Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (38 page)

Old newspapers, blowing in the wind, tell the same tale.

Set your rig at cruise control (this driver did), at American highway speed, mid fifties: cheese-burger, cigarette, porn stash. Trousers around ankles. Masturbating as he ploughed into the stationary vehicle. Road-reverie shattered. You can break the membrane of dream.

A man called John Davies walked it. ‘I spent the whole of September and October 2007 walking the motorway corridor, Hull back to Liverpool. This blog records my daily diary and reflections on the experience. The journey over, I’m resting my feet … I’m hoping that the break will give me some time to start to process this experience of walking … Thanks to the Liverpool Diocese Department of Lifelong Learning.’

The Hull bus terminal is right alongside the railway station. ‘Done!’ Anna says. With justified emphasis. But our journey is only beginning, these are the first flickers of a new addiction: random excursions on local buses, the Freedom Pass to Freeport. We’ve achieved enough to have one morning on the town, no report to be made. Back to the Old Whyte Hart for a plate of the best fish, chips and mushy peas in England: the pub where I stood in the rain with Petit. The contrast between the town’s original whaling museum and The Deep, Terry Farrell’s icon on the dock, is absolute. Having ridden all those miles, we have discovered that a marina is just a marina, Liverpool or Hull: different oceans, the same artworks. That pathetic family-group sculpture from Albert Dock on the Mersey has arrived on the Humber before us. In Liverpool the cast figures are emigrants, in Hull they are immigrants. Sentimental paperweights between sea and M62, idealized pilgrims walking blind through the SuperCity, shuffling between holding pens and soup kitchens. Knut Hamsun, the Nobel-winning author of
Hunger
, saw enough of England, on the train between Hull and Liverpool, before embarkation for America, to justify a lifelong hatred.

Manchester has taken possession of me for good. I cannot leave, I do not want to leave, I must not.

– W. G. Sebald

It starts with Thomas De Quincey, with
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
The recently elected godfather of psychogeography was born in Manchester in 1785. He attended Manchester Grammar School, where he found himself banished to a lightless crypt. At a whim, trunks carried to the cart, he fled; unsure if he had ‘eloped’ or ‘absconded’, south-west, to Chester and the Welsh borders. On foot. Putting up at roadside inns. Discovering that walking was remembering, anticipating, debating with your demons.

Newly settled in London, in 1967, I devoured the
Confessions
. Here was the film I would never make and the unstable model for everything I attempted to write: mountains and rivers, city as labyrinth, gossip about poets, fast-breeding metaphors. It was De Quincey who, brought to the city, plotted escape; until, lodged once more in Lake District domesticity, cells screaming, debtors beating on the cottage door, he hurtled back to town, passing himself out on the road. This creased and diminutive figure, man of the margins, unreliable witness, was the ultimate prisoner of scholarship, the library: writing to know himself, cultivating digression as a necessary device to stack up the pages, in support of a painfully loved family. Every drip of the midnight candle was a coin earned. Those twilight rambles through the most obscure parks, graveyards, riverbanks, were a method of avoiding creditors. Multiple identities were required to keep the words tumbling out. He supported a stable of researchers and ghostwriters: and they were all himself, toothless Tom, the courtly and venomous gnome of London and Edinburgh. Long coat and no linen.

In London De Quincey exists in a blur of perpetual motion: if he stops, he ceases, the words don’t come, funds dry up. In Manchester he is at rest, sheltering from the rain, pedestrians are a cinema of otherness, perhaps drunk, perhaps crushed by circumstance. The only route open to him is
out.
The road. Altringham on market day. Within the amphitheatre of the hills, the spread of the Cheshire plain, market gardens push at the townscape. Manchester is an island. A human stain. Daniel Defoe’s sprawling village from his
Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
is exploded by industry; it manages its decline by experimenting with novel identities, beneath which the old, weatherbeaten gods take shelter, pissing in doorways, and remembering to forget.

Of all British conurbations – rivers, railways, airports, development opportunities – Manchester was the grandest, the most challenging: and most avoided. It was too late, the story was too rich, I would not live long enough to fix my bearings. But there is attraction, always, in navigating a place that is completely unknown. Tapping along, fierce as Blind Pew, I was a sightless land-mariner negotiating territory where I had no good reason to prowl. As a suspect alien, I could launch wild speculations in the privilege of ignorance.

Is the rain falling now? Misting my spectacles? Good. The city-centre guide is pulp in my pocket. Out of drizzle, tasting of iron, a phantom ship appears like one of the spectres W. G. Sebald mentions in his fictive memoir
The Emigrants.
Ocean-going craft confirm Manchester’s status as a port by sliding down the Ship Canal, towering over terraces. A landlocked building, Urbis, sleek and unexpected, has turned its back on the River Irwell, to face the town and its compact, self-contained centre. Nobody knows, or needs to know, what Urbis actually is. It will soon be gone. Its swaggering newness is a suicide note. It’s all front and no content. Most of the energy around the development went into coming up with a name: Urbis. Like a hairspray or a mouthwash. A hump of mirrors. A ski slope launched with sackloads of loot and the vague intention of becoming a shout for the city. Urbis belongs to a fleet I am learning to recognize: ships that do not travel but which are the inspiration for travel by others. Attractors brought into existence with the death of industrial process. The final act of steel-rivet technology on Tyneside is to throw up Antony Gormley’s
Angel of the North
. An icon for a new theology of regeneration. The first religion to create its idols in advance of its doctrine. Construct your strange gods and we will invent the myths to explain them.

It was a simple notion: drive from London to Manchester, lodge somewhere generic, close to the airport (always a good edgelands indicator), take a bus to the centre, find Urbis (where my report is to be delivered), walk back out to hotel. Given that spine, I should be able to hang discoveries, anecdotes, on-the-hoof research, upon a single day’s excursion. I thought about recording a report, stage by stage, on park benches or steamy cafés, without mediation. I junked the notion: ‘Wovon mann nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss mann schweigen.’ Aware of the presence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, as an engineering student, in a house on Palatine Road (the same one that W. G. Sebald’s Manchester painter, Max Ferber, occupies at a later date), I consigned my ill-informed ramblings to silence. There is a legitimacy in direct speech but it has to be earned. I was never any good with dialogue, especially my own. But I keep a notebook handy and the bedroom walls are thin. The airport hotel, in which I was booked, was on Palatine Road.

Migrants, reeling from the M6 and the M56, discover in this concrete box a soothing redoubt, sound-baffled and Cold War casual. The hotel fulfils most of the criteria for one of Will Alsop’s SuperCity staging posts: Chaucerian exchanges, painless conviviality, commissioned art you are free to ignore. The building services its clients with minimal human intervention. Food is in trays, newspapers are stacked: help yourself. Automatic doors open directly on to a semicircular public space, deep chairs in which to lounge, big-screen sports-channel TV, sunken bar. A large man, who is wearing a T-shirt printed with
MAN U CHAMPIONS
18, spurns the cricket match in progress. His companion, or carer, is a City fan. ‘They should let Mark Hughes manage.’

27 May 2009. The encouraging aspect about the Urbis address we have been given is that it doesn’t exist, not in my 2001 edition of the
Manchester A–Z.
Urbis dropped from the sky, fully fashioned, around the turn of the millennium. Described as ‘iridescent’, this £28-million showpiece was designed by Ian Simpson Architects. The historian John J. Parkinson-Bailey describes it as ‘a visual and symbolic bridge between the first industrial city and the rebuilding of the centre … the focal point of the Millennium Quarter’.

Without prior knowledge, it would be impossible to assign a function to this post-architectural form. The sloping glacier wall in the deserted square is a memorial to a once-vital civilization. A concept building that will never become a ruin: either it is there or it is not there. The requirement to replace it, at once, with something louder and flashier is its mission statement. Urbis has been constructed like a set of empty parentheses.

Emerging from pedestrian precincts, investment opportunities created in the wake of the IRA bomb left outside Marks & Spencer, at 11.20 a.m. on Saturday 15 June 1996, we found ourselves in a provisional zone, the sort we have previously encountered in cities with Olympic ambitions and access to serious funds. The idea being to use local particulars to achieve a universal retail conceptualism, constructed around standard items of street furniture: the Ferris wheel, uniform ditches like elegies for lost rivers, beaches of post-ironic pebbles. Referencing a deleted industrial history is not the same thing as paying it respect, by moving on.

Anna, wearying of my attempt to register this absence, goes inside the berg:
urbis reception
(lower case). It has an inside? Oh yes – and racks of leaflets. ‘Urbis is an exhibition of city life.’ But this city doesn’t accept visitors until 10 a.m. Exhibitions we do not experience include: ‘Video Nation’ and ‘State of the Art Light Boxes’.

Tiny figures hug the flank of Urbis, heading towards their shops and offices, in a solemn, rain-slicked procession. Penitents keeping alive the traditions of the dark cathedral, the balancing structure in this precinct. In the window of the fashionable crimper Nicky Clarke, a stone-bald man is blow-drying his own polished brown skull. Like an alchemist taking a Bunsen burner to a serpent’s egg.

Anna doesn’t relish the atmosphere of the church across the square. I’m drawn to the association with the old town, the river as backdrop. Like Urbis, Manchester Cathedral is an exhibition of city life, spiritual and material. ‘This place is full of angels,’ says the brochure. A young man in silent contemplation is the only human presence. Anna heads straight for the door.

The angel flock is palpable, rooks in the rafters: in company with memory-wraiths of Manchester’s industrial underclass. The brochure tells us that Urbis was constructed on ground once occupied by ‘the worst slum in the world’. An area ‘described, in all its squalor’, by Friedrich Engels, in
The Condition of the Working Class in England
, in 1844. Engels, directing the affairs of the family cotton mill in Salford, studied economics in Chetham’s Free Library.

The complex iconography of the church would take weeks to appreciate. The depiction of a child in an eagle’s nest, mysterious and sinister, is glossed as a folk legend of illegitimate heirs and village dalliance. The panelling where the scene is found was once the warden’s seat: the place reserved for the Elizabethan magus and geographer Dr John Dee. Dee, that upstream man, with his troop of mischievous spirits, did not thrive in Manchester. ‘I visited the Grammar School,’ he wrote in a diary entry for 5 August 1600, ‘and found great imperfection in all and every of the scholars, to my great grief.’

The young man who seemed to be wrestling with a spiritual crisis approached me. ‘You draw them like moths,’ Anna muttered, on her way out. His face is smeared down one side with bloody treacle. He has been headbutting a pillar, staving in the right eye socket. He is hooded in black, but not as a fashion statement. He wears clothes from which all colour has been sucked by use. His left ear is tagged.

‘Can you list the seven deadly sins? I’m stuck on four.’

‘What have you got?’

‘Wrath, envy, greed, lust.’

‘Gluttony. Sloth.’ I improvise. There is that mnemonic, SALIGIA, but can I make the translation?
Superbia, avaritia, luxuria, invidia, gula, ira, acedia
. Cardinal sins all. We must not allow ourselves to be sucked into the granite melancholy of this city with its bombs and fires.

I am out of Victoria Street, into the long stretch of Deansgate, heading south, scanning the windows of Waterstones for my own books, when I come up with the final sin: pride.

We’re on the Roman road that ran from Carlisle to Chester (the direction young De Quincey walked). There is no time to investigate the John Rylands Library or to saunter through the House of Fraser, which Anna remembers in its previous incarnation as Kendal’s. She was sent over from Blackpool, as a teenager, to buy a cape. Those were the days when girls were supposed to dress like younger versions of their mothers. The only humans on Deansgate are hard-hats standing in quiet clusters to admire notices they have put up apologizing for the ‘hassle’ of major holes in the ground.

A tributary, to the right, sparks another fugue. The dentist. With her brothers, Anna came here by train to face drill, hammer and chisel, primitive oral interventions in an intimidating Georgian property. They looked forward to tea and sticky buns in the station café, after the session was over, and then found that their mouths were too numb for crumbling Eccles cakes.