Chris had been back to Germany, for a coda to the series, a co-production he called Content. ‘My latest film,’ he said, ‘is entirely posthumous. I started to think about structure. How you look at landscape, how to get from A to B. The obvious thing is not to meet anyone, not to be linear. I wanted to go back to the windscreen and the road. I wasn’t shooting anything. I wanted to go back to Berlin and on to Poland. And then, later, Dallas. The desert. California.’
Dissolution informs this Audi project too: shapes in the dark, disguised research institutes in farmers’ fields. The sun was setting over a deserted quarry; across the valley, a Land Rover churned up dust as it slalomed down the track towards us. Petit recalled the climactic sequence of Radio On, another quarry, another car, doors open, nowhere to go. We were never, at this stage of the game, going to travel far beyond quotation. Films were now shot in an afternoon.
The new Adelphi, Britannia Adelphi (Liverpool), is the state-of-Britain film that Lindsay Anderson never quite got around to making; after rugby league in Wakefield, Britannia Hospital and The White Bus. Our breakfast bunker is packed with Arthur Lowe and Leonard Rossiter substitutes waiting for their coaches: Lakeland tours, Blackpool Illuminations. Ranked taxis offer to run three people (£45) or five people (£65), for three hours, on a Beatles circuit with ‘lots of photo opportunities along the way’. Mathew Street, Penny Lane, Newcastle Road, Menlove Avenue, Forthlin Road, Arnold Grove, Madryn Street. The idolatry of exterminated Beatles is a major industry: bad boys, slick movers, sanctified by global capitalism and the Celtic passion for wakes and displays of public mourning.
Before we get that bus, we are obliged to sample the Mersey end of the Alsop SuperCity: art, food, spectacle. The Reich Chancellery weight and neoclassical gravitas of that block of halls and museums around William Brown Street is intimidating. Anna’s cataleptic episode on the dock road started with a high-speed trek, the way we insult a City of Culture by cherry-picking its highlights in a couple of hours.
I like the room of classical busts, old gods drained of blood, injected with formaldehyde, chilled into marble. Titular spirits who have seen it all. Shafts of pale afternoon light falling across city fathers, emblematic lovers. The Walker Art Gallery manages its heritage cargo of accidental plunder: trophy Pre-Raphaelite madonnas, competitive topography, and up-to-the-moment, top-dollar commissions.
The picture of the month is a Liverpool cityscape by Ben Johnson. An anamorphic spread: steely blues and aircraft greys so hyperreal that you know it’s another CGI fiction, another visiting card from a future that will never arrive. Johnson, after working on a reconstruction of the Urbino panel, an ideal city attributed to Piero della Francesca, accepted a gig from Hong Kong Telecom to paint a panorama to mark the transfer of sovereignty to China. This Liverpool cityscape, from high above the Mersey, stares unblinking at a planner’s dream of a regenerated, maritime city-state: with empty docks and the human element reduced to dots on the edge of the cultural quarter. ‘Some of the buildings,’ the brochure admits, ‘don’t yet exist or are currently being built.’ But the accuracy of their dimensions is unimpeachable: eleven studio assistants, consultations with historians, architects and planners, ensure it.
What need then of the old Liverpool, its crooked lanes and loud cellars, its failed speculations and faded department stores? What place is there for the golf-tee spike of the Post Office Tower growing out of a Holiday Inn? Or the shop windows filled with OK! magazines duplicating the approved marriage portrait of Wayne Rooney and his bronzed and airbrushed bride? A major ‘coming soon’ development – GRAND CENTRAL – has ambitions to make Liverpool anywhere but where it is. A destination without a hinterland.
Beside the revamped docks, necrophile sentiment underwrites the heritage makeover: a glistening black Billy Fury, legs spread, gestures at the cranes hovering over new white blocks. An immigrant group signals the pathos of their conversion into a compensatory symbol. Anna remembers, coming back to herself as we settle in an underground bar in Hope Street, being brought here by coach to take part in an anniversary service, to sing in Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral with the school choir. The dark interior of the Gothic revival church is forgotten, sound does not fade.
The point of our bus trip was spontaneity. Anna had to restrain me from jumping on the first vehicle with free seats that was pointing in approximately the right direction: kamikaze pensioners, rucksacked and black-bagged, half-smart (top half), we voyaged in expectation of the rising sun. A day of low cloud, dishcloth skies, mercury roads. Steady movement and, once aboard, no decisions to make: where you go, we go. End of the line. End of the story.
Liverpool buses, I do appreciate them. I stayed once, a terrace in the near-suburbs, with the poet Robert Sheppard. The highlight was the ride, next morning, into town: the friendliness, the breathing space, the way people carriers arrive as soon as you raise a hand. Back home in Hackney, aggrieved clients step further and further into the traffic, scanning the horizon, willing the missing bus, any bus, challenging it, to make an appearance. In Liverpool, travellers nod and chat, take in the scenery, discuss the reasons for their journey, cross themselves, and generally acknowledge the privilege of being chauffeured around town, in comfort, for a few coins.
Robert Sheppard, who had experienced it, full on, as rate-payer and citizen, composed a few words around Liverpool’s status as City of Culture. ‘Their shit’s verdure but that’s OK / This isn’t a nature poem.’ Sheppard’s near-twenty-year epic, Complete Twentieth Century Blues, outweighed the Ringo Starr returns, the showbiz art: he cooked slow and long, with tangy sauces and bits that break your teeth. The city averted its eyes. Alsopian relativity spurns language that stops our headlong gallop, calling it a ‘difficulty’. As if it were the poet’s fault that we want our meat pre-chewed.
We have a pack of timetables, but none of them make much sense. I’m impressed by the PR material put out by St Helens (previously known to me as a Rugby League team, the Saints). A triumphalist player is featured on the cover of the Visitor Guide, showing off his Pilkington Activtm sponsorship. That’s the other thing in St Helens, glass. We have to get to this Eden on the borders of Liverpool and Manchester. A very Alsop-sympathetic attractor. ‘One-time cradle of the industrial revolution … a growing regional destination of choice … with status as the most car-friendly place in Northwest England.’ The promotional pitch is constructed around ‘a landmark new internationally significant artwork’. Which has yet to be identified. It will be unveiled later in the year (subject to planning permission). It doesn’t matter what this artwork is, or does, or who made it: until you have your Angel of St Helens you are just another car park off the A580. (A road number which looks to my soft-focus gaze very much like ASBO.)
If St Helens is the event horizon of our first ride, the immediate prospect, according to Merseytravel, is Huyton. There is so much room on the bus; the bus is a room, a waiting room in transit. Silver-grey tarmac speckled with mica. A high street running on like an infinitely extendable ladder. This ride is a transformative experience, molecules shaken, memories invoked: the cold, greasy metal, the coarseness of tobacco-infested cloth. Generous window panels break down the division between street and interior. We’re clients of a single-decker with bright green poles and red request buttons. Old ladies are the only ones heading for Huyton; old ladies and their mild-mannered grandchildren. The ones who remind me of Welsh excursions in the company of women: mother, grandmother, great-aunts. I don’t think, outside London, I was ever on a bus with my father.
As we pull away from the city centre, the threat of regeneration imposes a uniformity on cancelled terraces; the same blue shutters, old trade-names painted out. The long, uphill road is as unreal as the back projections outside the coach, as it escapes East Germany, in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. Passengers accept their role as actors in this fiction, they acknowledge our presence, but leave it at that. The local bus service is the last democracy. Accents shift with the miles
travelled, allegiances are a real thing: Will Alsop’s elastic uniformity doesn’t play. Liverpool suburbs stretch but do not sprawl. A bus is not a coach (Freedom Pass holders have to pay for a coach ride). When Alsop was being processed through the north with the Urban Renaissance Panel and other lottery-fund commissars, a coach was laid on, never a bus. Luxuriously appointed coaches, with reclining seats and personal monitors, carry Premier League millionaires from ground to ground: Wigan, Blackburn, Bolton. In the flat-cap, Woodbine-and-pint-at-half-time days, footballers took the bus. Coaches don’t stop. They have tinted windows to ameliorate blight: to prevent the curious from looking in. Nobody looks out. Multinational superstars are electronically anaesthetized. Texting. Tweeting. Enduring.
Anna grew up in Blackpool and went to school, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, slap on this bus route.
‘Will you recognize Huyton?’
Would anyone recognize Huyton? Whatever ghosts it once possessed, they have been rehoused. The bus station is the best of it: a flat-pack conservatory with Jagger-tongues of wilting greenery. We have an agenda here, to locate Anna’s school, to validate that skein of the past, four seamless years, in which she was happy. The fissure in her life comes when she is removed at sixteen, sent off to another place, more bracing, academically challenging: a mistake. But a fortunate one for me, as our downward drift carried us both across the Irish Sea to Dublin. There were a lot of buses in Dublin.
The estate where the school once stood, pointed cliffs of red brick, has been treated in the usual fashion: residential care homes, nurseries for 4-wheel-drive mothers, secure apartments. Voices from captured playing fields. Private roads dressed with weeds. Dogs barking at our approach.
‘I should never have come,’ Anna said. Swimming pool, tennis courts, corridors loud with music. Brought back. Vividly present. ‘The chapel gleamed with flowers. There were groups of girls in the long cloaks we wore in the winter, hoods lined with the house colours.’
My conviction that every bus station must have a decent café somewhere in the neighbourhood is disproved: McDonald’s or nothing. The expedition I mount to humour my prejudice against uniformity carries us through accidents of pay-off architecture, a suspiciously well-funded library. Huyton is favoured by the legacy of its most celebrated MP, Harold Wilson (pipe in public, cigars and whisky in private). This is not one of those Californian vanity jobs, shrines to Reagan or Nixon. The Harold Wilson Library is downbeat municipal, shelves of politics and sociology for ambitious swots. But no maps, nothing local in this locality. No copies of the booklet on Liverpool’s Chinese community that I failed to pick up in the city.
St Helens has the first roadblock we encounter, a blue-tape incident. Concrete police station with windows like nicks from a cutthroat razor. The low rail around the flat roof won’t deter convinced (or persuaded) jumpers. A large woman in pink T-shirt, tight mid-calf leisure slacks, pink socks and trainers, is trawling a white bag for that missing cigarette. A hunched, no-neck ovoid, she seems built for water rather than the rough boundary wall of the police car park.
We need a luggage rethink. My black bag is cumbersome. I choose a rucksack from a shop on a pedestrianized traffic island. The town slumbers undisturbed around the statue of Queen Victoria and a promised comedy festival. ‘The spell of the journey is upon us,’ Anna says.
The Scouse accent has flattened out, the patter. When you move through unknown territory, there is no obligation to list particulars; let it drift. Shuttered pubs and roadhouses with no road. Avenues of dwarf trees barely shading patches of worn grass. Our fellow passengers are tidy, with lightweight sports-casual clothes and considered hair. They chat, some of them, turning a blind eye towards the themed George Orwell Wigan Pier pub, alongside the sanitized canal. An insinuation of pies and gravy on a bed of golden chips makes Anna hungry. But we don’t have time to stop, there’s another switch to be accomplished, another bus station.
A double-decker: MANCHESTER LIMITED STOP. We climb the stairs and take the seats at the front. We’re going to make it – and already there have been so many varieties of custom and behaviour; a retreat from the linguistic extravagance of Liverpool. Those Wigan pies sit heavy on the stomach, even when you have only seen them stacked like geological specimens in a shop window. The bus nurdles through miles of proud suburb. A gobby girl takes the seat to our left, chewing her mobile: ‘I’m not in a mood. It’s you, right, you’re in the mood. You’re not listening: I’m not, not, not.’ A daily ritual, this affectionate abuse. Virtual courtship: phone-sex on a budget. She studies her nails. Places her feet, ankles crossed, on the window ledge. She alternates spite-riffs with lingering red-tongued licks at a sugar bag that looks like a plasma sachet. ‘You’re trying to put me in a mood, you, so you don’t have to see me tonight. You don’t wanna see me, I don’t fucking care. I’m not in a mood, you’re in a right mood. You are, you fucking are. Are.’
Garden plots nudge against trim estates: Manchester’s emerging blot. The whale of the north displaces a lot of murky bathwater. Down which we slide, drenching pedestrians.
‘Traa. Traa. Traa. Fuck off.’
She dismounts, leaving us alone; the bus in its descent, into the storm, is our personal limousine. A tour of brown-sign cultural highlights: Trafford Park, Salford University, Coronation Street Experience. High-angle perspectives on terraces that are still terraces. Aspirational cul-de-sacs. Tudorbethan multiples with apron lawns. Stuttering cars from driving schools with self-important logos.
We need to find somewhere to stay that is convenient for the bus station. The nest I select, over other Travelodges, has a selling point: centre-city, in-transit sex. ‘Be more rock ’n’ roll next time you visit … Indulge in one of our suites, loaded with the latest gadgetry, dressed top to toe in the slinkiest of interiors. Enjoy power showers for sharing and tubs in front of the telly … A doll walks in … well, the place was once a doll hospital, someone fix her up.’
Very Tinto Brass Caligula. Straight to video. Straight to drug-shame-3-in-a-bed tabloid exposé. But a decent night’s king-size slumber after the shuddering of the buses, the hungry road. Segment of canal beyond double-glazed windows. Ink-jet smear of industrial heritage.
Next morning, a uniformed doorman with a branded umbrella chases us into bar-code rain.
‘Car or train, sir?’
‘Bus. Direction of Hull.’
Anna notices a scrawny young woman stilting towards Piccadilly Gardens. ‘Little cropped jacket,’ she recalls. ‘Bare white midriff. Sky-high black heels. Fishnet tights, tiny denim shorts. Wide leather belt decorated with metal studs. Thin blonde hair scraped back in a ponytail.’ And pushing a baby buggy, with attitude, on her way to ram-raid Mothercare. While giving her infant a good rinsing. ‘I love her style, her energy. Her attitude to the weather.’
A single-decker for the climb towards Oldham’s ridge, wipers going like a North Sea trawler. Cranes loom over unfinished concrete skeletons. Chinese distribution centres. Converted Methodist chapels. Junkyards, botched scams: a townscape with which I am very comfortable.
At the front of the bus is an old fellow whose portrait I have to record. A Lancashire music-hall turn, all nose, collapsed cheeks, and mouth like a ring-pull. He mumbles, rehearsing his patter, a litany of grievances. A stoic comedian who has run out of straight men. Ratty suede jacket with fake astrakhan collar. Nose dripping steadily. A stalactite mime of melancholy and malfate who makes me feel glad to be alive.
Opposite him, and totally unaware of his presence, are two young ladies of this city, beauty reps, old hand and novice, one white, one Asian. They charm us with their vivacity and rhythm. The girls are dragging demo equipment around with them, folding tables, bulky black bags. The newcomer, the round-faced Indian girl, never stops yapping. Her companion, checking with the supervisor on the mobile, has to shout. They love their work and wear it, painted masks of small perfection. They are industrially perfumed: against the urban mould of sodden gabardine, the consumpt
ive hacking of the submarine-bus. Hooped spines of demi-cripples transported through a catalogue of tall chimneys and dark canals to their proper Lowry setting. A rattle-bag of museum-quality relics glorying in their redundancy.
At the Oldham terminal, we pass out of one timetable, through a building that reminds me of Athens airport with its ever-shifting and reconvening queues for various island destinations, into another: the connection for Huddersfield. Nobody can convince me that the cultural shifts we are registering – weight of pies, speed of speech, attitude to surroundings – could be brought within a single system. Or that such a system would be desirable. Huddersfield passengers have an upland quality about them. Braced for the Pennine transit and delighted to be riding, not marching, heads down, into the perpetual mist.
Chip shops. Chinese restaurants. Hairdressers. A slow ascent with many stops to take on students who immerse themselves in books and iPods. Getting away from Oldham involves another blue-tape incident, blood on the stones. After Saddleworth, Yorkshire announces its difference. Anna respects the labour that has gone into rows of immaculate and competitive gardens. Over damp moors, the view from the front of the bus is romance: soft grey-green hills in the distance. Farms and scattered villages.
A change of driver and, after all these silent hours, what Anna describes as ‘a party atmosphere’. Like refugee families returning home after the Blitz. A young woman, loaded with bags, climbs out of the bus, miles from anywhere, the nearest farm barely in sight.
I haven’t allowed time for food, it’s out of one bus and straight on to the next. I’m not convinced, although I don’t admit it, that we’ll make that ultimate connection, back down the M62 to Hull. In Huddersfield a woman at the information desk suggests Pontefract. But we could try Wakefield. Provisioned with pork pie (an ice-hockey puck welded out of doggy chews), flapjacks and scalding coffee, we’re on the move again. Difficult to sip and suck in this trembling vehicle. Up north, buses are not cafeterias in the Hackney style. The odd schoolkid deflating a crisp packet or puncturing a can of fizz, that’s it. We dine with fastidious discretion, hunkered down in our seats. I hop off at the first halt to dispose of the half-drunk carton, the crumbly evidence.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Page 28