Sky Hooks

by Neil Campbell

  With all the walking I’d done I was exhausted when I got on the plane. I had three seats to myself, drank four beers and then stretched out across the seats to sleep, waking just before the approach to landing in Manchester.

  Back in the warehouse I was more depressed than ever. Because it was a job I could do easily I was never stressed, but I was physically knackered. That combination stopped me trying to get out. But it was the original dead-end job. I sat there looking into a bag of greasy barrel nipples, counting one after another as the order stretched out into the hundreds. In my mind I saw the sparkling expanse of San Francisco Bay below the blood red of the Golden Gate Bridge. The contrast of the two moments was stark in my mind. I thought about Alcatraz too. I looked at my hands, the ingrained dirt, sealed in by the oil and grease of the fittings I laboured to count every day; the hands that every women I met could never fail to see. The job seemed fucking pointless. I just dumped a load of fittings into the bag without counting.

  I began making more and more mistakes: picking and packing the wrong fittings, putting stock away in the wrong place, throwing bags in the wrong lockers so they went on the wrong wagons and got delivered to the wrong places. I got more and more bollockings from Alan, and then eventually he sent me in to see John Bourne. And Bourney surprised me. He said that I was being put back in goods in, and that if I did well over the next couple of months I would get a pay rise.

  The next few months I worked hard in goods in, getting all the stock put away quickly and nearly always keeping the loading bay free. Each night before five I swept the loading bay floor and glanced back with pride before leaving for the day. Two months later I went in the office and asked Bourney about the pay rise and he explained patiently to me that although I had done a good job and it had been noticed by many how often the loading bay was clear, the sales figures for the company were down and he couldn’t justify giving anyone a pay rise. I was fuming when I came out of the office. I felt like a total mug. I’d worked my bollocks off for nothing. From that moment I decided that I wasn’t going to work hard anymore and that I was going to have to try harder to find a way out. I had to do something else. But what? I needed more qualifications, but the tuition fees the Tories brought in made going to university seem out of reach for someone like me. Sometimes I thought there was no way out and that I would be stuck in the warehouse forever.

  Chris knew I’d been trying for a pay rise. And he’d been having a pop ever since I’d accused him of sending a wrong order out when it had been me. We were sitting in the chairs at break time and he wouldn’t stop ribbing me.

  ‘Thought you were getting a pay rise didn’t you shithead?’ he said.

  ‘No, why?’ I hadn’t told anyone about my promised pay rise and wondered how he’d found out. I guess Bourney had told Alan and Alan had told the lads. I suddenly felt cornered, like they were all against me, laughing.

  ‘Shithead.’

  ‘Fuck off, Chris.’

  ‘Shithead.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Hey Alan, I reckon both of us pay more tax each month than he gets wages.’

  It was an old joke, but Chris and Alan laughed merrily. I looked at Rennie, but though I liked him he never stood up for me. Like everyone else, he looked after his own back. He didn’t take sides, never rocked the boat.

  Chris started singing, ‘What a shithead, what a shithead.’

  ‘Chris, just fucking shut up will you?’

  ‘You’re a shithead. You blame other people for your cock-ups and you’re just a shithead,’ he said, rising from his seat and standing over me. I stood up and he pushed me back down but then something snapped. I grabbed him around the waist and pushed up out of my seat with my legs, knocking him into Alan and then Alan’s desk, spilling Alan’s coffee and knocking paperwork off the shelves. I kept my head down and kept shoving Chris’s back into the desk and he was punching me on the head but I didn’t feel it, and I kept ramming him into the desk until Alan and Baz and Rennie and Daniel pulled us apart. I could see the surprise on everyone’s face, especially Chris’s, who clearly wasn’t expecting it. Over the next few days I really watched my back. But nothing came, there were no reprisals. Chris had just been embarrassed and he left me alone after that.

  On the rare occasions when we got really busy Alan always got an extra lad in from the agency. Mark was one of those lads. The first day he came he had a black eye patch over the right eye. He was about ten years older than me. He was lanky and had long, light-coloured curly hair, blonde but with grey already in it. Every night after work he went into town on his own to go boozing. The second time we got him in from the agency he had a patch over his left eye.

  One night we went in the Bullshead, and then had a few more beers in different pubs around town: one in the Town Hall Tavern, another in Sam’s Chop House, one in Mr Tom’s Chop House, one in the Shakespeare. We ended up in The Waldorf. There was a match on the big screens and I settled back to watch it, but Mark just kept talking over the commentary.

  ‘Sport is a waste of time,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘It is. Bunch of grown men running around after a ball.’

  ‘Takes a lot of skill.’

  ‘My arse. And the money they are on is a joke.’

  ‘That could have been me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was with City when I was a kid. But I got injured.’

  ‘Sorry mate. But probably for the best.’

  ‘How do you work that one out?’

  ‘Look, sport is fucking stupid.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind if I was out there, all those people chanting my name.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything worse.’

  ‘What? You must be mad.’

  ‘All that kissing and cuddling after every goal. Rolling around on the floor, diving when someone kicks you. And then you all get in the showers together after.’

  Just then someone behind us told him to shut up. They were trying to watch the game. Mark stood up in front of the screen, blocking their view. He was tall, but skinny.

  ‘I am trying to have a conversation!’ he shouted. I pulled at his sleeve, but he carried on, ‘I know you plebs love to ease your pain by watching these pointless games, but we are having a conversation.’

  ‘Sit down lad,’ said an older bloke.

  ‘Fuck off granddad!’

  ‘Hey, that’s my dad!’ said someone else.

  ‘Tell him to mind his own fucking business then,’ said Mark. Just then City hit the crossbar, and the lad who’d first told Mark to shut up walked right over to him and put his face into his. ‘Either sit down mate or I’ll make you sit down.’

  ‘You and whose army?’

  At this, the lad, who was shorter than Mark but stocky and tattooed and with a crew-cut that contrasted sharply with Mark’s floppy blonde curls, shoved him down into his seat. I tried to keep calm, hoping it would blow over, but after the thing with Chris my fists were ready. Thankfully Aguero scored in that moment and City got another couple early in the second half, so everyone was in a better mood.

  I tried to get Mark to leave, to go for a pint somewhere else. I should have just gone home, but after a few pints I always just wanted to stay out, keep drinking. I thought only boring people had a couple and went home. But Mark wanted to stay. He kept staring at the crew-cut lad. But the crew-cut lad wasn’t pissed off anymore and just shook his head and laughed and turned away. Mark went for another couple of pints. He necked his and then suddenly marched over to the crew-cut lad, who had his back towards us. Mark put his hand on his shoulder and the lad just swung his fist around and knocked Mark onto his arse. And Mark just lay there. Then he started laughing and that freaked everyone out. He was just lying there on the floor and laughing. The landlord came over to me and told me to get Mark out of there before someon
e ‘wraps a fucking pool cue over his head.’

  That night he kipped on my couch and pissed on it in the night. After he’d gone and as I launched my sodden settee off the balcony I realized that he was an alcoholic. I was just someone for him to drink with. After that I never saw him again. He was just one of those people that burns brightly in your life and then disappears.

  In summer I went to see Springsteen at the Etihad Stadium, and though it was great and I felt at ease in my own company, I was tired of just seeing great things like New York and Frisco and Asbury Park and Springsteen and having nobody to share it with. I needed a new way forward. Drinking and holidays were just temporary solutions. I though the thing with Chris had made me feel better about myself, but not long after that I woke up in Bootle Street police station.

  There was bile in my throat and puke in the toilet. I was lying there on the blue mat and looking through the frosted window high on the ceiling and thinking about the time I scored twelve goals in one game for Audenshaw Rovers. Cell doors banged open and closed as I lay squinting into the haze of the morning sun.

  There’s a time when you’re a kid that if you are any good at sport you find that you are better than all the other players your age. That day I scored twelve goals was the day I found out. It was sodden wet and we were soaked even before we started the game. Dukinfield Tigers had won the league for the previous few years but their best players had got too old for the juniors and we had some great young kids coming through. There were two brothers who started playing for us. They were from Abbey Hey in Gorton and because our manager Norman was from there he knew them and persuaded them to play. And there was Daz, Norman’s son, six four at fourteen, good at cricket and golf too. Daz was a great passer of the ball and he set up many of my goals that day. I could take you through them all but I won’t. I swung one in with my left foot, got a couple of headers, but the best was a free kick, up and over the wall. We played in full sized goals and their keeper was tiny so I just kept lobbing and chipping him. I hit the bar a couple of times. Everyone was talking to me after the game that day. People always talked to you when you played well. When you missed a load of chances and you got beat nobody spoke to you at all. Dad was there on the day I scored twelve. What had happened to the promise of youth? How had I ended up like this? Sport is not pointless. It holds the promise of a dream, and the promise of a dream is something to keep you going.

  When they let me out of Bootle Street Station I walked past the Central Library and the Midland Hotel and back up to Oxford Road to Grosvenor Street where I took a left and walked back home towards the high rise. It was a bright Sunday morning. There were many windows, but no faces.

  I didn’t even know what Lent was really, but it happened to start the day after I’d spent the night at Bootle Street. So I gave up drinking for Lent. I wasn’t so up and down. I felt like I was on a flat even keel. I drank loads of tea instead. I had a clear head all the time and told myself I needed to get a grip. It meant I no longer went out with Shackie and Scoie for a beer, and any bloke I’d ever had a beer with soon disappeared off the radar. I missed them but I didn’t miss the drinking. I realized I had been spending all my free time drinking with other single men and talking about women.

  Because I didn’t need a drink, and I knew quite soon I had never needed a drink, I was much more relaxed. Women seemed to like it. I didn’t have anything to say and so I listened to them. I had learned at last to just shut the fuck up.

  I started going out with the girl on reception, Chloe. Her big tits made me crazy. When she first took them out I gazed in awe. I rumpled them repeatedly, causing her to giggle, and then kissed them before running out of ideas. She was impressed that I was going to night school. But I knew I wasn’t in love with her and so I ended it and she was upset. And then all the girls in the office were sniffing around me and I slept with a few of them. We were all young, nobody was interested in getting married. One thing I had learned was that you had to go out with a girl and sleep with her before you could decide how you felt. I had fucked up falling for that Caroline but there had been no chemistry between us and it was all a delusion. With certain girls it is how they talk, how their eyes animate when they smile, how their whole spirit and soul shines up through the skin. Even the anticipation of boobs excited me more than playing with them. Maybe that’s life right there.

  I had thought that all girls with boob jobs must be shallow. But some women just get a boob job because they’ve always been unhappy with the way their tits look. And if they have the money they sort it. When Michelle came in the office everyone, men and women, stared at those massive tits straining at her blouse. They were even bigger than Chloe’s and Claire’s. And she wore these tiny cardigans that fell back from her shoulders and accentuated everything. I knew that getting close to her was all about keeping my eyes on her face, which was very attractive to me, and complimenting her intelligence. The job on the phones was easy for her and none of the other women liked her. I talked to her whenever I could when she came out for a smoke. She was a sweet girl who was going to get married to a lad she’d gone to school with. We were all invited to the wedding and the do was at Quaffers in Bredbury. A few of us went on to Bredbury Hall. I copped off with a woman who’d just got divorced and we got ourselves a room in the hotel there. She was lost and I took advantage of her in a way.

  It came as a great surprise when a cheque came through the post for seven grand. It was an inheritance from my granddad. He’d passed away years before, but I didn’t get what he left me until his second wife died, and she clung on into her nineties. Suddenly it seemed I had more options. Granddad had worked forty years as an insurance agent for a company called Manulife and before that he’d fought in the war. He was a character with a zest for life. When I became a teenager and shot up quickly he started calling me Lofty. He showed me how to swim and how to swing a golf club, and he drove a Toyota Celica, and they went on holidays abroad every year and he always seemed to have a suntan and to never put on weight. I wasn’t going to waste this man’s money.

  I finally signed up to re-take my ‘A’ levels. First time around I’d got a D in English Literature and totally failed Business Studies. I was training at City then and I didn’t give a fuck. And I’d dropped out of P.E. in the first year. Instead of playing football and cricket they had us doing all these other stupid things like Modern Dance and lacrosse and trampoline and I couldn’t be arsed with all that. I decided to take the ‘A’ levels that I had the most chance of passing, and so I did English Literature and English Language.

  I could barely keep my eyes open in the evening classes. There were about a dozen of us there and the classroom was really warm and after working in the warehouse all day it was really hard to concentrate. In one of the classes we were talking about one of those boring nineteenth century novels that goes on forever and has loads of characters and describes everything in minute detail, and the lecturer said she had read it in a couple of hours. This amazed all of us, but she shrugged it off. What I like about books is that everything always stays in the same place and you can find what you are looking for in pages you hold in your own hands. Before the exam we were allowed to make notes and even write in the margins of the books. The exams were held in a gym. Afterwards I worried that I’d tried too hard, written too much.

  By the time June came around, I had a place waiting at Manchester Metropolitan University if I got the right grades. I remembered revising all the poetic terms like metaphor and personification and all those things, and using them all in my answers, and I hoped this might see me through the literature one. On the day of the results I went into the college and in through the open door and they gave me my envelope. I went outside with it and sat on a bench near a grassy area in a car park of the college. I opened the A4 envelope with my heart beating fast, and when I read the grades I shouted, ‘Yes! Fucking yes!’

  Everyone in the warehouse knew I was leaving o
n the Friday. Nobody had said anything about a leaving do. I guessed we would go to the Bullshead and get pissed, and then maybe head into town. But that Friday morning I stayed in bed, and stared at the time on my phone. Half an hour after I should have left the flat to go to work I got out of bed and dressed. I stood out on the balcony and looked across at the jam-packed traffic on the Mancunian Way and decided not to bother going in. Instead I walked down Oxford Road and went into the Ryman stationary shop, where I bought myself an A4 note pad and a pen.

  Back at the high rise I went up to the eighth floor in the lift and wandered the length of the walkway. Before going inside I looked beyond London Road towards the warehouse. I could just about see the roof behind the hotel that used to be the BT building. There were trains coming in and out of Piccadilly Station, and beyond them, the Etihad Stadium with its shiny hooks glinting in the sky. I remembered reading somewhere that Springsteen said if one dream fails then find another dream. That’s good advice, but you can’t just forget the first part.

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks again to Jen and Chris

  Also available from Modern Dreams

  Devil On Your Back by Denny Brown

  Sky Hooks by Neil Campbell

  The Pharmacist by Justin David

  Precious Metal by Michelle Flatley

  Albion by Jon Gale

  Marg by Jones Jones

  The Blame by Michael Nolan