Dissolution

I

Stansfield House. The relationships that occur on a day to day basis – the time spent in Eileen’s room – are immaterial. What matters, of course what matters, is doing the paperwork in black ink. Ensuring the Medical Administration Record can be scanned, and that the Trust will receive no liability.

—

Fr. Ignatius can hear his heart drawing in, singing its last. He can see Heaven; it brims in the white of the bindweed. Br. Andrew looks after him, praying in turn, flowering with the same silence.

–

A man called Reggie throws a fire extinguisher because chicken wings are not on the menu. They will not move him to a special facility due to insufficient funds.

Nothing else dramatic happens.

—

It’s Friday, so it’s perverse to stay in, or made perverse; John goes out past the tramlines and the recently exposed river, making clear its slightly stilted flow, the corpses it has borne aloft.

There’s a guy selling weed right by the front door of The Regal Moon.

John spends a lot of evenings in The Regal Moon. The mythological Wetherspoons. There are several books on display – the dialect verse of local ero Edwin Waugh. If he’d tried to rhapsodise about a local doffer, he probably would have been doffed himself, by the bouncer, leering at the pint-nursers that have made this their elective home.

Can ero give way to eros?

It’s the only place in town that doesn’t blare music. John needs the pretence of neumes moving in the Gregorian chant of John Smiths.

John gazes at the others not talking: stoic taxi-drivers, ferrymen stalking to the Underworld, comatose dancers in the local bars.

A man bearing a Stella like Albertus Magnus, holding the key to immortality, taps John on the shoulder, as if a familiar friend.

“I just went to see Elbow in Manny. It was wicked. This is the first night owt I’ve had in ages. How are you, mate?”

A sniffer test, Shibboleth – or just a warm greeting, a fraternal gesture. No time to tell, really; a couple of seconds to make up your mind. Trust? No-trust?

“Tired.”

“Why tired, mate? Can I cheer you up?”

“I’ve been at work all day. 10 hour shift. I’m knackered.”

Knackered. Good one. Even though John’s local, in every meaningful sense, and his dad is as salt of the earth as you can get, reminiscing about Stevie Grimes and Big Dave, the local lingo has always been obscured.

All the Latin, maybe. John wonders if this guy talks Latin. Never mind. Keep it up; be brother to all humankind.

“It’s hard, care work, I’ll tell you that, mate. My dad’s a carer to me mam. She’s got Dementia and that. She can’t remember his name.” Pause. “Listen mate, I’ll get you a drink.”

He comes back, without asking what John wants, with bucketfuls of lager.

(These are put back.)

“What sort of music do you like, mate?”

Salve regina. Holy contemplation. Madonna? Just be honest… “I like all kinds, you know. A lot of R & B.”

Rome & Bologna?

“Me too, mate. I’m into rock, too.” More warm small talk. “Listen, mate, you should meet me dad.”

His dad’s outside. His head is bleeding.

“Listen, son, what the fuck?”, he upbraids. A grim haircut.

A fierce argument erupts between him and his dad.

John slips off.

—

A keg of cider through the hatch. To sustain you during Lent. Days in the cell; bread and a thimble of cider, apples from the orchard. Meals in silence, surrounded by graces.

The yew tree’s voice. Nettles, cascades of vetch. An aeroplane screeches by, droplets of the world beyond.

—

Stansfield House, Saturday. John is tasked to visit Elizabeth. The whole room is covered in shit: shit on the floors, shit on the walls, shit on the period-candelabra. John begins bleaching the gaudy, cyan carpets, chosen so the recently-put away could somehow be convinced that they’d stumbled into a time machine, taken back to the room of their own grandmother.

Mild hangover hits. John binge-drinking solid tea from a metal flask in one gloved hand; mild suspicions there are a set of unenforced regulations on this. John takes the seventh plastic apron, begins the sanitary procedures, tries not to notice the differences, for example, in arse size.

“Who are you, John, the shit inspector?”

The plastic apron in the bin, a dash along the ward; the supervisor, James, made surly, asks for a chat.

“John, she had specifically requested no personal care. I’m inclined to give you a verbal warning. We must respect the Care Plans of customers in Stansfield House, and implement safety only respective of these documents.”

“She was literally covered from head to toe in shit, James.”

James: measured, professional concern, knotted with empathy, somehow notes of scorn. Is that right?

Anyhow, it seems clear that employee pot-shots like this are to be ignored, like bullets the chivalric James must bat away in promise of promotion; a job in the CQC, perhaps.

Away from this shit, of course.

—

Saturday night. Exhaustion. John has a curious habit, after work, of pinching a few of these Franciscan Weissbrau  that they do from the ALDI.

John pulls them open with his teeth in the flat; modern, white, with a mysterious blur that comes from some ethereal alarm-system that is installed across the whole complex. No thyme.

In other words, the reason, or so John likes to imagine, for why he spends so much time out. Mild drunkenness approximates the vulnerability we encounter. He can’t be bothered to clean his gaff. There is no reason to clean it; no holiness gold star.

(John wants someone to talk to.)

Weekly confession. Father Anthony: undistracted. Eventually: containing entire universes of undiluted spirit. He has paragraphs to provide, in reflection.

He has no-one else to see. No bureaucratic queue. No correspondence.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” And this is not so much as a ‘Father’, as in some Platonic form of one. This is a known to grasp. Someone who shares my pain, and joy, yet someone who can remove it in this moment.

The stir of a blackbird, wagtail, then the subdued movement of another monk. One who has learnt stillness.

“I have had fantasies of sex. I have spoken out of turn. I have been unjust and judgemental towards other brothers. I have complained about the quality of some of the meals. I have foraged, rather than enjoy the one, simple meal. I have had many thoughts of accidie, making abstract plans to run away at some intervals. I have been distracted during prayer.”

A copy of Wordsworth’s Collected Works in the flat, lying beside a chopping board smeared with coffee granules. John turns to “Furness Abbey”:

Here where, of holy industry, renewing

every daily Office on Time-distanced ways

what constant note here summons forth and prays

from every nature-cradled monk’s pursuing?

See how her ivy chants, each shard imbuing

fresh life to contemplations of fraternal days;

and on the meadowed walls, how bright, how gay,

the flowers in pearly buds, their blooms renewing.

Thanks to the place, blessings upon the hour;

even as I speak the rising sun’s first smile

gleams on the grass-crowned top of yon tall tower

whose threads sway with the brothers to proclaim

prescriptive title to the beating aisles

of cloisters, worshipping thy holy name!

Bastard.

—

Bloody dreams; pacing around an institutional building, a non-descript person with no face is lying on the floor, in a mixture of fluids. Then sex with James – why sex with James? – his Rochdale-professional twang, his middle-manager suit and charity-shop dotted tie. His leery, smoky breath puncturing. Mmm, lizardy.

Three a m. Awoken by the bell, seeing the moon ambling over the garden, free and level, crescent, a tapestry. This time of day has no sway any longer; the night is made holy.

The first dream of the night. An angel, faceless, breathless, but with something that, by convention, we would describe as life, bleached white, beckons towards a light: the esoteric, haloed, miniature light a cave provides.

Pre-amble to the brothers, in the church, mantled in darkness.

Pre-amble to the second, bisected dream…

II

Irregular beats reverberating from the Moston semi-detached AirBnB. Alternative types dancing, deliberately unprofessionally, to burdened speakers. After a predatorial beat, smashing subtly small sections of the brain of the revellers in close radius, a simulated, structured musical interlude is permitted to reign. Broadly considered, it’s the sound of someone hoovering, gradual and vacant, a part of the makeshift, carpeted dance floor.

The joyous and constant sound of a migraine.

T-Bone has been marshalled in as the ‘dealer’. In reality, he is merely a complex part of a much larger trafficking operation, spanning North Manchester. It is important, for marketing, that he keeps up appearances in this party, which, of course, is not technically happening. None of the eighty people, sprawled around this Victorian house, flailing their arms in some sort of mock-quadrille, are here. Nonetheless, despite never having been here, a woman with overflowing red hair necks the LED flickering silhouette of a man, a wobbly silhouette, falling over, or looking like he has lost something, trying, in a haze of intoxication, to perfect the allure of being a stranger.

He has been sent an address, but doesn’t need it, wandering through an unlocked front door, trying to reason with people marooned in a series of disparate K-holes. He sees the motions of people dancing to an undanceable mash-up – they look like they are trialing a post-modern form of exercise – and fits in, vaguely bobbing his head and moving his arms.

Someone recognises T-Bone’s own silhouette, and he hands over the produce in the tornado of this dance floor; a gram of ketamine, a gram of cannabis, hospital-stolen valium. Grimy cash exchanged: notes he accounts as he performs the bad and legless impression of a dance.

A guy on the margins of the dance floor: entirely gone. He addresses T-Bone, his great and true deliverer.

“What are we trying to do, man? Y’know what I mean? What is it? What are we here for?”

T-Bone, in the guise of a bouldering beat, hazards a response. “To follow, to worship, to guide…”

An unheeded response. “Man, I can’t think of anything I want to do right now. Who can guide me, man? I need a guide.” He smokes somehow badly, assailing his mouth with a bit of Amber Leaf without any filter tip, sitting awkwardly in the paper, burning like a pissed Prometheus had swindled fire from the wrong god.

“We balance our spiritual goals with our short-term objectives. You came here, on some level, to network, to cultivate and foster friendships that will see you through to the next chapter of your life. You also have a gentle and constant striving for truth, whatever that means to-“

Enough… T-Bone goes to an overgrown garden. Pots that must have been used for serious growing, at some point or other, pulsate with nettle and chervil. Dock leaves take their chance upon the pavement slabs. A few cans of Stella feed the unused soil, the clumps of grass.

“Not I was an interesting experiment-“

A literary conversation. What on earth; T-Bone is paralysed, reduced to stone. He zones out for a second and finds the motherfucker quoting a poem.

“In sooth it is right comely & sublime

   to loiter in the greensward cloisters gaze

upon these merry monks that dance with time

   within their witching psalms – they regally praise

the wheedling clock-a-clay that flies upon 

  the roystering clouds & rawky sunshine shone

in bright perfection on the great archways.

   The whitethorn joins with them in their lays

its massy limbs threading thro’ sext & none

   but time is but a garment that appears

to cloth these gents with majesty & grace

    while they beyond this setting conjure fear

of gods into the teeming knotty maze

  of awes & bumbarrels & clock-a-clays”

Said motherfucker has done the whole thing wrong, T-Bone decides. An emperor losing an empire of clothes.

“Oh, T-Bone. Nice to see you. I was wondering if I could buy an eighth of MD?”

—

The brothers have little socials, from time to time. They sit in the garden, when the weather permits, and watch the panorama of clouds that God scatters upon the canvas of the sky. Each cloud infinitely and separately unknowable, a shadow, an independent blindness, a darkling lustre. Parsed into imagery, cipher. The covenant of being here; that every token that hangs over the yielded day is a cipher, an entry into a mystery callously yet lovingly greater than ourselves, than this dependent moment.

Brother Simeon does talk: odd foxglove beaconed voice.

“Too many people are addicted to drugs beyond here. I’ve always felt that silence was my drug.” He talks as if sermonising, until retreating into a more personal diatribe. “I used to be really into sports. Tennis, croquet, the lot. And now… now I don’t even  know how to kick a ball any more. There is no need.”

—

T-Bone becomes studious for a little while, watching people leap into alternative temperatures, fuelled by their cocktail of drugs T-Bone knows is safe. Upstairs, in a jarringly childish bedroom filled with beany bags, a couple of young adults are hotboxing the cushions, filling the alternative-bedroom-slash-play-pen with weed. Bob Marley is standing his guard like Big Brother: mystic heiress to failed evenings, seer of the unseen, Rastafarian with no sacrament.

“This music has no flavour, Teeb.”

Attention swerves from the comment for a good hunk of time. Mass pupil dilation: volumes of people stare into their own shadows.  

“Like drugs, man”, the moustached man declaims, finally.

T-Bone swears this man’s moustache is actually luminescent.

“This is a good high, man, let me just say. This is good shit. Where did you get this shit?” His moustache is irradiated now.

T-Bone: “It’s MK Ultra. Better shit than you’ve had before. If you want to turbo-charge this high, I’ve got some 2C-B. Max euphoria. What do you say? I’ll be a shaman, man, back you, bro.”

T-Bone not entirely sure who is talking through him. This form of patter learnt from successive drug dealer tribal leaders, their pretences of extraversion naked in wind and cobble-strewn parties. 

“Sure thing, man. I love to get high.”

T-Bone hands over the 2C-B. A £20 note with ash smeared upon Elizabeth’s stiff upper lip is presented. “Be careful, bro”, T-Bone says.

Moustache engorges 2c-b.

 Within a few minutes, T-Bone sitting comfortably, in the best silence he can, the Dude is stunned, clearly having what the authorities would describe as a “dissociative moment”. His moustache has darkened, and he looks frightened, wary, like he is walking agog upon some painful childhood memory, an avuncular slap perhaps.

Shaman T-Bone. “Don’t worry, man. Find your safe space. Your beach. You can leave this island of despair. What sea is spreading out, ushering you? Where is your solace? What do you love?”

T-Bone reassures himself he is still some sort of guide. A better guide than the reams of charlatans on PsychologyToday (he reckons); £80 for a brief chat in a suburban Cheshire house, cash-in-hand. Or the parish priest with his long, drawn out homilies, his new lack of any place to retreat to. This is the only non-bougie psychological release available.

Eternities scaled, the Mesopotamian era winding up, the person who owns this house (happening to be a guy called Mike, who was dancing to his own audience most of the time) reinforcing his claim to it, the party slowly winds up, at 7 am.

The sun has set, and the concrete jungle proclaims its desire to be held beautiful, just as the still Victorian gothic façade of Manchester – its jumble of Red Brick prisons and abbeys – reveals itself.

T-Bone leaves: a successful night. His black Reebok bag sways in the crowded vista; the gilded walk of a tall man, who skirts around the alleys, with a concealed knife.

“Hand it all over”, he says, holding it to T-Bone’s throat. T-Bone empties himself purgatively of everything – his sea of random bank notes and his carefully vetted, ecological drugs. Ketamine, 2cB, and valium flutter away in the apple of his eye. The world, alive.

This has all, unfortunately, been a purely spiritual exercise.

III

The tram from Rochdale to Manchester is like a heritage railway trail, a tour of the studded post-industrial realm: Hollinwood, Oldham. John can see them in the process of charting a new way forward. But nothing will ever replace the mills, not as a source of meaning, an epicentre.

Equally, it is a painfully slow journey, in which society from every angle cannot be avoided. At Hollinwood, a group of three teenagers get on and recline in the seats, marijuana marauding from their caps.

At Newton Heath and Moston, the journey finally becomes cosmopolitan, post-industrial but drugged by the fantasia of shops and fashionable cafés, unable to see the demise of its own epicentres. Gigantic structures assail the eye, like ziggurats of an emptied civilisation.

The tram allows enough time to see the reality of the journey from Rochdale to Manchester. All its twisted contours, its spat-out bones. When St. Peter’s Square is finally reached, and the beacon of a modern ‘library’ (in fact, book-scarce médiatheque) is proclaimed, a slow time-travel – into what seems to be the present – is carried out.

Into the heartland of Manchester’s student capital – its cavalcade of diverse fast-food joints signifying a modern, youthful clientele – John follows Portland Street, barely registering its grizzly pubs, its looming casino.

He is reading a lost author of the Romantic era, a tawny paperback he’d acquired on a recent excursion to the city, sold to him by an apathetic Shudehill bookseller who blared jazz and smoked in store. Within the uncared for books was Brother Percy Neville, a nineteenth century Manc Franciscan. The book fits into his jacket, and so he is able to perfect the automatism of walking while reading it:

            Oh, Mary, bless, if you can, the mills

            that coil like a serpent where a crescendo

            of alder once breathed into the newly shrill

            coal languor, and the stars in diminuendo

Old volume smell a cure for the McDonaldsified tram.

But John reorientates himself to the walk, trying to picture Brother Percy making the same walk, witnessing to Christ among the stable-fringed inns. He notices the stars in diminuendo now, the light, unvenerate, slipping away. The loudness of this silence.

Cities, John reflects, are quieter places than towns. The willed effort of having to keep to oneself figures something approaching meditation. Walking is the only authentic past-time left. Premier Inn; which recently had fulfilled its original function as a House of Hospitality for the most vulnerable, welcoming asylum seekers through Manchester.

—

After matins, at 4 a.m., in the night, the presence of another.

“I’ve been meaning to speak to you, Brother Guthlac.” An Irish lay-brother, who reigned over the convent’s vast orchard. “Brother Guthlac, I wanted to ask how are ya?”
“Um, I’m ok.”
“Well, I feel so comfortable, so confident in your presence. I know here we’re all supposed to focus on prayer. But I think it’s yerself who has learned silence, truly. I think I might love yer.”

Pines, dazzling, many armed, embracing, forgiving.

“Thank you. I feel comfortable with you too.”

—

It’s a full sonnet, for fuck’s sake, but John wishes that Brother Neville would shut up now, having perfected the first quatrain:

            Still, I feel the presence of thy saintly will

            mothering each unholy growth. Intendo

            il Dio,I strive to say, and worship still

            when all is covered in vast smoke –

Stop. No more. Focus on the city, its sights, its scents. Its emptiness.

Right at Sackville Street, the long way round, to see all of this. Perhaps just how the city changes, perhaps how signposted this designated pilgrimage is. Sackville Street, and John sees it, right there: Mother of God Abbey.

Of course it has been turned into a gigantic Wetherspoons.

On this Friday night, everyone in there is fucked, and in no religious terms, putting back lager, real ales, shedding their creosote. It cannot be avoided. The city, once a place of prayer, is now a place to Get Fucked.

And only those who are in the city to Get Fucked will notice it. Blinding himself to a rococo cloister plastered with the latest deals on tequila, John strides onwards, seeing the spire still in view.

Now John has arrived at his true destination, and everything is LGBT. Club Tropicana, #MyPrideIs… even a very bicurious willow sprouts from below the bridge.

Canal Street, but the canal itself is not the thoroughfare it was once; a mooring point for a few alternative types. You might as well name the street after something else, at this point.

Flags for a heaven. An XR protest turned into a street shindig, apocalyptic partying.

It’s something John has meant to do. But has had no cause to do, having willed something desperately to alleviate his loneliness, longed to switch the old formula up, the dry constellations of Rochdale. He figures the only way to engage with the world is by some manner of bucket list.

Banners. Rainbows. And a place called “BarPop”.

Stumbling into its Red Brick façade, its triads of windows, John encounters the bright neon painted revellers, the top hats, the bright, velvet suits. Women and men are here – the women dancing happily to beams of “REACH FOR THE STARS”, the men kissing, snogging, licking.

—

The fortnightly walk. The brother swap, walking individually with everyone in the monastery. The Irish brother, Brother Francis, and Brother Guthlac, his walking partner, are dazzled by the flowing of a world they have rejected. There is a tangled oak tree, each falling leaf as a message from a nearby God.

Brother Guthlac cradles a leaf in his hands, studying it. Brother Francis suddenly remarks: “I do hope we can stay here.” Realising the comment was too general, he remarks, “You’re such a breath of fresh air, Brother Guthlac. You have so much going for yer, aye.”

—

Here has to be new brotherhood.

As soon as John walks in, a man strokes him. “Ooh, you’re damn sexy. Can I take your number?” He is wearing glitter.

He overhears one conversation about chem sex, that feels like it has been manufactured in a laboratory rather than uttered by two human beings. One of them: “T-Bone can help us bone, man, he’s got all kinds of shit.”

Shot of sambuca as relief, dirge.

John is impressed, though, by a thoughtful, tall man, sat in the corner by himself. The sambuca shot relieves him of the stilted consciousness that he has a paperback jammed into his pocket, but the man still remarks on it, talking loudly in order to block out the noise:

“WHAT ARE YOU READING?”
“IT’S SOME POEMS BY A MANCUNIAN FRANCISCAN MONK.”

“THAT’S REALLY COOL. ARE YOU INTO PAINTING? THERE WAS A FRANCISCAN PAINTER WHO PAINTED THE INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPES OF MANCHESTER. HAVE YOU SEEN HIM? VERY COOL.”

“WHEREABOUTS ARE YOU FROM?”
“ROCHDALE”
“AH, ME TOO.”

As you do in these situations – chemistry spread like a tablecloth – they do kiss, realising they’ve missed a necessary part of small talk. Noticing his curls, getting them caught in his beard.

“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”
“LUKE. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DRINK?”

“I’LL JUST TAKE A VODKA AND COKE, THAT’S VERY-“

The tragic sentence was balefully uncompleted by a loud, thudding beat.

—

A flat, somewhere, and John feels fingers press through the threshold of his cathedral. He is drunker than he expected, like the drink that Luke bought him somehow plunged him far off an edge. The sacred building of his body has been upturned, desanctified.

—

IV

A tall man in the shadows, known colloquially as ‘Killa’: “I would like to torch that fucker alive.”

Big Dave stubs a cigarette, places it into an ashtray beside the large, black wheelchair he occupies.

“T-Bone’s no threat to us, man”, Big Dave intones. “It’s too messy. He’s not in smack. Just keep an eye on him. Don’t let im get too confident. Leave him be.”
Killa: “And he won’t go into smack. But he’s trying to take our control away. We own these motherfucking streets, and he just shows up into our motherfucking territory, no care in the fuckin’ world. We keep robbing that fucker.”

Big Dave, suddenly hieratic, like he’s recording a poetry programme for Radio 4: “We have so many threats. Gangs coming in here, making it dangerous. Some lone dealer ain’t a threat. Just spook him. Spook him t’ fuck.”

Big Dave’s eye droops.

—

The names and shadows of herbs. Valerian, gentian… the mystery of the enclosing, meditative flower… alchemical secrets. Signatures, embedding different growing rates, different sensitivities. Each a particularity, remaining such, although the climate changes for the worse.

—

In a squatted Red Brick church near the M60, T-Bone and some other crusties are sitting around, T-Bone smoking a joint unexcessively, boredly.

“And I got mugged again the other day-“

“Those bastards. What happened?”
“It was late in Moston. It was like they’d known I was there all night. It’s a dangerous business.”
“But you’ll carry on?”
“Naturally. Someone has to challenge the power of oligarchs.”

“But, Teeb, you need a heavy to be with you. Someone to strongarm the local mafia capitalists.”

Student left-wing ideology one time weaponised.
“If we start forming a gang, it will sound we’re trying to spread power. Rather than create a movement, bringing psychedelic potentiality to people. Dispel the witches.”

Even the crusties think he’s nuts, laughing and gruntling through wreaths of smoke.

—

T-Bone does feel protected with Rees hanging over him. What he is doing, he reflects, is scriptural: “and your young men will see visions”. We who are visionless, bringers of life and colour into a dead Manchester, in which the people spiritually rot. Although the addition of a bodyguard makes it all somehow more nefarious, less scriptural.

Out on duty, T-Bone sees a man visibly covered in shit on the Market Street pavement. He looks as if he was about to play something – a ukulele is positioned nearby his shit-covered trousers.

T-Bone deals a gram of M-Kat to a child-looking teenager in a baseball cap: released into the universe.

—

The books are transfixed to the spot they emerged from. Many have been here for 800 years. A personal favourite is The Cloud of Unknowing, annotated up into the twenty-first century by the hands of inquirers, questioners.

—

T-Bone is also part of a greater mass; a movement. The place in which young people want drugs becomes the place to evangelise, to spread the good news. Rees is a disciple, his huge arms containing vessels of the Word.

In a charity shop window, they are selling huge vellum books for £5 each. Rees, watching the road determinedly for hordes of enemies that he would never be able to fend off alone.

“They are palimpsests”, T-Bone announces.
“What’s a palimpsest, brah?”
“Each book has annotations by a thousand different hands, all in dialogue with each other. It’s a book of conversation.”
“Why are they for sale?”

Rees rolls a cigarette, suddenly insecure about his ignorance, wishing he’d embarked in some kind of formal education.

They are headed to a warehouse in Prestwich. There is a little makeshift club, where cash is donated to surly-looking bouncers. The weather is strangely dry, as if Manchester mourns its rainlessness, its anchor.

There are people milling into the rave. Midnight, and the night is duelled by dodgy come-ups, streams of light, unsearched bags full of questionable cocaine. The night is positively Mediterranean. A beacon of house music, keeping strict time, punctuates the club.

T-Bone, accompanied by a tired-looking Rees, his hair flaying in the night, lets it be known that he is selling. A drugged-up Rumour spreads her wings, vaunting through the zombying youngsters with winsome alacrity. Upon the various elevations that make up the dance floor – which creates the sometime illusion that people are dancing on each other’s heads – MDMA is exchanged.

QR codes on tickets; data structures of formal illusion.

A girl with an equine face is snorting cocaine in the pallet-studded smoking area, which still bears the frenetic energy of heavy industry. She is trying to keep up. The warehouse seems pre-ordained to never be a place of stillness, and so an artificial one must be created: hermits seldom make these their dwelling places. 7

They must be re-used for capitalist function.

She is friable-looking, as if the cocaine will thaw her nose. Unable to attach, T-Bone takes a small break out of the dealer’s life to pull her. He gleans she is about 18, and the conversation swiftly moves to her insecurities.

“I really never fit in in college.”
“But you’re off to university next? Right? You’ll fit in there, surely.”

She coughs. “I’m worried about being far away from home.”

She is wearing black; her breasts protrude through the thin margin of a black top.

“Where are you from?”
T-Bone mutters something; a nonexistence. “Colmarton.”
“I’ve never heard of that place.” Then, with a note of pride, and T-Bone suddenly aware of a tiny silver crucifix hanging from her neck. “I’m from Whitby.”
“Have you heard of the Goth Festival?”

T-Bone hands the relics of the night’s stash to Rees. He invites the girl for a walk, never asking her name. 

Walking on Bury New Road, they take a left past a shul, then head into an enclave of wetlands, which cormorants and snipes have made their home. There is a little marshy leaf-maze, flanked by a willow, where they touch. The few faint stars stencil the outline of her skin.

Blah blah blah.

—

Was it ever time to leave? It is strange to say goodbye to an entire universe, not home but a series of homes, each ventricle spreading the warmth of an individual home, where generations have found the joy and the conflict of silence. The oak tree in which invented generations have cursed God and so have been buried demonstrably beside him. It was a battle, but doesn’t seem so any more.

Weep, weep for the battles we have lost, Father Anthony finds himself saying.

—

T-Bone imagines her cast into the bog, along with the transient pleasure, the reckonings of something akin to love.

But there was a magic. But a magic reduced to a nothing. A perfect emptiness. A fleetingness less taken.

—

Like a mind stretched out on a golden field, the hills breathed upwards in the image of God, the clouds swerve in their crannies of human imagining, of human thought.

—

Who needs a goth festival? T-Bone reflects. We are dead already, because the dead clutch to life, aim to shoot life through their veins. Only the living can live.

Sad looking people, their health sucked out by a vacuum. T-Bone drifting in Bury. The shopping centre drags on and on, a tabernacle of falsity. The Rock is the most perverse of all, announcing chains.

Something could grow here.

The Rock. This is not the rock upon which a church was be built. Even so, there are the beginnings of a church, if only the right cocktail of drugs were sold in perfect purity. Not the pusillanimous eenager who announces himself in the field. Or someone will give him the tools to assess and pinpoint a miracle, know it in the dead morass.

But T-Bone wants to be no longer outside all of this.

A gram outside Costa: immediate, desensitised.

T-Bone would seize life, grab it by the chains, forge the iron of responsibility. But there is nothing to seize, not that he can see. No weights to wear, only charity shop windows with bright yellow T shirts.

V

Stansfield House. John is thinking about commedia dell’arte, stock characters, not that he really knows what commedia dell’arte is. John is the Harlequin, clownishly striding back and forth in the care home, as Rita gets her meds and Eileen carries on bathing in pure shit.

Meanwhile the jester flings forth on the ward, bringing folk comedy to the scene, stepping with comic gait over the sanitised ward.

Made bearable by Lucy, a new colleague, with whom John mocks the endless rituals of paperwork. Signed food diaries and diagrams of minor injuries sustained, while Eileen still refuses personal care. But to give her a good wipe would be a sacking.

Lucy is a student at the University of Manchester. She lives in Rochdale for cost purposes, regrets it. No hipster cafés.

A colleague to scheme with. After infinite fumblings in the cash tin, signed diaries, then insistence that this is something that will happen, a trip is finally arranged. They will go to a carvery because it’s somewhere that they have gone before, one of these little places by a roundabout that seems to exist as a little side-note to the roundabout. A beef-juice drenched cover. John and Lucy race to get all of the ‘customers’ ready (for an urgent memo, sent to all staff), flinging blouses and titanium breasts around, mangling familiar and unfamiliar zips. Finally, the entourage is ready, splintered bones hoisted in Zimmer frames, polished wheelchairs (the polishing noted, footnoted) at the ready. A minibus has been ordered on house expenses – comes with the usual stony-faced driver – the old people carted in, strapped in tight, rockabyed out of necessity like gigantic babies. A minibus scuttles up Manchester Road, to the anonymous, nameless precinct, with the Odeon, and the bar, or whatever it might be, but somehow everything is going great, and suddenly Rita is jolted into reflection.

“There was a grocery now, where the care home used to be, you could buy tripe in shillings, but you’re going way back there. I remember meeting me Iain, at the Methodist Hall, aw remember him courting me, aw remember they used to have these dances, all kinds of dances, ballroom, ceilidh –“ She is going on and on, as if becoming the mouth, transforming into the swirl of words that are ushering from her, from the mountain of Yorkshires, with which she builds the geology of her life – “And he were sweet, Iain, aw remember he used t’ have this moustache, he were so sweet, love, but he forgot who I was, didn’t he, and aw’ve always had my faculties –“

Rita has stung the room into a kind of reverent silence, the ladies all drinking tea and heeding the energised figure as if her recollections were their own. Energised by a ziggurat of all-you-can-eat Yorkshires.

“Oh ay, Iain was a looker. Aw can never forget when he first looked at me, looked at me he did, and everything were just glowing. Everyone were smoking, as they used to do back then, and there were a little cloud around him, but aw knew, there and then, he were the man aw loved.”

Rita withdraws to a cocoon again, after the bombshell of this memoir, delivered faster than anyone could transcribe it.

–

“I did one time taste pizza, proper Neopolitan pizza… I was a priest, I was sended there to a conference. It was a heavenly taste.” Fr. Marco looked around awkwardly. “Well, not heavenly.”

Br. Guthlac sometimes found it odd sometimes how the spatimentum – the fortnightly walk and talk – could feature such apparently inane chatter. But this was what interrupting silence was like; according a dignity, a sacramentality, to pure, trite chatter, in its infrequency.

It was talk on the margins of silence, not silence on the margin of talk.

–

On the way home, John settles into a conversation with Lucy, huddled among the sound of scraping blouses buffeted with the various perfumes of yesteryear.

“I’m interested in all kinds of religious experiences, spiritual traditions, how we can merge all the god or gods or whatever we call them. I’m doing a module this term on comparative religion.” A minibus, Lucy is droning on, Rita and Eileen are slouching, in a sort of psychedelic stupor. “This is a bit like having children, isn’t it?
I’m doing a module this year actually, ‘the theology of children’. Talking about how children are this sort of theological aporia, considering they often can’t fully understand doctrine, and yet are sort of venerated.”

The minibus trundles home. A successful trip; only a question of doing the bowel charts, the MAR charts. And a colleague bursts in, frantically complaining about how untidy the ward is, hurriedly dusting, mopping, his bald head desperate itself to be polished.

John and Lucy grab their warm coats, head out together. There is a pleasant air of confident nattering, John machine-gunning Lucy with all the usual pleasantries, logistical wranglings.

“Have you heard of Brother Neville?”, he asks. “Something that Rita was going on about reminded me of him. It was all quite emotional, wasn’t it. Definitely the most interesting thing that’s happened to me at work so far.

I think I saw God on the railway

hulking his freight towards an angel’s post

into the coal yard of a godly host

espied in secret in the muddled sway

of the poor lad, morose, then gay

returning to his lassie. Though the most

of speed will veil him, the more we boast,

I fear, of the power that our steam conveys

the more we lose ‘im in the fields. But speed

awhile, if the living Christ awaits

in Liverpool, or in this cloud of haste

for which I say we fall apart & bleed.

Our Saviour needs no fuel. He consummates

the steady ground – my Love, I lie, I heed.”

After the poem is quickly foisted on a smartphone, after John’s slightly jaunted memory-recital, Lucy retorts. “It’s interesting, but it’s so masculine. Where are women? The mothers? They were around back then. And it’s all glossed over, this brutal history, the deaths, the crimes. It romanticises it all. I’m tired of romanticising.”

“What’s there to do but romanticise? How else to live? And he’s returning to his lassie.”
“Yes, but she’s disembodied, a floating carcass, an image, an idea. She is probably at home somewhere but her home doesn’t have a setting. Unlike the “poor lad”, who is surrounded in setting.”
“But – but this was a masculine world. And all Brother Neville knew was masculine, the stuff of men. All most male poets before a certain time were men. Women were an object of mystery, a Petrarchan deer.”
“But they just had to get out a bit. Girls were working: crawling in factories and having their irrelevant bodies mauled.”

“But this stuff’s all we were exposed to. You find joy and life in what you know. ”

“I wonder how many of the saints and apostles and whatever, Buddhist and Christian and Jain, and their writings, and ideas, were suppressed by men. I wonder how many of them were heretics, or Gnostics, or part of dismissed and dismembered sects.”

“I wonder how much what we know is suppressed.”

—

The library gathers dust; the books are scattered, and bear the memory of having been read, carefully, continuously, perceptively. They are held in an elaborate key based on a Latin numbering system. In ‘quattro’ is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.

Treasures of the earth, and trinkets of the earth. Heeding the gospels, the monks stow them away, do not allow the novices to devour books, invite them to request a book and state exactly and clearly how it might be relevant to their spiritual and metaphysical maturity. A sustained interview.

Br. Guthlac has inherited a system of wooden step-ladders, which allows him to return the multi-lingual volumes (making no distinction as to language, restoring literature to a pre-Babelian semblance) to their rightful place in a system not driven by worldly concerns like ‘academic discipline’ or ‘subject’, but by the particular grace these books enact or the particular spiritual quality they might embody. In fact, the library’s organisational system is known only by the librarian, Br. Guthlac, who inherited it from a deceased brother he helped to shovel into a tumulus and bury. The library’s system was perhaps truly gleaned in this way; it is a means of resurrection, of finding how books may lead us into a living death, a dying life. It does not venerate books as material objects. It knows that scripture is of the heart. It knows that the first writing is blood.

—

They go to Wetherspoons after work. Lucy has never been to Spoons in Rochdale, but has been to the several Spoons in Manchester that host stag dos and straggling students. This one is different, more local, less of a constant play. Bored drinkers in the corner, committed, penitent, swapping Lancashire lingo, hyperbolised anecdotes about an imagined mill-town-existence, unpreserved in the metaverse and only in incidental, undocumented oral recordings. Two Stellas served by over-over-worked bartenders who have no time for human beings, are drink robots out of mangled need.

“How did you learn to think? Surely you were told exactly what to think?”
“From suffering. From boredom.”

After half an hour of being here they are assailed by a guy in a flatcap and an outdoor coat. He is not talking to John and Lucy but an imagined former version of himself, courting irresponsibly, recklessly.

“Listen, lads. Ye’ve got to have commitment. Without commitment, there’s nowt.”

Departing, frantically looking for other pubs, The Roebuck avails itself of its yearning streams, a nice, cosy little establishment. John gets an Old Brewery Bitter, Lucy gets a cider. Lucy checks her WhatsApp and a man yells at her to put her voice away, a voice from the wilderness. They are adjacent to a large group who talk to them as if no boundaries exist between people, who in a moment are harassing them.

“Listen, yer not getting any of my bloody treasure.” She is pointing, viciously, pugnaciously, at Lucy. “Yer wrong about that. But listen, we’re kind in here, we accept any one. But yer not from here. Are yer vampires? From Eastern Europe  n that?”

Pints gulped and exits swiftly made.

“I didn’t mean for a night out in Rochdale to be like this”, John is saying.

VI

You can, John is saying to himself. You can just put the offices on your goddamn phone and still do them. You can be reverent. You can ensoul a world that has been falling apart ever since Brother Neville rhapsodised its end.

It’s been ending forever.

Terce. Sext. Perpetually ignored little beeps on the phone. It doesn’t feel right. It hasn’t felt right. Meanwhile, WhatsApp is bleating with work updates, people from Stansfield House posting emojis about whatever, sending invites to work outings in which some dress code or other is required.

Don’t know.

They can be done sometimes. But there’s no breviary any more. The breviaries were not burnt but they might as well have been.

What is this place? Dare we ask? What is this endless cavalcade of distractions? This constant and uninterrupted psychodrama?

But there is still land. There is a bog that enriches and encloses us.

One office a day. Matins. Terce. Sext. John remembers being woken up in the night to spend three solid hours in prayer. Now the night is so languorous. Comatose..

It gnaws the vitals. It robs us of sleep and visions. Or it polices these visions. Or it kills, in an abstract sense. Or in a literally concrete sense that we just cannot see.

My home shall be a hermitage, John is saying. I will cover the mould with new beginnings of frankincense, new warmths of urban Scripture. The concrete will breathe. Everything shall be holy.

Everything was defiled long ago. I am defiled. Even the holiest pursuits turn awry here, in this vista of despair and loss and regret. In this vista of hopelessness.

It is time for None. And we will rise to the occasion, get the bloody phone out and get out Universalis and pretend that everything is how it was. Pretend there are ivy fronds here, untarnished brambles there, a paperweight of dock leaves over there. And that we are sealed in rings of silence and of prayer and of a nameless and impossible love.

VII

John has taken to meandering. Beyond Rochdale there is Manchester, a city where people go to get fucked.

In Shudehill, by the Hare and Hounds. Starless sky. And a group of four women.

They invite him to eat a bag of Walkers crisps, splayed open vertically and horizontally. Soon, John is lecturing.

“This is where Brother Neville strayed – when it was a brothel – attempting to reason the prostitutes into a holier life.”

A woman, with the sudden up-spring of a bittern: “I don’t care about something that used to be, mate.”

Our free time has become industrial labour, John reflects. The silence of the garden is gone, or the cell’s flame, lambent, spiring, gesturing to a pure noise. Whatever.

The world is silly. In all the meanings of the word silly; the Old English ‘blessed’. The more recent ‘intellectually stunted’. And, especially, the modern: everything blessed.

A sillyman bounces around on a gigantic mountain bike with gnarlish tyres. He is pumping loud music into the loud city, leaving beats like fragrant bitter. This remains December. His boxers are coming loose from his shorts, wrestling to come away and be one entity, one independent part. He is wearing a cap. The flint of his scurrying around the crowded Oxford Street reveals the first beginnings of a bum-tattoo.

He shall be blessed, and blasted by cold wind.

–

There is a visionary light flickering in Manchester. There is the sudden breath of an improbable sun, whereby the few trees sing. And a man, silent and strange, particular and illuminating. His presence of oak in the barren. His uncommon light sudden and blinding.

VIII

He of the mangled haircut and showerlessness. The crusty. The man who sits in the squatless squat.

Abundant, dyed hair, that is falling into the soiled tiles. A sense that whenever you talk to him he is getting right into your exact space, overcoming the square you have demarcated for yourself. And a sprawling Manchester dialect in which words are rescued from the morass of a lost, dark cotton empire made continental only by a few friaries inexplicably full of Belgians.

T-Bone has learnt to detach. The indissoluble bond of God and man helps here. These people do not matter. They are transient, as are their attempts to appear, to speak their animation.

“I’m no longer a Pacifist”, the man with the mangled haircut, one day, is saying. In fact, he has a gigantic revolver tattooed on his left thigh, not the traditional symbol of the pacifist movement.

These are the typical discussions here, where time has come to roost and canker, along with the merits of NVDA, whether or not the vermin should be controlled, what exactly being “down to clean the kitchen” entails.

There is a mangled, splayed leather settee, where T-Bone sleeps. ‘Sleeps’ is a strong word; he makes his bed among a thin layer of beats, that spread their way into the darkness, turning life into a sleepless void.

As it has perhaps always been. Insomnia as an esoteric mysticism. Some part in a vocation package. Insomnia the modern city, insomnia us.

Bloody arseholes. But what choice does T-Bone have? Dealing so volatile. So it is this; the interminable, the purgatorial.

And they don’t shut up. And they are multiplying.

“I think NVDA is falling into the mindset of the oppressor”, Catherine is saying. Catherine has a nose ring but she has obviously never been in a violent confrontation. But she likes to sit around and talk. And here, where time stretches out, talking is a necessity and a distraction.

Where a thousand cables without devices lie, waiting for someone to assemble a new DJ booth, or electrocute themselves.

A hell-hole. The only hell-hole.

In general, T-Bone has combated the ensuring sense of his own lack of Heavenward journeying through a generalised detachment. This wasn’t perfect. He made the mistake of caring about the people he dealt drugs to. But he was learning to forcefully detach.

Until some other pathway, ivy-fringed, leads to the rust-smoothed gate of Paradise.

Luckily, most of this is difficult to attach to, in the first place. T-Bone didn’t attach himself to these debates; he was busy in his lab.

The lab was a place of sacramental energy. The preparation of acid tabs is careful work, requiring extreme concentration and devotion. It is hieratic, or the only process that feels hieratic any more, divorced from the binding truth of the priesthood and its restructuring of the soul. The blots the allotting of gloss to this act of psychedelic communion, the garniture that binds the soul to God.

The crusties do not understand. They are not initiated in the mysteries. T-Bone notes, to some dismay, that drugs of an unholy nature are in use here. Crack cocaine is rife. The ceilings are laced in fentanyl.

They are going to the rivals. Big Dave’s clasping of wealth and power. Undiscovered affectations. The unholy mysteries are invading this Red Brick church.

Which has given T-Bone several superstitions. He has begun to view his activity as safeguarded by God himself. And so the strung out guys who loiter in the crypt are a defilement.

All is defilement. T-Bone is participating in a losing battle. He is playing four-dimensional spiritual chess. The sacristy as spiritual laboratory, where the regenesis occurs, the twisted and messy liberation of souls.

The old sacristy is uniquely his. There is a confessional for the squat’s storage.

The commune has rules, meetings. Especially meetings. Endless meetings where nothing is discussed, no conclusion ever come to. Whirlwinds of vacuous chatter. There are discussions on whether or not to ban drugs, as well as whether or not the concept of ‘drugs’ is socially constructed. The commune – the squat – the community – tends to come to a fairly fixed position on the matter.

Horizontal decision-making, and then a deference to a leader, who defers to horizontal decision-making. Or insists on horizontal decision-making.

Today a discussion on drugs. A long soliloquy from Leaf.

“I’m always aware that there’s stuff to do around here. There are cleaning tasks that still need to be done, so many places that haven’t been cleaned in a while. And basic replastering. I think it’d be great if we reinstituted the cleaning rota. I think a lot of people are taking drugs throughout the day, and I do think we need some premise of a basic structure. We should have a ban on drugs apart from during the weekend.”

Approving nods, knowing nobody will enforce this rule, knowing that coming up with unimplementable, ingenious solutions to problems is the modus operandi here and everywhere. But how tiresome is action.

–

Who should the cantor be? Should the rite be adapted? Should new chants be adopted, replaced? These were matters that the brothers were invited to give their opinion on in turn, allowing their human voices to be sounded, before the matter eventually came before the Prior, who enacted the final decision. This is how the noble liturgical reforms were effected.

–

In the end, the desire for St. Chad’s  to be a functioning, healthy community was enough. After a lengthy meeting, certain red lines were agreed, and typed up and codified in a maelstrom of Microsoft Excel documents. 

No heroin. No methamphetamines.

The point is that denying the police as a means of coercive state control, part of the philosophy of the group, meant that this couldn’t be enforced. The state has a monopoly on violence, according to documents drafted six years ago, the foundation of the roving squat. These documents are ill-remembered by most but sit comfortably in the memories of the groups’ more seasoned pencil-pushers.

And pencil-pushing will filter here, to the ‘alternative’ world, given it is such a widespread skill in Manchester. Thus, horizontal agreements are skilfully and expertly typed up, as if they were marketing transcripts.

Pencil-pushing allowed a veneer to be maintained, an idea that this was somehow connected to work. In its negation of work it had become more work than work.

And the community’s various and sincere projects had to be funded somehow, by some revenue stream or other. The rent on the allotment must be paid. And so the community, for better or for worse, as well as the innocent pursuit of survival, became given over to drugs, the solution to not being a registered charity.

In a manner of speaking, one had to apply to join St. Chad’s. The door was not automatically opened to the many rough sleepers of North Manchester. The application process has no rigour; drawn out meetings with an ‘internal committee’ of people who have survived the squat for more than a year. The internal committee asking how you can contribute, meticulously Facebook stalking you to make sure you’re not a Tory or (perhaps worse) a Lib Dem, A meeting in the church, sanitised. No mention of drugs, only the community allotment, the soup kitchen (in the old church hall.) No explicit mention, one imagines, of the despair of intrigue, the  wonderful boredom of interest.

T-Bone remembers being fresh from ‘the other place’, enduring this process. The mirrors of silence still cast into his mind. A yarny woman in large home-made glasses, inquiring what he would contribute. And somehow a winning answer; a different perspective; a sense of honour; a desire to support the spiritual health of brethren and work for the brother- and sister-hood.

A misplaced kind of egalitarian principles.

T-Bone wishes St. Chad’s had not begun to feel like a microcosm for broader society. An eroded church used for drug production.

T-Bone’s own equipment is stolen from the University of Manchester. And blessed in the strongest Christian terms possible, every vial and philtre submitted to every stricture of the Carthusian rite.

And what a strange vocation it was, to be consigned by the Immortal God to bring psychedelic consciousness to living souls.

Someone else. “It’s totally wrong to bring in any regulations of this kind. Human beings should not be restricted. It’s totally contrary to our vision here.”

IX

Conversations with Mormons. They head-hunt John in Rochdale, press-ganging him on the bus. He talks to people of other religious faiths. Embraces the confusion: Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christadelphians winning new converts here like wizened army veterans. Video game religion.

The Book of Mormon, thrust into his hand on a 468 home like candyfloss. Reproducible: cut from a coke-fuelled American sermoniser’s cloth.

John does engage, with the pleasant man who sits next to him, targets him as a specimen of confusion. With the corporate Mormon badge and the more-corporate full name. A quaint reminder that all churches are corporate.

“I do feel a bit like institutional religion has lost its grip. There was a great trauma, you see, the end of all we had ever known. Our homes sold off to investors.”

The white-toothed man bristles, shines with enthusiasm. His badge waxes in the rows of leather. “What you say is true, and we Mormons understand you. We believe, you know, that the Holy Spirit has passed into the prophets of today, who have continued in their pursuit of the prophecy of Galilee and of Antioch. And there are so many prophets who they don’t tell you about. There is Abinadom, for example, whose stunning and seldom recorded gift of prophecy stunned and captivated. Abinadom recognises an enduring and continuing place for prophecy, a Holy Spirit that moves today. “And behold, the record of this people is engraven upon plates which is had by the kings, according to the generations; and I know of no revelation save that which has been written, neither prophecy; wherefore, that which is sufficient is written. And I make an end.” But this end flows, as the Holy Spirit flows, and speaks, and flashes visions for his Beloved.”

John loves annoying, misguided missionaries. He loves everyone who is ignored enough. Though he was never a missionary; the gentle invitation to a love of Christ moved him to an alternative, lifelong devotion.

A lifelong devotion that has ended.

–

“The Jehovah’s Witnesses are a beautiful misinterpretation of the gospel”, Father Anthony is saying. “Witness is motion as it is stasis.”

–

Protestant denominations plastered around Manchester city centre, not just on the Rochdale bus. John goes after work, scurrying along Market Street, listening to a preacher.

“Hear the word of the Lord. For the Lord does not want you to buy underwear in Debenhams. The Lord wants you to under-wear the mantle of his Gospel, underweep in the inmost of your heart for the Sacred Mystery of his Gospel.”

An anxious, tall man selling sweetcorn in a cart, as if locked into an iron ritual, weaves past the preacher. He looks both proud and embarrassed of the “authentic” sweetcorn. A couple of pissed-up lads salute the blue passages of the coming dark. 3.30 PM, darkening sky.

These are the after-work rituals. Clawing back prayer after work. The perpetual alarm for Vespers goes off on John’s phone and he decides to actually do it, this time. On Market Street, kneeling, watching the rumblings of shop fronts, the tattooed people spilling out of the multicoloured tiles of the Northern Quarter. The glass assaulting the skyline, over-climbing the old church vantage points.

“Virgam poténtiæ tuæ emíttet Dóminus ex Sion, domináre in médio inimicórum tuórum.”

The man with sweetcorn notices, looks up, as if he is urinating on an old woman.

John is forced to interrupt the proceedings when an unknown number calls his phone.

“Hello there, it’s Josiah from the Mormon church. I’m just checking in with you to see how you’re doing after our conversation.”

–

As if the doors of perception had been slammed open forever. After Vespers that image again, an angel beckoning towards a light and a noise and an impossible sensation, like suddenly moments are multiplying and multiplying until the architecture of infinity is mapping and remapping in the dream’s eye. Last time, a single angel, like the outline or the stencil of a statue, but rendered imperceptible once the dream, galley lurches towards it. Now a citadel of angels, forming and reforming in every boundary-stone of a jutting country. And the surging of water, a fountain spreading through this great city. Roots, and networks of overlapping sensations, and a celestial mist suddenly obscuring what has been seen, what has been mapped out.

As if the world is underwater, once the dream has dissipated.

–

Back at work, Eileen has pissed herself. The floor is designed that way, and John contemplates the urine’s embrace of the endlessly mopped tiles.

While John is busy in urinary contemplation, Lucy mops the floor.

X

T-Bone in the St. Chad’s crypt: “Aldous Huxley. Mystic and intellectual. Posited a kind of non-religious mysticism in which a greater sensory world was opened up by naturalistic means.”

–

 Dust-flecked copies of J.G. Ballard, Irvine Welsh and Hunter S. Thompson. Even commentaries, in the homiletic tradition, on their relationship to salvation. An anonymous brother who has provided them. Endless contributions to knowledge, outside of any library system; novels wedged among the Desert Fathers. But scripture as sacred, the Word as sacred. Everything preserved piously, everything preserved. No literary waste.

Br. Guthlac knowing the library as a lost sequence of friends.

–

Someone bears the foil, suddenly, assured that the commune’s actual busybodies are not around. But not everyone has done it, so it is helpfully explained by a muscular, oily clean-shaven man, someone who knows this occurs at this hour.

“It sends you into such a deep sleep that you’re not aware of anything going on. Like a near coma. You just don’t care. You’re unaware, like.”

A girl in a large overcoat, brought over to the crypt, is not entirely convinced. This is heroin – it’s the very stuff you’re supposed to avoid. But the oily man does have some structured thoughts on why heroin is ok.

“Heroin has become a by-word for disgrace. But there are all kinds o’ addictive substances, if yer think about it. Cocaine. Alcohol. They’re all addictive, and they all ruin people’s lives. And people can’t stop. So why not heroin? People are looking for abandonment, for oblivion. That’s what they’re bloody looking for, right? And they’re failing to find it chasing the dragon with mandy or coke or poppers. But with heroin, you find it. And of course, I still have me life. We all still have our life. We never lose that. Life will go on, believe you me. It always doesn’t.”

T-Bone, as an auditor, thinking about how and if it ends, it ends. But he believed and preached a generation of martyrs and tortures as Heaven-ward. But everyone does. But he still does now; he has undergone a martyrdom, not sacrificing himself to the boring middle-class precarity of an ordinary life. Because he had that; now it is razed.

The plastering is falling off. The room is without life. What is undetected should always be miserable. But nobody will find this; and it has been retrofitted with beds and with pilfered furniture. With a kind of electric light, though, appropriately, it has an odd habit of blinking or flickering.

What distinguishes religious visions, T-Bone ponders, from the comparative flickers of orgasms, highs, random, volatile ecstasies? Only a single, genuine levitation, not stunned but invited. But still a sense of being unable to move, still a willed determination for an opiate reality. A denial of activity.

T-Bone leaves the crypt and finds people huddled around the sanctuary, making a joint out of Ecclesiastes. He insists that it should at least be attended. He finds a handful of pages of a hardback Jerusalem Bible already ripped out. He reads a few verses: all he can get in during the hunger and thirst for a joint. Someone has lit some incense from a burner; it loiters along with the ubiquitous smell of cannabis through the fibres of the carpet of St. Chad’s. Someone’s phone is bleeping like a dreadnought. The electric light of the sanctuary has been switched on; still there are icons, nestled between a gigantic Byzantine Bob Marley. T-Bone reads, carefully: “The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh away.

Better one handful of repose than two hands full of effort in chasing the wind. And I observe another vanity under the sun: a man is quite alone – no son, no brother…” Perhaps a few people’s eyes light up, or T-Bone imagines they do, a yearning after wisdom fastened to the emerald of a dilated, groggy eye, the drooping festoons of Wisdom Literature settling in. The same eye that is then passed a joint in which the effigy of Ecclesiastes is burning like the Temple of Jerusalem.

T-Bone tries to seize the individual words as they are engulfed in flames – tries to make out the hint of a ‘fool’ or a ‘flesh’ in the inhalations. There is still a lectionary in the corner, never used. Or used for purely ironic reasons; sometimes the reading of sheep pornography, the tarring and feathering of the Bible.

–

Vespers, stunned silence, teetering heaven-ward; incense absorbing the soul into an othernesss which is also of the self. Levitations, as the world would deem them; darts towards God, before the plenitude of His vision. In the secrecy of the breast, the exalted Word, throwing shapes to eternity.

–

XI

Stansfield House, a lazy day; rain pattering against the clinical roof, storming the grainy, medical movement of silent noise. A television set. John’s alien phone going off; an endlessly redirected Terce, which if he does now Eileen will think he’s insane, even though she spends a lot of time wittering to herself. A text from the Mormons to ripple into the beating heart of his loneliness: “Hey there, it’s the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.”

No Tinder, yet. John has acquired the phone solely so he can use the Rosso app, getting 5% off bus transport as a ‘key worker’. Then there is the Universalis app, administering ignored electric shocks to partake in the Divine Office.

In the meantime, care provision is exclusively dependent on physical paperwork, which some of the younger members must have forgotten how to do. While apps cattle-prod us into rememberances.

–

Full-fledged conversations with people, living and dead, taking place in the mind. The origin of the Socratic Dialogue and one of the greatest gifts of silence. Brother Guthlac knowing exactly what his grandmother would be saying to him right now. Not a séance but an exact hypothecation, a flee from conversation in order for greater purity of conversation. And so the voices of the familiar, on and on, in stillness, joy…

–

John walks through the streets of Rochdale, half-commuting home, reading Brother Neville, thinking about these odd metrical patterns that poets were forced to adopt, like weird contorted dances.

Meanwhile, in a twilit sky, the light fast retreating, Rochdale is entering into an odd sense of liveliness.

A tatty paperback with a battered spine. John reads it sometimes at work, in disposable, piss-stained gloves. Br. Neville’s wisdom sprawling out across the courtyard of Dixie Chicken, ill-fitting garments of poetry woven discarded polystyrene containers, bullets of tomato ketchup scratched off the surface of oleaginous fractions of chips.

Br. Neville has a series of poems written about Ignatian visualisation, in which you imagine yourself immersed in a Biblical scene. But Br. Neville was never able to leave, stranded in the new urban miasma.

These whorls of smoke will wrap our dying faces,

scrub out the black we’ve gathered from the pit,

invent new smoke-stripped remedies of graces,

apothecaries where a God can sit:

for I see Christ, looking through the glass,

transfixed in the joyous, then the solemn repast.

“I was in prison, right”, a man is talking into the paperback, thrilled to have the possibility of an auditor.

A drab coldness is settling in.

–

Later, after a night in The Regal Moon, a tall man penetrates the soft cathedral of John’s body, uninvited.

XII

T-Bone longs for a meaningful drug experience, beyond the dusty confines of St. Chad’s. He decides that his personal drug use will now entail only meaningful psychedelic spatiamentum; trips involving trips, far away from the St. Chad’s crypt. Spiritual manifestations, recollections of his power as dealer.

He decides upon the mouth of Norden Reservoir, the trip planned over desperate days in the dead basement.

On one day, it happens so quickly; a guy in intensive care, barren, after an overdose, a near overdose.

A pause for reflection, transcendental meditation. His eyes almost gouged as nursing personnel try to kickstart the absolute lowlife back into health.

A spiritual revolution must take place.

This spiritual revolution, therefore, is subject to meticulous planning. Bus times co-ordinated, the 135 to Bury, the 468 to Norden. A disciplined, military early rise of 8.50, even though Reis is rolling a cigarette at Arden Grove.

“What if those guys follow us to the Reservoir?”, he asks, nonchalantly, as if it’s an academic question.

They drop acid, in a circle, whorls of smoke scattering the tabs. It is a lovely winter day: flecks of sun in the chinks of sky-line. The cold, blue sky nimbly intercepts the trees, the flaking houses, the bold, Victorian churches, which begin to echo with sunlight as if Manchester had the same sprawling, fragile antiquity of Milan. Coming into Bury, the interchange and the Millgate is even a joy; skateboarders and mobility scootered pensioners are admiring the gentle snow and ice that has gathered on the pavement below. The brutal road leading to the Millgate and the market is lined with brute snow, resembling Diagon Alley, and the market, which can be seen during the change from Bury to Rochdale, is rendered Byzantine, clothed in shimmering white blotches, a portal into an effervescent image of the past, where clothiers dwell, where strawberries are sold not for 99p but a farthing. Men in tweed, bringing woodland to this genteeling urban sprawl, are buying coffees and pastries from Katsouris and, squintly, they definitely look as if they are pocketing tripe.

They walk, Rees, Lucy, T-Bone. The triumvirate. Grail knights on a mission seeking the holiest blood, allowing a small detour before the bus. Galahad, unrecruited, sips his lance latté in Costa. A crusade.

“Acid sort of unleashes thoughts that you already had”, Lucy postulates with hard-won wisdom. “Or it allows you to think the unthinkable, what you thought you were going to think but never wanted or allowed yourself to truly think. Right?”
T-Bone shrugs. A man is going to CEX, which T-Bone imagines as the library of Alexandria, the gamers and watchers of old episodes of Old Fools and Horses off on little jaunts to consult sacred tomes, manuscripts devoted to alchemy and mysticism, Scooby Doo (in the window) as an ancient voodoo incantation. “I think acid invites contemplation as it represses hunger and makes doing anything feel languid. I don’t know what effect it has on thought other than that thoughts do become different, electrified, bent. But fundamentally the same, maybe just more noticeable. But it’s all placebo, anyway, you’d take a nice walk and notice, if you could, and it’s all already inside you, but taking a drug you think would empower you to do that makes you know you can.”

A man is yelling, “get yer strawberies for 99p, get yer strawberries for 99p.” Reis: “Those visuals, man.” Bury as a strawberry.

They clamber on another bus, suddenly unsure and confused by the whole notion of exchanging a place on a moving vehicle for a set of arbitrary tokens, aware that the man requesting bus fare can be ignored at any moment, can be silenced and is unlikely to call the British Transport Police. It takes them a while to consciously remember how to pay for a bus journey – rooting through their pockets begins to feel like some sort of Bronze age dig. Then there’s the process of adding up; Lucy has got a contactless card, but Reis is forced to reckon the absurdist yet utilitarian principle that 1 can be esteemed to 2, and 2 can be esteemed to 5, until enough 5s are esteemed to £2.20, which consists both of 5s and of 2s, but this embarrassing farrago, watched on by a serpentine old lady who seems seriously on a mission, eventually leads to a privileged position at the back of this amazing, stupendous, awe-inspiring large motor vehicle, roaring them all the countless distance from Bury into Rochdale, which used to be a horse-led journey and is now again, as the sky opens out and the impossible glistening silver expanse of The Rock turns them to stone, before the clouds eventually tie the living gift of Birtle.

T-Bone’s words weave into the cotton-threaded cocoon of farmland and the twinings of the human and the animal. A woman on a horse – sight seldom seen in Manchester – somersaults past, and T-Bone’s words seem in time, in tune, with these acrobatic pyrotechnics. “The key word is dissolve. Acid dissolves. A spiritual word, now a crude word for a physiochemical equation. The body is integral, but the body dissolves until the soul glistens and threads and becomes soluble. Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible testifies to this: “If our earthly house of this dwelling is dissolved… we have a building made by God, a house made not by hands, everlasting.” Here we are, moving in the everlasting building of God, in the architecture of Mount Qaf, which we ascend, through the goodness of God.”
“Spare us the fucking homily, Teeb. Only messin.” Reis is marrying the valleys and hills of a joint together, beating the world in shape, hammering as a Demiurge the foundations of a world from its source to its tributaries, dells. The sun has now come fully out; any morning blackness is gone; an actual sparrow frolics past the Bird at Birtle, at the same speed as a taxi.

It’s at around this point that time falls out of joint; the journey forward becomes a journey backward, a return; time dissolves into space, space dissolves into time. The bus driver is stewarding the flow and dissolve of centuries, nonchalantly, placidly, a custodian of eternity.

Norden – thank God they have a destination – is arrived at, and the trio follow the trajectory of water, slobber into dogwalkers, until a destination is arrived at, the source of water, beaming waves into a delta, a fountain temple.

“Feats of human engineering must be a paradise”, T-Bone is insisting, “we must find the natural world anew in them. Prophecy is awake in the hyper-human. These are our hermitages.”

It is true that the this humble reservoir, created to provide water to citizens, part of a huge and revolutionary industrial project to rechannel and restructure the waterways, is becoming a source of mysticism, a great enigma, a wonder of the world, like the lost riviera of an ancient civilisation, a means of irrigation unearthed by careful excavation in the ruins of an ancient Mesopotamian city.

Yonder, one could just make out a teenager in a large overcoat, eating a McDonalds wrap.

Lucy: “You chat a lot of shit, T-Bone. But this is good shit.”

XIII

In the cascades of silence, one can hear the sweet, uncontaminated flow of the river. A feast day, and every anxiety and difficulty has been subsumed, absorbed, forded by the prayers and the sudden agony of calm. Fr. Ignatius’ lilies and rose beds were swaying, the statue of the Virgin Mary he has erected rendering the scene awash with effervescent clarity. After leagues of rain, a cautious sun has collected all into a still, motionless, fervent clarity. Problems of the monastery – its accounts, the manifold transgressions and evils that even the Carthusians have allowed, even the encroachment that would give it wholesale to the shackles of Mammon, to corporate power – were as nothing, as long as God sends days like this, days in which the interior works of mercy and the careful voyage of the soul’s show an exterior aspect, and the interior and the exterior are held in union, and the hasty motions of interjection, of human barb, of retort, are as a poor comparison to this deep and endless tranquillity. A tranquillity that makes tranquil all around, that grounds, that exhorts to focus on the seeds, the chaffinch skimming in and out of the garden.

–

Stansfield House. Sun brings broad, cautious, loosely-structured hopes. A manicured hedgerow is suddenly beautiful. Eileen – quiet since the mounds of Yorkshires – is chatting.

Lucy is on, and talks to John, ignoring the patients half-watching Loose Women. Half-an-hour until they are all medicated, the most stressful part of the day.

Lucy: “I know this strange guy called T-Bone. Thinks he’s some sort of mystic. He says a lot of interesting stuff that must have come from somewhere. But he’s dismissive of talking about his past. I’ve never been able to pinpoint anything concrete about him. He’s a man?  I think he used to be some sort of minister but got expelled? Just from the way he talks, you know? I’m not really sure. I’d like to introduce you to him. Know what you make of him.”
Acquired intonation rings in John’s ears: “How did you meet him?”
“Some sort of after-party after a house night. I don’t remember that well.”

Then the meds, and an uncontainable amount of drugs. Vitamin D, anti-histamines, anti-epileptics, beta blockers – Eileen placed by some doctor’s decision on a dose of anti-depressants, sertraline and the like, which seem to be helping, in some way, although never completely or wholly. She fundamentally needs family, which she’s too old to secure or pin down definitively, but can be coaxed from this state into a manner of acceptance by the meds. Which are administered, John reflects, as if some sort of special operation; never to be perverted in the taking of meals or any other unnecessary distraction. Meds are votive, even taken practically in a separate room, which conjures the special fear. 6 PM is meds time; the gnarling hands of the charity-shop-clock announce it, as John and Lucy herd the pensioners like a firing squad. Eileen, Rita, Mark, Tina, Oluwatobi, Karen, Irene, “Siddie”, Karen, Robert, Henry, Lisa. The 12. 

Meds is power, power for the care home, and John and Lucy are the intermediaries, enforcing a network of power greater than themselves, lubing up the mill. After meds, the shellshock is complete; any petty resistances to personal care are ironed out, and all is subdued, sedate, by force. Sprinkle of tablets at 6 pm, that’s us medicine, and after that the Invisible Hand of some pharmaceutical God is at work.

Lucy thinks about the acid trip. Eileen is slightly grainy, all of of a sudden, or frog-like, or both, wandering in and out in her inertia, and she imagines T-Bone, here, perhaps offering some sort of service to the oldsters, like ritual healing, shamaniacally prodding Rita or providing Henry with some sort of psychedelic shortbread, his flat-cap rising like a toadstool.

XIV

The café that one sits in one’s days off somehow has to be open, sprawling, with sufficient adaptability, like someone can enter or exit at any point. People-watching. It is a twee sort of café. There is a yellow teapot poised upon a chequered tablecloth, even though one suspects that neither a teapot nor a tablecloth are, in the strictest sense, required here, with its modern coffee machine and hyper-fast milk frothing implement, whirring like a lawnmower in the metallic languor and skirmish of voices, animated and caffeinated Sicilian (by caffeine) hands and arms in motion. Without John’s vantage point, there is a team of posh boys, calculated to annoy him, with a poshness so precise that it renders their voices incoherent and indistinct. Nor is their poshness made manifest by their clothes, which are mere jeans, t-shirt, groomed but responsible hair-styles; it is a sea of voices that paints them thus, a sea of unavoidable Received Pronunciation grunts.

University of Manchester students? Yes, since they’re too young to be hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers, PR executives, or MediaCityUK types. But luckily they are only part of the panoramic vault, and can be zoned in and out of. Elsewhere, a corporate type on a laptop is sending e-mails while throwing an espresso into the personal vault of his throat.

This is the Northern Quarter, rapidly hipsterified and dismantled from whatever it once was. Treeless, although a few hedgerows provide a nervous backdrop to John’s reading. The ambient and slightly distracting sound of people talking is forcing him to twiddle a rosary, the Hail Maries becoming a sort of nervous tic he’s taken up again recently. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with this scrambled tofu that crumbles and collects dust in the corner of a mock-china plate.

Holy Mary – but John espies a man also reading, a copy of Eugene O’Neill’s works, and a calm, compassionate presence, like a magical energy, offsetting the fluency of the other negative energies. John puts away the beads and continues reading; a book of Louis MacNeice’s poetry. But he can’t stop reading ‘Snow’, and in this saturation the room is suddenly rich, the great bay-window is spawning. Not spawning faceless graffiti, or mind-numbing parodies of hipster Disneyland, but something resembling love. What John had imagined the love of God was. A sensitive beacon that needs no private geography, no wave or cage of light, to be experienced, yet is outward.

Equally, there is no need for it to be the love of God. It is relentlessly and embodiedly personal. It is true that according to all the slender Trinitarian formulations the love of God was supposed to be uniquely personal. But all John had ever understood from the Trinity, in the end, was some botched formulation of how something can be both personal and impersonal. The impersonal comes first; then, as someone he had felt he had known had said (another ‘anonymous’ monk, but someone who was nonetheless in the cell with him), the unknown or impersonal suddenly turns to that ‘sharp dart of longing love’.

But here is no sharp dart, just the sudden consciousness of intimacy, that this man has been elected and created to be his love. But what this love is he is not certain, or what form this love takes. And in all its naked fear and in all its embarrassment, fomented in what the other people who were in the cell meant uniquely when they referred to the ‘stuff of the world’, this love is horrifically exciting and dreadfully fearsome in equal measure. Suddenly, he is awash with the specifically childish excitement the he can go over and talk to this man, ask for his number. Distracted by this thought, he is suddenly unable to concentrate on what he is reading, which is now ‘The Meeting Point’.

But time is too away, and despite scripting the conversation several times in his head, the script falls flat as he begins to make the approach, as if he has something to do over in the nether regions of the cafe, where the man is sitting and bringing symbols from another world. Inelegantly, as if a misplaced giraffe in a desert, he strides awkwardly over, and asks, “What are you reading?”, even though he already knows, has already glimpsed it.

–

The man has given John a number but John suspects he has feigned an exit out of embarrassment. An aborted conversation took place. A phone number was exchanged, hurriedly, as if a ransom letter. “Do you want – my”, the man had said, like he had been harassed. The beautiful, tall man with windswept hair, a rugged jumper, but like there was no quintessence of pretence whatsoever. The entire history of the interaction recollected in nervous stop-motion.

A man with a sleeping bag and knapsack is sitting in the corner. The man also has a great beauty, a nest of hair and a tall, sturdy form. The deflected request for a couple of quid has them talking. “And the man gave me only chicken bone, but not the chicken. And I cried. I was thinking about my boys. Back in India.” He holds his head in his hands for a couple of minutes, in a way that seems half-performative, but with a dashing of sincerity, like he is always trying to persuade John of something. But he does not reiterate his request for a couple of quid. “Listen. Can we just talk. I am so lonely here. I have nobody, no-one will talk to me. I am lost. I went in here because I didn’t see anywhere else around. The staff haven’t kicked me out yet.”

John: “Who are your boys?”

“Two year old, four year old. I cried when thinking about my boys. My boys.”

–

A larch is crooning by a sequence of concrete. Plastic bags tatter and fray. A chaffinch flickers past; the day is welcomed by a shy sun that fails to pierce blindered windows, laced destinies, cupboards stung by the scent of silk blouses, hole-globuled leather-brown shirts, evenings and destinies undone by pasty, tired-looking dressing gowns.

It’s the personal care routine of Eileen, and John hasn’t done it for a while so he is flicking through it in an analogue ring-binded file. Dentures fitted, supported from bed, E45 cream applied in selective areas, beware occasional mild hostility or rambles.

He enters the room and discovers a great lifelessness. Eileen is no more, and yet is; a collection of bones and tissues.

“Another one of these in the ward”, someone is heard telling, when John tells it him; one less personal care routine to do.

–

At home that evening John is alone, feeling a morbid depression, wishing there is a purpose or premise to his aloneness. Evening bulldozings. Flicking through a laptop’s revolving screen, swirling empty combinations of sounds and images. “Carthusian chant” as a YouTube video, a digestible bit of sound combined with adverts for Grammarly, an American football undercutting a sensitive bit of plainsong, beating the neumes. One advert depicts an ex-monastic stately home as a five star golf hotel, American bros with spindly legs swinging metallic implements where monks gardened, grew wheat, tended to their spirits. Countryside = golf.

He has seen it before. But it hits somehow harder and softer every time.

XV

They knew about the raid, its mock-dramatic 6 am start, but still the police seized gallons of drugs, and people. But the squat cannot be fully defeated; nobody’s property or nothing that belongs to anyone is being seized. But suddenly all of the community’s meaningful and productive breakout groups, committees, sub-groups, and agenda items are reduced to meaninglessness, rendered to nothing by the rough hand of the police.

T-Bone vows to continue. While the police apparently went through everything, there are vast quantities of drugs that have not been seized. T-Bone has a date with The Human Warehouse, dealing 2C-B to the usual frenzy of ravers.

–

Lucy recalls that she has never comprehensively lost her mind to this extent. She can no longer recognise faces. Prosopagnosia. This wouldn’t be a problem, if there weren’t so many faces around. Faceless entities kissing, faceless entities dragging their silhouettes across the faceless floor of the nightclub, a great and overwhelming and languorous facelessness.

Lucy is kissing someone, but isn’t sure if it was the same person she was just kissing. All she can tell is the silhouette is differently bleary and granular.

Lucy recalls she has had a precise Tetris Syndrome-infused experience at precisely the night after visiting a nightclub. Silhouettes swarm in the cavities of her eyes. In the meantime, in the backdrop of this, a half-real music plays, like natural sounds or shapes assembling into a waltz, into a repetitive rhythm.  Like whale song or water trembling and curving into ¾.

But this is life as Tetris Syndrome, the silhouettes overlapping and restructuring themselves, merging like curvatures of flame forming one cosmic picture. This is the only time, Lucy recalls, people have seized to be people. They have become strange little ink-blot-moulded shapes. Lucy reflects, when she can reflect, on the danger of this, how all of these shapes could be erased or blotted out in an instant, how easy it is to desensitise yourself to other humans. The humans that she does know, and name, become blurry. A mother, and somehow the recollected, for the first time, feeling of nursing, and of a constant, maternal attention.

And all of a sudden the sound and look and ‘vibe’ of things going wrong, forcing one to know that this illusion was easy to shatter at any moment, that it was built in. It is easy to desensitise oneself to the feeling of humans, to think they could be chaff, until you see one attacked, maimed, spitting blood into a Waltz pattern. In a waste of silhouettes, now becoming clearer, gaining contours and edges, the very clear outline of paramedics carrying the very clear outline of a man on a stretcher can be made out. And it’s all going on so seamlessly, as if it’s part of the architecture here, even though anywhere else this would be a deeply peculiar occurrence. Are people watching? People weave away, and the trance-like state of the man becomes apparent. Is he dead? But everyone here is dead. But this will be a buried memory.

Lucy peels away, headed to the bathroom; on the way, a sign advises safe drug use, looking after each other. People are doing coke; for the first time, discernible voices can be heard, many of them Southerners but one or two of them are the typical Northern lass types. Or they’re just volumes and volumes of water.

Is anyone there? Who did she come with? She finds T-Bone, who looks a little dejected with his vocation, and they walk and walk through a corridor that has no end until a smoking area can be located. The smoking area is beginning to welcome light. It is morning.

“You just never know how this is going to go”, T-Bone says, with an air of methodical sagacity.
Suddenly shaking with empathy, Lucy puts her arms around T-Bone’s cold and statuary shoulders, makes curls in the pools of his sombre, sinister, sober eyes. “Listen, Teeb. You’ve got to stop doing this. You’ve got to stop doing this.”

And a sudden medical empathy from T-Bone. “Are you ok, Luce? Do you need some shamanic intervention?”
“Teeb, you have to stop. You have to stop. What could you be? What could you be?”
Everything comes out as twoly, until she toggles, fiddles with the settings in her eyes. “There was someone in a stretcher. I’ve got bad vibes.” A license to continue. “I… my mum. My mum said I couldn’t talk to my dad. And I did, and, this whole thing, happened, then, this, change, this sense, of not being whole but of wanting more, to experiment, you know?” An oviparous glare from T-Bone. “Is this your shamanism, Teeb? Just fucking standing there? But I didn’t want my student years…  be like this… somehow. I want to be… a wholesome girl, a wholesome girl in a nice blouse, and I want to celebrate.. a festival.”

The silhouettes begin to dissipate, and suddenly people’s faces begin to brim with oppressive clarity and colour. T-Bone’s face is garlanded with soft fruits, orange and blue and blue-orange. But the man himself becomes no clearer: the anti-elucidation complete, T-Bone stands, naked, relentlessly handsome and hieratic.

“WHAT DID YOU DO WITH MOTHERFUCKING EILEEN”, Lucy dreams she says.

In the bone-house somewhere, in the freezer, THE CARE HOME FREEZER, WAKE UP, LUCE, WAKE UP, WAKE UP

XVI

Stansfield House and everything has shaken into stability: even in this late-January sun robins whisper into its canvas and cradle of willed extremity, where its inhabitants are reinfantilised, resocialised into their cradles of childhood energy, becoming a new themselves in this latter-day moment.

They are even falling in love again, regaining the ability in old age, in love like dizzy children; Lucy swears she saw Rita and Mark holding hands the other day, Mark grabbing softly her arthritic digits, geriatric apostles having already converted most of Asia Minor and now disappointed not to be martyrs, resolved to fall in love in some nameless Mediterranean grove. Like they are teenagers, Mark forgetting his widowhood.

Perhaps Eileen’s death has made everyone feel young again; the memory of a Zoom funeral is swirling in the air conditioning. Despite the unexpectedly and perversely positive atmosphere, or a random and almost demonic feeling of possibility, nothing is happening, even though everything is going on psychologically, as is always the case with the busy and sweet mantle of inertia.

A million pasts are meeting. A Nigerian village: an elder gabbles over an undifferentiated meal of jollof rice, lamb grizzled in oil, in a marital home nestled in Littleborough, sheep hovering around a lively discussion, where the drought-fuelled pining for a welcome rain to arrest the dynamo crops. Sunday afternoon across the Pennines, swaying with wind; Sunday afternoon, stalking into Lagos. And Sunday afternoon here, which is never sterile, since it is a cross section of the memorial of everywhere.

And though Eileen’s death is a statistic, the memorial she erected in this jumble is not lost. John remembers a meeting with James, in which it was agreed that Eileen would not be replaced due, once again, to insufficient funds. Her room is to be replaced with a meds cabinet. Throughout the interaction, James had not even performed grief, only vocalised a certain professional bereavement.

A flashback of this meeting, which occurred last week: James adjusting his cuff-links by a cactus, quaffing a coffee from a local Costa coffee he must have conjured from the aether, an immaculate ‘large’ with ‘JAMES’ scrawled on the side in black pen, as if he had made a special request for his important first name to appear on this important.

Leave off him, John thinks, the man is human.

Grail vessel – but these are fantasies – “We at Stansfield House are sorry all this happened, and will make all relevant funereal and professional arrangements. We have been informed that Eileen had no living relatives. I would like one Care Assistant to attend the funeral and fill out the necessary timesheet. The care assistant that does go should also liaise with the Funeral Directors in order to compose the eulogy. Unfortunately, we are unable to pay extra for this, but it would be a vital service towards our organisation, and your diligence would be readily perceived by the Management.”

Eileen might not be mourned, explicitly, by James – who John has got to know and realised is essentially just depressed and subject to a greater Leviathan of Management than he can begin to understand – but she is certainly mourned here. The fact that the Ward is collapsing in number makes it all the more ominous, her absence felt, recognised.

But Death happens, and has embellished these corridors, knotted its way into this active languor. And John has taken refuge in this languor as the only rest he will ever achieve, even though the moments where nothing are happening are the opposite of rest, a nervous and busy sort of relaxation, the calm before an earthquake.

He turns Brother Neville’s Collected Poetry to page 26, which is oddly prescient, in the way Evangelicals talk about opening the Bible to a particular page.

If only Thou had blessed these poor sods

Thou hast created, my half-deaf God, with more

of Methuselah’s hardy contemplation in clods

of Canaan clay, trimming back the verdant core

of the lush pastures of a fertile land

slouched in the brook of Time, carved in the sand,

then I could pray to Thou my Saviour with

a little more conviction than I sometimes can.

A life eternal, greater than the span

of anything my words can bring to life

is flowing in the foundries of this man

whose back is broken from this teeming strife

even if we do not always deem it thus

and flows, too, in me, this clasp of Christ.

Suddenly this reading is interrupted by Robert, confused in a stupored act of defecation, in which he has apparently lost consciousness of where and who he is. The phrase ‘clasp of Christ’ echoes as John attempts to clasp his shoulders in order to get him up, burping away into the time-transcending ward.

Lucy gets in and John is too busy to instantly get to her. John wants to communicate all of this but there’s only a half an hour handover, and he is steamrolled by Lucy’s anecdotal verve.

“I had a mystical experience”, she is saying. “And I’m scared.”

“In mystical experiences, we transcend death. Are you sure that happened?”

“No, but I understood what it was for life itself to stop. Anyway, we should do our fucking jobs, I guess.”

She just got in but she is anxiously rolling a cigarette, anxiously studying the heart of Stansfield House.

–

A weird bond that has emerged between John and Lucy, a bond cemented by thousands of medication containers, their protective coating peeled off into a manic intimacy. A bond that unfortunately fizzles in these increasingly boozey pub trips. In the Picturehouse, some sort of ghoul wax figure plays a rinketty-tink piano, clad in a top hat and waistcoat, overlooking the countless boozers. It is supposed to speak of the genuine picture house that used to occupy this spot, but instead makes it seem like someone had a go at creating a warped sex-shop Madame Tussauds in order to facilitate Rochdale’s ailing culture industry and gave up the ghost half-way through. Under the spurious light of this figure, old men look into the Lethe of bitter glasses, trying to spot their lost (or spurned) wives, trying to séance their bloody kids, who’ve fucked off to the heart of Manchester or London or flippin’ Tibet or wherever else. And in the expanse this gigantic mock-personalised Spoons is like the great, mythological mine that will come up in conversation if one chooses to pierce these pockets of Bitterness, come into – voluntarily or involuntarily – the eremitic space of a beer-cradle-cocoon. But it’s occasionally as if, inhabiting this space, everyone will suddenly start singing, burst into choral interludes at any moment, in a grotesque 21st-century black-and-white film starring a dour-faced and chip-eating Chaplin.

It’s this black-and-white film that John and Lucy have entered into, pushing the average age down significantly in a cocky and somehow Londonish way, the waxy figure a-tinkering the violent dénouement in which they enter, as if they’ve walked into John Wayne’s personal gaff. They sit near the waxy figure, trying not to let this disrupt their conversation.

If only this figure could be yanked away, the piano might actually be played and some life might be hoisted into this shit-tip, John reflects as he says, seriously, methodically: “So you had a … mystical experience?”
Lucy: “I just took a lot of drugs. But for the first time I forgot myself. I’ve taken… acid… you know… but it’s always been… somehow wholesome…”
“Wholesome?”
“We’ve always gone for a walk and had some fun having visuals, you know, but this time it was different. It was a club. And I suddenly lost the ability to see faces. That’s never, ever happened. And it’s only just back, as in, in the past couple of days. But the point is that that’s the point. In the aftermath, it’s become a mystical experience, because I’ve realised people’s faces are only an illusion, there’s no reason a certain face should “match” to a certain person, and then I’ve started to question what a “person” or an “individual” is. Like we experience ourselves as two separate people, right? But at this moment we’re not? You know?”
They drink American Pale Ale. There are two separate glasses.

“This T-Bone character is having quite a strong effect on you.”
“Did you ever have any experiences like that? Over there? Did you ever do any of the stuff mystics are supposed to do?”

–

It is in stillness we rise, thinks Brother Guthlac. In this perfect stillness and repetition I am able to levitate. And, see, now the visible world rises like a dream, and all of creation focuses out. Before inevitably focusing back in. But all of this will end. And if it should end, Br. Guthlac is thinking, allow this levitation to carry me in all my worldly endeavours, allow it to become the source of my being, the stream that moves my veins. It is Vespers again: let it be Vespers again, as it always is now, and let the unconscious part of my mind that wonders what I should be doing at any given moment be silenced and let my mind be locked into the Trance that it is of.

–

“I haven’t had any mystical experiences in quite some time.”

–

Brother Simeon is talking about levitation. “The essence of what you’re telling me must be kept secret. Everything here must be kept secret, everything you feel, everything you think. Do not let the world defile it. Let what is here be here, eternally. And let the world have its own concerns. You’re going back there. We’re going back there. And one day this will all become a distant memory, but a distant memory that will make you whole.”

–

“Do you fancy going to the Coco Lounge?” Nights-out that are regretted before they even have started. Terrible pissey lager in plastic containers coupled with the club toons that are on endless rotation and have been on endless rotation forever. Cascada’s ‘Every Time We Touch’. John shuffles his legs and arms to some sort of internal rhythm. People are openly snorting coke. Someone is being given a volley of free drinks by his friend, who works at the bar.

Despite the utter ludicrousness of John’s dancing, a silhouette is caressing him, beckoning him back to his. He asks Lucy if it’s alright, if he should, if this is not a violation or an act of unholy defiance in a way or a context he has not understood. He misses her response. The repetition of Boney M’s ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ – sometimes heard in the care home, played on one of these Gothic music-video TV channels – finally forces him to flee.

He walks in the company of a tall, hyper-tactile man. He assures himself this time it will be a liberation, that this will be on his terms. That he won’t talk about this or that. And it does all happen a little too fast, the cup of tea, the blaring David Bowie, the Removal of the Boxers, but it does restore his hope in the basic procedure. His hope in this as a basic human endeavour that has a place somewhere. He will never marry but he wants to know other people are doing this, without penury. It is always never how we want it to be. And there is a spark here, clear as daylight.

John wakes up to a Napoleonic shoulder and realises he has a text. “It was so nice to meet you the other day in the café. I wondered if you’d like to go for coffee at some point?”

–

Stansfield House, and the only place they’ve managed to persuade management to let them take the ward out this time is Prestwich Morrison’s café. A baby in a shopping trolley hones the craft of speech.

John is thinking about a dream he had. The dream is shaking the coffee cups, frenzying the plates of unmanned baked beans.

A man is following him, in a mixture of lust and professional concern. He is slavering – in the dream, it was merely saliva, now, with the elderly Oluwatobi confusedly eating the pseudo-harvests of British cuisine, he is also confusedly drinking tea, basting his shoulders with tomato ketchup. He is wearing a robe, but not in white, in a gaudy silk. He is perhaps from the eighteenth century or perhaps from nowhere at all. The robe flashes from purple, to blue, to white.

I will tell Lucy about this, John is thinking, she will understand. The man is pacing confidently around a large, multi-storey house that he knows like the back of his hand. It was, he supposed in his dream, lain out by him in more lust-free moments, perhaps during slightly younger days. But John is not sure how old the man is: he is no younger than 30, but the robe seems to obscure the real details that would indicate his age. His wrinkles, perhaps, or his head of either 30s slightly receding hair or 80s baldness. The man seems to be wearing some kind of make-up, or perhaps his eyes are merely like that? Contracted – boxed in – but John’s advantage over the man is his speed. John is physically fit, and this does carries over to his dream; he has not changed form like in some dreams (some reported dreams!)

John is pacing around the house, looking for the exit, but only sees a wildfire of antique furniture he cannot navigate. And would he look for some kind of weapon in there, if he knew how all the drawers opened? A blunderbuss!?

Suddenly he waits up, and the lustful and yet somehow parental stare is emerging from Oluwatobi. He is feeding her hash browns, and she is wordless, but would speak, if someone would allow her, would tell endless stories of growing up here, of systematic harassment, of loss. But she has chosen, John suspects, this equally systematic mutehood, because she knows that people of her stature and position ought to tell such stories.

One who, deracinated so early on, struggling against  a town that has accepted immigrants in such a volume in order that it can reject them, now hangs mute in this moment, spoon-fed as if she is damn well supposed to be.

–

The pub visits with Lucy have become all he has, the only time John can talk candidly. His surrogate mother. And they always, always, go to the pub, never see a play or go to the opera.

There is no opera or play to see, John reflects. There is a theatre – the Gracie Fields Theatre – but it hosts only stand-up comedians. Perhaps an opera has occurred there, by accident. But the pub is the place of conversation of a Higher Order: the fine-points of dreams, mysticisms, religions, exiles, deaths, literatures incommensurable.

“I think I had an experience like that. Like your faceless… experience. I had a dream. A dream that is sticking with me. There was a face coming towards me. I couldn’t make out its contours exactly. I had a thought about your mystical experience. There’s all this stuff about seeing God face-to-face. Maybe you had blotted out other faces because you could see the face of God at that moment? But then why would seeing God mean that we can’t see other faces. Why would God mean acute prosopagnosia.”

“It sounds like you’re ready to meet T-Bone.”

“I’m never ready to meet T-Bone. I don’t want to be sucked into that world. What can T-Bone give me?”

This is, finally, a cute pub night, John and Lucy rejecting extremes. They are both shattered, and embarrassed that they can find nothing, no thing, to spend their money and time on apart from this. They are not out on the pull. The pull is gone, there is nothing to pull here now apart from the air.

Why can John not fully fancy Lucy? He can admire a certain beauty, a certain intelligence, a force of character. But to fancy her – to actually be with her – would be somehow incestuous.

But why could he not be with a woman? Perhaps if he’d ever had the training. When he thought of being with any woman, even the opinionated student-woman he knew best, he froze up.

But his times with men had been forgettable. They’d

been fancies. But why would he want anything constant – the folly of a human love when he had something greater.

So the solution is perpetual inconstancy. Or is there some exalted point in between?  But talk to Lucy about it had always been his first response. But Lucy was so much like Boudicca that he couldn’t dare. Or maybe she was just a real woman: the only other women he sees on a regular basis are women in blouses, on drip, usually rather sagaciously pallid in their old age.

He will talk to Lucy about personal matters, even though she sits there, scrutinising both him and the Pint.

“Lucy, have you ever been in love?”
For some reason this is the question that gets her, that stings. He can see her searching for an answer, searching in the entire vastness of a mental desert.

All she can muster is, “I think so.”

–

Back to Stansfield House and John is realising more and more that Robert is in love with him. As the languid TV rolls on – one of the last TV sets alive to preserve the simple formula of a set of channels to flick between, with no option to pause, record, or allow a complex set of algorithms to decide what you want to watch or listen to – Robert is staring at him, longingly. He can see him almost convulsing in desire, as if about to lunge out of his body.

John mentions it to James. “Well, it’s not doing any harm, is it? It’s be too awkward to move him at this point”, is James’ retort.

“It makes me uncomfortable.”
“But we have to do our jobs? To play a role? Like?”
How did this man ever have anything at all to do with a care home, John thinks, it’s like he’s been transplanted from Goldman Sachs. I wonder who does his hair in the morning – how long that personal care routine takes him – clearly ten care assistants or so would be needed to perfect a sheen that good.

“If you do have a complaint, you can take it up with the relevant Safeguarding official”, James finally says, aware that every word is suffused with bollocks, an anti-logos.

He is falling out of his suit.

–

From St. Vincent’s, where John reluctantly attends Mass, singing hymns in an inappropriately old-world Gregorian voice, ducking communion, he decides to walk the arm of Spotland Road. Unexpectedly, he’d received a message from his uncle – the only relative who is here, or perhaps was ever here – to meet for coffee. Thinking of finely Gothic enclosed cells as he leaves the concrete stable of St. Vincent’s, he regurgitates the motifs of today’s urbanisation. The most abiding of these is that by a beaten glimmer of cobblestones, covered in cloud, a pizza box encloses a set of blue ADIDAS underpants, that almost could be a radioactive pizza slice. There are the old, Brutalist council estates, constructed in a hurried but (John imagines) vaguely visionary, futuristic energy, which John notices for the first time have names. Quinton, Newstead, Stavordale. Anything which needs to remind you of its name or insist on its nomenclature has no true name, no reason to be named.

There are purposeful looking families, real: children kick footballs into potholes. Then the tattooed undertow and the inclining monobrow of the town centre. A homeless man kicks coffee cups, trying presumably to hit the new bus station. There are shuttered buildings, but John notices behind the Spoons the new mass-produced recreation zone that he’s never been to, where he’s set to meet his uncle.

It announces itself with a modern sign, itself a garment of pseudo-antiquity; “Baillee Street Quarter, established 1830.” While there’s still no McDonalds in the town – this would invite the same criminality as before, McDonalds having to be community centres for the young – there is the bright optimism of a thousand chains, the annunciation of a Nando’s.

When was the last time I saw my uncle?John thinks. And how would he understand – how would he understand any of this – the sense of loss I have experienced, the wholeness of having lost my whole family, the inhumanity of this modernity – to me – the perpetual searching for a community – a new family – and the sense that the family, which John is sure consists of just himself and a few stepbrothers and sisters, is not enough. Once I woke up, John thinks, but starts again: once I woke up and I was somewhere. Once I woke up and there was a sense of purpose.

Is it the place? It’s certainly true that what used to hold the town together no longer does. Not even these forged spaces of economic activity, where people get fuel to go and work in places that no longer exist.

But what – what if the home is the spirit? What if the spirit is here? What if we’ve always felt this malaise, this sense of depersonalisation, so wankerly what we have designated the ‘ennui’? People died, were killed in wars, people’s children were ripped away. The family of asylum seekers I saw (this town has the most asylum seekers and the most racism) have had their entire village ripped apart. Their entire country? And John has to admit this is his country, though it is a different notion of this country, a country-within-the-country in which a constant bell designates prayer, a constant hand urges the motion of heaven. Where the dead are buried beneath your feet (where you bury the dead and not some faceless corporation in Baillee Street Quarter – John supposes there are funerary companies here, companies that will again pseudo-old-worldily deliver your digitally-logged corpse to its new digitally-designated space, as if a hand and with the visible hand but only the invisible digit) – and where, therefore, by conclusion, you are part of it. Part of the ecosystem, John means, one with the ebony table he nervously reads Brother Neville on, one with the dangling dotterel leaf, reaching the wisps of hair in Bean Café (for it is here he meets his uncle. Who is called Greg – he has a name – but John is trying to avoid it because he is trying to unlock the metaphysical potentiality of the Uncle, like Plotinus’ One. He-Who-Shepherds-Me-From-Afar.)

Proximity to the Regal Moon means he may run into the only person who has ever held a leaf of his own soul and smoothed its fringes through her delicate fingers: Lucy.

She he loves but cannot fancy. She he would marry just to find communion, if she believed in God, or believed in something in any way resembling God. Another empty metaphysical.

But she who may lead him to T-Bone, who, in the amplified sense of him as the only person here who understands the Spirit – even if it is through drugs – he recognises implicitly as his earthly saviour.

But he is not ready for his earthly saviour. He wants to read the ciphers of Rochdale, know how the secular world works. For people seem to ride and skate slipshod through it as if they have some innate sense of its dance. As if someone taught them the steps: some urban shepherd in a secondary school classroom, who, when the bureaucracy was absent, had whispered the secrets of the real world.

John wants to meet this shepherd. But has not met him in care homes, where the old men and women seem equally adrift from society today, who seem equally awkward breathing in an atmosphere of apps, tracing a world guided not by the Invisible Hand but by the Mutilated Hand, where a Worldly God moves the world through the portal of a dodgy PC. Who is here?

Nor will John meet this gentle shepherd in books. Specifically, a hardback book that has suffered the damage of repeatedly being carted back and forth from workplace, pub, “home”. Unlike the monastic books, which had only ever been moved once, which were carted to cells sensitively, with diligence and sensitivity and prayer. Always prayer. But John believes that Brother Neville – who had the same struggles and conflicts, only a couple of centuries ago – will speak to now, believes it falsely, as he beholds another untitled poem, one he was too shy to publish in his lifetime but has been mined by nonmonastic editors for its relevance to now – which must mean it is relevant to now –

Our Holy Father smeared sin

into the moors our faces make

to bid a Sacrifice begin

among the skies: and, thus, we take

but why a second sacrifice

to clean away a needless first

and why not virtue out of vice,

a heavenly to earthly thirst?

Slur the heavenly. Definitely Brother Neville trying out forms, wearing shapes.

An experiment. Just like this meeting with his uncle, which John is suddenly nervous about. And at the very moment his nervousness is activated, his uncle walks through, wearing a vial of cash: a fancy Apple Watch, a golden amulet. He is hairless and handsome; his bald head looks oddly polished, like he dipped it in a vat of sheen before his date with his nephew, just in case any women would assail him on the way. Is he married? John doesn’t know, or care: somehow he is now determined only to flee, to ghost his uncle, to run to the bus station and leave him to flounder in a cage of his own simmering vanity.

Does he want to murder his uncle? Is this a Shakespeare play?

John stands up.

“Hello, John, mate. It’s so good to see you. I an’t seen you since you were a little lad. How the hell are you?”
That ‘how the hell are you’ rings so hollow, like a particularly crazed alien’s greeting.

But this is what made me. John tries to engage with it.

“I’m alright, thanks. Working as a carer.”
Greg scowls. “Well, bloody ell, lad, I just got back from Dubai, where I were Marketing Director. Yer might have heard.”

There’s no-one who John could have heard this from.

XVII

T-Bone remembers when his dreams had a clear trajectory. Here, they are convulsive beatings of light with no narrative. Sometimes they do involve sex but they are never “sex dreams” and they are never “sexy”. Often they involve odd settings where he thinks he is sleeping with a woman but is in fact sleeping with an anthropomorphised… something. As he lurches closer, reels to a woman in a nightclub or a house party, he realises he is lurching towards some sort of pustule of colour, some sort of nervous radioactive silhouette…

He is too much of a Desert Father. But there is no Desert, no wilderness to return to any more. No cave that has not been touristified. Or would he wander into Ethiopia, to somewhere  someone like him had never been or even emerged from?

Or would he return to his ancestral home – somewhere besieged in that Sub-Continent, where to be a Christian, or Hereditary Ex-Hyper Christian, would be death?

Or is this death? Not to dream properly, to only have dreams of flickering visions, lost opportunities, garlands of nothingness, is to die. Is – to – die – and how does he bring his dreams back? Does he return to a faith that is no more, or to the extent of a faith or the style of a faith which is no more? I have stopped going, he has vowed, to mere empty sulphourous nothingy parodied of wanting to hang on the Cross. Wanting to live one’s live upon the Cross. Here, instead, will be mysticism, where the young are, and can still be led to the imprint of the vision or the dream.

T-Bone has begun to believe he has an illegitimate child, somewhere, as people like him should have and do. And, in picturing his illegitimate child, always a son, he begins to feel such depth of emotion. Such extremities, undercut with mysticism, his son cradled on a dune, dandling from a tree in Ethiopia somewhere as he retreated entirely and absolutely from the world – why had it become Ethiopia?

It was the squat’s doing. This restless place had been nothing he wanted. And people like him were it’s problem; suddenly, he began to suspect he should leave, just wander the far corners of the earth, or at least of Manchester, just wallow in the unsung and unrepented raptures of his sin and die somewhere.

Or there is a mission; or there are least vocational offshoots, sending bitter signals to an Allah somewhere. And this is a Work; let us believe.

–

XVIII

Goslings play near the unexposed river, as if plunged out of place. A man flies down Drake Street; a Metrolink driver swerves hurriedly out of his way. A grey cloud reigns, indifferent: stretches of blue vein the February sky.

A spring, in a manner of speaking, is coming. But his meeting with his uncle is not it, not the painful anti-reconciliation of knowing that his only biological family member (known biological family member?) is a complete and utter tosser.

But what was he hoping for? A perfect, genteel member of the bourgeoisie? A hidden Lord Byron?

John walks back, rather than going to the 3D printed, etiolated bus station. Etiolated indeed: someone needs to plant vast empires of bonsai and ivy all over it, restore it to its ceremonial function as a greenhouse.

–

His love lives in Littleborough. John gets the lovely, verdant train across the flailing Pennines, the beginning of the permitted lushness, the descent into the different valley of Yorkshire. Of course he is nervous, but equally he feels like a coquettish school-girl.

The swooning heather coils around the cobble-stones, giving way to a taunting of nature. John reflects that so much of the world is like this – industrial decay then sheep-folds, crofts, technowains.

A hope.

In this case the Pennines still harbours volumes of unprofitable sheep. Sheep that were brought over by monks in the late Middle Ages: our legacy.

Getting in to Littleborough railway station, John witnesses businessmen flocking into a conference at a mock-rustic corporatised monastery called The Friary, with an ebony sign. The cloister is turned into a recreational conference space for a business called Cowl Capital where conference goers can brain storm new ventures in a new practice called Business Meditation. In fact, John witnesses two corporate types employing this practice, which seems involve some kind of talking therapy, as businessmen pace up and down the recently secularised cloister spouting corporate lexis. John hears one of them, a man with an oleaginous, combed beard married to a suit neat to Baroque standards, stating, “We need to diversify this venture going forward.”

There is, however, an agreeable bookshop, filled with prints, even manuscripts, apparently the industrial byproducts of the closing friary. John espies Lucretius’ ‘De Rerum Natura’ wedged into a shelf that also has various pop-psychology works, like “How to Be a Better Person” by Dr. David So-And-So M.D.

He even notices books on meditation by ex-Carthusian monks, whose worldly names he happens to recall from visa and immigration documentation he undertook as a lay-brother. In a desperate attempt to earn a living, they have gone from “anonymous” (how monks in the Carthusian order are published) to “John Stottle BACP.” The worldly identity that they once ungloved is back, in order to reduce the servitude of the dole, for they whose only skills are gardening, praying, and holy idleness. A little money from something ChatGPT could probably do better, auto-generating listicles about how to be more serene, more ordered. Perhaps the monks divulge the secrets of their Carthusian past in the works.

John opens “How To Be Better” by John Stottle, and realises that his monastic past is treated, but elusively, enigmatically: “I learnt how to be, and by the end of this book you will also learn that grand and coveted secret.”

John reflects that this apparent genre of self-help books supposes one reading, not the multiple and constant readings of lectio divina. The old monks, John reflects, have turned themselves into quick shags; small fingerings of forged truth.

Are they only commodities? Or does this prostitution (or so John has seen it) democratise them? Spread their teachings to a wider audience? Did meditation always deserve to be mainstream, to be accessible? Or have their teachings become diluted at the point of accessibility?

It is odd to see such living and recent imprints of recent activity for sale here. There’s even an annotated copy of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, evidently made by a close-reading but acerbic monk. Opening to a random page, John found, in clerical handwriting, a monk had underlined “All war was simply unjust, and that was that” and provided a quote from Augustine; “for even the wars which arise from human passions cannot harm the eternal well-being of God”, while also noting “Augustine and Thomas Merton have something in common!?”

John heads over to Toppos Wine Bar, where he is due to meet Andrew, after his fortuitous text. The phrase echoes in his head; this is the eternal well-being of God. But the brain-fog that he had read that phrase in his gone away. Among this bog-slate, he has been renewed, plucked. He could be absolutely anywhere. The moor-slumbering town is aching with wind, but such does not matter. An instant and silent chemistry pervades; John barely knows what is being discussed. Stansfield House? Faith? After taking a sip of pinot grigio – which the tall and overcoated Andrew pays for – they take a trip around Littleborough, arm in arm, beholding the fields or wind farms that lie beyond, the corporatised Augustinian friary. The Celtic wind makes the whole expedition feel very Pagan; the softness with which John’s hand falls on Andrew’s is neither aggressive or timid. It is determined, the sinews of a strong dart of longing love. They see a steady and gentle bay horse go past, which they decide together is called “Betsie”.

When John gets on the train his whole body is crawling with love. Suddenly the dalliances he has experienced seem far remote. Even the monastery, with its promises of divine love, seem remote. Even Littleborough, as he departs from it, seems like a figment of a distant and distorted past. Any geographical entity could have been the theatre of their love. A city or a hamlet; a field or a staccato industrial estate. They have made no plans to see each other again, but it is exactly implicit they will. Marriage seems on the cards. The slow-thundering train is no restraining agent to the sheer vaults that John’s imagination is leaping to. He pictures the two of them strolling down an aisle together, Andrew in a folksy Elizabethan suit, getting married to a procession of farm animals. He knows his imagination is jumping, and he tries to restrain it, but he knows, equally, there is love. Nor can he rein in the love, and he cannot wait for a text from Andrew; he does get one. “I really enjoyed today” – rather than the promises of eternal love – is all he gets.

But to be loved is to be doomed. The mark of Cain is the mark of love. John knows his time, somehow, is up, as he speeds to a worldly god. What can this man do for me? Everything and nothing; he is the blunt promise of an admission of the world. John felt warm and calm and stable with the monks. But never was his soul gravitating towards them in a resting state. And this is love, finally and awfully, and in the most embarrassing of possible locations: a train chartering and rechartering the painful journey from the wooly and hippie-laden Calder Valley to the painful and almost paradoxical loneliness of Rochdale.

Rochdale, which surely must be someone’s dream. And how nice it is to come this way. Maybe the refugees alighting on Rochdale as their First Refuge in the UK have also come upon Rochdale this way, via Leeds, across the pinfolds of West Yorkshire. Country of cattle and clean air and infrastructure; a civilisational symbiosis. But while refugees were escaping love, or realising their love more fully in a different country, John was beginning to feel love.

But to already feel a love that was utterly foolish, or fading, or thumping away as the brutalist canvas drew in again.

–

A feeling of helpless loving has prompted John to finally meet T-Bone. Amid a multitude of bowel movements, John and Lucy stare into the corporate hodgepodge of the rota alongside a Facebook event page of Manchester events. Eventually, ‘The Rub a Dub Dub’ on March 14^th is affirmed as a time neither of them will be working. The moment in which John will stand face-to-face before T-Bone.

After deciding this cardinal point, meds are hurriedly and now perfunctorily attended to, beta blockers administered as if they were useless sugar pills.

XIX

T-Bone’s visions are becoming more mundane and economical by the day. Shuffling through the city centre at 4 am, ready to take up his military post, he is confronted with aesthetic marvels of waste; artful mosaics of cigarettes poised in Lipton ice tea containers. And the artful mosaics of rough sleepers, in their endless multitudes, adopting sanctuary in St. Ann’s, couched under tarpaulin and sprawled almost unnoticeably around every part of the church. And the church no longer able to admit them. Waste-people.

It is raining. Rain scries the tarpaulin sheets, threatening the imperfect bivouacs constructed under colour-drenched stained glass windows. Rain beads the forehead of one particular man, whose sleeping bag makes him seem aglow with radiation, a cartoon alien huddled under a godly imprint.

T-Bone simply has an earthly vision of how resources might be better managed. People used in some way. Technologies used only insofar as they don’t interrupt the sonic landscape, or the beauty of labour, he thinks now as a massive curling-tractor polishes the floor of Manchester Victoria. A vision that does not involve quite so much rough sleeping, so many drugs.

There are people under the doorway of Marvyn and Co – a new watch manufacturer – having a lively argument, and one proclaims, “yer can safely fuck off now”. Then one of them huddles into a cold and a storm-singed night, almost cowering, wilting? –  and T-Bone returns to the McDonalds, delivery-only at this time, where there are several Deliveroo bicycles stationed for the night-time delivery cycle or whatever it is. And there is a white man telling a black man to get out if he’s not getting anything, the black man is taking a little bit of time deciding what he wants, fighting perhaps the fatigue from a night-shift, and his dawdliness makes him subject to racism.

T-Bone wanders to Shudehill and takes up a post on Tib Street, asking unsuspicious punters if they want ket or md, ket or md. Ket is new on the menu – sudden batches available on the dark web. Exist on the margins, watch for the right stumblers. Endure racial abuse.

–

After a nap at the commune, which he can now barely endure, T-Bone heads to the Soup Kitchen for Rub-a-Dub-Dub. T-Bone has begun to prefer the cold and thumping rain, avoiding the various tattooed bloviators, banging on about actions they will take. He has begun to take refuge in the outdoors, the music of Duke Ellington, the strange silence of the street.

T-Bone was struck during his morning paper round by his lack of consciousness about when the day actually begun. There definitely was a point in which everything here, in this busy city, was locked into a sort of slumber. People were sleeping, McDonalds was inert apart from people on a night-out. But at some point the day gives way to seriousness, to solemnity, and T-Bone has been determined for a long time now to find out exactly what that point is.

It is a mystical moment. People decide to enact the enclosed rituals of their existence, Costa Coffee choreographies. They seem to come out of nowhere, shuddering against the tranquillated night, and they seem to be so fixed, so tied into place, so antithetical to any form of presence. By the afternoon, these people are entirely not there, to the point where the guy wandering into the Market Street Costa nearly blinking his eye off is unregistered by the young Costa workers, desperately to get the list ticked off (change the silver tray, replenish the cuts, check the toilet for heroin users.)

T-Bone treats himself to a double espresso.

–

Father Anthony and Brother Guthlac stand looking at each other in Rub-A-Dub-Dub. They are far from the quietude of the cell. They are far from the daily and timed patterns of silence and noise. They are in a post-modern dub remix rather than a Carthusian liturgy. They are remembering the liturgy, looking at one another, dancing. They are remembering together, exclusively, the entire history of a secret world.

“Why did you choose T-Bone?”
“’I am the resurrection and the life.’

“Why did you choose… here?”
“Why did any of us choose here?”
“What will happen to you? Where are you staying?”
“I stay where an imperfect sanctuary is. I stay in the Devil’s abode.”
They exchange a cigarette, overawed that they know each other. To be reunited, and for it to be thus, with no further questions.

–

But what did John, in fact, know? Even if meaning does restore itself for a moment, even if the universe occasionally has some design, he felt sure he wanted to grow out of all of this. None of it was any good. Maybe the perfectly lucid days are gone, hued in mystic clarity. But if there are snatches of lucidity here, then this is enough. Why did we ever dream everything was supposed to fall in place exactly? This world is all we have, it can’t be ploughed or carved into another world, shaped into a mirror of mystic perfection. The true God is the occasionally-ceded numinous moment. The false God invites us to hammer the world into shape in our own image, dream of an isolation or solitude beyond relationships. Relationships die and relive. Relationships come back. But are true despite their frailty. We are true despite our frailty. The monasteries, the monasteries will all come back. When God is ready. When we are ready.

–

John stares as a bald, emotionless police officer carts T-Bone away.