Back on Stockport Rd road I spot a red red sled dangling on a shop hook – if it snows this month it’ll be good for when she visits, though Levenshulme is all flat bogs, I could be a husky to her driver, rope round my waist – now would that be hernia territory or good for the heart according to the doctors at the blue cube surgery by car crash junction where I haven’t yet registered? -the one next to the unfinished mosque (Donations dried up? Planning trouble?) - you know the one?
A Roma kid rides a Netto trolley in the supermarket carpark. A traffic light sings. Outside the Internet shop I try to figure out whether I need a Polish bricklayer, a Persian Fortune Teller, or a room, £40 a week with pleasant company.
Phoning home @ £1 for half hour
Posting on-line job applications @ £1 for half hour
Sending money home @ £1 for half hour
Burying relatives arrangements @ £1 for half hour
Sending school fees @ £1 for half hour
Appealing Immigration decisions @ £1 for half hour
At Medina Supermarket I ask a shelf filler, ‘Pani ha?’
He smiles wryly, ‘at the back, second fridge on the left... sah!’
Lahoray vibes come flooding back: Lahoray! Lahoray!
Makes this A6 traffic seem puny.
The street lights are flickering on.
I step inside The Mahal Banqueting Hall. Its decor touches base with every possible wedding dream:
The Hollywood: white clothed tables, an Oscars ceremony but Dolls House in its stillness, emptiness, and perfection.
The Bedouin: Gauzes – this is a tent, you are camped in a desert, a microdot among this blowing sand, and what makes life bearable, against the keening thirsty wind, is love – cup it with both hands. Love is the only thing, everything else is a chimera.
The Raj: The gilted statues of kathak dancers: you have married beauty, poise, stability, now the Vedas will guide you, garland your wedding bed and you will discover untrammelled joy, drink from the deepest river of joy.
Outside again, the A6 slaps my dreaming head with hard rain . And I tramp home. In Lonsdale Rd I hang up my trainers as my kitchen fluorescent splutters a hello. And the gas cooker, trembles, says, Ok, guys, here we go. And a pak choi feast is eaten, and a belly burped.
Lulled by the scratching of the terrier to the right, as the neighbours to the left take a hammer to their card meter, I miss my girlfriend’s sigh, my old dog’s baleful stare, I miss the ceiling squeaks as the couple in the room above us make love, I miss the frenum licking dub of my Longsight mate’s car stereo. I miss me.
And now hemmed by the ReMar filing cabinet and the red red sled, I doss in an old Ikea chair, dreaming of the bed shop, the Mahal, the postcards in the window.... And up comes the murmurings of the monks of Gorton monastery... lifting with the rumble of Al Jamia’s host of prayers... As Hennigan’s Rooney hordes chant their hopes to the sky... And a thousand self-taught saxophonists start up. And this soundscape soars above the sprawling, caterwauling, stitched lip of Levenshulme. And those lips unfold into the shape of the Om. Of the Amen. Of the Zzzzzzzzz. And I lay my head.
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