Red North

One

Red North

One

I awoke from the anaesthetic. The room where they had taken me to have my teeth pulled out looked the same, but something was different. 

The digital clock was flashing 6:66, though I didn't reflect on it at the time -- clocks were always flashing when they were wrong. My mouth hurt. I'd had four wisdom teeth pulled. 

I felt a pounding in my head as I rose from the bed where they had left me. My girlfriend entered the room: a sight for sore eyes. She looked somehow different. Had she worn that dress when we left home? I couldn't remember, but I remembered that it had been snowing when we left the house. Wouldn't she have worn something warmer? I didn't know anymore.

"How are you feeling, love? Does it hurt? Are you OK to go now? I'm worried that they'll give me a ticket if we don't leave soon. We've been here all day already."

I answered that I was OK: that I just wanted to get home and go to bed. Then as we slowly shuffled out of the hospital I felt relieved. My memory started to return. Of course, it hadn't snowed: it was July after all. I must have dreamt about the snow while I was under anaesthetic. 

We pulled out onto the Mancunian Way, the way we always went home when we'd been to Manchester. We drove past the University and I saw the sun reflected from the windows of the tower blocks in the city centre. I still felt tired and would have slept but for the pounding in my head and the nausea.

"Can you pull over?" I asked abruptly. "I think I need to be sick".

We took a slip-road off the motorway and entered that nowhere land of railway arches and derelict mills, where I'm never sure whether I'm in Manchester or Salford. We pulled off the main road just before the viaduct that carries the Metrolink to Altrincham. We drove in the maze of side streets looking for a parking place. Even this derelict corner of the city was teeming with parked cars. 

Two miles away Scotland had just played their final match in the group stage of the European Cup at Old Trafford. Half of Glasgow's traffic was crowding the streets of the city for miles around the stadium. 

Finally we pulled up outside a garage or a workshop and I lurched from the car. The nausea rose in my stomach and litres of blood-red bile spewed from my mouth leaving a pool on the ground and staining my trousers. 

Alicia came running from the parked car with all the tissues she could find. She wiped my mouth and brought me a bottle of warm mineral water from the glove compartment. I leaned against the passenger door for a while until the nausea subsided and I was certain that I wouldn't need to throw again. 

The news had just begun on the radio. It must have been 7pm. Scotland had lost the match, so were out of the cup.

"Come on" Alicia ushered me into the car. "There'll be trouble tonight when the fans get out of the stadium; let's get you home".

Of course, that was easier said than done. We had entered a tangle of one- way streets and couldn't go back the way we came even if we remembered which way we had come, which neither of us did. I didn't know the area and Alicia had only moved to Manchester six months previously, so she didn't know it either. 

We drove round helplessly for ten minutes. It had grown very dark outside as storm clouds rumbled above. We took a wrong turn down a dead-end street and reversed out, watching in amazement as a fork of lightning shot down before our eyes, engulfing the shell of an old warehouse in flames. 

The thunder roared and the rain began to pour down. It was hard to see where we were going. Through the rain and the misty windows I could make out tall buildings at the side of the road. There were no longer any parked cars and we were alone on the road. Everything looked foreign to me. Alicia asked me for directions but I was unable to provide them. We stopped the car again because I felt sick, and Alicia was tired and frustrated.

"We'll wait a while until this storm calms down. I can't even see where I'm going." She said, with still a hint of her Spanish accent.

We stopped in the middle of the road, not sure whether we were safer from the lightening there or under the shelter of the tall buildings. I loosened my seatbelt and leaned my head against Alicia's shoulder. She softly ran her fingers through my hair and told me that it would all be alright: that we'd be home soon.