Status: Finished, but never forgotten.
Live Forever
Back into the hole where I was born.
This is not a Mancunian road. It can’t be.
There are crazed Manchester City fans, loitering in their front rooms with the radio turned up, listening to the game. Badly-daubed splashes of grey chewing gum decorate the pavement. Glistening glass fragments from beer bottles litter the streets like teardrops.
But there is salvation. It comes in the form of an innocuous construction with dusty windows and a diminutive, cracked billboard. A music shop. The anodyne to my painfully monotonous existence. Of course it is here, where all my hopes are born, where I will nearly die.
An incarnadine poster next to some ingrates invites me to buy one CD, get one free. I can’t afford it. But that’s ok; as long as they have tapes from this week’s chart I’ll be fine. I’ve been waiting all week long for this...
I hum the tune. It is lost beneath the roistering of the troglodytes clustered around the street, shouting like faux-gangsters at each other. My feet patter a rhythm across the street because I feel like dancing; I feel like twirling; I feel like spinning in my own personal oasis in this desert of backstreet Manchester. A music shop! This is how Charlie Bucket must have felt after winning the golden ticket.
Except the only ticket I have is a one way ticket towards trouble; the plebs on this side of the road are leering at me.
“Going somewhere, darlin’?” begins one of the more threatening-looking ones. Oh, God. “Jez wants to cop off with a nipper like you!”
“Yer wot?” snaps his inebriated friend, who is equally vile, “Cop a load of ‘er – she’s rank!” Not specifically enraged, I carry myself closer to that heaven. A meaty paw lands on my shoulder, the smell of alcohol and BO intoxicating my nasal passage, my vision blurred...
There are crazed Manchester City fans, loitering in their front rooms with the radio turned up, listening to the game. Badly-daubed splashes of grey chewing gum decorate the pavement. Glistening glass fragments from beer bottles litter the streets like teardrops.
But there is salvation. It comes in the form of an innocuous construction with dusty windows and a diminutive, cracked billboard. A music shop. The anodyne to my painfully monotonous existence. Of course it is here, where all my hopes are born, where I will nearly die.
An incarnadine poster next to some ingrates invites me to buy one CD, get one free. I can’t afford it. But that’s ok; as long as they have tapes from this week’s chart I’ll be fine. I’ve been waiting all week long for this...
I hum the tune. It is lost beneath the roistering of the troglodytes clustered around the street, shouting like faux-gangsters at each other. My feet patter a rhythm across the street because I feel like dancing; I feel like twirling; I feel like spinning in my own personal oasis in this desert of backstreet Manchester. A music shop! This is how Charlie Bucket must have felt after winning the golden ticket.
Except the only ticket I have is a one way ticket towards trouble; the plebs on this side of the road are leering at me.
“Going somewhere, darlin’?” begins one of the more threatening-looking ones. Oh, God. “Jez wants to cop off with a nipper like you!”
“Yer wot?” snaps his inebriated friend, who is equally vile, “Cop a load of ‘er – she’s rank!” Not specifically enraged, I carry myself closer to that heaven. A meaty paw lands on my shoulder, the smell of alcohol and BO intoxicating my nasal passage, my vision blurred...
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I've never actually been to Manchester.