Whalley Range
/
By Helen Grant
For Emily
I arrive in Manchester utterly unknowing. I have no job and my job applications have only received rejections, so no interviews are on the horizon either. The living situation is at least somewhat sorted. My friend, a drummer in a Bristol band called Scaler, knows a woman in Whalley Range, the outskirts of the centre of Manchester. She had done her house up herself over time, a solid, old semi-detached terraced, split into three spacious flats, her having the bottom flat, her daughter in the middle, a friend on the top. She has always been a live music lover, and that love and admiration for live music has transformed her life enough that she hosts musicians that are on tour in her magnificent basement. Sufjan Stevens, Big Thief... walls absolutely plastered with band posters, signed to her, or to this place, for its respite. She has hosted for over twenty five years. My drummer friend thought this could be a good place for me, to lodge with her in the bottom flat; to create, to write. He wasn't and isn't wrong. I'm just a bit shit at getting on with it.
I move in with ease despite the long train journey from Pembrokeshire to Manchester Piccadilly with my heavy suitcase. I'm picked up and shown my room. Its light and airy and at the back of the house facing south. There's a desk, an armchair, and attic windows that reverberate with rain, making me feel in an igloo of sorts. So here I am, moved to Manchester with a 'socialist landlady,' £1500 to my name, and no job. I don't know what to do with myself. 'There's obviously a giant park across the road,' she says to me.
The first time I walk through Alexandra Park of leafy Whalley Range it is only with purpose in mind, to pass through to reach the city centre to look for jobs. Somehow instead of veering to the right of the park like I had clearly been instructed to by Em (the daughter in the flat above,) I manage to veer totally left. Determined not to take out my phone and look at Google maps, I end up in Old Trafford, so I do then succumb to the weight of my phone in my pocket, practically begging me to open the map app. By the time I get to the city centre my legs are exhausted, and I only really explore Oxford Road which just feels claustrophobic to me. I don't give the city a fair shot at all and walk all the way back, refusing the bus and more closeness to people. Walking past a corner shop on my way back, the squirrels of the park come to mind, and I find myself buying a big bag of nuts.
A couple of weeks go by: avoiding the city, applying to jobs online from the safety of my room, and I orbit between the house, Aldi, a few band gigs, and the park.
To the left of the the central entrance that I always take at the bottom of the park, is the lake. It is definitely a lake, not a pond. The lake shines a mint colour from the spreading algae, that floats on the surface like a table cloth. Gliding on the lake is the only swan I've seen that is solo. He is always alone, no partner, no other floating ghost of white on this lake. Sometimes I feel sorry for him, but not as sorry for the duck that has a plastic ring stuck around its beak. I'd felt such alarm for this duck on first sight, but after courageously talking in all my social anxiety and self awareness, to the woman who was closing the park cafe, it transpires that everyone is worried about this duck, and has been since January (I moved here in August.) So the duck can clearly feed still, and he wont let any saviour near it, including an animal ambulance that once came out. The other day I was watching him drift on the water and I was half tempted to climb the short fence around the lake and lean over and grab him. As if he sensed this very thought he turned to directly face me, then promptly sank beneath the water's surface. On this lake too are coots and moorhens. To me they always seem less boisterous than ducks, perhaps that's because they always seem to be in lesser numbers. There is one grand heron that hangs around this lake. I'm quite sure it is always the same heron that comes, that stands stoic like a security guard, or a shiny skeleton in illuminating heat or greying downpours. If you walk too close on the path surrounding the lake, she doesn't fly in fear, but disdain, and then only to the lake's island, from where she can actually catch your eye, and let you know; no, I am not afraid, just fuck off!
Nearly a month here and I've found a part time job. A gruelling housekeeping job, not gruelling for being housekeeping itself, which I have done before, and in the past have even found a kind of body meditation with at times. It is gruelling for the size of the hotel; meaning the cleaning department is agency owned, meaning working at infeasible speeds. So I grow weary and irritable quickly, and the park becomes more and more a haven. Even though a dread is already building around the job, (that nostalgic feeling of being a child and not wanting to go to school and pulling a 'sickie' in the morning,) still, with the work day ahead, I am able to find a real spark of joy half asleep, setting off through the park on a Brompton bike gifted to me. Cycling along Lime Avenue; elm, oak, hawthorn, birch and beech trees are definitely not budging for anyone's unrealistic work demands. They loom over me, throwing dappled light with the day just beginning, parallel to the already queuing traffic all pointing to the city centre. I fly along, weaving between morning joggers, school drop-off walks, dog walkers, a throb to the park already; people feeling the pull of the park as much as me, and making time for it. And I think no matter what the next five to eight hours may hold, the park will be waiting.
Everyone still throws bread to ducks despite the growing awareness that bread is no good for ducks. In the evenings turning late afternoons, with the already noticeably shorter daylight hours, I walk to feed the squirrels; my pockets stashed with nuts. I see women not being able to resist sharing their nearly stale loaves, ripping up the bread and hurling the pieces like confetti; a celebration of a not wasted purchase. Sometimes there is a very tall and hooded man that enthusiastically throws seed, but the pigeons are too quick and always grab most of it before the water birds get a look in. The pigeons of this park are the bravest I have ever met. They don't move out of the way for my bike work commute. They don't move out of the way of the city's rentable electric bikes. They don't even move out of the way of chasing toddlers!
About two weeks after starting the job, autumn is already in the air. When I moved it was a late summer clinging on. I arrived just in time for a Caribbean carnival in the park, music blasting, speakers reverberating, and the ducks and especially the heron yet again thinking what the fuck, but not scared. Now there is no music shaking the air, instead there is rain. The leaves are falling more, though I never seem to see them falling, I just find their clusters of damp, brown, leafy sludge mixing with the soil. By the lake there is a willow tree, with branches reaching down to the earth, sweeping, sweeping, and not yet shedding at all; still green, shining a bright lime colour when the light is right, slanting through the surrounding terraced housing. A little further up from this delicate umbrella of a tree, is often a pensioner with his walker, his fishing rod and his rescued Pomeranian with its 'Warning: Nervous' jacket. I feel honoured the dog lets me pet him, and I ponder about buying myself the same jacket for work.
When I moved here it was after a break-up from a painful on-and-off ten year relationship, which was after a work/accommodation agreement not working out, which was after a Christmas seasonal job ending, which was after a summer seasonal job ending. I am aged thirty three. I have never owned collateral, except a 2002 Clio that I'd bought off Facebook marketplace for £300, that lasted me three months on the road before failing its MOT miserably. I moved to Manchester in utter loss and with a suitcase. I can't say writing now that I feel 'found.' I'm still lost, but I have an unexpected point on a map, that is the park. I gravitate to Alexandra park, I feel a grounding once I'm within its gates, and I often think about it when I'm outside its gates. When it all feels a bit shit, and how can it not – only talking about myself here and beyond that simultaneously is daily violence, killing, is fire, is blood, is drought, is flooding; is every extreme no one person can hold and shouldn't, but often is left to – here I am in this body of mine, flummoxed with my immediate personal issues, haloed by all the bigger and scarier issues globally, and I throw nuts to squirrels. Some squirrels even come over to my outstretched hand and put their fuzzy paws on the knuckle of my index finger, the nut held between two bent fingers to protect my finger tips from any accidental nips, and I really do feel peace in these moments – no, joy! If there can be a jolt of connection and giving and ease with a nut passed to a squirrel, in a rectangular park in a city, filled with people looking for what only a park in a city can give, then I think that all is not lost.
I come back home, the park is already dark because it is late September now. Through the window I see the last light in the sky is a darkening purple hue. The landlady is at the kitchen table making a banner. I think of making my first one, I think of 'throw nuts, not bombs.' The wind is hurling. Yesterday there was thunder and lightning. I sit at my desk in my room to try and write at last, in this house that I know is good for creativity that I keep not creating in. I stall, like I constantly did the 2002 Clio. I glance to my right and see the houseplant Em gave to me, a Monstera. I've not owned it long enough to worry I might kill it. It sits on my desk, its thin leaves are strong, like shields.
Helen Grant has been published in a wide array of magazines such as The Poetry Review and The North, and been shortlisted, longlisted and commended in various poetry competitions, most recently The Black Cat Poetry Press Turning Points and Nature Competition and Hedgehog Press Micro Collection Competition #2. She is Primary Poetry Editor for Spellbinder magazine.