The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  I drove back through Hulme, which had changed more radically than the Northern Quarter in the years I’d been away. Gone were the concrete crescents and the Aaben Cinema, where I’d seen what I’d thought was the most outré cinema Manchester had had to offer in the early 80s. Fassbinder. Waters. Wenders. It was nice to think I’d been wrong, but frustrating not to have any way of finding out what was on that DVD.

  I heard the yelp of a siren behind me and instinctively went to pull over to let them pass, but when I looked in the mirror I saw a police car with no intention of overtaking.

  Apparently I’d been speeding. I protested that I couldn’t have been doing more than 35 and I got the full sarcastic treatment. Is this your car, sir? Do you know what the speed limit is, sir? Have you been drinking at all, sir? I thought about mentioning my dad, but I could see from his small,flat, joyless eyes that there was no point. I let him give me a ticket just so he’d fuck off.

  When I got back behind the wheel, instead of turning left for Whalley Range, I kept going towards Old Trafford. Somewhere in this Escher diagram of pebble-dash council blocks and blood-redbrick terraced housing was Joe’s dad, the legendary Anthony Hoffman, sitting staring into space – or at a shitty park. I drove around for half an hour but succeeded only in making myself question the wisdom of having moved back to Manchester. How did I even know that Joe’s description of the nursing home’s location was accurate. There’d been something of the performer about him, as if he’d been sitting in his lair waiting for an audience to come along. Maybe he was a fantasist and not even related to Hoffman. Or maybe you had to ease yourself out of the nursing home window on a mechanical platform to glimpse either a patch of grass or the white Meccano exoskeleton of the football ground. Maybe he was as full of shit as a lot of people had said his father had been.

  I gave up and drove home. At one point a police car seemed to be following me. Just as I was about to make an unnecessary left turn to make sure, it took a turning off to the right. In my rear-view mirror I saw the passenger’s face at the side window. It was impossible to say whether he was looking at me or just watching the traffic.

  That night I lay in bed unable to sleep as I tried to work out my next move. I was in the middle of formulating a surprisingly simple plan that I decided was bound to succeed when I fell asleep and in the morning could remember not even the slightest detail. I showered quickly and drove into town, parking close to the Apollo Theatre and walking to St Peter’s Square. I’d reasoned that Central Library might be able to provide me with a list of care homes in Old Trafford, but when I got inside the reference section I started by looking up Anthony Hoffman in the newspaper catalogue. There was tons of stuff. The illegal screenings of Thundercrack! at the Apollo were mentioned. I flicked through bound copies of the Evening News and scanned the nationals on microfilm for more in-depth reports. One story in the Guardian listed the gear the police were supposed to have confiscated from Hoffman along with a 16mm copy of Thundercrack!, namely two 8mm movie cameras, a professional-standard 16mm Bolex and enough film stock to make a dozen full-length features. The article quoted an Evening News journalist, John Cavanagh, who claimed that Hoffman and his colleagues were legitimate filmmakers, who, contrary to the story put out by the police, were embarked on a mission to clean up Manchester.

  Intrigued by this, I looked up Cavanagh and found a whole bunch of references to pieces of his in the Evening News that suddenly stopped appearing around the time he was quoted in the Guardian story.

  Cavanagh was easy to track down. He was in the book. There were a few listings under Cavanagh, J, so I went for the one in the most down-at-heel district and got lucky. He agreed to meet me and suggested Spearmint Rhino. I wasn’t sure I could handle that, so he named a pub in Harpurhey I’d never heard of. Of course, when I got there, it was a strip joint, so I was vying with three naked girls for Cavanagh’s attention. Their bellies were bigger than their boobs, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Call me Cav,’ was all I could get out of him for the first ten minutes.

  I went to the gents and had a bit of trouble finding it. The first door I tried down the darkened corridor that had been indicated led straight outside. Eventually I found it and stood staring at the cracked tiles wondering what on earth I was doing there. On my way back I got Cav another pint, determined that I would wring some information out of him.

  You could tell he’d been a decent-looking young man, but had let himself go quite badly. Pouch-like bags under his eyes, grubby shirt buttoned tightly over a drinker’s paunch. The girls left the stage for a minute and I pressed him. He’d not written for the paper, he confirmed, since being quoted in the Guardian.

  ‘Someone told me,’ he said eventually, ‘that Hoffman had other stuff confiscated, stuff that was never reported. Films he’d shot on Super-8 at parties in south Manchester. Powerful types, you know. Councillors, magistrates, justices of the so-called peace.’

  ‘Did he ever show this stuff?’ I asked him.

  ‘That’s unconfirmed.’

  ‘The police had a particular incentive to keep those films out of circulation, then?’

  Cav shrugged, then brightened as the girls reappeared.

  ‘Where’s Hoffman now?’ I asked.

  ‘Some home near Old Trafford.’

  ‘Name?’

  His fingers were splayed on his stained jeans as he watched the routine.

  I took a twenty out of my wallet and folded it into his hand.

  He told me a name and the very next second there was a commotion from the bar area. I heard someone shout ‘Police!’ and I leapt from my seat and ran to the darkened corridor, where I pushed open the door to the car park. I didn’t look back as I ran.

  Driving back into town, I took the DVD-R out of my inside pocket and looked at it. The purple underside reflected a rainbow of colours that reminded me of the curtain in Joe’s shop. As I waited for the lights to change at the bottom of Cheetham Hill, I wondered if this simple plastic disc was worth all the trouble I was getting into. Then, as a police car pulled silently alongside and I felt my heart rate quicken, I thought about what might be on the disc and why Joe had given it to me. Perhaps because I’d told him I wrote for the papers. It took all the self-control I had not to turn and check out the uniforms in the next lane. I couldn’t be sure which cops were after me and which were not. The lights changed and they veered off to the right. I went the other way.

  It turned out the place in Old Trafford where Hoffman was holed up was a lot closer to the park than it was to the football ground. It also turned out that there was a dark blue Cavalier parked outside the front entrance with three burly-looking plainclothes men sitting inside it. Still fifty yards away, I backed up and turned around. Admittedly, performing this manoeuvre was tantamount to winding my window down and shouting ‘Come and get me, coppers’, but it was marginally less risky than carrying on and driving right past them. As far as I could tell, no one followed me back to Chester Road. At the Chorlton turn-off I thought about going straight on to Sale, but resisted that temptation and turned left, heading for home.

  I parked two streets away and approached on foot. There was no car outside, and the door hadn’t been forced. I climbed the stairs and everything seemed normal. Surely I was being paranoid. The raid on the strip joint was routine and I’d got a ticket for driving in excess of the speed limit. Simple as that.

  I unlocked the door to my flat and saw that it wasn’t, in fact, as simple as that.

  The place had been turned over. Looking at it with cold detachment, which I found I could do, in a looking-down-from-above sort of way, what they had done was quite impressive. Every movable surface was at a new angle to all others. Upended cupboards, overturned drawers. The mattress had been slit open with a knife, pillows eviscerated. Every book or CD or DVD or video that had been on a shelf was now on the floor creating a restless sea of plastic and paper. I was reminded of the Paul Nash painting of downed German warplanes in a Cowle
y field, Totes Meer.

  There was a smell in the flat, too, that reminded me of Joe Hoffman’s shop. It wasn’t damp. It was the animal smell. They had come with dogs.

  The TV, DVD player, VCR and my computer were gone, as if to make me think I’d been burgled, yet they’d left no signs of forced entry. It was this detail that made me realise they were laughing at me, but it was a laugh that bared the sharpest of teeth.

  I left the flat without bothering to lock the door and walked the long way around to where I’d parked the car. I felt dissociated from reality as I drove over to Sale. James Anderton wasn’t the only ex-Manchester copper who’d retired there. I parked across the road from my father’s semi, its dimensions presumably much less generous than those of Anderton’s place, wherever that was, perhaps on The Avenue or somewhere like that. I tried to imagine crossing the road and walking up the path. Knocking on the door. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I was curious, though. I wondered if my dad had a DVD player, or maybe an old projector and a little pile of film cans. I wondered what went on behind those artificially leaded windows. I fingered the contents of my inside pocket and started the car engine. The house grew smaller in my rear-view mirror and I rejoined Washway Road, then slipped on to the M60, heading in an anticlockwise direction. Turning the clock back, I thought. Ha-ha. It was getting towards rush hour, but the traffic moved smoothly enough. I got off on to the M67 and was held up in a long queue to join the road to Glossop. At the Glossop turn-off, I kept going, through Hollingworth and Tintwistle. The first of the reservoirs appeared below me to the right. At Crowden I pulled off the road and drove in a semi-circle to reach the car park.

  The first paths were easy, nothing more than gentle diagonals up the side of the hill. I soon left the path and struck out for the quarry. There are two quarries at Crowden: a small one at the back of the hill only half way up it, and a much larger one right at the top. It was the latter I was making for and once I had negotiated the scree slope I found myself having to grab handfuls of springy grass to help pull myself up a near vertical section. I was breathing heavily, but the tension that had knotted my muscles in the car while still in Manchester was easing. I could feel my heart beating as fast as a child’s. Suddenly into my mind came the first X films I’d snuck into at the cinema, a double bill of David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Rabid at the only picture house there had been in Altrincham in the 1970s. The slope above me began to level out, or more accurately, I could see nothing beyond where it stopped, so I knew I was near the top. The first film I could remember my parents taking me to was Kes. I remembered the contrast between the sense of freedom in the long shots of the kestrel’s free flight and the stark finality of the shallow grave.

  I pulled myself over the last ridge and dropped down into the scoured basin of the quarry.

  My father had brought me here several times and no matter how much tension there was between us, it all fell away in the hush of the quarry. The towering sandstone bluffs like the walls of a ruined cathedral. The enormous, unmoving boulders dotted about. A very particular quality of stillness. As if this was a place in which man and nature had reached some kind of settlement. I climbed up the far side and walked up on to the moor. I turned for a moment and looked to the west, towards Manchester. I felt fully removed from the city and everyone in it. Turning my back, I considered the moor. In the distance was a trig point, beyond that and to the right the radio transmitter at Black Hill, where my father had taken me bog-trotting. I began walking. The going was soft – peat, heather, tussocky grass – but I covered a lot of ground. I walked hard for ten or fifteen minutes. I started to run. I felt free. Slowly the radio transmitter slid around to the left in relation to the trig point. When the two were aligned, I stopped, panting for breath, and knelt down. I took the DVD out of my inside pocket, still inside its clear plastic wallet, and inserted it into the damp, peaty earth, which accepted it as easily and smoothly as if it were a machine designed for that very purpose.

  When I looked up I saw a pair of peregrine falcons in the distance, soaring and swooping over the quarry.

  Hooked on Classics

  Michael Bywater

  If music be the food of love, it be also the food of harsh sex, food of the flying swoon, of the needle and the rich dream-laden smoke; of languor and anger and road rage and triumphalism and that most decadent of all false sensibilities: the feeling of limitless power or even, may god help us, Oneness With The Universe. Drugs? Sex? Perfumes? Food? Lordy lordy, music is even the food of food and there’s no plush fig sucked from the glistening flesh of a (she’s drugged, dears; opium probably; she doesn’t mind) young duchess gone awhoring that can half touch what goes on in even the most innocent, the most uncorrupt (but never incorruptible; nobody is that) mind under the influence of music.

  I don’t mean that terrible stuff, mind. Not the thud and whop of music stripped of all that makes music music: complexity, variation, tension, the building and relaxing and building and building and then final – aaah – release of energy. No; that music (nk nk nk-nk-nk, nk nk nk-nk-nk until your head rots). I mean music music.

  We need to chop the word ‘decadent’ here. Do we mean something fallen into decay,something gone irredeemably wrong – a city crumbling with weeds growing through, a civilisation at last gasp, a marriage corrupted beyond all speech or embrace, a life derailed into an empty siding – or do we mean an exultation in those indulgences of the flesh which exist solely to be indulged? For the former, we have little to say. Merely the endless whining of the old, the past it, the Golden-Agers who have existed since the Golden Age itself: grim grey withershins in need of Viagra for the soul, keening endlessly for imaginary days when everything was better. But for the latter (the decadence of chaises-longues in darkened rooms, virgins to despoil, the luxury of musk and ambergris drifting on the air, everything somehow slippery, or to be made slippery, actions unconfined by consequence or consent) then music is the most decadent art of all, and the most fleshly since it stirs that most fleshly of all our organs, the brain itself.

  Music is about nothing. It has no redeeming connection with reality. When composers try to describe things – the plight of the Soviet people, storms followed by tweety-bird sunshine, Fingal’s fucking Cave – it’s just embarrassing. But when music dissociates from the hard physical edges of reality and becomes itself, then unpredictable decadences infect even the most pedestrian of brains. See that middle-manager, waving his hand surreptitiously to the Brahms? His life is orderly, up-to-date, everything accounted for, but as the last movement slides into its Dionysian 6/8 he is somewhere else, out of control, exultant, breathing sulphur, riding something, something that bucks and sweats, something he’s holding down … for as long as it lasts, he is ecstatic, and there is nothing more decadent than ecstasy. In ecstasy, we are out of it and if the opposite of decadence is the smack of firm government (well of course it is) then ecstasy is the Enemy of the State: never mind organic peroxides in Snapple bottles, we should be banning music on aeroplanes, even in peoples’ heads. iPods? We don’ need no steenkin iPods. I once went out with a woman who could come on demand, contact-free. It was like Deep Throat except, in her case, it was in her head. Music can live there, too, and when you run the end of Götterdämmerung in your own personal head neither scanners nor goons, not Tony Blair or George Bush or Osama bin Laden, not any of the hordes of jobsworths and peckerheads who are after your vote, your compliance, your hand-luggage or your mind can get anywhere near you. You’re going down with the gods in an incandescent apocalypse, riding into the fire having humped Brünnhilde (all that pan-Germanic breast and striding thigh, helmet knocked aside and hair streaming) and possibly her horse Gräne into the bargain, tastes being what they are and the music world being what it is.

  Never mind the dumb flat-eyed little twazzock plugged into his earbuds. We don’t care about him; the stuff he’s been sold is pre-marketed as decadence – ‘listen to this drivel and annoy your parents’ – and is no mo
re the real thing than Ainsley Harriott powdered chowder is food. No; look over there at the little attorney with her pretty hair, listening to Messiaen, coiling in her chair as she is had by the Joie du Sang des Etoiles. Why is she breathing like that? Why are her lips parted like that? You can’t do that to her. Nobody can. But music can do it; does it every day. And does it unpredictably. God knows what Sebastian Bach had in mind when he set his Et in unum Spiritum Sanctum for two twining sopranos but since he married one – Anna Magdalena – and got into trouble for having other ones Up In The Organ Loft, it’s fair to say he knew as much about their bodies and what they could do with them as he did about their voices or indeed the sinuous coilings of purest intellect which summon a Holy Ghost of a polymorphous perversity that, fully apprehended, would send a bishop running to the brothel in search of a simulacrum.

  No; neither purity nor holiness is a defence against the absolute vital necessity to have Emma Kirkby naked at an open window overlooking the Grand Canal singing the Pulchra es from Monteverdi’s Vespers … despite the sad truth that no man could do, nor any woman accommodate, the things that the music makes one want to do (while simultaneously weeping for the honey-dripping love of the ‘Song of Songs’, which is Solomon’s).

  Violence? We got violence, man. Let a honking politician or a strangulated, slogan-mouthing PRO show their neck anywhere near me in the last movement of Bruckner’s 8th symphony and I will bite it to shreds; here’s music to be conducted not with a baton but a length of freshly-ripped-out spine, and a torn artery, maybe a sinew or two, hanging from the blood-smeared mouth. Mahler’s for running down the street naked, cackling, slashing wildly with a new Feather ‘Artist Club’ Japanese steel straight razor; any Palestrina is soaked in opiates, just as, somewhere behind Nikhil Banerjee, as he plays Raag Manomanjari, there is a cloud of oud smoke, rich as a woman’s musk, and – look! here she comes! a redheaded 6′2″ nonparametric statistician, slicked with agar, and you’ve never seen her before but this is the moment of reuniting, the one in all those dreams from which you wake, your eyes wet with tears (and who remembers at moments like this that the music is in the hands of a chap who looks a bit like a GP, playing an instrument designed by a madman, an instrument which incorporates, as an essential component, a pumpkin?)