Today is a contradiction. Henry realises this when he finally stops walking and takes a seat at the top of the steps. Beneath congregating rainclouds, his particular part of the world seems awash with silver. In front, the twisted, unpolished tin can frame of the Lowry looms, its rotrousse nose stretching skyward as if in sick desperation. Henry, perhaps strangely for a fellow of his sensibilities, admires the building intensely, but still he wonders whether this is because of the structure itself, or as a consequence of some inexplicable adopted sense of civic pride. Even the name fills him with excited curiosity.
He removes his jacket and curses himself for wearing it at all. The air hangs heavy and warm in Salford this evening and, despite the heavenly threat of summer rain, most of the folks ambling back and forth around him are in tee-shirts.
He glances across the water and is once again cast into a tender silvery orb. It has been nearly half an hour since he stepped out of the Imperial War Museum, back into the present, but he cannot shake the feeling he is somehow trapped inside.
Even from this distance, with gently glistening water dividing them, its jagged, unconventional carcass both exhilarates and terrifies him. If the Lowry is symbolic of a deeply hidden national pride, the museum exists as a beacon of personal guilt and despair; a slanted, fragile, distorted globe that expels the unity of the sphere and instead points accursedly and triumphantly at the sky. It is a deafening reminder of oppression and liberty, a joyous exclamation of the way things were and the way they are now, and Henry finds himself playing over familiar statements, clichéd but pure, in his mind: Not in MY name; Stop the BLOODY war; Your Country Needs YOU… Each war, he figures, requires a different word to be emphasised.
The quays are getting quieter now, and the sun is beginning to sink. He checks his watch, finds it is only twenty past six, and pulls himself up from the stone steps. Hushed voices are replaced by the tranquillity of early evening birdsong and the quiet exchanges of Saturday night couples.
Descending the stairs he passes a group of six holidaymakers, four of whom are in hysterics over something Henry will never know about. This pleases him and as he strolls alongside the water, away from the accusatory eye of the museum, he becomes excited at the thought of all the conversations he will never hear - those belonging to young lovers, old friends, inspired children and world-weary adults.
He settles on a bench directly across the water from Old Trafford. He has always had an affinity with the Wharfside and now, stationed centrally between two trees, he thinks he understands why. For Henry, this place is emancipation from urban existence. It resembles, at Sovereign Point, a kind of Northern Berlin. Here one can sit and inhale the people as they move over deep red bricks, not under the Linden trees, but beneath modest, beautiful replicas that – if you angle yourself correctly – entirely mask a ghastly sign for the Outlet Mall. It is here that one can gaze upon the elegant brown glass of Quay West and know that behind them stands a run-down roundabout directing people away from a picturesque island of wealth and taste, and towards poverty-stricken council estates. It is not the division of these landscapes that fascinates him, but rather the simple evidence of their co-existence.
He is torn from fumbled contemplation by the sound of a young couple arguing. They pass by, oblivious to Henry’s mounting interest in their quarrel, and each take a defiant seat on a waterfront bench. He watches them covertly for a few seconds before they slip into secretive debate and he can no longer hear.
That’s when the thought returns. It has had a grip on him all day and, although the War Museum has altered his mood in an as yet indefinable manner, Henry knows it will not be easily disposed of: today, like hundreds of days before it, is a contradiction. Alas, it had felt that way long before he decided to make an increasingly familiar pilgrimage to Salford. He remembers now the strange, burdened walk from the Lowry to the museum, still hung-over, left foot leading right across the blue and white footbridge, dragged onwards by an incredible overwhelming energy.
Since childhood he has been utterly infatuated with, perplexed by, and guiltily voyeuristic of war. When he was thirteen, his grandfather – a proud, intelligent man, both handsome and stylish – had given him a Pandora’s Box of wartime memorabilia and, with it, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. In those days, war, to Henry, meant 1939 – 1945, and everything that followed with it: hideous, alien-looking gas masks, ration books, Anderson shelters, powerful propaganda. It was then – and remains now – an entire universe of microscopic stories waiting to be unlocked and unleashed. His mind continues to oscillate between the major events and the minor significances. By the time he was sixteen he was reading books that examined the state of Europe in the early thirties and discovering, perhaps belatedly, that war does not necessarily begin and end with specific dates. Now, as he slides towards thirty, he is finally savvy enough to know that everything – every assassination, declaration, attack and conflict – is a consequence of the tiniest detail and a spellbinding occurrence unto itself.
But life can be beautiful too. He knows this by sitting here, untouched and uninterrupted, whilst the couple argues, the water rolls, and a self-obsessed world of polluted consumerism stretches out across the dockland. Regardless of its imperfections, Henry feels privileged to be a part of it - albeit from a mocking distance.
There are scores of photographers around and Henry admires every one of them. Like all beautiful places, the Quays inspire a fundamental human desire to capture the present. Some, he figures, do it purely for aestheticism; others for art. He is envious of the latter. A sensitivity to the virtues of Art has pervaded his existence since childhood (he looks at the world and experiences a private, subjective wonderment), and there is little doubt in his own mind that he can comprehend and even respond to an artist’s work. But still he cannot create it.
He first learnt this through music. At fifteen, having acquired a taste for Carl Perkins, Eric Clapton and BB King, Henry borrowed an acoustic guitar from his school’s music department and set about teaching himself to play. Just shy of fifteen years later, he is able to jam with the best of them. Sometimes, in the dusty yellow candlelight of his apartment, he catches sight of his left hand as it unconsciously frames a minor seventh, or stretches across the fretboard to conclude the resonation of some century-old blues riff, and is set alight by his ability to replicate the heartbreak, pain, misery and loss conjured up by the song’s creator – but this is as far as it ever goes.
Even as a teenager, devoid of the perilous insecurities that go hand in glove with trying to create, and in his early twenties when alcohol succeeded in temporarily liberating him from these shackles, he found it impossible to transform a love of music into inventive outbursts of his own. For six years he envisaged himself as a tortured composer: he could hear music everywhere and knew innately how its peculiar science worked, but any attempt at songwriting of his own sounded flat, diluted, troubled and uninspired.
Then he met Jenny, his first real girlfriend, and she introduced him to the music of Johnny Marr. It was unlike anything he had encountered before: sweet, subtle, melancholic notes weaving in and out of one another to form modern day concertos exploding with life. Henry turned his hand to learning these records, spellbound by the crashing cacophony of major and minor chords, and realised that by playing them he could lose himself, however briefly, in reflective sadness and swelling joy. A guitarist born only a few miles from where he is sitting now had saved his life.
Henry shifts his attention to a man of Eastern descent who is setting up a tripod. His movement as he takes aim behind the viewfinder carries a delicate professionalism, and there is grace and intelligence in the way his fingers glide and hover over the camera’s aperture controls. Henry would give anything to trade places with the photographer for a few moments, if only to see what an expert sees in that small rectangular box as he mentally divides the world into thirds and frames a shot that will transport whoever sees it in the future back to this precise point in time. He keeps his eyes fixed on the tripod, engrossed and anxious, suddenly sure that when the camera clicks it will sound like a gunshot resounding off the water. Weighted seconds pass and then –
‘I know you.’
It is not the sudden closeness of the voice that surprises Henry, but the sweet, softly spoken certainty of its tone. Only later, forced by the dying of the day to light a candle, does he recall those opening three words and understand their full importance. How different the statement might have been; how expansive and varied the connotations of the English language – ‘Do I know you?’ and ‘I recognise you’ resigned to the blacklist in favour of an honest, soulful declaration of assurance.
Henry turns to find a girl standing beside him.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I know you,’ she says again. ‘From the museum. I saw you by the nuclear warhead. You looked lost.’
Henry smiles. Indeed he had felt lost, stood before a small television screen while a 1976 government film explained what to do in case of a nuclear attack; and, below, the black, slender, shark-like exterior of humanity’s most devastating scientific achievement. To look upon such a vile creature, so Henry believes, is to witness the struggle between Oppenheimer’s moral consciousness and the dark psyche of the American government.
‘I don’t know what’s worse,’ Henry starts, fumbling for the right words. ‘The bomb itself or that bullshit office-training-video excuse for a film.’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ the girl answers. ‘The bomb is much worse. It pretty much wins out against everything in terms of disaster, destruction, distaste…’ She trails off, steps out of the light, and takes a seat on the bench. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Not at all,’ he replies, without thinking. Despite a natural inclination to greet confidence with a pathological shyness, and presently set somewhere between intrigue and apprehension, Henry cannot help but look at her. Without the sun obscuring her, he can make out green eyes and pink, thinly-pursed lips. She is beautiful, charged with an unconventional desirability that many would recognise but few understand.
‘So, is that the first time you’ve been?’ She asks, looking, for the first time, directly into his eyes.
‘Yes, but it definitely won’t be the last. Already I feel compelled to return.’
He considers holding back his full arsenal of feelings about the museum, partly because he does not want to erupt in flashes of hyperbolic nonsense, but mostly because he wishes to protect his own mind from dealing with the intensity of his experience inside.
‘I watched you while the show was playing,’ the girl says. ‘You passed me twice and there was a look on your face like… like you couldn’t get out.’ The girl is sincere – this much, at least, is obvious. When she speaks it is with the delightful insight of a comedy writer and not condescending self-confidence. Henry immediately likes her. He recalls entering the museum, penniless and at odds with his state of mind, convinced that beyond the gift shop, just up the darkened stairs, something illuminating lay in wait for him.
The World War 1 exhibition had been fine, and apart from a dehydrated shakiness in his limbs, Henry had floated around like all the others, distantly appalled by suicide in the trenches and lice-infected boots. It was when he arrived at the gates of the unsteady thirties – those years plagued by a gathering sense of disharmony and betrayal – that he began to withdraw. Powerlessly, unwillingly, he slipped into a world enveloped by twenty-foot black and white photographs: women from the home front stared down at him; tremendous film projections of Holocaust survivors set to a soundtrack of childish pencils scratching and scribbling words onto discoloured paper climbed the walls. A disorientating darkness prevailed and his chest grew tight. He pressed on quickly, his heart heavy, his will surrendered, shamelessly following small black arrows in the same way he had once excitedly followed former girlfriends across crowded dancefloors. Before long he had lost sight of the directions and found himself alone. Breathless and consumed by panic, he fell obliviously past windows boasting a wealth of curious artefacts, desperate to be near someone. It struck him then that he was operating on some primitive level, pre-historic in its purity, longing only for another of his species, craving nothing more than blind, unspoken belonging.
He turned a corner, the noise of the show solemn and deafening, and was confronted by an armoured tank. Totally in awe of its size, the extended gun barrel bearing down on him, all he could think about was Tiananmen Square, and that solitary figure facing down a demon similar to this one, motionless, unmovable, trapped forever in celluloid.
‘I don’t remember seeing you,’ Henry says, unevenly.
‘Oh, I didn’t expect you to.’ And then: ‘Wine?’ She fishes a glass bottle from a plastic bag Henry had not seen at first, and smiles. ‘It’s red. I can tell you’re a Communist.’
‘Thank you.’ He is unsure about which part of her statement he is replying to.
‘I’m a forward thinker.’ She says, and fiddles with the neck for a moment. ‘Screw top, see?’ And with a flourish she removes the lid. ‘No cups though, so we’ll have to have at this like a couple of winos.’
For the next minute or so nothing passes between them except for the wine. It burns pleasantly in Henry’s throat and he feels as though he ought to offer words of gratitude. Equally, it is a silence he does not wish to interrupt. He has experienced this kind of feeling before: a dizzying wave of connective awareness that occurs when you meet the gaze of a stranger on a passing bus, or catch the heavy eyes of somebody on a loveless nightclub dancefloor. There appears, in those moments, a fleeting glimpse of the self reflected in the uniqueness of another. It is comforting to have solid evidence that vulnerability is not without its virtues.
‘I’m leaving here tomorrow,’ the girl announces.
‘Leaving Manchester?’
She nods, coyly. ‘Forever.’
‘Do you feel sad to go?’
She considers this before answering. ‘Giddy. I feel giddy.’
A smile forms at the corners of her mouth and she glances at Henry very briefly as if in need of validation. She does not strike him as socially inept but he knows that those who truly are sometimes polish off the Wildean mask and become somebody else entirely. It is not easy to do, neither is it a particularly life-affirming role to play, but it does possess a reticent charm.
‘Why are you going?’ He asks, inwardly troubled by the premature loss of this curious stranger. One of the imagination’s primary beauties is its ability to race impatiently and vividly ahead of itself when it comes to other human begins. Though he cannot rationalise it yet, Henry already knows that he wants to be around her. By the time the question is out, friendship – or perhaps even a romantic relationship – is no longer a stretch of the cognitive faculties.
The girl – still nameless in his world, though it matters very little – gestures for the bottle and when it is back in her grasp she explains: ‘I made a pact with myself when I was sixteen never to live in the same place for more than two years.’ She takes a good gulp of wine, glances at the couple sitting by the water (who have given up talking in favour of a silent, passionate embrace) then continues: ‘Between you and me, I cheated. I’ve been here closer to three.’
‘This city will do that to you.’
‘And then some,’ she agrees. ‘I lived in Mile End before. Musical association aside, I couldn’t wait to get out.’
The bottle returns to Henry. He does not know how or why is here, let alone his reasons for remaining on the bench. Standard British etiquette dictates that when confronted by strangers one is to make their excuses and get as far away from them as possible, thus avoiding pity, sympathy and lengthy unwanted conversation. Today that is not the case and he feels elated to be rejecting his usual manner.
This morning he had been awoken by the sound of the Electric Light Orchestra harmonising over ‘Mr Blue Sky’, only to find that Emma had slipped into bed beside him sometime during the night. In spite of an indefinite, unromantic hiatus in their relationship, she has done this a lot over the past few weeks and Henry, constitutionally bound to believe that when the sun comes up all his love is wasted, finds it difficult to deal with. He has friends that have, in the past, continued to sleep with their lovers in the months following a supposed break-up, but it has always struck him as an unhealthy vice in which to indulge.
Not anymore.
Throughout the two and a half year tenure of their courtship Henry has become accustomed and, worse, addicted to sharing a bed with her. He enjoys the way they fit together: the tried and tested point at which their bodies meet, the curve of her breasts, an arch of the back that allows comfort and ease when they sleep. It is a synchronicity two people perfect over time and he is not yet ready to relinquish it.
How then did he come to be sitting here? He is - to his own mind - angry, ill, and ugly as sin; unapproachable to those who do not know him, aggravating to those who do. But there is something that burns within him – not the bright, illuminating spark of an artist – but something that draws human beings to him, and he to them. He both loves and hates people, and this is not based entirely on the flippancy of mood. Deep within Henry there is a contradictory soul - genetic, natural and true - that enables his feelings to fluctuate from day to day. Long ago he had believed - even longed for - it to be the building blocks of Genius; an exceptional ability to see a little further down the road, to read people in the same way he read Hemingway, Orwell and Blake. Later, when adolescence crossed the road into early adulthood, he questioned his faith, began to see it as hopeful arrogance, and contemplated instead the plausible absence of some pleasure-inducing biological reaction in the brain.
‘Where are you going to go?’ He asks, mindful of the prolonged silence.
‘Canvey Island. Then Brighton. At least I think so.’ She pauses. ‘And you? Are you going to stay here?’
Henry laughs. ‘I don’t know. Freedom is wasted on me.’ He swigs a huge amount from the bottle, a little too much to enjoy the full spectrum of flavour on his tongue, and passes the baton. She takes the wine - still nameless, still charming – and asks:
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘The museum,’ he replies. ‘How terrifying it is, and what my sort-of-is, sort-of-isn’t girlfriend would think about it all.’ His honesty surprises him.
‘And?’
‘I have no fucking idea.’ They laugh, in sync and in harmony, and it feels genuine. ‘There’s this thick grey cancerous wall of silent deception when it comes to that girl. Just when I think I understand how she works, or what we’re doing together, or whether we even are together anymore, the cloud descends and I’m screwed all over again.’
‘Sounds like the L word to me. Better to have it than to not. That’s a fact, and I should know.’ Her words are drenched in what could be sarcasm or bitterness. Either way, Henry wonders what has brought her here, to this point of existence, evidently versed in love and life, clever enough to make fun of them both. He tries to imagine the boy that broke her heart and his motivations for doing so. Was he inwardly beautiful, perhaps raised on jealousy, resentment and insecurity? Or pretty, cool and insincere? Had he been unfaithful? Did he crumble completely when she cried? Henry dismisses speculation, startled by the miserable pain he feels for a fictional infidelity.
That’s when she grabs his hand.
It is a familiar sensation: the reassuring touch of another person, made fresh by the unfamiliar softness of the girl’s flesh. At first he dares not look and, seemingly triggered by his lack of reciprocation, the girl squeezes tightly. It is everything he needs and Henry lets his palm flow into her grasp, their fingers entwined in a manner usually reserved for shy, nervous lovers. She does not know him and he knows nothing of her, but it feels right. Today the world is nothing more than a swirling contradiction and yet to be here, locked intimately into a person he may never have encountered if not for the bloody celebration of a thousand years’ conflict, is to welcome a dulling of the senses and the onset of an evening’s peace. The arbitrary nature of strange hands coming together for no reason other than to feel something injects him with a bizarre happiness.
They sit like this for a long time, not speaking or looking at one another, preferring instead to keep their eyes fixed on the diminishing glow of the Salford evening. Henry, his thoughts introverted and private, is somewhere else entirely when the girl speaks again.
‘And now you know,’ she says, turning towards him.
‘Know what?’
‘That in amongst the confusion and the dark clouds, for one day in June there was somebody else in the world that understood what you’re about.’
He takes a moment to consider this and feels her hand fall away. She downs the last of the wine, sets the bottle on the ground. He wonders if she feels light-headed now. He most certainly does, and he quickly remembers he has not eaten today.
The girl roots around in her pocket and removes a small black notepad. It strikes Henry that she is going to write down her name and telephone number, something he previously believed happened only in Hollywood.
Emma’s face does not need to spring into his mind. It has been there all along, waiting for this moment, the physical personification of his conscience.
The girl scribbles onto the first page of the book, and he can tell by the movements of her hand that she is taking time and effort to make it readable. She rips the sheet out, folds it in half and gives it to him.
‘Don’t lose it,’ she says, getting to her feet and collecting the wine bottle. ‘Bye.’
‘Bye,’ Henry says, but she is already walking away. He watches her, a little spellbound, and soon she is gone.
He does not read the note right away, happy in the knowledge that whatever it says will not match the infinite number of life-changing statements he is currently imagining.
Without her next to him things become hazy again. Alone on the bench, his mood lightened somewhat by the wine, he thinks about W.H. Auden’s immortal definition of what constitutes great art: ‘clear thinking about mixed feelings.’ This, Henry feels, is easier said than done, and very rarely do people uncover insightful truths about themselves without an element of blissful surprise.
With this in mind, he unfolds the note and reads what the girl has written. In dark pink lettering, the words:
This Day Will
Never
Happen
Again
And, beneath, a drawing of a heart.
Henry smiles, elated by the sentence’s shameless relevance, and when he stands to leave he is sure of only one thing:
He won’t let it get lost.
(Tim Woodall, 9th June, Manchester, 2008)
