i
Midnight on West Street, and the couples huddled
under lintels in a gathering rain are featureless –
their faces boiled sweets sucked too long.
This is how a dream betrays itself:
the smartened shops and bars unaltered,
but their names removed, the signs wiped clean.
A night bus passes with no destination lit.
I look up at the billboards; each a perfect blank.
Even the street name’s been erased.
I know where I am by scent alone, the way
a fox must navigate suburban gardens after dark,
a lame dog sniffs his way back home.
The city is a song with all its words removed,
a tune I recognise but can’t repeat.
The unmarked taxis splash me as they pass.
A crowd of lipless girls pours from what used to be
an ‘80s bar. They jostle me aside. Their legs
are knives. They have no eyes.
I think about my grandfather who, blind at sixty,
used to sit in front of the TV all day, mesmerised
by what was never happening in front of him,
or how he’d take my face in both his hands,
draw near as if to look,
then tell me I was beautiful.
ii
As if the night’s gone scavenging,
down over St Paul’s Tower and the Hallamshire,
the thin spires of St John’s and St Marie,
from the top of the Town Hall
to the green expanse of Endcliffe Park,
neat as a snooker table’s baize.
As if the sky went stealing over terrace rooftops
shimmied down the flanks of tower blocks,
light-fingered, taking the brass numbers from the houses
the licence plates from parked-up cars
removing the graffiti from the underpass,
the marks that tell us who loves who.
Night, unnoticed, slipping into a house
in Meersbrook where a woman nods off
at the kitchen table, newspaper-in-hand.
It takes the headlines, steals away. It sidles round
the shoulders of a girl beside the tram stop with her phone
and as she types, it wipes the screen.
Tonight, our messages will not arrive,
our signatures are void. The book you carry in your bag
has pages pale as new, untarnished snow.
On the corner of Division Street, I watch
a couple frozen in a doorway with their heads tipped close
as if to kiss for the first time or the last
before the night swoops down,
a silent bird of prey, and takes the words
clean from their mouths.
iii
I’m looking for a pub like The Moon under Water,
a mythic ale house that I’ll know by the alleyway
leading towards it, stinking of fags;
the silence grown around the building
like a scab, the windows with their blinds pulled down,
a lock-in set for all eternity.
The key will be in my pocket, small as a milk tooth.
Inside, the candles sunk in jam jars on the tabletops,
the pewter tankards balancing on books I know the endings to.
I’m looking for a pub where I’m recognised
not by my name but by my customary lukewarm drink;
where the evening unfolds like a tale I’ve heard before,
a pub where the landlord lies through his broken teeth
This is the place where Marilyn Monroe called in
to drink her last. A free kick in the 1946 World Cup
landed just there, above the pumps.
We can’t exhaust our plentiful supplies of ice…
Outside, the moon’s a lemon slice
above the empty sign, the missing name.
If it had one, it’d be The Last Goodtime Hotel.
A pub where I don’t have to speak
where I could meet someone who doesn’t hate
me nursing a whisky and a day-long hangover
and pull up a barstool
an endless quiet falling
like a white tablecloth, dropped over the pub
and us sheltering beneath it, the real world hushed.
iv
I move like the sleepwalker I am
down to The Bath Hotel, where my grandmother
was born in a dank, uncurtained room above the bar,
her first cries drowned out by the county pool game
– grudge match – in its final throes downstairs.
Outside, a group of lads who tack their collars up
with fish hooks – half a dozen of them,
slim and sharp – have caught nothing again tonight,
not even the eye of a bouncer,
casting smoke rings on his break.
They slouch at the late night bus stop
throwing chips into the empty road.
I push the door. The pub’s half-dark.
I think I see a woman giving birth, prepare to meet
my tiny, howling grandmother, unlikely time traveller,
until I recognise the barmaid by her clothes
the barman kneeling down between her legs.
She turns to me, her face inert.
I notice that the pub’s deserted, regulars kicked out.
So quiet, I can hear the songs of birds before
they’ve even thought of them,
the hiss of drizzle yet to fall
the conversations in the slumbering telephone,
the drip-drip heartbeat of a tap that isn’t broken yet,
the breathing of the baby clenched
inside the barmaid, hardly bigger than a fingernail.
The names we might have had instead of these.
v
The Fat Cat’s heaving, though the pumps,
of course, are all unmarked – the beer’s pot luck.
The dart board’s numbers are removed.
A fortune teller with a silvery-fringed hood
across her absent face is threading through the crowd.
She clasps my hand as if she wants to squeeze the blood from it,
then lets me go. Upstairs, a poet on a barstool,
balancing improbably and holding court,
reciting something scribbled on a beer mat concertina:
Pledge-shy, rain-gorged, thunder-struck,
lime-lit, Sheffield forged on its own red coals.
City of forks, its new builds
stabbing at the fattened clouds.
City of knives, the river cutting cold
through butter-lit back streets.
City of spoons, the trees scooped up
and cradled in the hollows below hills.
(He pauses to unfold his script).
A face and body pimpled with reflective water features
the chewed ear of the pop music museum,
Its hair the rats tails of suburban roads,
its feet bogged down in Hathersage,
its nose the sniffling fountain in the Peace Gardens,
its lips a pair of snooker cues aligned
its arms, or what we take for them
are ours outstretched, holding the mirror
of the sky, never afraid to look.
vi
He says his name’s the God of Gaps.
He’s on his fifteenth rum-and-dash-of-coke.
He serves himself when his glass is dry.
This is my handiwork, he slurs
this dream you’re wading through.
Suppose you reckoned it was yours?
I wonder at the point of it. He says:
Suppose you’re wondering ‘what’s the point’?
I thought I’d engineer a world
(he holds his glass up like a telescope)
without the language… language…
of desire. The words that give us poor bastards away.
Of course, it’s all no-fucking-good.
We know a man's tastes
by the corners folded over in his book…
Well then. A stare’s enough to tell you everything
– a moment too long drinking the outline
of a girl whose back is turned…
Jesus, we make life easy for our kidnappers.
We’re hopelessly in love, the lot of us.
Look at yourself –
vii
He pauses to refill his glass,
then whacks it down so hard the coke
slops out. He’s starting to recite again:
It starts like this: you take a wrong turn
from the pub one night, veer off into a backlit park
where even the drunks have found a better place to go
and soon, you’re taking the wrong turn deliberately,
the worst way home. In love with diversions,
not the place you live, but where you can’t.
Abandoned cars and caravans,
the houses you could never make a home,
the city done in negative…
He tries to make a circling gesture with his hand
and accidentally slings his glass across the room.
It strikes the shoulder of a six-foot man,
making him spill his brimming pint.
It takes the man three seconds to cross the bar,
then two to lift the glass above his head
and one to bring it down. The poet pauses
for an instant, crumples to the floor as if he’s been
lit from the centre. As if he’s burning out.
viii
I leave him cold, go out into the Kelham Island dark,
the lights of Hillsborough beads against the hill.
I glance down at my wrist,
find my tattoo’s unravelled, left my skin
as white as the day I was born. Forget that stuff
about the thieving night. It is as if the city’s been unwritten,
slowly, all our histories undone,a book made up of blanks.
Thinking of that’s enough to send me rooting, frantic
through my bag – my notebook’s there.
I open it; yesterday’s thoughts have gone,
my handwriting’s erased. I’m sinking slowly
down the rain-slicked wall.
Three girls in fishnets look at me, move on.
I’m fumbling for my pen. A world without
the language of desire… I grip the biro and begin to write.
I start off small: I write about a street lamp
going out and watch the one above me gutter,
die. I sketch a minor fight between the prostitutes
and one of them turns on her heel, lashes
her mate across the cheek, then carries on walking.
Now, I’m breathing hard.
Slowly, I write back all the stars, the words
‘Fat Cat’, the drum & bass night posters on the wall.
I give the working girls their faces back.
ix
I write about a black house with a slanting roof
and watch its walls take root and flourish
here, between the empty foundries and the warehouses.
I write a path to the front door,
a knackered bicycle propped up outside.
I write weather that’s fit to shelter from,
a half-tornado wind, handfuls of sleet
thrown hard against the windowpanes.
I write my mother, cowering underneath her coat
then cross her out again. I write my grandmother,
the one born in The Bath Hotel,
but when she shivers in the cold, I send her back.
I write the boys I used to drink with in The Somerset,
their off-kilter grins, then send them off
into the Cat. I write a childhood friend who hates it here.
Like it or not, I write you next,
just as you are. I write your jacket and your face.
I have you stand where I can see you properly.
I set the pen down then. I’m hungry,
shuddering, tired. And since I might as well say anything,
I find I’m speaking quietly:
x
Blindfold me. Take me past the absence of the cooling towers
towards a clearing, spiked with broken glass you kick away
before you place the makeshift rug – your dad’s unlucky football shirt.
The loaf should be stolen. The butter salted with a single tear.
Tomatoes withered on the vine. The chicken must be live,
run off at speed towards the Ulley reservoir.
The wine should be the colour of a smoker’s lung,
served best in jam jars used for rinsing paintbrushes.
Describe its bouquet – wet dogs sprayed with lavender –
then call a toast to all we love about this clapped-out town,
arrange the feast, lend me a jacket made out of polluted air.
Then turn to me, leave nothing untouched.
You don’t say anything. You lead me down the badly-written path t
owards the black front door. Beyond it, there’s a darkness
and the outline of old chairs and tables,
a room much like the back room of a pub.
The tankards resting on familiar books. A pool table I’ve seen before.
I grip your arm. We step inside.
A silence falls between us like a cloth.
I wake up in another city, blinking
with my arm moored fast across your chest.
