A Pint With Morrissey at The Marble Arch Manchester

The next day you get to tell her that you ‘have to go, or you’ll be late meeting Morrissey.’ Her expression, as she sits up in the bed, shows that she remembers you claiming this would happen but that she never really entertained that the time would actually come. You would burn with pride but it all feels too ridiculous and surreal. 

You don’t know what to make of the wild-eyed way she looks at you and bites her lip. So you check your hair looks okay and you just gather your wallet and take your card from the light slot and leave. But as you make your way to the Marble Arch pub, wrapping your navy blue coat around you, the collar flapping in the wind, you wonder if this is really happening. Are you simply going to walk to the end of the street and then, at some flaring wound of a rain-flecked concrete junction, find there is no Morrissey? Certainly not here? 

But instead you dart over a pelican crossing, and walk down a weed strewn expanse of the cities ripped backsides. And looking around you ponder when this country became a place so clenched, with people so tightly wound inside themselves. The men, hands deep in pockets, faces pockmarked by un mourned cruelty, that pass you. And inside the pub- that gasp of relief from the warmth that screens out the sleet- they are in there as well. Their shoulders at the bar heave with indolence. The happy drinkers. Their clothes smell of dried sweat and they smell of shaming, wasted years, of misdirected marriages and unsettled debts turned infectious. Each of these men are compressed sites of unresolved trauma. When they turn to look at the pretentious young man in the designer coat their eyes carry in them the glimmer of opportunities that the world carelessly dangled before they were all lopped into the laps of people of privilege. It wasn’t simply that they stopped trying. They were let down and shafted too many times and the need to take a brief step back became for them a need to stay back. And now here they heave their pints and rue all those wasted hours.

And then, behind you all along, in the corner by the door you see Morrissey, and his presence is substantial. The heft of that smile, as he rises to his feet, substantial and nourishing, with a ‘Well,’ that offers a sense of largesse and wisdom. The twinkle- it really is a grey twinkle- in the eyes. You shake his hand as he bustles heartily to greet you, full of face. You’re acutely aware that your handshake needs to be strong. He smells of aftershave and of important and cultured friends, of sandalwood studies. He seems satisfied with the exchange, and with how you have presented yourself. ‘What are you drinking? You ask, motioning to his empty glass. His expression becomes camp and disdainful as he glances at the bar. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Something hoppy,’ he says, with flapping hands that speak of a crushing awareness of widespread pointlessness. 

You are sure someone behind the bar says the word ‘Moz’ but the crushed men don’t ultimately care- some pop star is not going to offer them the sex, money and emotional anaesthetics they are really interested in. What’s more, the barman won’t bother him- places like this rely on their sense of anonymity, on some vague sheen of authenticity, and to Mozzer these places remind him enough of the past to resonate the same. Perhaps, you think, we all choose the places we dwell in based on some misconception that others have not addressed, by fault or design? The crushed men are lost in turfed up roads and tarmac and the memory of broken homes. Their lives have been one of strain, the velocity of which never found a landing pad. It’s all flailing, and the non-acknowledgement of that makes that conclusion debatable; the only comfort they can ensure. But with Moz imagination was a rocket that pulled him out of the mire and into the sun. Good for him, and all that, but what about me, they wonder? And besides, when did this country become so much about rain and concrete, that sense of the barbarous, that sense of the ruptured, that sense of the infected wound? When did we give up and when exactly was our collective sense of direction lost? When Thatcher crushed the miners and the left didn’t come to their rescue? Questions, questions. 

You carefully set down the pints and drop yourself opposite him. A man passes behind you and whispers ‘all hail the Mozfather’ and his smile of benediction reveals that- yes- this is his preferred way of being addressed by a stranger. 

As you settle into the chair he draws breath in a way that sounds elemental enough that it reminds you of a harbour drawing out tide. He is nature. In accepting such high praise from the very people he fetishizes in his work, from up in his unreal, wispy cloud in front of the sun, he dictates how he should be spoken to. 

The handsome, creased features. ‘So,’ he says, beginning The Event, The Encounter, The Anecdote. ‘The Night and Day. I must admit’- he says, as he flaps his hands, demonstrative, a senator in Rome pleading with the consulate, the wisest of the bunch, the First Of The Gang To Die. ‘I poked my head around the corner and caught- the best part of two minutes. It was just too full, and I was just too-’ the eyebrows raise, fix into an expression hard as granite. ‘Tired. But you appeared- most engaged.’

There it is. The truncated sentences. That distinct, jagged syntax, which has such depth that it reminds you that people are places and he is here. Can it really be true? That in this deep-dive into a place that means so much to you Morrissey came out, into the cold, to watch you flail on a Manchester stage?

‘And what did you think? Did I come across as a poor tribute to you?’

A smile flinches across his face. He is satisfied by where you have conceptually placed yourself relative to him, and you congratulate yourself for slaloming through his insecurities to pet his ego so deftly. 

'Was I commanding?'

‘You were,’ (a dramatic pause) ‘commandeering. And entirely without melody. I would not say I was disappointed.'

It is all there. Confirmation of his status relative to you, and in generous benediction the assurance of this ongoing dynamic. 

You laugh, with generosity, as if genuinely amused and even titillated, but it sounds so thin and insubstantial next to the sound you know he could make. He drew from the city and inhaled it and now it breathes through him, with all its dread and suburban splendour. 

'Half the people there must've been delighted,' he adds.

'And only half the people were there in the first place. So really, we're talking fractions,' I reply. 

He laughs. 'I left because I thought, my work here is done.'

‘Your ‘work’ as in, you have influenced me to the point where I can pull something off?’

His turn to laugh. A brief wheeze. ‘No, as in-’ he smiles, and his eyes really do twinkle. ‘As in, ‘all seems present and correct here. Yes, yes, yes.’ 

You look around you. Something bristles beyond your back, beyond the bar. ‘What does it mean to you to come back here? Because to me- in no small part thanks to you, it all sings with significance when I’m here.’

‘Yes.’ He considers his pint. ‘Sure. And when I sing here it is, of course-’ he looks down, ‘in more ostentatious establishments.’

‘Stadiums.’

He harrumphs a laugh. ‘Ballrooms. Hotels on the edge of town. End-of-the-pier pavilions.’ 

‘Where you are the star turn.’

‘Where I have my turns.’

‘Your funny turns?’

‘Yes.’ He exhales with laugher, an ancient accordion. ‘I have funny turns, and many many many (the ‘a’ a real ‘a’) not so funny turns.’ 

You look around you, having enjoyed the exchange. ‘And how do you feel about Manchester now?’

‘Man-ches-ter.’ He becomes a Rusholme Ruffian as he pronounces it.

‘Manj-fest-a.’ 

‘Man-chess-tarr.’ 

You squint, to extract from him a proper answer. 

‘Well,’ he says (in a tone that says, ‘here comes my answer, if I must,’) I feel even more distance to the place. But I also know that that these people are my kith and kin,’ he waves his hand. ‘The only person to really connect to this place on a mass level in recent years, for reasons that are most tragic, was of course, Ariana Grande.’ 

‘Oh yes. Our very own Edith Piaff.’ He raises and eyebrow. You press on. ‘There’s something very bizarre about that, isn’t there, Morrissey?’ you ask. ‘The explosion as a clumsy metaphor for ripping through the layers of a place, something that with such consistency you have long worked to do. The IRA destroying the Arndale Centre, and then that. The wider world learns a lot about places by the way they react to tragedy.’ 

He is warming up. That tug of a smile. ‘Yes. At the Bataclan the Parisians reacted to tragedy one way and the Mancunian’s another. With charity and self-interest. Mancunians are people of great resistance. Inner steel. The likes of Thatcher forged it- those years of deprivation. Did you know that the rebuilding of the Arndale Centre pushed the cultural richness of the city to its very limits? That it was only concerted efforts by Labour councillors, against the centralisation, that allowed funding to build the Northern Quarter?’

‘I did not.’ Yes; he is this place.  

His eyes- are they rheumy? Roomy? ‘These are people- these are lives- forged under incredible pressure.’ He looks at the ceiling. ‘If you spend your whole life being slowly crushed one day you wake up and find yourself very tough.’ 

He pronounces the word as ‘tuff.’ 

The damp man passing behind us screams agreement in his body language. 

‘I made the mistake of thinking that this was a place of poise and beauty, because otherwise such great art- ‘you gesture at him. ‘could not have come from here.’

He dismisses that. ‘Yes, and I’m afraid that was a grave misreading of yours. Most dangerous. This is a tough, mundane place. But- in a way-’ he catches a glance at his surroundings. ‘It is home. I am built out of this stuff,’ he says, raising his hands, a necromancer. 

He does this. He hinges on certain words. 

‘Yes. You are home,’ you say. And for the first time you pause to drink your pint. 'This place is problematic. You are deeply problematic.' 

'Well. Let's not get into that.' He looks nourished and disgusted by the taste of his pint, or by my observation. As if you really can resolve it all, get it all, over a quiet pint. What fancy. His gaze is long, his gaze is glazed, as he looks out at the concrete expanse. Years and loss and hurt and pain and the clamour of retreating memories, replicated within the parameters of the latest attempt every time. You talk about it and you don't talk about. He makes you talk around it and he makes you talk about yourself when you don't want to. 

Afterwards, you clasp hands at the roundabout. Then, he feels insubstantial. You are still wondering if you should have asked about him and Johnny Marr, but you don’t want to fall into that category of the gossiper. You are proud you didn’t. You are proud you weren't tiresome. He didn’t expect you to be. 

‘I find it hard not to get distracted by it all. By the velvet ropes. By those who are screaming. How did you handle all that?’

‘Does the mind rule the body or the body rule the mind?’

He is testing you.

‘I dunno,’ you quote. He nods his approval. 

‘To me, you see,’ he says, leaning back, ‘this was about living a life that is real. People mistook me refusing their prurience for me thinking I was not a real, corporeal thing.’

‘And yet your music showed you were.’

‘Exactly,’ he gestures. ‘Exactly. I may have romanticised the ruffians and all that but I knew I was doing that. It did not mean I was not made of flesh and bone.’

‘But-’

He overrides my interjection. ‘I know you’re about to say ‘but’, and so am I. It’s not the bone of contention they thought it was.’

‘Like you, I did this to make my life seem real. But the attentions you get, the velvet ropes. I think I have lost my way, getting caught up in that. The rush of feeling that my life is real has made me want to make it hyper real.’

‘You mean you have gorged on it all? Why, do you think, you felt a need to gorge? When did you go beyond ‘Only Connect’ and into ‘Only Gorge?’

It is a powerful question, and it makes me pull my fabrics around myself. I realise how thin these expensive, invisible robes are. 

‘Connecting is natural. Gorging is greedy.’

He looks up at me. His eyes brim with past pain and with all the abilities he is yet to use. Everyone has them, stacked behind their eyes, like intimidating indexes. You quake at the sight of your own reflection, insubstantial 

Should the moment that you that hold onto his elbow, onto the fabric that hugs his body, be the moment you pass through the layers of the city and finally seize them, occupy them? The moment that you enter a portal to the ultimate meaning of this place? 

But you are just shaking the hand of an older, bigger man at a wet roundabout and it is only when you look closely you realise he is an icon. And that symbols are simply impenetrable, they just go on being symbolic. What else is there to unpack- you can’t live in signs? They are meaningful only to those who are in your conscious, spiritual tribe. They will certainly offer you no refuge from the rain, the cold, the hostility. 

And then he departs, into the boxy wilderness of neon exterior and redbrick and rain that is Manchester on a weekday afternoon. Where is the glamour of last night, and when did it fade? What else is there to unpack, and how could you even unpack it? 

You walk back to the hotel past the Night and Day, where the flecked rain is drying on the pavement outside Affleck’s Palace. Second hand dreams, sold at a snip, so many that it is both layered charm and also faintly disgusting. The past stacks up for consideration, and none of it gets enough. Uncelebrated heroes and un mourned martyrs. People are pretending to rush back from various lunch breaks. And for a moment you are nothing. If anything, a guy in a strangely smart attire for daywear- who does he think he is? And then the unreality gains semblance when you walk up the driveway to the imposing façade of the hotel. And when your card is swiped and the door gasps open- you must have a few bob to be allowed in here- it isn’t just the outfit. The unrelenting doorman smiles just inside, and there again is something to unpack about it all. There is a bubble that will one day burst.

This is a scene from an unpublished novel, 'Between My Skin And Her Skin'.