By Charlie Hill.
On my way to the bookshop, I got lost and met Dean. It was dusk and drizzling. I’d walked from the station and, having missed my turn, had arrived at some five-a-side pitches and a distinctly un-campus-like vibe. At a bus stop promising services to Moss Side I turned round and headed back the way I’d come, when a small slight fella came scuttling across the road.
‘Nearly got hit there,’ he muttered.
‘Yeah I saw that,’ I said.
We walked together for a few yards then he turned off to the right, back onto the campus and I followed, only vaguely aware of my bearings. ‘Where do you want to go?’ he said and I said ‘Blackwells’ and he said ‘where?’ and I said ‘it’s near a BrewDog’ and he said ‘oh I know where that is. I’m going that way. I’m going to try to make some money. I’ll take you there.’
We walked together for about five minutes, chatting away. He told me his name was Dean. I wondered if I should tell him that I knew what it was like to be NFA, but every time I said something, he changed the subject. He touched on the implications of a cashless society, how few people gave him money these days, how difficult it was to keep a good spot. He said something about being a ‘dependent’ which I didn’t quite catch. As we turned another corner, he said ‘could you get me something for showing you where it is?’ and I agreed.
He wanted a big bottle of Stella. I was late for the reading and I checked we wouldn’t be going too far. ‘There’s a Tesco just up here,’ said Dean. We walked past Blackwells to a Co-op I’d noticed earlier. As we approached, he indicated a woman sitting on the low wall outside. She looked in a bad way. ‘Be careful,’ he said ‘don’t let her see you. She’s violent. She’ll have it off me’ and then, as we left, ‘did you see her? Her eyes are all over the place.’
The bookshop was shut. I stood outside, trying to catch the attention of the people inside by force of will, while Dean banged repeatedly on the door. This made me uneasy. I hadn’t been to Manchester for 10 years, and had wondered about the wisdom of coming so far for an event. Would people remember me? How — if at all — would I be received? Either way, I wanted to make a good impression. Eventually we were spotted and I was let in. ‘Thanks a lot,’ said Dean, and he walked off in the direction of the Co-op.
I sat at the back of the room. The readings had already started. Two of the collections — David Frankel’s Forgetting is How We Survive and David Gaffney’s Concrete Fields — were about the contrast between living in the city and living in the countryside, and the effects of these environments on their inhabitants’ behaviours. One was dark, edgy, the other occasionally surreal. The third book — Clare Fisher’s The Moon is Trending — touched on another contemporary literary preoccupation, the reconciliation of identity with external expectations.
The host was cheery, the mood jocular. There was a good crowd who asked enthusiastic questions, before power-milling. To my relief, I was greeted with pleasant surprise by the writers and editors of my acquaintance. After the audience Q&A, we went to a bar next door, drank craft lager, snacked and gossiped about publications and rejections and forthcoming projects. I enjoyed basking in this validation, and left myself short of time to get back the station. When I left, I had to go past the Co-op. By now it was dark. Dean was there, sitting cross-legged on the wall, nursing his bottle. ‘Thanks mate’ he said as I approached, and I said ‘any time.’ Then he held out his hand for what I thought was a handshake, but turned out to be a fist bump. I was walking so fast I didn’t have time to adjust and ended up grasping his thin wrist firmly, which felt wrong and wasn’t, I hoped, interpreted as some sort of power play.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlie Hill is a writer from Birmingham and the author of two novels, a novella and a handful of poems. His latest book is a memoir, I Don’t Want to go to the Taj Mahal.
