chapter one

   Like the ringing noise of the unanswered telephone echoing down the line, like the angry futility of coldly attempting to light the dampened fire - the different dream and vision began that night for Lyndsey. There was someone or something in the gloom that she was straining to reach out to and see as she peered piercingly through the cold night air. Her usually quiet and ordered mind was suddenly in turmoil as she sought to identify and observe what and to where it was that she was thinking.

   Standing on the Victoria Bridge and looking southwards over the River Irwell and the grey linear landscape of Manchester’s city centre, Lyndsey was looking at and intensely scrutinizing her view. Around, below and behind her there were bright lights and shrieks, and crashing crescendos of noise. Only tonight though, whilst the noise and stimulus were raging all around her, she could feel the tranquil and vapid air inside herself too becoming more troubled, as confusement and questions were brimming inside her head.

   The cold air was sharp and there was a chill mist lying low over the river surface. Up above it all on the bridge, Lyndsey was well layered and sealed into her warm clothes, but her suddenly racing mind coupled with the frosty temperature, prompted her to keep moving – keep on walking. This evening so far, she had been quiet and peaceful, her mind still and merely patiently viewing, through her dark expressionless eyes, the dull familiarity of her hometown around her and the view she often came to see and examine from her vantage point on the Victoria Bridge. Whilst all was often still and quiet within her though, she viewed a busy frenetic world of movement and purpose.

   Traffic and commutation was alive and total movement all around her, as she stood motionless against the parapet. Scattered all over the breadth of her vision were the bright lights of the hundreds of tall buildings, the randomly placed office blocks and the lonely jutting outlines of the hotel towers. Everywhere before her, piercing in the darkness of the late evening light, was the glaring, blurring illumination of the red, orange, white and yellow traffic, tram and train lights. And the noise was total too – every smaller background noise filling in the lulls and dips of the soundtrack of the shrieks and tumult of strident horns, sirens, alarms and engine noises.

   Lyndsey carried on walking her slow, thoughtful steps. From the direction of Deansgate she continued to move along the walkway of the bridge whilst craning and turning her neck with her eyes wide to take in all she could see. Slowly and increasingly, her mind was beginning to turn as it abstractly assembled and labelled all she was viewing. Cars, vans, buses, et al were rushing and pushing by, unstoppably flowing and moving on to their different destinations, all busy with their own intentions and purposes. Away they surged, down the dual carriageways to near locations  - Salford, Prestwich, Middleton, Stockport. 
  
   Outwards out of the city, joining the arterial links allowing quick access and exodus routes to Liverpool, Lancashire, West Yorkshire and on and on. Away so smoothly, so quickly, so fast. Away from it all. Lyndsey watched and pondered on the processions and celebrations of bright lights and noise with watchful, darting, dark eyes and pursed-up lips.

   Exhaling a long stream of cigarette smoke, Lyndsey pulled down the sleeves of her black leather jacket further to allow the cuffs to mostly obscure her cold, white hands. The late evening air was almost still, but there was a low creeping chill in the place of the wind. Pulling her woollen hat further down over her ears, she began to walk back towards the north side of the river and the city. Joining Chapel Street, then onto Victoria Street, she walked with an increased step. She cast her spent cigarette as she passed along the street in the vague general direction of those still working almost automatedly late into the evening, and through the night into morning. Office workers hunched over monitors and keyboards, chattering inaudibly into mouthpieces. Cleaners, with glazed far-away eyes, vacantly pushing and pulling around their implements and tools. Security people, absently and frownedly moving quietly through the empty corridors and concourses they guarded.

   Lyndsey passed their offices and buildings – the high, sheer, artificially lit slabs of grey granite and glass. And all the time while she passed by the perpetually moving wheels of industry and work, the un-impedable and never ending stream of traffic passed her by at far greater speeds.

   Now at this late evening time on a frosty, cold autumnal night, the streets around the area of Victoria Station were largely devoid of people. Onwards she walked past the angular Arena building – cavernous and sleek. In the distance, the low twinkling of the rows of residential flats – all with inhabitants shuttered, enclosed and locked away from the outside world. Away into the darkness of the sidewalk, only the occasional streetlight was partially illuminating the road and walkway giving visibility and a remote semblance of security. Occasionally a passer-by would move by, or worse and more frighteningly, one would step out of the dim and dark alleyways bordering the road. Male – always male, these lonely, aimless inhabitants of the night streets.

   “Hey darling, how much do you want for…”

   Or more openly – “Hey dear, are you working?”

   Or just straight to the point – “Hey – do you want to fuck?” 

   Occasionally she would be confronted on her night wanderings by these sad cases who couldn’t help remarking on their feelings and base impulses when they suddenly saw the unfamiliar sight of a young lady on these streets at this time of night. Mostly Lyndsey was silent. She didn’t want to engage in any contact or allow herself to be jolted or withdrawn from her own private world. Only occasionally and reluctantly would she speak or reply, always as a last resort:

   “Nothing – no”

   “No – go away”

   “Just Fuck off!”

   She tried always to move onwards without stopping and so offer no indication that she had heard. If she had to speak, it was with the shortest of sentences, the merest ejaculation of words. Always her rule, her long term philosophy – her being, all her act was to absorb their remarks without showing any signs that she had done so and this existed in her living routine and make-up for most of her daily encounters with those around her, not just merely for her regular walks and forays into the night of the dark city.

   But tonight was even more important. Lyndsey’s mind and head were busy with rising thoughts, visions and ideas. There had been something out there from the bridge that she had sensed that night, something that was stirring something inside her. As she walked on, busy assembling her abstract wonderings, as she elusively grappled with what the something’s were, that were troubling and moving her, she moved on slowly, determinedly keeping out all outside human interference. Tonight she was for herself, tonight Lyndsey was inside herself. She moved on relentlessly walking, apparently towards nowhere.

   Away up and onto Cheetham Hill Road. The artificial light was more constant and reliable now, but still the only passers-by were the ceaseless cars and general traffic. Lyndsey stopped for the first time since leaving the Victoria Bridge to look back towards and at the busy moving vehicles. Such speed, movement, haste and so much apparent purpose.



   Lyndsey didn’t work, she still lived with, and was largely kept by her parents, who lived in a pleasant ordinary flat in a relatively rundown and built up anonymous area. Two years previously she had left school with passes and good grades in all the subjects she had taken. Through her final years at school she had been in many respects the model pupil, but also, almost in equal measure, she had often been the antithesis of this. Her studied silences and internal mental habitation had been viewed firstly as hostility bordering on arrogance by those around her. Towards the end of her forced attendance and confinement at school, she was largely viewed with bemusement. Such a strange odd girl this pretty, dark haired, brown eyed creature. Very able to articulate and interact – fitted and laden with these skills, she just for a variety of reasons chose not to use them.

   To describe her as lonely and friendless would be wrong, Lyndsey knew many people and some were elevated to closer confidences and allowed more access and penetration into her world than others. But to describe her as confidante-less would be more truthful though. An action as explicit and, in her eyes, crass, as claiming or explaining her anxiety was not a mode of expression or an emotion she would use. What seemed to make sense to her troubled logic and twisted sense of self-protection was to convey any feelings of angst, contempt or joy by her facial expressions, her eyes and with as few words as possible. By these actions she may have seemed or come across as being hard, impassive or even emotion-less. But they wouldn’t see her later retreating into one of her favourite, familiar, private haunts and attempt to mend the hurt inside with thorough and internal dialogue.

   The support her parents gave her – the feeding of, the shelter and the small allowance she received, kept her afloat and able to exist physically in the world around her. Her ability to mentally exist was at times shaky, but she was the sole contributor and supporter of this, withstanding the sometimes earnest, the sometimes semi-violent attempts of others and her parents to penetrate and contribute – in brief, to understand her.

   The dual reasons of work are, arguably and solely, financial and self-respect. Both of these seemed redundant to Lyndsey as one was supplied to a limited, but an acceptable degree, by her parents, and the other was present in a tangled sense, fed by her own feelings and self-belief. She was very sure and confident of her own worth and the validity of her outlook and views, and of the importance of herself and the place she occupied. But just now and increasingly of late, she could feel herself looking at herself and wondering. Of shaking her head and looking away, almost of sharing the bemusement of many of the others.

   Tonight of course the abundance of frenetic movement, activity and purpose she had watched from the bridge had precipitated more of her self doubt; she could easily close this off – she could sense quickly the malignant elements in her thoughts of too much listening to what others were saying, too much of watching the world around her moving and doing their things. At times like these she had to guard and steel herself and her resolve; this was almost like siding with the opposition! She smiled to herself. Narrowly with no feelings of joy and happiness, just a grim black sense of humour.

   To see others happy and at one with their world when you are not can be stirring. To see others around you succeeding and progressing while you – yourself are… Well Lyndsey certainly couldn’t feel any sensation of missing out, falling behind, of losing. But she had a strong sense of merely feeling. Of simply being still: buoyant but motionless. A strong, ever-growing aura of stasis was seeming to pervade her thoughts and her direction. A strong sense of self-confidence and belief can deflect and repel these feelings, even tackle and disseminate them. But recently questions and doubts of her own making were beginning to creep beneath her protective shell and make themselves felt.

   Now, standing on the bridge, all thoughts, observations and feelings, had been of others moving on – and purposefully, with intent and reason. With direction. Walking herself up Cheetham Hill Road, Lyndsey’s head was heavy with questions and self-inflicted accusations. Fitting in with these, almost aurally she could hear the questions of her parents, her teachers, her associates and other assorted well and ill wishers:

   “Where are you going?”
   “Why are you doing this?”
   “When will you change?”
   “Why can’t you grow up, act conventionally – act normally…?”

   One vision from the bridge, one broad ranging thought and now so many questions shifting the unstable sands of resolve under her feet. Now her own ambience of well being, her contentment with stasis, it all felt like something other than a different path or a different viewpoint; it felt like something more negative, almost akin to travelling blindly and lazily. Instead of determinedly moving toward a world of her own choosing and existing on her own terms, she was merely drifting. And drifting so aimlessly and slowly.

    But all those other people tonight... All those people travelling from A to B. Why travel at all? For so many reasons and purposes, or merely because B is a better place right now than A. And the sensation now – the bright lights and noise of the city centre, of Cheetham Hill, Denton or Stretford, could soon be the quiet and darkness of Cheshire, Snake Pass or Saddleworth. The road or rail they were on now, could and would soon be another track in a different part of the town, country, even the world…



    Lyndsey was walking with a heavy heart but with a slowly gaining-determination step. To her left of Cheetham Hill Road, she could hear rather than see the trains travelling into Victoria Station and out again, out of Manchester, out and on to… well anywhere you could imagine given enough time. And she had so much time…

    She closed her eyes as she continued walking along the street she had travelled along so many times before. This was her hometown; she knew so many of its corners, streets, and pavements. She closed and kept her eyes closed because it gave her an activity to think of, other than the well of unwelcome thoughts in her head. It also made it easier for her to keep from crying.

   She didn’t want to feel like this, didn’t want to begin accepting the other points of view – but she had to have faith in her own being and direction, otherwise she had to seek a new one and maybe, possibly could they be right..?

   Now, right now, she snapped her head back and firmly opened her newly defiant eyes. This cracking and sudden splintering of her resolve and self-belief decided her, her sudden impulsive course of action. The obvious one – to go, get out and move on. Time to find people with whom she could articulate with and mould herself on, time to live amongst scenery and an environment that was new, different and one that inspired her.

   Now to walk back to Cheetham Hill and Crumpsall to the jarring familiar was hard and dulling. But the bridge, and now her resolve had shown her a different view, a different way. Suddenly she felt happier, more determined and pointed. She was once again walking her own path, singing her song, she wasn’t looking at and listening to theirs. It was time to shape up, wise up and go - get out there to find herself. It was time to stop drifting.

    The streets are dark and big in north Manchester at night. But you’re by yourself. Through Cheetham Hill to Crumpsall is lonely; cars rush by, but onto distant destinations near and far away – they never invade or penetrate the lonely pedestrian’s world at this time of night. Lyndsey had been in the city centre, her home had been only ten or fifteen minutes away by car or taxi, but she needed and wanted the thinking time afforded to her by her long walk home, even though she had made up her mind and her resolve was only stiffening. Walking past and through the residential streets, she tired of the endless link roads, main roads and junctions – the grey erratic spaghetti of the streets. Reaching a low fence she shinned over and dropped down into the environs of Crumpsall Park.

    Now all is black. 10.30 in the evening in October, and in a secluded place with no artificial lights, this could be anywhere that is dark in the world. On this cloudy night the idea and remembrance of what this park was like under a bright summer’s sun was so far away and almost a fantasy. After a few footsteps on the twinkling reflecting stones of one of the walkways, the fence behind Lyndsey disappeared into the night. And so Crumpsall Park with its distant audible background noises of rushing traffic, sirens and the odd persistent alarm, was suddenly Lyndsey’s only and immediate world.

    Up and down the low hills and inclines of the park, she stumbled several times in the dark, even though she knew the walkways so well. Thankfully she met no one here; here it was far too dark and distant to be safe. But then Lyndsey had ill-considered this, she was too deep in her own thoughts to reason sensibly and safely; she was keen to be on with her own plans before too much of the evening disappeared. Also her own heightened sense of self-belief and confidence gave her a misplaced and mistaken sense of her own security and strength. Thankfully tonight no one challenged them.

    Coming through to the other side of the park, she could see the lights of the small block of private flats where her parents lived. She began to straighten her route over the grass and muddy soil and plotted her way over the far wall, through the few streets and up the public stairwell to her parent’s abode.

   Lyndsey unlocked the front door with a nonchalance she didn’t feel. Entering, she felt immediately the inner warmth and the domestic cosiness. Up the stairs she went, murmuring back the greeting to her parents who didn’t stir from the confines of the front room.

   “Hi Lyndsey – okay?”
   “Hi yeah – fine.”

    She often went out alone in the evening. If they asked, she had an errand, an excuse, a destination. Sometimes she would mention an accomplice, somewhere else, waiting to join her. But she knew they knew her absence of conventional reasons and excuses for her night walks, and she was sure they knew she was always alone. But like so many other workings and happenings in Lyndsey’s world, her parents didn’t ask or question anymore. So many unpleasant scenes had exploded before owing to their disability to understand and influence their only child, and all because of Lyndsey’s own disinclination to reason or explain herself, and her total refusal to argue her point. But anyway what use is the argument from which you know you cannot solicit an agreement or a meeting of minds over? If there was one thing about Lyndsey that her parents did know, it was the painful fact that they didn’t really know or understand her. Hearing their daughter re-enter their home, they plugged themselves back into the routine murder-mystery mayhem that the TV was pumping out at them. Contented to their acceptable degree that apparently things were exactly as normal.

    An hour later Lyndsey re-emerged from her bedroom and quietly pulled the door to behind her. The pack on her shoulders was filled beyond its capacity and was so very heavy and cumbersome. So her progress back down the stairs was rather laboured, but the noise from the TV her parents were still watching, drowned out comfortably her sometimes noisy progress. She paused only momentarily at the foot of the stairs, a goodbye, would have been the kinder act, but she couldn’t bear to go through the routines of shock, emotions and raised voices. Not when they wouldn’t have any bearing on her decision – on this she was adamant.

   Neither did she wish to leave an explaining letter for them to find; she had visions of them finding it far too soon and seeking her out before she had escaped even Crumpsall and Cheetham Hill. And yes, escape was how it felt now as she so carefully and quietly opened and closed the front door after herself.

   Her paucity of thought for her parent’s feelings at finding her suddenly vanished, and with no apparent explanation, didn’t trouble her overmuch. She could easily see problems, at least tonight, in her carrying out and through her plans fully, and she wished to proceed while her resolve was still firm and solid.

    When you are down and your back is against the wall, when everything outside your immediate world seems bad and in danger of tainting that which is inside you, the obvious and spontaneous action is to run, move on and leave behind the worries and problems that existed there to rectify and resolve themselves. While these problems and strifes play on behind you, one can throw one’s head into something new; difficult but manageable, something different, and a situation more fulfilling. This is the answer that can come rising with such force to the brim of troubled thoughts in your head.

    But to some this is the cowards’ way out. Not to stay and confront the problems you – we all find everyday. To try to leave the worries and inability to deal with whatever mess you found or uncovered to someone else to wrestle or deal with or merely leave it unresolved. Not to mention the fall-out and worry from your actual decision and activity of clearing out and moving on. But why is this small-minded and in any way cowardly? For fuck’s sake, why stay, sit and stew in a mess that you could never convince those around you of your method for living with or dealing with? Of living in a situation and place that you – for your own reasons - don’t want to see through or live with? And of course what type of person might you be after staying with it, dealing with it, getting used or attuned to it? Maybe the kind of person who would never have the nerve or courage to just get out and move on, maybe the kind who claims that those that do are merely taking the cowards way out. Lyndsey was convinced of the valediction behind all her actions and decisions that night, she was just unaware that many of her problems were going to travel with her, whether she liked it or not. Some things we cannot run from – some things will ride with us and rise to be resolved another time.

    Two blocks away from the flat and already the pack was causing her pain and impeding her from walking properly. But if merely getting to Victoria Station was a problem, then there would surely be far greater difficulties when she arrived at the station at the other end at…where? A flood of names of destinations had been coursing through her thoughts almost upon leaving the bridge, only hours earlier. When suddenly an occasion arises which provides potentially, many newer opportunities and horizons; many options – maybe too many options, can be assembled in one’s mind and debated. But onwards from Manchester to where?

    Her real knowledge of any place or area outside her own hometown was scant. She had had little opportunity for travel and the names in her head were little more than places on the map. Anyway, more important than where was what. What to do on arrival, what kind of place did she want to be in tomorrow and exist in from then? Still she had few ideas and as she laboured along the litter-strewn side roads taking her back to Cheetham Hill Road, she began to feel increasingly negative.

    What she primarily wanted, what she felt she needed in order to collect herself, and to decide on her life and whom she wanted to be, was to blend in and disappear amongst the backdrop of other people. The company of the faceless other people all around her in the city that she tried everyday to shun; she suddenly wanted to be in their midst so as to feel anonymous and not feel the need to communicate. In a lonely, quiet town she would stand out; in a big city where the streets throng with all levels of humanity and noise at all times of the day and night, she would be able to pass through and contemplate, unnoticed and unmolested. The city may be the loneliest place of all, but it can be a comforting kind of loneliness when all you crave is anonymity and time to yourself. No one would want to know why the troubled face of the thoughtful girl wandered the streets late at night, and if she wanted to, Lyndsey could look and almost feel confident and purposeful in her new anonymous surroundings. She would blend in amongst all the others into the greyness, the blankness and the nothingness of the inner city. No one would make conversation or ask questions, and anywhere at any stage she could re-invent herself, lie and re-name herself and re-write her own history, to be whoever and whatever the moment had prompted her to desire to be. For at least a while upon touch down somewhere else, she wanted to dwell entirely in her own head and thoughts. This Lyndsey could do in Manchester, for the initial time at least it had to be so at her initial destination.

    She gave up the battle with the rucksack upon reaching Cheetham Hill Road. Standing, she waved and managed to flag down a passing black cab. To start spending money so soon on a relative luxury seemed to be rather foolish, but the relief afforded to her sore shoulders and the distance she could see she still had to travel to reach Victoria Station, gave her a reason that satisfied her. In her bag, tightly concealed in her purse she had enough money to live frugally from day to day for a few more weeks, but then she had no idea of real living or accommodation expenses, so she couldn’t reliably state how long she could live by what she had. She also had a credit card, absurdly thrown at her by the banks that had few moral qualms about enticing her into debt. The present situation of her current status of no income didn’t seem to bother them – she was young and bright and so would therefore soon be of value to them. Her only true resolve financially - the only one she had any real idea or perception of, was to merely spend only when she had to. Right now she wanted the lift down Cheetham Hill Road and soon she would be paying again for her lift out of familiarity and normality – away and out of Manchester.
 

    Into the station, into the unpleasant, cavernous cattle shed containing all the many breeds of humanity that every large city centre station in all the large towns in Britain contains. All manner of lights and noses too and at all times of day and night. Underneath the high roof, the lights were permanently on – the difference between day and night was minimal and not obvious.

    After adjusting to her new surroundings, Lyndsey attended her thoughts to the large destinations and departings board illuminated in front of the many platforms. She threaded her way through to the centre of the large floor space to get a good reading view, and to avoid the loiterers and men begging funds for a ‘cup of tea’. She stopped and read through her meagre options – they were not rich. Departing, were last trains for Hull via Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield and Bury. Just gone, was the late sleeper to London, and an hour had passed since the ‘Aberdeen – Penzance train stopping off at many destinations en-route’. Incoming, were trains from Liverpool and ‘York, but going no further’. 

    She sighed and sat down heavily allowing her rucksack to fall by her feet. She was still no nearer the bright idea – the obvious destination that she had been willing to flash up at her on the large destinations board. Leaning against the back of her seat she closed her eyes. The indecision, or the lack of real obvious reliable options, left her feeling weary and nervous. Here she was at the literal crossroads of the railway terminus and she had no good idea of what to do next and of what to do whenever she arrived at wherever it was she was going to travel to.

    Lyndsey opened her eyes again and grimaced at the dull familiarity and horrible mundanity of the announcement of the approaching Liverpool train. It was 11.45 and the messages of departing trains were getting shorter – even on a mainline in on of Britain’s biggest cities, the trains thin out to a trickle at some time. It was time to make up her mind – where to go and if to go. She grimaced again – she definitely wanted to go, she just didn’t know where.

    London would have been a good choice – somewhere big enough to hide her down in its folds of abundant people and anonymity. Somewhere with potential promise, opportunity and the assurance of other interesting groups of different-looking and seeking folk, somewhere with interesting architecture, parks and pleasant old buildings to interest her and stimulate her enthusiasm for her new surroundings. But for now, this chance had gone until tomorrow… so - wait until tomorrow?

    But just sitting here now, listing the positive features and ideas she had of what London could offer her, Lyndsey for the first time began to assimilate and construct in her head what it was she thought she wanted from her new town. Somewhere big, old, different, and a place presenting her with something totally different and new. Over her head the loudspeaker again read out the number of the rapidly approaching train and its destinations – the approach of the Glasgow train.

    All at once it seemed clear and obvious. Somewhere big and different, well out of her limited experience, a place almost in a different country, yet within relatively easy reach, an old town she knew containing many parks and triumphant buildings of astounding architecture. Surely a place containing people with an outlook and philosophy similar to hers. A town containing those that would help shape and mould her and give her experiences and days to live, rather than stare at and observe.

    She jerked out of her seat and dragged her rucksack across the floor behind her. Back there she had been standing on the parapet with two feet over the abyss of the unknown. Back into her head floated all the her ill-assembled plans of that evening, her jumbled vision and perceptions of what she had seen from the Victoria Bridge. And so far, all the way behind her she had left a safe runway back from all this unconventional madness. At any time she could step back and turn away from all the unknowing below her. But on walking and jumping forward, she could smell all around her, the heavy stench of giving up. She could see that leaving an easy escape route made the final decision that much harder to identify, to come out and to decide upon. So now she leaped forward and resolved to continue her trip through to where her thoughts and mind were going to take her.

    She stood at the ticket office and exchanged money for a one-way ticket to Glasgow. Then she stepped onto the train, over the abyss and she changed her life forever. And she smiled. This new-ness of acting and responding felt good. She was doing as she alone bidded, and it did indeed feel good.