SKYHOOKS
The story of a lad who was on the books at Manchester City but got injured and never made it.
‘A vital writer, in touch with people and the natural and constructed worlds around us.’ —NICHOLAS ROYLE
Sky hooks are like glass hammers and bubbles from spirit levels, things you get asked to find on your first day in a warehouse. In this case it is also a metaphor for dreams.
Set in contemporary Manchester this story is about a lad who was on the books at City but got injured and never made it. It is a coming of age tale, and the first part of a trilogy.
Praise for Neil Campbell’s work
‘Everyone who takes contemporary fiction seriously will want to read and re-read this book.’ —ANDREW BISWELL
‘The dialogue is note perfect and has a studied, savage banality.’ —PAUL MAGRS
‘These are stories not of love but of need and they ache with truth; they are as eerie and lonely as any Hopper painting.’ —NUALA NÍ CHONCHÚIR
NEIL CAMPBELL was born in Audenshaw, Manchester and has worked in a variety of jobs including warehouseman, bookseller, library assistant and teacher. He has two collections of short stories published by Salt and two poetry chapbooks published by Knives Forks and Spoons. In 1999 he completed an MA Dissertation on the short stories of Raymond Carver. In 2005 he did an MA in Novel Writing at MMU, and from 2010 to 2013 studied a PhD in Creative Writing at Northumbria University. He has had numerous poems and stories published in small press magazines, and from 2003–2008 edited a magazine called Lamport Court. Had a story, ‘Sun on Prospect Street’ published in the Best British Short Stories 2012. He currently lives in Stockport.
Published by Salt Publishing Ltd
12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX
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Copyright © Neil Campbell, 2014
The right of Neil Campbell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.
Salt Publishing 2014
Created by Salt Publishing Ltd
This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 978-1-78463-000-3 electronic
Sky Hooks
I KNEW FROM THE start that the foreman was a twat. One of the first things he said to me was, ‘I don’t like loners.’ Another thing he said was, ‘don’t give a sucker an even break.’ We were never going to get on.
When I was kid I was on the books at City. I’d played for the local team, Audenshaw Rovers, and then I got picked up by Tameside Boys, and on my debut for Tameside Boys I scored four goals. They took me to Platt Lane and I trained there with some of the first team and then I did my fucking knee in. The triumph in my Dad’s face turned to bitterness and he’s been drinking more and more ever since. I played with a lot of lads who didn’t make it. You get written off in your early teens. Mate of mine was a keeper at Bolton. He got rave reviews in the youth team, but because he was less than six foot tall at sixteen they let him go. What a joke.
I got some stick in the first few weeks working in the warehouse because though I was fit as a butcher’s dog I wasn’t used to lifting and carrying things. So I’d sit down on the oily surface of flat bed trucks and it was obvious I’d been sitting down because the oil stained the arse of my jeans. The only good parts of the day were when the birds came out of the office for a smoke. Some of them were well fit. When I was working upstairs you could see out of the windows at the front and into the factory on the other side of the road and there was a fit bird in reception there.
I went out at weekend with my mates Shacky and Scoie. We went to Deansgate and it was always rammed. Scoie worked at Tahiti Aquariums in Ashton and Shacky at Kerry Foods in Hyde. All the lads in Deansgate wore the same kind of shirts. Getting dressed up just made me feel stupid. When I got home pissed I’d sit there on the bog and look at my hands. No matter how hard I scrubbed I couldn’t get the oil off them. It was ingrained in the skin on my knuckles and at the sides of my fingers. Even punching shop shutters till my hands bled didn’t get rid of the oil.
In a warehouse the way it works is that you spend the morning loading up the wagons, and then when the wagons go out, you spend the rest of the morning putting stock away. In the afternoon you start picking and packing the new orders, and then in the morning you do it all over again. That was pretty much the routine at Manchester Fittings.
At first they started me off in Goods In. They gave me training on the stacker truck and then I was able to take pallets off delivery wagons all day. I’d put the pallets in the loading bay and then use a pump truck to wheel the pallets around the warehouse putting the stock away. Whenever the bell rang on the shutter doors I had to stop what I was doing and go and answer it, and I’d stand there with my finger on the button watching as the shutter door started rising and curling up on itself and the legs of the delivery driver and then the rest of him appeared below it. He’d give me an invoice to sign and tear off my copy and then we’d start unloading the wagon. Sometimes it was just a few boxes, not pallets, and so we’d carry them off and drop them down in the loading bay or put them on a flat bed truck. The drivers always wanted to talk and I’d join in with them. I remembered that one of them was a rugby league linesman. I’d recognized him once on the telly. Another one always used to tell me about his fishing trips to Denmark and how much the beer cost over there. One time the delivery driver was a woman. I couldn’t stop staring at her tits and she smiled wryly. I had tits on my mind all the time. I was obsessed with them. The bigger the better.
There was a guy called Rennie who worked in the warehouse and he was a total pisscart. Mad as fuck too. Whenever the goods in bell rang you could always hear him shriek from wherever he was, ‘who is it? who is it?’ It was a daily feature of the warehouse and it always made me laugh. Rennie had worked there for forty years and the thought of that didn’t even make me smile.
The trouble is when you’ve been out of work for ages they make you take a job you wouldn’t normally want to do. After college I never thought of working in a warehouse but they told me I had to go for the interview. The rock and roll was fine apart from the depressing part where you had to go to Fallowfield and sign on once a fortnight. They interrogated you more and more each time and offered you all kinds of crap. But they said the job would be better for my self-esteem and I fell for that bullshit. So I took it and I got stuck there, was too tired to think when I got home, and all I wanted to do at weekend was get absolutely shitfaced. I left behind my teens in this way.
The worst jobs in the world are the ones that involve manual labour. When you finish work you are well and truly fucked and you can’t even think any more. And there’s nothing like manual labour to give a man a thirst. If you’ve never done manual labour you’ll never be able to understand that. You start getting thirsty from about three in the afternoon and when you get to the boozer and have that first pint it really is the best moment in your life.
I lived about a ten minute walk from the warehouse, in a high rise flat called Lamport Court. It overlooks the Mancunian Way. The only times the traffic went quiet was when they sometimes closed it for mainte
nance work at weekends. One night I slept through a fourteen car pile-up. You don’t have trouble sleeping when you work in a warehouse. During the week I used to go to bed before ten just to get the day over with. I was on the eighth floor and it was okay up there. In a high rise flat the characters get dodgier the lower down the building you go. Don’t ever go in someone’s flat on the first floor of a high rise. I rolled home pissed one night and got chatting to a bloke as we put our fobs to the door. In his flat he passed me a can of lager and even though I was pissed I was conscious of the absolute roar of the traffic. It was funny how you could always find someone to drink with. He put the telly on really loud and we sat on a couch that felt damp. The room was lit by a low wattage light bulb that dangled from a tangle of twisted wires among patches of damp on the ceiling. There were piles of dirty clothes on the floor and a baseball bat resting against the wall. When I went for a piss the water in the bog was black and on my way back I looked into his bedroom and saw a mattress on the floor covered in a scattering of empty beer cans and bottles. I gulped my can and got the fuck out of there, leaving him slumped in the shifting light off the massive TV. The next time I saw him I hadn’t remembered him and the time after that, when I had, he blanked me. Nobody said anything to anyone in the flats. When people got mugged outside you just watched from the windows. The first time I saw a mugging I called the police at Longsight and they never came. So I didn’t bother after that. People used to park near the flats and then walk into work, maybe at the universities or in town. I was walking beneath the underpass when I turned and saw a guy in a suit being set upon by two hoodies. He threw punches back but the two of them were too much. They took his phone and he just stood there bloodied and baffled. I had to get to work. What could I have done? That’s just the way it was. No sense in getting my own head kicked in. That’s why people always kept themselves to themselves in the flats. If you turned a blind eye and didn’t get involved you could at least look after your own back. And the higher you went in the high rise the better off you were when you locked and bolted that heavy door behind you. Nobody was going to rob you on the eighth floor and the views when the sun set were something special; the skies all red and vast and dazzling. I’d sit out there with a beer and watch crows on the roof of the Manchester Language School, the evening sun glinting on the glossy black of their feathers as they croaked to each other.
Another night on my way home past what used to be called UMIST I saw one of my neighbours in the flats hassling young girls for money. I was a bit pissed and feeling brave and so I said, ‘Stop fucking begging’.
‘You fucking what?’ he said.
‘Stop fucking begging. And your girlfriend’s a hooker.’ Although this was a statement of fact I’d put it rather crudely and he twatted me in the right eye. I swung back and caught him a glancing blow but then he twatted me in the right eye again. At that point a bouncer came out of the Retro Bar and the scrote that had been twatting me ran away. I had a hell of a shiner the next morning and my colleagues in the warehouse seemed to approve. Maybe I was just like them after all.
The lad that had punched me was called Riggers and he found out what flat I was living in. This is why people keep their heads down in flats and don’t get involved. He started banging on my door in the middle of the night, and whistling below my window hour after hour, at two, three, and four in the morning. I never saw that it was him but I knew it was. It was a game, maybe something he’d learned in prison; psychological warfare that involved depriving me of sleep. I got out of bed to peer down on the streets to try and see him whistling. I never saw him but I saw a lot of other things, mainly women from the flats getting in and out of different cars and foreign looking men driving away. And many times people having sex in the cars, the rocking motion, the muted fucking sounds ending all too quickly.
So many times I’d seen drunken men wobbling home, falling off pavements, stumbling in puddles, re-righting themselves, travelling by drunken radar and cursing at the streetlights. And these were men I’d seen with suits and briefcases on weekday mornings. I watched the billboards turn over while nobody was watching, the traffic lights changing when there were no cars, the green man leading nothing across the road except the odd urban fox that had torn apart rubbish bags and littered the flats around the lobby. But I never saw Riggers, and never heard a whistle or a bang on the door unless it was waking me up, by which time it was too late to see him. Then all of a sudden the whistling just stopped, and I never saw Riggers again. I think maybe he’d probably been banged up for something and was doing a bit of a stretch.
At work they trained me up on the overhead crane so I could load and unload pipes on and off the wagons. It could hold ten tonnes of pipes. The pipes were mild steel and either black or galvanized, in all sizes from an eighth of an inch to six inches in diameter. And they were either plain ended or screwed and socketed. There was a yellow control box that hung down from the ceiling and it had up and down and forward and back buttons on it, and you put bands around the pipes and then attached them to the hook and then lifted the pipes up and walked with them through the warehouse to the racks. Then you put skids down and lowered the pipes down onto them. And when you had unhooked the crane and taken off the bands you pressed the button and took the hook back up to where it rested in the rafters, left the yellow control box dangling and went for the wire cutters. When you cut through the metal straps that held the pipes tightly together they fell apart and crashed against their metal supports sending echoes around the warehouse. I was always anxious doing this. It was a dangerous process. If those pipes fell on you they’d kill you without a doubt, and I did this on most days until the lad they’d put in goods in wasn’t getting the stock put away quick enough and I had to go back there.
This lad was called Daniel and later on they gave him the job cutting the pipes. Sometimes customers wanted three metre lengths not six metre so he had to cut them in half. This was another dangerous job and I was glad I didn’t have to do it anymore. You clamped the pipe in a vice and rested the rest of it on a rack and you were supposed to oil the blade before every cut and use goggles, but nobody used the goggles because they were covered in shit and left oil on your face and head. You turned the cutter on and the circular steel blade whizzed around, and you adjusted the vice to just above the blade and then you took the handle from under the blade and began to wheel around in a clockwise direction, holding it steady when the blade met the mild steel of the pipes in a flash of sparks. You had to put your shoulder into it and after you’d done about half a dozen your arm felt like a lead weight and there was a silver heap of oily shavings melting on the floor by your feet.
Sometimes if a bloke came in just wanting half a dozen or so pipes in less than a three inch diameter it was quicker to carry them than use the crane. If the blokes were okay, which most of them were, they’d give you a lift. The pipes were all six metres long so you lifted them up at the end and slid them back until halfway along when you rested the pipe on your shoulder and lifted it. Your shoulder ended up with a black or silver patch on it depending on whether the pipes were black or galvanized and how many you lifted. And you had to walk carefully with them especially when you turned around because if you smacked some fucker in the chops with the arse-end they’d know about it. You’d carry them to the bloke’s flat bed truck and he’d rest one end of the pipes across the roof of the cab and the other end in the back of the truck and then strap them together and then you’d close the shutter doors behind him when he drove off.
If all the orders were done and the wagons were all loaded and all the stock was put away then instead of standing around you picked up a sweeping brush and swept all the dust and fag dimps together and shovelled it all into a bin. If one of the directors came out of the office it always seemed to be in a moment when you’d just stopped briefly to have a chat with a driver or something like that, and it looked to them like you were weren’t working and that really pissed m
e off. It wasn’t long before I had a real chip on my shoulder about all those fuckers in the office. Just because they wore suits and ties they thought they were better than us. None of them knew that I’d turned a job down in there. That was a stupid move on my part. I felt like a mug and a loser and that was the truth of it. When I was in the pub with Rennie after work I drank one pint after another until he had to get his bus. I walked back down Bury Street past the warehouse and over the Medlock and under the Mancunian Way, crossing London Road near a skate park under the overpass and making my way back down Brunswick Street to the high rise.
We stocked pipe fittings of all kinds: flanges and valves and pipe couplings, elbows, tees, barrel nipples, hexagon nipples, reducing bush, cross, sockets, unions, plugs and caps, clamps and brackets, Kee Klamps, sockets and hemp. We delivered to places like Boole’s Tools in Stockport, and Crane in Northampton and British Steel in Sheffield, and Kellogg’s and loads of other places in Trafford Park, and all over the place where building work was going on. But when all the building projects stopped because of the recession we started to struggle. Every month after the sales figures they took us in the office and we had a meeting. And I always resented the fact that month after month they felt the need to tell us we could lose our jobs if we didn’t work hard. I didn’t give a fuck about losing my job. If I worked hard sometimes it was because that was how I felt like getting through the day. But it was warm in the office and women went past, and we got to sit down, and we kept the foreman talking for as long as we could and the dumb cunt never twigged.
At the end of each day we’d go up to the toilets on the first floor to wash our hands. Each of us would stand at a sink, fill the bowl with hot water and then reach into the bucket of Swarfega and rub the jelly-like substance on our hands before rinsing them. There were scrubbing brushes too, and I’d scrub my hands red raw trying to get the oil and dust and dirt out of my hands. But I think the oil sealed the dirt in, and I couldn’t lose the shading on my knuckles or the patchwork patterns along the edges of my fingers. They gave us gardening gloves but they were a pain to wear. You had to keep taking them on and off all day to sign paperwork or check invoices or to use your phone and in the end you just couldn’t be arsed.
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