Sky Hooks Read online

  With half an hour to wait for the bus back into Red Bank, I sat on a fence opposite Springsteen’s house. After a few minutes a police car pulled up in front of me, and a young officer stepped out.

  ‘Excuse me, sir; I’m going to have to ask you to leave. We can’t have you near these premises. We’ve had a call from Bruce’s security people.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  He motioned me into the car and then drove me back to the bus stop. It was getting dark when I saw the blurred headlights of the bus approaching, and before I got on I wiped tears from my eyes.

  I’d never told anyone at work that I was into Springsteen. The guy was sixty odd years old and I should have been into something more recent but nobody else’s music affected me like his. The only reason I liked Gaslight Anthem was because the lead singer sounded like Springsteen. Even when I was on my way to train at City I listened to Springsteen’s songs on my MP3 player to pump myself up. But I never told any of the lads what I was listening to. Springsteen sang about being glad you’re alive. A song from one of his really old albums was called Factory and it described my life and made me feel less alone. I never told any of the lads I’d been to America either. They would only have tried to reduce it somehow.

  Coming back to work after holidays is always a nightmare. That’s the price you pay for the illusion of freedom. They had me on picking and packing now. You wandered around with a shopping trolley and a picking note, putting oily fittings into bags, or boxed up fittings into boxes. You’d wheel the trolley to the packing desk that rested against the partition separating the warehouse from the trade counter and then you’d seal the bags by twisting wire around the sides or sealing cardboard boxes using a tape gun. Opposite the packing desk there were a series of wooden lockers with numbers on them and you put the bags or boxes in them, wrote the locker number on the bottom of the picking note and took it in the office, where you put it in one tray where it was picked up by someone in there and transferred onto an invoice. In that brief moment in the office you could look at the breasts of the women and get yourself a coffee from the brew machine. When you were working you could while away hours with erotic fantasies about those bloused breasts. I could disappear into my own head like that, preferred it to talking really. I stopped wearing a watch, never looked at the clock or my phone until it was close to break time, and kept all thoughts of time out of my head.

  One morning I blamed Chris for a wrong order that had gone out. He disputed it. As usual when there was doubt, Alan went into the office to find the picking note. He brought out the crumpled sheet with my signature on it. ‘Evidence is there. Black and white. Tried to stitch you up, Chris.’

  ‘Fucking told you it wasn’t me,’ said Chris, and walked over.

  ‘Sorry mate,’ I said.

  He walked closer to me and, smiling, punched me in the stomach. It took my breath away and I felt like folding myself in half, but I just walked away and tried not to show any pain. They laughed behind me. It wasn’t in my nature but I should have fought back like I had with the scrote outside the Retro Bar. If anything happened like that again I had to show the lads that I could stand up for myself. That night, back at the flat, I did a load of sit-ups to strengthen my stomach muscles and lay back on the lino sweating and exhausted. I noticed all the damp patches on the ceiling, and as I turned to get up the lamplight shone on silver fish.

  Every Christmas we went out to the Bullshead on London Road and when everyone had had a few drinks most of the men and women started kissing each other. It didn’t matter to them that most of them were married to someone else. I shagged a girl with big gozongas called Claire. I say it that way because that is what it was. I felt great when she said thank you in the morning. The good thing was we were off for Christmas and by the time we were back in work Claire seemed to have forgotten all about it. Maybe I could have tried to make something more out of it but I didn’t want a relationship with her. I was terrified of getting a bird pregnant. Rennie had done that at seventeen and he said it had ruined his life. He said his life was over from that point. Not long after that Claire got together with the young lad, Daniel, and I saw a difference in him, how he got more confident, and how much better looking she seemed to get when she was around him. I felt a bit jealous for a while there until he got her up the duff. When she came in to work pregnant she looked gorgeous though. Her eyes were bright and shining and those gozongas were huge and reappeared for weeks in morning glories.

  Big Plums was quite amiable most of the time. But when there was a line on the trade counter he got wound up. The thing that got him up most was when customers rang the bell on the till even when it was obvious people were already waiting. Every time the bell rang and Pete was in the warehouse bagging up orders you could hear him curse against ‘dumb fuckers’ or ‘cunts’. On my first day in the warehouse, after I’d been looking in vain for sky hooks, glass hammers, and spirit level bubbles, Baz and Chris forced me into a chair and used tape guns to fix me into it. Then they carried me out in front of the trade counter queue and all the customers pissed themselves laughing. But Pete was the one who ripped the tape off so I could get out.

  After my trip to America I was totally skint so I did a load of overtime to make sure I could pay the rent. One night there was just me in the warehouse and Bourney in the office. I turned the radio off and worked quietly on my own. The only noise came from the shutter doors at either end of the warehouse rippling in the wind. I looked at the rows of chairs where we sat every day on our breaks. My eyes lingered on the Brno chair. I walked through the warehouse and looked at all the pipes sitting in their racks. Evening sunlight fell in through windows and glimmered on the galvanized steel. The cutter sat motionless above the piles of silver shards. Resting on a pile of the pipes there was the football we’d made from bubble wrap and gaffa tape. I climbed onto the pipes to fetch the ball and then I started kicking it into the massive goals of the shutter doors. I practiced the technique I’d been taught at City, keeping my knee over the ball as I struck it, but then I just forgot all that and pretended to be Sergio Aguero and Alvaro Negredo, and just kicked the ball naturally like I’d always done as a kid. I smashed the bubble wrap ball into the shutters where it crashed, and the crash on the shutters echoed around the silent caverns of the warehouse, until Bourney came out of the office with the heavy bunch of keys and told me it was time to lock up. I thought he’d bollock me for kicking the ball around but he had his mind on other things. As I left the building and walked down Bury Street towards the Mancunian Way on what was a humid evening, a blonde hooker in black boots passed me going the other way. I’d heard all these rumours about Bourney before and I walked back to see for myself as the blonde climbed into the passenger seat of his car. I walked back again, stopped at the bridge just past Kozy Knitwear and looked down at the slow trickle of the Medlock. There was a heron there, stalking slowly through the shallows as the dusk turned the waters slowly black. Suddenly I felt my knee starting to cramp. The pain was almost unbearable as I limped past the FedEx depot.

  Hookers were all around the area where I lived, coming in and out of the flats, hanging around on the industrial estate where I worked. I’d walk past them every night on my way home. They would always say the same thing, ‘you want any business love?’ and it always made my pants twitch.

  I was pissed when I went with them. Usually it was after I’d had a few pints with Rennie after work. He went for his bus and I walked home through what was effectively a red light district. I didn’t want any of them to know where I lived so I let them take me to places they knew. We always seemed to walk miles in circuitous routes so that when we got somewhere I thought we’d gone a long way. Once it was at the back of what used to be called UMIST, near the loading bay. Once against the sculpture of a Vimto bottle. Once near the FedEx Depot on Baring Street. A couple of times in the old Mayfield Station. Another time on Bury Street, other times under the railway arches
below Piccadilly Station and the line going in to platform 14, down near the Mayfield Distribution Centre, or further round, down Temperence Street near the Manky Way. I had hookers on Helmet Street and Sparkle Street. I once ended up in Levenshulme on The Street with No Name, another time on a disused bowling green by the back of the old Green End Hotel in Burnage. I had a blow job in the car park at the back of The Sun in September. I never went with the same one twice. I rarely saw the same one twice. And I’ve got no stories about hookers with hearts of gold. They were all hard as nails and if I’d done anything dodgy I would have got sprayed with mace or had a battering off one of the pimps that slinked around in big cars with tinted windows. I know that because they told me that was what they’d do. You never saw pimp’s faces. The hookers stood there, talking into the car windows and then the windows zoomed shut. The last time I tried it with a hooker we were stood on the bridge on Bury Street and I saw the heron in the moonlit waters of the Medlock. She was on her knees between my legs. She wasn’t any good at it. I think she was Polish. I wasn’t drunk enough. I saw her face in the moonlight. I could have just run away. I could have done anything to her. She hadn’t even asked me for the money first and she was probably about seventeen years old. I felt compassion for her and it was sickening to me. I zipped up and walked away without paying. I said to myself that it was the only way she would learn.

  I walked back past the warehouse and the Star and Garter and up to the post office depot on Travis Street. I carried on to Great Ancoats Street, where I got on the Ashton canal towpath. Red brick walls backed onto the water. There were dull lights in small windows. The sound of a radio drifted across the canal. People were always working in shit jobs, wherever you looked, at all times of the day and night. I carried on up the towpath, moonlight shining on the broken glass around my feet. Across the water there was a yard filled with gas canisters. I ducked under a low bridge and the towpath smelled of piss. Someone had laughably called this area New Islington. It was Ancoats. They called the tram stop New Islington. The stop for Miles Platting was called Holt Town. It was Miles Platting. Near New Viaduct Street a gasholder rose high into the air and I thought about climbing one of the ladders to the top. But that was not what I’d come to do. I followed the towpath around the bend and up past a series of canal locks and sat near a tennis court, looking across the water at the magnificent Etihad Stadium with its beams all pointing to the sky. I thought about playing on the immaculate turf, how passing across that green baize would be so easy. I thought about how incredible it must feel to score a goal in front of forty-seven thousand people; to have them chanting your name after. To get substituted to a standing ovation after a brilliant seventy minutes because they wanted to keep you fresh for the next game. I hadn’t walked far but I had to walk all the way back and my dodgy knee was already hurting. In the dark on the towpath I looked back up at the windows of dull light in among the red bricks of the factories backing onto the canal, and I thought that my life was going to be one of working in dull light, not striding out to be brilliant below the sparkling floodlights before an expectant crowd for whom I could so easily have been a hero. I turned around and looked at the gasholder. I laughed at the prospect of climbing it. I looked at the water. I thought about the innocent face of the young hooker. Further up Great Ancoats Street was the Rochdale Canal. They were always fishing people out of there.

  I knew this bloke in Wythenshawe who looked after his parents at home. He had been on City’s books as a kid too. His parents were both in their eighties and had dementia, and Rob looked after them for years, wiping their arses and cleaning up their sick and picking them up when they fell. The Tories reduced his care allowance when he was getting fuck all in the first place. I hated that Eton mob: Cameron, Osbourne, Johnson. The good thing for the Tories was that Rob’s parents both died and he couldn’t put the claim in at all anymore.

  It was a Sunday night, always a time of dread, the moment when your weekend freedom is over and the creeping sadness of Monday mornings start to crawl all over you. I just went to bed and I was sleepwalking until at least Wednesday lunchtime, when the working week finally passed beyond halfway. Working had paid for my trip to America, but what about the rest of the year? Could you live your whole life just for weekends and holidays? Clearly millions of people do and that’s why they go ape-shit down Deansgate and bonkers in Magaluf. But I always had an aching sense that there must be more. Until I figured out what that was I decided to save for another holiday. I did as much overtime as was going and when I left to walk home I nearly always saw Bourney meeting up with the blonde hooker. But I wasn’t going to spend my money on that anymore. I wanted to go somewhere else in the world again. I didn’t know why I wanted to go to San Francisco or what I was expecting to find there. I just loved the name of the place. It seemed romantic to me. There was a blues song called ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ and I’d always loved that. And the one about wearing flowers in your hair. As with New York I got a cheap flight, bought myself a little guidebook, packed my rucksack and got the train to Manchester Airport. As I waited for the plane I forgot all about the warehouse and felt glad to be alive.

  The flight came in over the Silicon Valley. I got on the tram system called the Bart which took me in to Frisco. I walked my way to North Beach and booked myself into a little hostel there. I shared a room with young people of many nationalities. They didn’t stop talking until about one in the morning and then at three I was woken by the bin men outside.

  I had no plans except to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. But that first morning it was foggy as fuck so I walked down Columbus to Fisherman’s Wharf to look at the sea lions lumped together on Pier 39. The fog across San Francisco Bay was all enveloping and cold and hugged around the Coit Tower and the other tall buildings rendering everything grey. Both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland Bay Bridge were invisible, the sparkling headlights of cars seeming to fly slowly through the mist. Somewhere out in the bay was Alcatraz, no longer a prison but a powerful thought in my mind after all the films I’d watched set there. And beyond that was Sausalito, I wanted to go to Sausalito just because I loved the name, and beyond that was Marin County.

  I reckoned the mist would eventually clear and so I kept walking along the shore of San Francisco Bay and right up and around the hillside to the long approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. I started walking over it, the rumble of traffic alongside me. I saw the signs with numbers on to ring if you were thinking of throwing yourself off. I looked up at the giant red stanchions rising into the mist and walked all the way over into Sausalito. I climbed a hill, higher and higher and I sat there waiting for the sun, and the sun came, started to burn all the fog away and the Golden Gate Bridge rose red from the mists, and I looked down on its dazzling splendour and at the surrounding bay that began to sparkle beneath it, and then the sun shone on Frisco and on all the white buildings, and it looked a bit like Italy rising from the water. Suddenly I knew exactly why I’d come to Frisco. It was just to walk over this bridge. It didn’t really matter what else I did all week after that, because the sight of Frisco and the Golden Gate Bridge emerging from the mist was a thrill they could never take away.

  I walked back down the hill in the sunshine and caught a tourist ferry from Sausalito that took me back to the writhing sea lions at Pier 39. On the way there we skirted through the glistening waters of the bay and past Alcatraz, and you got a sense of the distance anyone escaping would have to swim, and how desperately lonely it must have felt to look from the island and over to Frisco all white and shining and rising up to Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill. I looked over at the Bay Bridge and that was impressive too, even bigger than the Golden Gate but without the romance or the poetry.

  I had spent all my money on transport and my accommodation in the hostel and so I didn’t really have money to do anything for the next few days except be in San Francisco. That was enough for me. One afternoon I bought a bottle of beer and sat in
Golden Gate Park looking at a lake, other days I walked up and down the hills of Haight Ashbury and through the Filmore District. I liked the sound of the Tenderloin and I wandered through there but it was full of winos and druggies and hookers. I thought, I’ve not travelled all this way to be back in a place like that.

  The vibe of Frisco was different from New York. It was more chilled out, relaxed, quieter, and with the hills and the sparkling bay and the wider spaces. Unlike New York it was place I thought I could live in. There were a load of streets named after poets. And there were high rise flats on Russian Hill, but they didn’t look over the Mancunian Way, and every afternoon when the fog cleared you would get a view of San Francisco Bay. One night I walked up Russian Hill just to see the Golden Gate Bridge at night. It was worth it. The silhouettes of its towers rose above the moonlit bay and the cars flew across it like diamonds.

  On my way back to the hostel I walked past Russell Street where the guidebook said the writer Jack Kerouac had lived. I’d seen the film of On the Road and was inspired to read the book. It was one of few novels I’d ever finished. I loved the sense of freedom in the book, how he put you right there, described the people and the places. I loved the fact that there was no plot and only really a couple of characters. And I loved that he was working class, talked about things in an honest way and didn’t dress things up in sophistication. I bought myself a copy from upstairs in the rickety old City Lights Book Store and read passages of it in a bar called Tosca’s while nursing a Canadian Club whisky. The whisky and the writing made me amazed, especially when they got to the hills of Mexico near the end, and I dreamed one day I’d go there and maybe to Colorado too.