Names have been changed to protect anonymity.
All of Manchester student life is strung off of one long road. It starts in town. You probably got the train there when you first arrived, just cool and unaware enough to think your parents were the most embarrassing thing about you. Then on through town. Northern Quarter: the cocktails are unbearably expensive; the piercings are unnervingly cheap and you can always hear someone with more student loan left having a better time than you just around the corner. Past Gay Village in its perpetual Saturday-Night illumination and then down to the unis. Where the academic students pride themselves on going to ‘uni of’ to do English or Maths or History and the smart ones go to ‘Man-Met’ to do vocational courses and end up with jobs. You’re on a roll now. Like a pinball, bouncing giddily between the bars - the Student Union, KroBar, Big Hands, Turing Tap, The Ford Maddox. Before you know it you’re on the Curry Mile proper. Electric in the evening, aromatic with Indian restaurants in the morning and foggy with car fumes and exhaled Shisha always. Churning with life, even in the early hours where you can look into well-lit, glass-front Turkish Barber’s and watch men get their haircuts at 3 A.M. You’re nearly at the end of the line.
Fallowfield first though, where the students live. Everyone knows someone that’s been mugged down each road. My friend Charlie twice in one night down Furness [much in aggravation to the second poor sod that tried it] but you’ll choose to live there for at least two years.
Then finally, out the back of Withington, where the Curry Mile has well and truly been converted to Wilmslow Road, is Christie’s Hospital Roof.
It’s the rooftop of a small hospital carpark in Withington. Twelve floors high. You either go at sunset or sunrise and if you go when the carpark is shut you have to duck beneath a car barrier but you can still get in. The floor is a horrible salmon colour. The full-length windows on the way up are dusty and the door to each storey is painted a bright primary-school colour. Four is red. Six is Fuchsia. Twelve, the final door, is purple. The view is fairly average but we all will it to be beautiful.
Behind you the flat roofs of the hospital are sloped together, shards of cream and grey and navy stuck haphazardly into the air. No one looks that way. You go up the ramp and on the left is the main road. You don’t look down at that either. You look out. Towards the tall buildings in town, silver sentinels of professional life and to the right, comforting familiarity where the grey student houses nudge amicably together. They’re crowded and lean crookedly like their inhabitants on a Friday night. Or a Saturday night. Or any time, really - our lectures are recorded now and none of us can get jobs.
I went for the first time in my second semester of uni. Alex Laurence took me. I’d met him rehearsing for a play about teenagers growing up on the Scottish Isles and halfway through our scene I had to kiss him on the cheek. I always think he has a beautiful name, like a romantic poet’s. Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Alex Laurence, and as we looked out across the wide expanse of Fallowfield he enigmatically declared,
‘One floor shy of being perfect the perfect view.’
He thought of himself as a romantic poet too, but much like our play about the Scottish Isles, the line felt a little over- rehearsed. His fingers were drifting lazily over my arms, however, skimming the soft satin bend of my elbow and flirting with my boundaries in a fumbling distraction from the crooked hemline of houses and trees and skies sewn together in the crisp air - overstitched and dark in certain areas and in others, beautifully spread, and it wasn’t the right moment to take the piss out of him for saying it.
His cologne and the heat of his breath were still strong as we leant into the cold, buffering wind. Alex was a master’s student when I was in first year. Three years older than me and devilishly charismatic; you could smell that he was in the drama building before you saw him. A bold, expensive musk that lingered and seemed untouchably grown-up to me and when I kissed him on the cheek it was always bristly.
The first time I met him, I remember thinking to myself,
‘Okay so I fancy him. Nothing will come of it but that’ll be fun, keep rehearsals entertaining.’
But we ended up getting on. I would go out to pubs with large groups and end up talking with him into the small hours. We were both painfully aware of the dynamic between us. I was new to Manchester with a phone that perpetually buzzed with sickly sweet reassurance from my long-distance boyfriend. I was always Google Mapsing my way through town, learning by signs: Wembley Grove, Albion Road, Boothe Avenue. He knew Fallowfield by names and faces and roads he’d thrown up down and I yearned for the one day I would too.
The purple door used to mark a crossroads as you entered into that strange, flat, liminal arena. If I went in the right mood, with the right person, the world seemed to open up to me. It was a place of promise. The sky kept just at bay by congregated metal and stocky concrete columns. The tall blueish buildings in town conspiring with the sun in interesting twists of light. The tops of them peeping just above the horizon and brimming with industry. I’d lean almost too far against the rough concrete edge. Breathe the deepest breath I’d taken that day and breach for big student discussions: anxieties about the future; sexual encounters that were a bit too much and left you feeling hollow; what it meant to grow up and realise your parents were people too. That they had once drunk and danced and gazed dreamily into sunsets and sunrises. That they, too, had pictured the coloured, breathless, breadth of their future and had ended up instead, with you. That midlife crises were entirely valid.
You’d leave Christie’s Hospital Roof with a grin tugging the very corner of your mouth and the evening would be warm and calm or the morning crisp and dewy, a chilled tangerine of a day emerging before you.
During the pandemic, I started noticing people taking dates to Christie’s all the time. It made sense, there was nowhere else to go.
Boys like Alex, who are in love with themselves and attempt to convince girls they should feel the same. Purveyors of Fallowfield Culture who had ridden the 142 so many times it now only came when they beckoned. North face puffer jackets, and a hoop in one ear. Two hoops, if they particularly wanted to start an argument at Sunday lunch back home. They’re usually from London, some are from Portsmouth or Bristol, but it doesn’t matter because they all sound the same. They’ll probably have DJed in the Oak House accommodation (occasionally referred to as ‘The Stables’ by the older generations because of all the ketamine consumed) before working their way up to Cubo. Cubo was a ten foot by ten foot sweatbox. It was hot and heavy in a horrible damp way and you could never quite figure out who was touching you. Other people’s sweat worked away at the smiley face sharpied on your wrist and I’ll die genuinely thankful for never having seen it in the light.
Now, the boys only had Christie’s and two bottles from the Sainsbury’s BOGOF deal to impress with.
I went just once this year, after the first set of restrictions had lifted. Not for a date. I’d been round my friend Maisie’s for a drink and we ended up sneaking in with her housemates at five in the morning. ‘Shall we go? Let’s go.’ She never waits for a response. Always one step ahead, looking back at you over a mass of long, black hair.
We were rowdy on the walk there. I hadn’t bought a jacket but Maisie had draped a leopard print blanket over me. I knew it was only half to keep me warm and half for the image. We were bohemian reprobates, throwing our voices to the still night. The air crisp, the only sound the distant warning trill of a car alarm which called helplessly from a few roads behind. In the early hours you are either running towards or from and there is no in-between. Either trying to creep unnoticed home from day-time endeavours, the tail end of which have accidentally bled into the darkness, or you are the one hunting. Out on a mission. You mark your territory with each electric step. Your laughter echoes down brickwork alleys formed of other people’s sensible homes and warns them to stay inside.
We knew the way intuitively and there was not far to go.
Maisie sent a pile of shattered glass skimming and skipping in a tinkling green ricochet across the patchwork concrete pavement. Shards of glass danced dangerously in the faltering glow of a streetlight before being crushed to stillness under her black leather trainer.
I separated from the pack, wandering aimlessly over the mustard yellow threshold of the bus lane, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, palms up to the eerie blue.
Two of Maisie’s flatmates were ahead, their shadows morphing and converging grotesquely as they play-fought. They came as a pair. Always. Then, in the rare moments they separated, you felt uncomfortable and caught in the perpetual gravity between them.
‘Come on!’
I hurried then. We were baggy patterned anomalies, our shadows growing incrementally longer as we paced the streets. Occasionally one of us would jog a little, surging us all forward in our unspoken understanding.
The darkness was lifting, promising cornflower blue, and the birds began muttering as we crept round to the barrier. Maisie ducked under first, her two silver eyebrow piercings glinting dangerously as the strip lights of the first floor clicked on. It was soberingly cool in the stairwell. She led the brigade with her long fingers first, walking them up the scarlet rubber handrail, her dark hair out behind her like the tail of a comet. Our trainers pattered flatly after. The steps were worn in the centre like a church’s might be and we stayed quiet just the same. She pushed open the purple door, back first, so she could smile knowingly as the dawn spilled in from behind her. The sky bloomed in front of us. Pale, lemon-sorbet light seeping into the blue. A few thin, vaporous clouds lifting like a wedding veil to the amber face of the sun. We, the congregation, smiled up at her, throwing our cheers to the breeze like confetti on that, her happy day.
I planted myself over the painted 5 miles- an- hour sign on the ramp and began appraising Fallowfield. All the small wonders that had opened up to me over the years . The names and faces and roads I’d thrown up down.
How there’s an ice cream truck that runs up and down Wellington road at 6pm every day that sells Mr. Whippy, Calippos, and drugs out the back in the evening,
How the left aisle of a Magic Bus has more legroom than the right even though the chairs seem to align,
How the hill in Plattfields, when the sun tilts just the right way, is the eighth wonder of the world,
How when I walk through Fallowfield and Withington at night now I imagine silver lines between me and the next person I know's house and weave my way happily through the streets based off of this spider’s web of a safety net.
Maisie was rolling a cigarette, having hopped up on one of the concrete pillars. I watched her, tongue stuck firmly in her left cheek as she methodically tucked the paper and furled the curls of tobacco.
She looked up and then past me, I followed her gaze.
A nurse. Dressed in royal blue scrubs, her hair pulled back in a large clip the way my mother used to and a similar air of nurturing disapproval . A mask hung limply at her side and she was fumbling for her keys. She looked exhausted. Pale, ghostly, and cold. I could see us all through her eyes in that moment, as though for the first time. Messy, self-absorbed twenty-somethings who didn’t know how to dress for the weather. I clasped the blanket closer around me as a plume of stale smoke escaped out the corner of Maisie's mouth, merging and mingling with our condensed breathe. Whilst the nurse had been pacing linoleum floors, pushing needles through skin, and looking reassuringly into pooling eyes, we’d been relishing in our youth. Crept up to her doorstep even, and then hovered embarrassingly as her blue Ford Kia rolled sensibly down the ramp. My only saving grace was that I’d never been quite edgy enough to commit to smoking.
I don’t remember leaving, only the bare-shouldered walk back home. Home through what was suddenly just Fallowfield. Perpetually grey, and in mourning for the work we weren't doing. Flat and unforgiving and characterised harshly with homeless people you ignored out of instinct, then immediately wished you hadn’t a few paces on.
Alex Laurence messaged me a couple of days later. He does that occasionally. I think it’s just to check that I, custodian of his third year image, still exist. He lives in a nice apartment in London and has some sort of business internship but I’d be surprised if he paid his own rent. I understand now, though. How each day he’d cultivated his identity at university; that with each new friend and experience, the person he wanted to be had become more vivid and more precious to him. Until suddenly it was the end and he was no longer Alex Laurence, Captain of Fallowfield. No longer moored only to the current moment and riding high on a tide of expensive cologne and casual flirting . He was Alex Laurence: Unemployed Graduate. And now, just like him, we were filled with a precise and broadly useless knowledge. Connoisseurs of Fallowfield Culture. Idiots on Roofs.
I heard Maisie tell the story of the night a week or so back. It was filled with the same romanticism and exaggerated debauchery needed to spin a tale about Christie’s. She trailed off at the end though, losing conviction for once, and couldn’t quite meet my gaze when she spoke of the nurse coming out. I was grateful to know that at least we’d all realised together in that moment that it was time. Time to go and not look back.
