisers to the bread where I found a (by now stale) baguette. Last before checkout was the drinks 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.

Back in my holy 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 also 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 it 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, yeah man. From the cold tap I added a drip of water, with a spatula I mushed 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. All of this is boring and forgotten stuff. 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 and typing the news I said he’s my fave photographer to Rosey 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 relevant to this text.

Glued t’t television

Chicken skin, spiced, flamed to a crunch, tastes the best. Bababababa. Eating drumsticks, sipping thin redwine, I was parked in this wooden chair that rubbed my arsebones and I had this big twenty inch MAC monitor stood 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 involuntarily moving from my dinner to YAHOO Chat (waiting for Rosey’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 would've been a pundit in those days. ITV broadcast it though, free-to-air. You could just switch on your shitty old box and watch the first half, Milan scoring three, Kundera nil and my gaze was on the computer not the television as the teams walked off the pitch at half-time. Rosey typed: I’m sorry Chat Twat. She knew I was a bit gutted. Three-nil down. I poured another mug of which muddies the lips I saw in the bathroom mirror and then peed, thinking: That was typical English-clubs-in-Europe, we were totally out-cultured.

Wow though, in the second, when to our wonder it exploded. Gerrard connected with Riise's cross arching a header past Dida for an early goal, which was okay but then Šmicer beat Dida bounding a shot into the bottom left for another and it was soon after that (the what was by now machine on fire) Gerrard ran for Baros' layoff and was tripped by Gattuso in Milan’s box. It was a penalty, potentially making it three-all, making it historic, an epic in Istanbul. Yet for most of that wild second-half I was drunk, typing (bababababa dialogue) to Tracey on my clunky home computer. At least I know I’d have watched pinned to Alonso taking 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-jesus-wow. The street outside would’ve heard. The windows were open. Another detail I enjoy to remember.

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 Tracey who from something she said which I forget she expected me to be cheerier about Liverpool 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 me laugh, I thought as we talked about what? The Coral. Tea-towels. Princess Anne. The Coral write sea shanties and my tea-towels need washing or I’ll catch impetigo, which can give you weepy scabs on the chin and Princess Anne? I stood on the forecourt wall when she opened Jawbone fire-station. So close I could’ve karate-kicked her. Nerves in my lower back throbbed then felt numb from sitting in that wood chair so long and twice while on the phone a car went beeping on Burton Road going bee-bee-bee-bee-bee-beep, celebrating the result, Scousers trolling South Manchester. 

And I don’t know how I got into this next situation. It was around 3am 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 and warmed it in the oven, so it was like fresh again, nice fluffy bread and sat back in the bone chair, I wanted to dive into this snack and watch crap on telly. Thing was I couldn’t relax cos Tracey was still on the phoneline.

She said: Put your mobile down on the arm of the chair but don’t hang up and let me listen to you eating.

Nah, I said and.  

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 7:45am: my eyes opened, I groaned and stank (of sweat, cigs and booze) even before farting loud. Forget the smell but my guess it was vile cos of the two bottles I’d drank. At least my head felt clearish as I brushed teeth, made coffee and sat in the bone listening to Alan Brazil who said the Liverpool team are due late afternoon for an open-top bus ride through the city. No hangover: that bread soaked up the wine, 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 chicken 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 mind.  

A thing about the TNS office, a very boring thing is until about 11am on clear days sunlight would gleam through the office windows. Maybe not in winter but when I arrived at 8:51am 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 my eyes for a second followed the rhythm of her rump swaying in tight black jeans as she walked simply to her top desk. We stood about ten meters apart, my brain dancing with skazz energy like a steel 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 cool, I said and my attitude then was if you’ve got legs you’ve gotta rise off your backside some time or other.

The shift ended 4:30pm. Straight outside I sparked up, saying see-yah bye-bye to TNS people and I mooched alone to Piccadilly. 

Side 2

Matt busby

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 tops 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. Fuck getting a train ticket. I lit up and an old woman, hair shaped like a box-kite, she looked flustered at me and then at a no smoking sign and looked flustered at me again and refaced the sign. She ruined that cig. I flicked the butt to the railtracks. A bottle smashed. Sounded accidental. Men whooped like men like boisterous chimpanzees. Then this poxy little regional type of train pulled up, just four wagons and a panic was I’d be unable to climb on cos every window showed a carriage 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 but we all squeezed and yeah, every seat and aisle from the vestibule, all filled so I leaned near a toilet door and began to sweat, pure crammed. A group of men and a woman all probably about my age talked about the Liverpool team Kenny managed which was when millions of us started following the club, hunting glory and I recall a guy who referred to John Barnes. I remember his poor breath, the smell. 

Maggoty, I thought with relish: cos I didn’t know the man and I was irritated and bored. 

Each time he spoke, the woman coughed I noticed. And it ain’t me who stinks it’s him, said the toilet door I imagined for fun but by the time we’d paused at Warrington I was feeling sorry for the man cos he sounded okay while his friends were too gabby. Like when he went into the toilet cubicle, one of them bitched: Hope he’s brushing his teeth. And they all laughed evil. Beforehand, though, on stepping inside the loo, he’d squeezed next to me and said sorry so I got a direct whiff and I coughed: an involuntary reaction for which I slightly kind of cringed.

Yeah 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 had by now found a seat and texted Tracey and was looking through a sunny window with a Fall live tape I’d recorded on earphones and can’t recall but 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 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, there was a kind of click-northerly-click in my brain as my body moved through this space. But it’s impossible to describe cos the clarity vanished soon enough. And I could be tapping bollocks too.

We’d reached Mercyside.

Bows of burning gold, 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. I could see the stone columns 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, as hot as Ibiza said a girl, beating on every pavement full of heads and feet and legs, countless in Liverpool jerseys like the old TOSHIBA and CANDY kits and the now CARLSBERG. I walked. Or I tried to. Pressed-together bodies rippled like seawater as I more or less shuffled along the pavement. A woman with iron-grey hair in a bun, she leaned into my orbit and opened her mouth wide to drink in the solar rays. A red and white chequered banner (or in my mind a Liverpool FC quilt cover) was draped over a statue of a knight on a lashed horse. I stood and then tried to walk for a bit within this constant circle of moving people until I found a spot where I could stand and look at my phone and Tracey had texted: You’re on TV. And I typed: Bababababa x. When I hit send, it said: You Have Zero Credit. Yeah. Some bald chap had a stall flogging LFC bootleg shit: Gerrard posters, bucket hats with the club crest, loads of new printed Istanbul 2005 t-shirts, sweatbands, badges, two teddybears, wimpels and wimpels. 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 xxx.

I remember. I remember. I remember. From a Paul’s Newsagents out of the fridge I grabbed two cans of RED STRIPE and asked a man 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. 

For about forty minutes I sat on a carpark’s brick wall. I took biggish swigs of the Jamaican lager, which is weakish and sweet and I soon cracked open the second and had two cigs while noticing the sky gradually go orange in the west and in the east almost emerald. A bit bored, I reread Tracey’s text and imagined a TV camera filming me, broadcasting a two second headshot of me exhaling a smoke live on SKY Sports and then cut to the ad break. Eventually I returned to Paul’s and bought four more cans, three of which I put in my rucksack. Then I looked for somewhere else to chill.

Loads are saying the bus is delayed, a passing voice said. 

Mersey police 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 rows from the kerb. People yelled and talked but I wasn’t listening. I wanted a seat again and drinking that third tin I badly needed a pee. So after my smoke 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 I saw and I’m talking hundreds, all the men had bright pinkie faces in the daylight and really thick shining necks and a 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 the same type of NOKIA I used to own. He said something like: Oh sod off yer mardy fat fuckin sack of bitter blue shite. He was crying and laughing, going: Yerra divvy, yer divvy, yer fat fuckin div. Then a totally different man, a pensioner in a tweed cap, he was outside a betting shop cos a display photo of a sprinting greyhound lay above in the window, he said: The bus is passing Anfield now, it’s been significantly delayed but shouldn’t be too long.

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 and trainers had climbed up other lampposts, standing, perching. Five or six mingled on a bus-shelter roof. Chanting flowed richer then, more absorbed, more coordinated with You’ll Never Walk Alone rising and falling from one end of the road into my ear via some PA speakers I think as as my head swirled from the beer, gut empty. Just below the crest of a hill in the gone 9pm gloaming the crowd’s pulse went a beat 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.

Around then I felt like weeping. Tingles in fact rose to the back of my neck and a few teardrops fell 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 by four months. 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. I mooched into a street with more space. Needing another pee. 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 jammed full of buzzing and happy people. I looked for toilets first. The gents are down there, said a man. And it was beautiful, the piss I had, long and satisfying, out of my bladder, down the urinal and then my eye was caught by graffiti. Penned black in that classic hip-hoppy style a white ceramic tile said: Misunderstood Vision 1983. The artist is twenty-two, I calculated and now 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.

I saw a cosy spot free and asked a woman: Excuse me, is it okay to?

Yeah 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 the bog. It was okay though and I listened to the lady talking about 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 puff of a cig later, I got a disease called talking, I said to her: You’re from here, sounds by your accent, did you ever watch Liverpool back in the day, in the Eighties or Seventies, 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 changed, like she was thinking: Yeah, what is this fella on about? So I went quiet and when an inch remained of my drink I stuffed a finger in that tiny coin pocket of my jeans. Checking my last fiver was there. In the bigger pocket below I felt a two pound coin and shrapnel and it was pointless using my debitcard. So I don’t remember saying bye to the lady, why would I? I went into the fog of destroyed memory.

Postmortem effects: ghosts for memory

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. It must’ve gone 10:30pm. The sounds of traffic and voices echoed from the centre but nobody was around on this corner other than a whitehaired man on a chair next to three huge plywood boards of Liverpool football 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.

Why not?

No.

Oh man.

No.

The theme is about staying alive and by now I was mashed. Knackered. Skint. Drained so low in juice. Meant I likely wobbled a few of the eight hundred steps to Lime Street where I remember a macadam road in the terminus and I never thought about it before, this hundred metre stretch of tarmac, might be destroyed now, it lay at the side of a platform and I didn’t care it was spotted in pigeon guano, I sat on one of the curbstones wishing my train would come. To get home to bed. A woman nearby glanced my way and from an invisible change in her face I heard her thinking: Why’s he 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 thing 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. Neon is sad, I thought. Then I blew it away and dreamed of it. The fly: my spoogle totem. I climbed out at Oxford Road. Carefully man, falling down that gap between the vestibule’s doorstep and the track below, getting my head crushed, I’d pictured a few times. 

I was back in Manchester, stinking tired.

Parked in the stop outside of the Palace was a Fingland’s decker, a 42 I read and dashed just before the driver was about to go. He saw us wave and the doors unfolded so I stepped on saying thanks, Withington please mate and then dealt the small amount, I forget how much a single ticket cost. But a night-bus, nobody around as I sat near the front on bottom deck and slept too deeply. When I jerked awake in the slobber, I saw, through the bus windscreen a motorway bridge, Northenden, a ten minute ride south of Withington. The instant I walked to the front of the bus, too, to tell the driver next stop please, right then we were crossing the river and she who stretches from east of here and ends at Liverpool Bay. 

The Mercy, a holy stretch of water, I thought today.

Perhaps I waited for another 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. I would’ve not prayed for bed, but.

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

A bit, I said.

I’d be exhausted if I was you.

Surprisingly I feel alright.

I did.

At about twenty to five on that Friday afternoon I stood among pedestrians waiting to cross near Portland Street MCDONALD’S. Passing cars-cars, a couple of buses and a white limo pumped fumes into the muggy heat and I was shattered. And yeah it was warm but overcast and the power of the sun had bleached the sky silver. Stood to my right was a man whose side and the back of his head were shaved, a tuft on the top combed into a quiff. Three earrings dangled from his left lobule. It was John Robb. The music journalist off the telly, shows like I Love 1988. Nothing to do with him but a gloom started to rise shortly after our eyes met and once the traffic cleared and I strolled south, a route done countlessly until my feet ached and I’d get a bus home, a feeling of pissed-offness began building. I remember two or three very fuzzy images. Back in my room I logged on and messaged Tracey: Too tired to speak tonight, bababababa. That evening I lay atop of the bed. In fact there was no bed in that room, simply a mattress upon which I read not many pages of a novel as it got dark, melancholy from every pore. 

Next day, I scored a couple of bags of.