i. Greystones’ Backyards
.....through numerous lies this city unpeels its stratigraphy, by means of camouflage, by hiding, blending in long sequences of bus trips to and fro in late October rain between downtown and dark bricked alleyways. It is mostly steely rain, which streams down from the surrounding hills into the cracks of the concrete heart of this Northern settlement. When you do not know someone, like the way you don’t know the intricacies of unfamiliar bodies, impenetrable ginnels, untouched geographies, you trust whatever they offer, allowing yourself to plunge into flooded impasses and cul-de-sacs, rivers of unknown neighbours’ junk, cast-off children’s toys, blown up rubber tyres, winter spades, ice axes thrown on the ground of hoar-frosty backyards’ glossy ice rinks, wading through open doors of littered garages to lock your own bike in the shed. They offer you the post of the river diver to rummage through their junk. In this sense, there is no deception involved, since they too know riverbeds are thick, dense and grey. But sometimes they offer you more: liquefied maps with fuzzy street names to track down the old town which you can’t quite touch yet with your mind. They often promise you a large number of rivers instead of the sea, hills instead of hazy dreams which they reckon are more tangible to climb. Or dive into. No gear needed to live here day by day apart from an oily anorak and a pair of old rubber thigh waders. But these rivers always seem to retreat into tiny arteries pulsing under the skin when you approach them. Then they offer you panorama. An afternoon through the kitchen window a solitary boy kicking a football within a square metre muddy grass knot or bizarre angles of tiny back gardens with the irregular visit of the odd guest who hangs their laundry out in the rain. So that you feel that you too should become a parasite on the carpet of this soggy cityscape. In the riverbed of this grey town. And culminate clutter in your own cobbled courtyard. Two hours from London. Up towards the nucleus. Its whole life organised by its Northern aorta, the Pennine. According to the sign someone randomly left in the underpass one day near Bramall Lane the sea must have been here a long time ago. And that’s just possibly another lie too.;
ii. The Sheffield Mágus
Once when you visited this undulating landscape in the early days you highlighted its hideousness with no mercy in your manners, snapping pointedly at its malformed maps, the rough tarmac of heaving streets, solid houses with anaemic colours, the pre-cast and poured-in shapes of composites and wondered at the antonym of the word ‘ostentatious.’ We spent two days in the city sightseeing around trying to find the soft core of it, its delicate focal point, where, as you said, everything happens. Yet there is some raw untruth in every verdict. And sometimes it’s the rawness that can pay some aphorismic tribute. These yellow, pink and lilac light effects at night enveloping the carcass of the city, erecting the outline of another ghost town, you established, are nothing but simulacrum. Silky legerdemain. Although under the multihued flesh of this city apparition a concrete caricature, quietly clanks and clatters in the dark. In the daytime, from a bird’s eye view if anything at all, the valley is industrious like an enormous workshop, a multitude of metal sawdust. But then it is the density of this iron debris, the valley filled with steel wool, copper wire, scrap aluminium items, which are magnetising. And we dived into comparisons with which we linked this geography to former and forgotten ones by mistake, from Bákó to Miskolc, Warsaw to Dunaújváros or Dresden... and then disappeared in the fluid afternoon through curvilinear glass pavilions of botanical gardens and fiery Guy Fawkes nights’ crowded autumn fairgrounds, dizzying merry-go-rounds like the ones we’d seen at the edges of derelict seaside towns. Forgotten playgrounds which have crawled further inland to be closer to the core. The next morning you woke on the carpet, rolled up like a pupa on a pillow and a sleeping bag turned inside out to make the place habitable for me, you said. Yet you left in haste with the coach to London which was two hours away. The glossy window of the bus was black, like East Anglian flint or quartz reflecting nothing but the pallid complexion of the early morning station always already weary, with empty cafes, vacant corridors coated with white floor tiles still echoing from late night footsteps from the previous day. The day, you might say, has not started just yet and warned me to wait. I waited a few moments and dissolved into what you may call the wake of a city in a November morning or around that time.
iii. Panorama from the Top of the Wicker Arches
Missing to find the delicate core, the focal point where everything happens, the streets led towards the margin of the city on that Saturday afternoon, sometimes between daytime and night time, not quite twilight yet, a few minutes past the difference between dusk and dawn, uncertain. Such day-fragments in January often blend into one smoky whirlwind of the hours sweeping tiny groups of women dressed in black, stacks of small and weightless twigs, towards home. Through littered roads wading in the debris of the day, they roll in air like ash or crows sweeping by metal shutters of shops semi-shut. An hour, in-between, when stallholders have nearly packed up all their goods, with only a few boxes of oranges, local eggs on sale still waiting to be sold. Then the fish smell. And the smell of disinfectants. The smell of small second-hand things. The tiny cafes with aluminium chairs piled up on the tables. We were standing here, I think, between a black bin and a yellow mop bucket, what I mean is between what actually happened and what could have happened to us in a half-existent here and now on the threshold of the urban market a few seconds before it was closed. That moment occurs when you arrive at an empty corner once dwelling in people, not so much too late, but not quite right on time. The momentum of forcing an arrival on a space which is ready to depart, is what I mean by all this. And so we left with five small and ragged avocados, a cardboard egg box of six local eggs and one shiny Braeburn apple from some Yorkshire orchard. All at once blown out into the streets towards the district, where, you said, the Wicker began to stretch out into nowhere. To the edge of the heart. To the periphery where ghost kids kick phantom football and dark-clothed locals group at corners laconically nodding at you gesturing that they know how to inhabit this town without words. A spot which enables you to look at things from a distance but squinting from a distant enough distance sometimes allows you to fit every single miniature chip into a small but perfect pocket guide or map. And from the stone bridge over the watyr of Dune neghe the castell of Sheffeld we saw the angle of the city as if we had always been pilgriming in reverse, crawling backwards towards the core. We arrived in the empty streets in the end and stared into second hand furniture shops with objects unreal and underpriced. Exhibits of a dribbling vagabond in the window displayed between a metal kettle and a wooden nativity set with thirteen characters still complete. Then following flocks of black skirts and scarves flapping in front of us in the wind we found the railway wall, the arch, the heraldic insignia carved out with a long peeled-off pride, a lion and a horse holding a shield sola virtus invicta but we thought this place was equally unconquerable and carried on walking wordlessly under the dysfunctional viaduct where, they said, in the odd hour one could spot blurred contours of cargo wagons of the Wicker crisscrossing the disused station and disappearing with the intermittent ‘chuff’ into the valley of no-man’s land. And then from the top of the forty-one invisible arches we saw the city from this twisted Eastern angle subdued under a weighty petrol-blue skyline, the city walls, the fire walls, the derelict factory surfaces, then the blind-glassed office walls, the enormous rounded gas tanks, unstrippable folios grown eclectically together, like fractured bones imperfectly healed, clumsily designed prosthetic limbs, mismatching mosaics of the afternoon hour in-between, the pale palimpsest of now. We watched the tired posture of the landscape from this frame, paralysed in the hour where nothing really happens. And then we too got tired of staring at the littered streets, the deserted wide avenues dragging their way back to the plastered city hall wrapped in barbed wire against pigeons’ dirt and to the pinnacles of the two cathedrals each engaged in their own solipsistic monologue and decided not to return to the centre until we have exchanged words with those who, although so cunningly camouflaged, have colonized this peripheral segment of the world.
iv. The Concrete Space: ‘Utopia-Nirvana’
[Leaving platform 5] en route to the South-West of the city where, I was told, everything happened, walking into twilight I got lost following the instructions of a cacophonic map, its clandestine directions written over one another. The horizon, I thought, is subterranean in this part of the world and likes to hide under layers of bitumen. Sky, which I last wandered under, was weightier than mud. This way it would be hard to find the way back to the dark-bricked house, the corroded signboard ‘Greystones Fish Bar’ hanging on its firewall, to spot the Chinese man’s old jovial face which for months now was a flag for some kind of homewards. His still expression under his white cap was like an accommodating anthropomorphic road sign semi snowed up pointing toward the shaded, littered backyard sliced into two halves by the washing line cutting the tiny grassy patch into even tinier equal rectangular quotas the solitary phantom boy tended to plough through with his leather football each day after school ignoring any invisible border. But getting lost or drifting with the undulating crowd is much more artless than premeditated city meanderings. Allowing one to somersault impromptu into deep valleys and gutters, cracks of cobbled pavements tumbling down towards the bottom of a colossal gravel pit forgetting names of former cities for a while or letting their craters be flooded by the weiry Don. Absent-mindedly consenting to early December to envelop them with thick snow. All tautologies attached to these discarded landscapes too become one thick layer of altocumulus mackerel sky, unpronounceable words I frequently used to pronounce out loud one day vanish in the winter whirlwinds of these driftings turning eventually into nothing but erased full stops. Geographically, so to say, missing the scheduled destinations and arriving at the unknown square I all at once rolled inside an enormous cementitious bowl like a kite pulled by a gravitational ghost semi-attached by the arm, magnetically drawn to the bottom of the basin rimmed with slopes unscalable, confined by seven chasms with never edge and crisscrossed by seven rivers undulating unnoticeably, like seven laundry ropes gone loose in the wind blending into a panorama always already fractured. I, in fact, felt as if she had found the soft focal point of the city, the square, like an asphalt lake shimmering in the middle of a concrete island, heaving in the late winter sunlight like a highway mirage, like a délibáb felt suddenly familiar. Nither down, and they pointed at the open parade running backwards into the station after the first sudden afternoon snow fall, stretching between the invisible Porter Brook and the inaudible Sheaf there once was a wasteland with a clandestine pathway hidden in the ground. What I saw now, and they stroke the snowed up horizon with a slow gesture of their palm, the wilderness is bulldozed, the ghosts have sunk deeper in the icy soil and a modern acropolis is built on the top of the old tombland congesting any cracks and crevices through which I could have fled from this opaque land back to the country scaffolding vast skylines. And I noticed the slippery surface of the banks of the hills as if continuously rising higher like dough, the iced-up gloss of the concrete square which made it impossible to move fast on the pavement, the strips of frosty muck the locals dragged along on their boots in the strata of snow slowing them down as if they were astronauts walking on the Moon, or as if they were still connected with what was under snow, under sky, under earth via imaginary roots, their leather soles tunnelling inaudible tunnels trudging everyday not so much on the tarmac of the streets but on some invisible border-line, unpronounceable words of calcium, or on some shaft of an old radio’s muffled signals, on murmurs of an alternative map.
v. The Owls of Never Edge
And so to fabricate a city so unknown the telling lies continues. Never Edge is an undulating home of a street-lined deep valley without a rim. Beneath the earth’s surface. It is because this valley must have been filled up by the North Sea a long time ago. At least according to the impromptu sign in the underpass near Bramall Lane. Despite the rumours of their mysterious disappearance from the landscape, two Tawny Owls live on the top of the foliage of the birches. You said they’d lived there for more than three hundred years. That night they appeared out of the one thousand and one tarred nights and got stuck on the starry skyline, wings so loudly flapping that they could have broken each other’s frail bone structure. Each other’s feather bones. Flight feathers. Wings or retrices. You couldn’t tell whether it was a violent act of love making or a domestic fight or the intersection of the two. The two heavy bodies emerged into one and came so close to you, you said, that they all at once shaped the grey face of the old white haired man you conversed with at the sea one early summer evening. He watched you with his stereoscopic eyes. In those two stereoscopic eyes you saw eight wives and forty four children and a hundred and seven grandchildren. He walked out of the pub as if out of the middle of a billiard overstarry skies of the small village perched right on the coast, and sat down next to you. Then his words flew out of his mouth high up in the air as far as the tiles on the roof of the church flapping loudly in the wind for long seconds. He spoke of the old graveyard over there and about the three thousand drowned sailors and the mad murderer who killed two hundred young Happisburgh virgins all buried in the same cemetery. He was very much into numbers and had a farsighted vision perpetually keeping half an orange eye on the sky and the church tower and the dozen of Honey Buzzards circulating around it. But it is this forward facing piercing, this Northern nithera low light hunting which, you said, is a skill so necessary to appropriate in order to find your way in a city so unknown. In the city of the three-legged dogs. (You had good reasons to award this urban landscape with the title.) In order to have a vision which observes the world with not eyeballs as such but with some kind of elongated tubes. To have disproportionally large eyes in order to decipher universes so disparate. And link them with half a blink. Or to separate overlapping planets. A lot of these solitary spectres seem to lurk like shadows of Ἀλβιών, bog men and bog women of Britain, drifting from the North Pole to the South, from Aberdeen to Aberystwyth, from town to town, tavern to tavern humming or occasionally whistling the same song between dusk and dawn ‘Tu-whit; Tu-who, a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.’ This tune once was whispered to you by a white faced ghost in Norwich who stopped you in The Rose and asked about words. He asked how they sell. He was wearing a ten-gallon hat and smoked a cigar. Wingless. Or with very rudimentary wings. When you queried his knowledge he turned into a smallish urban fox. Or a tiny three-legged dog. Small enough to make you confused and wonder about the difference between the prey and the predator. Then he turned into an odd local who swore he had never said a word. (This bit was the hardest to believe) Then he shut the pub door quietly after himself leaving only a tiny piece of fabric caught by the door. The corner of his coat. His red tail. Staring back at you for a last second with bright irises he vanished among the birches. Then do you remember the elderly actor with nicotine hued eyesight wearing the mask of the green man on Midsummer Night who wanted to know about certain dates and places. He wanted to be your orbit. He wanted to make you converse. So that he could secretly erase the line between night and day. So that you would never go to sleep and too would become nocturnal. You seem to be bumping into these feathery phantoms, frail phoenixes of the past wherever you wander around this island. The veiled ghost of West Street, you reckon the Lindow Woman of Sheffield, was another one of them balancing on the metallic rails in the city centre late at night. Her eyes, two miniature lighthouses flickered from under her veil, two tiny table lamps blinking through net curtains. Yes, all these creatures must be genetically related. The world has only one topography at a time. Then take the taxi driver, for another example, whose binocular eyes winked back at you in his rear view mirror in Budapest while telling you he had been shot into the stomach for nine times but he has nine lives like a cat, just touch the sleeve of his winter coat, his winter fur, his retrice feather. Not to mention the ashen-faced town-dweller from Ireland, whose permanent dwelling place is now a corner of the Bath Hotel, back in the city of the three-legged dogs, the city of illusory owls, the city of undraining rivers. When the night turns to midnight he would claim he was a poet and would stare with eyes, two miniature Midsummer suns, two burning planets painstakingly scribbling in his notebook ... line after line, page after page, night after night, drink after drink, city after city, century after century, solar system after solar system... who...ho, ho, hoo-hoo-hoo-whoo....
vi. Postcard from West Street
Mo grá, it’s been now two magnolia springs since the last time I lurked around that tree, so finely rooted in the middle of the lawn in the outskirts of Cambridge. You used to watch it from a window slowly changing its texture as years were unfolding casting shadows of the suburbs on your pale face smearing the colours of seasons on your white skin....it is not May time yet when the magnolia tree should blossom puffy squabs which then fall by September on the ground like small bodies of dry moths, today’s morning moment is a little earlier, the end of winter here just on the threshold of spring and I am up in the North quite far away from that spot under that window I used to stand between the tree and the white wall. But up here May arrives much later than in the Fens (you couldn’t find two geographies more disparate), they warned me, we live higher in altitude and closer to the North Pole. They told me to learn to wear layers and not to forget to remember to change the clock tonight and urged me to start planning life according to the new time. I often hear of the most recent news in Ponds Forge which sits right next to Cobweb Bridge the locals on odd days nickname Spider Bridge dependent perhaps on the position of focal points, the question of origin or the angle of squinting or spontaneity or public bad mood, I don’t know. I was resting with my elbows holding onto the tiled edge between two lengths from waist down dipped in the water with legs flapping like sea weed, half air and half water, sliced into two like a centaur, and looked at the central clock wondering who had unravelled the complicated network of an entire hour out of that late winter Sunday evening, what mysterious air-breathing anthropod and I thought of the day shortened by sixty minutes and that swimming pools are the best places to talk about time or timelessness and then I remembered the shape of the two meter long duvet cover I had pulled on the white radiator turning it into some kind of a coated crime scene or a large body of a mummified memory before I locked the door after myself then turned right at the corner of Netherfield Road somersaulting down seven chasms with never edge through Springvale to Taptonville Road via Winter Street straight into early spring of Western Bank to find the heart of the city signposted by the inescapably gigantic writing of the city’s firewall drawing my memories fram somwher-elles to here arysyng fram shefeld cariage-place and shef-sqware to gon wandrynge abuten laberinthes of aere. I decided to learn this pictograph by heart reiterating every syllable until it made some sense, hieroglyphs which claim to have the magic power to decorate blank facades and force drunken teens in the middle of the night to slur each word and pondered hwat yf but I never thought surfaces can ever be blank. One needs to be a parasite gnawing through strata crawling with bright pupils under the skin of the many cities fossilised under plaster. To find the soft core, the delicate porous heart of the concrete. Every day I pan over the undulating surface of maps and make an attempt to find the seven rivers entangling the city’s heart like a wire greten and understonden hwat lyen abouten afore the cite wher dremen is re-paien the lives hwat lyen abouten as yit nat rede. But it seems these unread lives, never written manuscripts, like invisible rivers hide even on the topographic paper. Yet I have been told each map maker has their own vision of the absolute map. They think these rivers, like uneraseable memories, indelible stains on the palimpsest of the mind, still trickle under the skin, under the vellum of the codex for years after possible rare and brief encounters with them. Like those rare encounters with the magnolia tree. I still keep the body of a dry moth in my pocket. That memorable magnolia in the middle of the garden always seemed displaced to me, like this city’s ghost woman I saw one night shrouded in a long maroon veil staggering on the tramlines then swept off to the side of the road by the draught the tram cars left behind after they whooshed off into the dark distance. Her face cloaked with silk and secrecy, her two orange eyes gleaming in the dark. Then she threw her right sleeve up in the air and waved shedding random contents of her late night shopping on the rails. I looked around but from the bus shelter I couldn’t see a soul. Then she thrust her heavy body back onto the metallic lines like an amateur rope dancer balancing with plastic bags in her hands. Meandering among honking cars her silhouette was then again blown back to the pavement by the next tram on its way to Hillsborough and so it went for about an hour her shadow like an empty gown flying to and fro between the tram lines and the wall. They say she haunts those tramlines every night in the dark of West Street, repetitively, tautologically, with some obstinate yet inexplicable intention. Post scriptum. Tonight I thought I was on my own. I leaned my back against the house and stared into darkness, like a hooded courier with no news. (But they say these non- messages claim to have the power to predict the past.) I noticed a cat was staring me out in a dark backyard of Crookes curled up on the top of a brick like a perfect bean. The two eyes, light streetlamps, or miniature lighthouses, blind and blinding, watched my every step pottering around within a square mossy metre. Mo grá. It is a mild night. The sky is clear. Heavily starry. The hour is slowly turning to midnight. According to the new time.
