Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (37 page)

Anna grew up in Blackpool and went to school, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, slap on this bus route.

‘Will you recognize Huyton?’

Would anyone recognize Huyton? Whatever ghosts it once possessed, they have been rehoused. The bus station is the best of it: a flat-pack conservatory with Jagger-tongues of wilting greenery. We have an agenda here, to locate Anna’s school, to validate that skein of the past, four seamless years, in which she was happy. The fissure in her life comes when she is removed at sixteen, sent off to another place, more bracing, academically challenging: a mistake. But a fortunate one for me, as our downward drift carried us both across the Irish Sea to Dublin. There were a lot of buses in Dublin.

The estate where the school once stood, pointed cliffs of red brick, has been treated in the usual fashion: residential care homes, nurseries for 4-wheel-drive mothers, secure apartments. Voices from captured playing fields. Private roads dressed with weeds. Dogs barking at our approach.

‘I should never have come,’ Anna said. Swimming pool, tennis courts, corridors loud with music. Brought back. Vividly present. ‘The chapel gleamed with flowers. There were groups of girls in the long cloaks we wore in the winter, hoods lined with the house colours.’

My conviction that every bus station must have a decent café somewhere in the neighbourhood is disproved: McDonald’s or nothing. The expedition I mount to humour my prejudice against uniformity carries us through accidents of pay-off architecture, a suspiciously well-funded library. Huyton is favoured by the legacy of its most celebrated MP, Harold Wilson (pipe in public, cigars and whisky in private). This is not one of those Californian vanity jobs, shrines to Reagan or Nixon. The Harold Wilson Library is downbeat municipal, shelves of politics and sociology for ambitious swots. But no maps, nothing local in this locality. No copies of the booklet on Liverpool’s Chinese community that I failed to pick up in the city.

St Helens has the first roadblock we encounter, a blue-tape incident. Concrete police station with windows like nicks from a cutthroat razor. The low rail around the flat roof won’t deter convinced (or persuaded) jumpers. A large woman in pink T-shirt, tight mid-calf leisure slacks, pink socks and trainers, is trawling a white bag for that missing cigarette. A hunched, no-neck ovoid, she seems built for water rather than the rough boundary wall of the police car park.

We need a luggage rethink. My black bag is cumbersome. I choose a rucksack from a shop on a pedestrianized traffic island. The town slumbers undisturbed around the statue of Queen Victoria and a promised comedy festival. ‘The spell of the journey is upon us,’ Anna says.

The Scouse accent has flattened out, the patter. When you move through unknown territory, there is no obligation to list particulars; let it drift. Shuttered pubs and roadhouses with no road. Avenues of dwarf trees barely shading patches of worn grass. Our fellow passengers are tidy, with lightweight sports-casual clothes and considered hair. They chat, some of them, turning a blind eye towards the themed George Orwell Wigan Pier pub, alongside the sanitized canal. An insinuation of pies and gravy on a bed of golden chips makes Anna hungry. But we don’t have time to stop, there’s another switch to be accomplished, another bus station.

A double-decker:
MANCHESTER LIMITED STOP
. We climb the stairs and take the seats at the front. We’re going to make it – and already there have been so many varieties of custom and behaviour; a retreat from the linguistic extravagance of Liverpool. Those Wigan pies sit heavy on the stomach, even when you have only seen them stacked like geological specimens in a shop window. The bus nurdles through miles of proud suburb. A gobby girl takes the seat to our left, chewing her mobile: ‘
I’m
not in a mood. It’s you, right, you’re in the mood. You’re not listening: I’m not, not,
not
.’ A daily ritual, this affectionate abuse. Virtual courtship: phone-sex on a budget. She studies her nails. Places her feet, ankles crossed, on the window ledge. She alternates spite-riffs with lingering red-tongued licks at a sugar bag that looks like a plasma sachet. ‘You’re trying to put me in a mood, you, so you don’t have to see me tonight. You don’t wanna see me, I don’t fucking care. I’m not in a mood, you’re in a
right
mood. You are, you fucking are. Are.’

Garden plots nudge against trim estates: Manchester’s emerging blot. The whale of the north displaces a lot of murky bathwater. Down which we slide, drenching pedestrians.

‘Traa. Traa.
Traa
. Fuck off.’

She dismounts, leaving us alone; the bus in its descent, into the storm, is our personal limousine. A tour of brown-sign cultural highlights: Trafford Park, Salford University, Coronation Street Experience. High-angle perspectives on terraces that are still terraces. Aspirational cul-de-sacs. Tudorbethan multiples with apron lawns. Stuttering cars from driving schools with self-important logos.

We need to find somewhere to stay that is convenient for the bus station. The nest I select, over other Travelodges, has a selling point: centre-city, in-transit sex. ‘Be more rock ’n’ roll next time you visit … Indulge in one of our suites, loaded with the latest gadgetry, dressed top to toe in the slinkiest of interiors. Enjoy power showers for sharing and tubs in front of the telly … A doll walks in … well, the place was once a doll hospital, someone fix her up.’

Very Tinto Brass
Caligula.
Straight to video. Straight to drug-shame-3-in-a-bed tabloid exposé. But a decent night’s king-size slumber after the shuddering of the buses, the hungry road. Segment of canal beyond double-glazed windows. Ink-jet smear of industrial heritage.

Next morning, a uniformed doorman with a branded umbrella chases us into bar-code rain.

‘Car or train, sir?’

‘Bus. Direction of Hull.’

Anna notices a scrawny young woman stilting towards Piccadilly Gardens. ‘Little cropped jacket,’ she recalls. ‘Bare white midriff. Sky-high black heels. Fishnet tights, tiny denim shorts. Wide leather belt decorated with metal studs. Thin blonde hair scraped back in a ponytail.’ And pushing a baby buggy, with attitude, on her way to ram-raid Mothercare. While giving her infant a good rinsing. ‘I love her style, her energy. Her attitude to the weather.’

A single-decker for the climb towards Oldham’s ridge, wipers going like a North Sea trawler. Cranes loom over unfinished concrete skeletons. Chinese distribution centres. Converted Methodist chapels. Junkyards, botched scams: a townscape with which I am very comfortable.

At the front of the bus is an old fellow whose portrait I have to record. A Lancashire music-hall turn, all nose, collapsed cheeks, and mouth like a ring-pull. He mumbles, rehearsing his patter, a litany of grievances. A stoic comedian who has run out of straight men. Ratty suede jacket with fake astrakhan collar. Nose dripping steadily. A stalactite mime of melancholy and malfate who makes me feel glad to be alive.

Opposite him, and totally unaware of his presence, are two young ladies of this city, beauty reps, old hand and novice, one white, one Asian. They charm us with their vivacity and rhythm. The girls are dragging demo equipment around with them, folding tables, bulky black bags. The newcomer, the round-faced Indian girl, never stops yapping. Her companion, checking with the supervisor on the mobile, has to shout. They love their work and wear it, painted masks of small perfection. They are industrially perfumed: against the urban mould of sodden gabardine, the consumptive hacking of the submarine-bus. Hooped spines of demi-cripples transported through a catalogue of tall chimneys and dark canals to their proper Lowry setting. A rattle-bag of museum-quality relics glorying in their redundancy.

At the Oldham terminal, we pass out of one timetable, through a building that reminds me of Athens airport with its ever-shifting and reconvening queues for various island destinations, into another: the connection for Huddersfield. Nobody can convince me that the cultural shifts we are registering – weight of pies, speed of speech, attitude to surroundings – could be brought within a single system. Or that such a system would be desirable. Huddersfield passengers have an upland quality about them. Braced for the Pennine transit and delighted to be riding, not marching, heads down, into the perpetual mist.

Chip shops. Chinese restaurants. Hairdressers. A slow ascent with many stops to take on students who immerse themselves in books and iPods. Getting away from Oldham involves another blue-tape incident, blood on the stones. After Saddleworth, Yorkshire announces its difference. Anna respects the labour that has gone into rows of immaculate and competitive gardens. Over damp moors, the view from the front of the bus is romance: soft grey-green hills in the distance. Farms and scattered villages.

A change of driver and, after all these silent hours, what Anna describes as ‘a party atmosphere’. Like refugee families returning home after the Blitz. A young woman, loaded with bags, climbs out of the bus, miles from anywhere, the nearest farm barely in sight.

I haven’t allowed time for food, it’s out of one bus and straight on to the next. I’m not convinced, although I don’t admit it, that we’ll make that ultimate connection, back down the M62 to Hull. In Huddersfield a woman at the information desk suggests Pontefract. But we could try Wakefield. Provisioned with pork pie (an ice-hockey puck welded out of doggy chews), flapjacks and scalding coffee, we’re on the move again. Difficult to sip and suck in this trembling vehicle. Up north, buses are not cafeterias in the Hackney style. The odd schoolkid deflating a crisp packet or puncturing a can of fizz, that’s it. We dine with fastidious discretion, hunkered down in our seats. I hop off at the first halt to dispose of the half-drunk carton, the crumbly evidence.

A field of scarlet poppies. ‘Isn’t that a beautiful sight?’ a woman remarks. ‘Farmer must have made a mistake.’

Wakefield is no longer the town of Lindsay Anderson’s
This Sporting Life
, that homoerotic psychodrama of physical hurt and otherness. Richard Harris, fists bunched in donkey jacket, makes the social ascent from community bus to showy Jag. Grudging envy to local fame. Stay on bus, lad, that’s the message. Stick with your own.

We run for the Pontefract connection. But it’s not Pontefract any more, it’s a retail and transport hub known as Freeport. We have arrived at an outpost of Will Alsop’s SuperCity. It’s off-highway, grown out of nowhere. All-purpose warehouses: restaurants, white goods, fun palaces. Anonymous hotels double-glazed against the roaring river of the motorway. A consumerist oasis built from a doodle on Alsop’s windscreen. But he’s not the architect, Freeport is post-architectural, self-propagating; he’s just the prophet.

Bus stops in Freeport are covered stands of the sort you find in the long-stay car park at Stansted. There is one connection for Hull, miss it and we are done for the night. Rain falls remorselessly. Buses for other destinations come and go. Our stand is shared with two old ladies who have heard the rumour of a possible Hull transfer, a bus coming down from Leeds, but they can’t confirm it. A young couple, bored and hormonal, feast like panthers. Or fast-food addicts. The girl is hungrier than the boy. She burrows under his sweater, nipping, biting. They swap wads of gum, mouth to mouth. He drains a bottle of Vimto, before drumming with the empty, kicking it against the glass. Then opening another in a sugary spray. They grapple, pinch, slap bellies. My linen trousers, I notice, are black with the road, oily dirt from picking up bags left on the floor of the bus. All my clothes are wet. I run across to the NEXT discount hangar and re-outfit myself for £7. The old ladies are cheerful, a great day out. ‘We’ve been to Frankie & Benny’s, we’ve had us dinners.’

Freeport is the proof of SuperCity, everybody has an unconvincing reason to come here, nobody has much motivation to stay. You could dismantle any part of it without loss. The XSCAPE block promises cinemas, restaurants, shops, bowling alleys and an indoor ski slope. Storage, distribution and self-service have combined to form a lagoon of non-space. The surrounding canal system is an opportunity for Orwell-themed pubs, boutique hotels, city marinas. The road is the only absolute. The condition of the airport _ expensive parking, terrorist alerts, celebrity visitations – is the universal model for the new England. Freeport isn’t a port and it certainly isn’t free. Language is the final casualty.

Forty-five minutes late, our bus arrives. The young lovers were running out of permutations of engagement: her soft-cannibal assaults and his Vimto-drumming indifference. Darkness was closing in across the flatlands. We reconnected with Alsop’s superhighway, the M62 to Hull.

All the passengers, sea-facing now, are women; tawny, fluffed-owl hair. It’s like being in a compartment of office cleaners, on the wrong side of dawn: solidarity, anticipated exhaustion. The sights – Selby’s belching cooling towers (steam from the mouth of a megaphone), bridges, motorways on stilts – are too familiar to notice, or enjoy, rattled and stiff as we are from two days of hauling bags on and off buses.

We are booked into the same Hull hotel I visited with Petit. I look forward to a free day exploring the town, before we take the train back to London. But I know that this road, the M62, has its victims. Blue trucks like a school of dolphins accompany us to harbour. Drivers are secure in their pods, high above tarmac. The soft English landscape is a film that watches you: nothing to be done. These men are exhausted, bored, but aroused by the pulse of the engine, the steady vibration of movement. Road myths of pick-ups, casual encounters at service stations: B-movie existentialism.