NEIL CAMPBELL

All Smiles Saved

I’ve got to go and sign on, and it’s the only day of the fortnight where I have to be somewhere I don’t want to be. Getting out of the lift, I leave the building and walk to Oxford Road, past all the students waiting for buses back to Rusholme and Fallowfield and Withington. I pass Manchester Metropolitan, then Manchester University, and sit for a time in Whitworth Park, where I can smell the cheap beer clutched in a wino’s hand.

After walking past some hoodies by the door of the jobcentre, I’m hit by a wave of dry sweat and the sound of a young woman berating a member of staff. A security guard gets up from her table and wanders across the carpet to put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. All around the room people are trying to ignore each other, including staff with emotionless faces, faces changed by abuse from open to defensive, all smiles saved for the moment they leave the building.

When my name is called I go over and sit down at the desk. The assistant registers my presence from the corner of his eye, before focusing back on the computer.

   ‘How’s your job search going?’ he says, eyes still on the screen.

   ‘I keep looking,’ I answer.

   ‘Are you still looking for teaching jobs and retail?’

   ‘Yeah.’

   ‘Well, as you’ve been signing on for six months we need to start expanding the range of jobs you apply for. I’ll just check what’s on the system,’ he says, before I can reply.

   ‘Okay, well, there’s nothing for bookshops, but there are a few retail jobs. There’s one here to work in a video shop in Moss Side. Five pounds an hour, must be available evenings and weekends. I’ll just print out the details for you. I won't be a minute,’ he says, getting up from the desk and walking over to the printer.

As he comes back I notice he’s called KENNY. He passes me the printout and also my book, which I sign. After he’s done what he has to, he gives the book back, and when I say ‘Thanks, Kenny’ he looks at me like I’ve slapped him out of a sleepwalk, and it’s the first eye contact we’ve made.

When I get up to leave I look at the waiting line. There’s a black guy hunched over with his elbows on his knees, heels bouncing up and down on the floor, a skinny bloke with tattooed arms, rolling a cigarette, a woman with earrings like giant bubbles, a man in his fifties with a greasy quiff and a boozer’s red nose, a man with gel in his hair alternately reading job pages and looking up at the clock (a new claimant), two girls who look like they’ve just left school, both talking on mobiles, and a young man in a baseball cap, fondling a gold bracelet on his wrist.

As the doors shut behind me I feel my shoulders loosen - I’ve never been much of an actor, so looking keen was difficult. Screwing the printout into a ball, I volley it into the air six times, a new record.

For years I worked in a factory in Ashton-Under-Lyne, standing at a conveyor belt and loading pallets up with boxes of bacon. Five of us stood in line, watching the boxes as they sidled along the conveyor, turned a corner and slid down the slope, the cardboard brushing over the metal runners, loud as traffic.

It was a refrigerated area, so I’d be wearing a heavy coat and trousers, gloves and a woolly hat, even in mid-summer. Every time I lifted a box off the conveyor and put it on the pallet I had to turn around straight away to catch the next one, or else the boxes would jam up.

Directly behind the pallet there was a heated office where the supervisors sat, reading from newspapers or laughing and joking with each other. If I caught their eye they’d stick two fingers up, or point at the moving conveyor. Behind them was a giant clock that I couldn’t help noticing every time I stacked a box.

When a pallet was full I had to shrink wrap it, so I’d pick up a wrap the size and shape of a rolling pin, tuck some of it under the corner of a box and run round and round, wrapping it as tight as possible so the fork lifts could pick up the pallet.

The shift was 3-11, and some nights when I worked overtime I’d stand alone by the cold conveyor until two in the morning, the boxes barely a trickle and the clock getting slower and slower.   

I go to the nearest cash point on Wilmslow Road and walk away from the curry mile. Weaving through the crowds outside the Student Union, I notice how I’m one of the few people not offered a flyer.    

Near the bookshop there’s a university building with a connecting walkway stretching high over Oxford Road. Going under it reminds me of being on a bus with my Dad on the way to and from City - little did I know then that I’d be living around here and signing on the rock n’ roll.

Pondering that, I go to the Salutation for a drink. It’s just off Oxford Road, hidden from the buses by a university building, and as ever it’s filled with a mixture of students and locals. There’s always an edge to the atmosphere, as though armed raiders came yesterday, but I like that; I’d rather see a fight than a fashion show. There’s something about being here on a Monday afternoon that makes me feel like an outlaw, free from the working posse.

I look at my golden pint, and then pick it up and start drinking. I could easily down it in one, because I love the taste so much, but I make the effort not to. On the sports pages of a newspaper left on the table next to me, the headline reads: WRIGHT-PHILLIPS SINKS REDS, and I think about Maine Road.

Pushing through the rusty turnstile and into the ground behind Dad, I wait while he buys a shiny blue programme. We climb up the grey steps into the Kippax. Halfway up the stand we go down a white tunnel, and the ground gradually appears, first the blue seats in the Main stand opposite, then the advertising boards, and then the magic expanse of green, with the players warming up – the coach sending crosses over for the keeper to catch in his yellow-trimmed gloves, and the rest doing shuttle runs from the touchline to the centre, the heels of their black boots kicking up leeches of soil. I sit on a blue metal stanchion, above the same faces that surround us every game: the man who passes a silver hip flask around, the man who stands on a wooden box with oranges on it, the man in black who stutters, the man in brown who takes the piss out of the man who stutters, the man with a black moustache who shouts abuse at the referee for the whole game, the man with the blue flask who takes sarcasm to new heights and can barely clap his red hands.

Looking back at my golden pint, I think of how scared I was of Dad when I was a child. The more like him I became the less we got on, but eventually we mellowed out and learned to trust each other again. I always pictured him as he was in an old photograph I had. A black and white shot, it showed him playing football in his twenties. He had a beard and long hair, and was bursting between two players with the ball at his feet, rampaging towards the opposition goal. He looked totally and utterly fearless, and that gave a real poignancy to his final days, when the only life came from his eyes, blue as a brand new City shirt.

I haven’t had a permanent full time job for ten years. When I did work, I used to think people on the dole were all skiving bastards that I was paying taxes for, although in the back of my mind I’m sure I must have known that economics is more complex than that.

Finishing my beer, I go home to pick up my guitar. I play it and play it and play it, because I know it’s the only thing I like to do, and the only shot I’ve got at not having to work at something I don’t. The rush hour traffic on the Mancunian Way plays its weekday dirge, but I put it out of my mind, like I tried to do with the clock on the bacon factory wall.

I’ve got a gig at Night and Day tomorrow, and two new songs to add to the set. I don’t know if anyone will ever pay me for making music, but I do know that apart from a few minutes every fortnight, I’m free. Maybe I’m selfish, or maybe it’s because I’ve never fallen in love, but I’m glad I don’t have to pay a mortgage on a house filled with furniture, and a picture on top of the TV of my Dad, rampaging towards the opposition goal.

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