W. has Liverpool, I, Manchester. W. his northwestern city, where he lived during the bad years of the 80s, and I my northwestern city, where I lived through the years of regeneration in the 90s. He saw the destruction of the economy ... and I the ostensible remaking of an economy; he the end of a period of decline, I the ostensible beginning of a period of rebirth.
Haven't we seen it all? Haven't we experience it all between us? We need to pool our resources, W. says. We need to remember. I need to remember. That's his aim on our trip to Manchester: that I recall what happened to the city and to me, who lived in the city.
I'm to be a test case, W. says. A symptom. He wants to awaken my tremendous, free-flying pathos, he says. He wants to poke me with metaphorical sticks until I send up my great cry of desolation. And isn't this why he keeps me beside him? Isn't it to hear the great cries of an ape driven unhinged by captivity? Isn't that why he assented to be my keeper and my ringmaster?
What was the first sign, the first sign of regeneration?, W. asks. When did you know it was coming, the great change? I was living in Hulme, wasn't I - in Old Hulme? I had a room in one of the maisonettes on the top deck of one of the high-rises.
That was my Bohemian phase, W. says. It was my living-like-a-hippie-phase. Only I could never live like a hippie, could I? I couldn't live like the crusties and ravers around me; could live like a rasta, although I wanted to live like a rastra. I couldn't so much as inhale the smoke from a joint without coughing and spluttering.
I was what I still am: an impatient man, a frantic man, a man who wants to get on with things, even though he has no idea what he wants to get on with. I was then as now, essentially an administrator. I was essentially suited to administrative tasks, but I didn't know it at the time, of course.
I was unemployed like everyone else. I was squatting like everyone around me, I had my room, I had my cave painting pictures on the wall. And I had time - time above all. No one understands that now, W. says, the depth of time. Haven't I spoken at length, and very movingly about just that: the depth of time? Yes, that's what I learnt in Hulme Free State, as the graffiti called it. That as I wondered among the condemned buildings, passed the piles of rusting white goods and shattered TVs.
There were fires burning on the walkways, I'd told him that, he remembers, W. says. It gives the whole thing a Tarkovskian air. Fires on the walkways, fire on concrete, in the Manchester rain ...
The maisonettes were always drenched through, of course, I told him that. They were damp throughout most of the year, all the way through to high summer, really, or what we thought of as high summer. The concrete was once white, a futural white, but it had long since faded to grey under the grey northern skies.
Once there'd been families living here, once it seemed like the future itself, in the crescents of maisonette flats linked by walkways. They went up very quickly in the 60s, of course, the Crescents. They were system built, concrete panels locked together like a house of cards.
But the council tenants fled. The flats were too damp and too expensive to heat. They were too bleak! And so the council gave anyone who wanted one a flat. And so they came from every direction - hippies and ravers and bikers, travellers with pit-bulls and rastas in their colours. And now the bunker-like pubs built by the Crescents were full again and a bunker-like nightclub played lover's rock.
And so I found myself there like the others, barely touching solid ground for weeks. I scraped the pigeon shit from my boxroom on the back balcony, and dragged up a mattress and the complete works of Kierkegaard. And at night, after the pubs closed, I sat with the other squatters of the greens, looking up at the belly of the police helicopter.
I sat and listened to the others talked as they sat round me smoking and waiting for the Kitchen to open. I listened to the Rastas reason about Babylon and the Babylon system. Listened them to speak about the Almighty, and about the god-king Messiah. I listened to the anarchists speak of direct democracy and the Paris Commune.
I listen to a junky speak about the religiousness of getting high. Of the tingling on the surface of her skin, as though it were being brushed by a shoal of fish; of a kind of lifting or lightness, accompanied by a sense of the heaviness of her arms and legs. Her blood felt warm, she had said. The Most High: that's what they call God, she said. And laughed: the Most High: higher than all highs, and all highs pointing up to him like aretes. She saw them in her mind's eye, she said, riding up ever higher, flashing the light back along their keen edges and converging on a single point: God, God.
And what were you doing?, W. said. He knows the answer: I was sober, desperately sober. I was thinking about Kierkegaard as ravers, bug-eyed, danced in tiny circles. I was thinking about the Moment as packs of ownerless dogs, tongues lolling from their mouths, loped along in the distance.