Claire Massey (photograph: Jonathan Bean)

Biography: Claire Massey’s short stories have been published in The Best British Short Stories 2011, Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds, Flax, Patricide, A cappella Zoo and elsewhere. Two of her stories, ‘Marionettes’ and ‘Into the Penny Arcade’, were recently published as chapbooks by Nightjar Press. An editor at Litfest, she also co-edits online short story magazine Paraxis and keeps a blog,  Gathering Scraps. She lives in Lancashire with her two young sons.

Introduction: The LWH theme for May is Place.  Cities found on a Wednesday afternoon in Preston is the third piece of work to be commissioned by the Pretend Boss. 

Claire is a wonderful writer (and she has earned a bucket of gold stars for writing about Preston).   I once picked up and sat on one of Claire’s stories.  We were both reading at the Lancaster live lit night Back&Beyond.  I’d already read my story and Claire only discovered her work was missing when she was about to go on.

Look.  It was a genuine mistake.

Cities found on a Wednesday afternoon in Preston by Claire Massey

i.

She is exhaling spores of the city. In her breath are all the places she wants to take him. As she walks, she feels the tug of him at the side of her. A future ghost. She’ll take his hand and say – that van over there sells parched peas, polystyrene cups full of hot meaty-tasting sludge. Or she’ll say – have you ever seen the concrete waves of the bus station? It’s monstrous but beautiful. Or she’ll say – let’s sit in the park awhile before you have to get the train. And he’ll smile, happy to be in this place that is hers, for it to become somewhere that is theirs.

Where the spores land they grow. These newborn cities sprawl with the moss across red brick walls. Sometimes they germinate before landing. Tiny airborne cities, swept amongst traffic and the crush of feet.

ii.

A woman sits underneath the railway bridge, beside the river. She’s tucked her handbag into a cleft in the bank and hung her scarf from the bare branches overhead, where it struggles with the wind. The peaty water churns by, carrying tiny pieces of sunlight. This is a place where people come to hide, under the bridge, under the noise of the trains that cut though the clouds above. The great stone archways are streaked with lichen and petrified bird-shit.

On the silty beach, she is surrounded by debris: discarded things, bottles and cans, bits of brick and broken memories people meant to be washed away. With these reclaimed materials she builds row after row of miniature houses on plastic bags. She carves out windows and doors, binds spaces together with mud and stick roads, glass bridges and clouds of her breath. She tethers them one to the other before letting them go, a string of cities just beneath the surface of the water.

iii.

The market is a monument to rust. Victorian cast-iron pillars and struts hold the roof high over rows of empty trestle tables. A solitary bookstall stands in the centre, a lighthouse to draw her in. She fingers the paperbacks in plastic crates and then picks up a big, old hardback with an unmarked cover from a cardboard box on floor.

Inside she finds maps, each one drawn in a different style. She sees tributaries, a leaf skeleton, the wrinkles and age spots on her grandma’s hands, but she also sees the city. There are no street names. There are no keys. There are initials where the page numbers should be. As she flicks through, she realises the maps are the city as fingerprints. Each one slightly different, giving the routes someone takes, the places they hold on to. The stallholder coughs and starts packing up around her, but she is lost in the book trying to find the map that is hers.

iv.

She likes jigsaws, but the city is beginning to trouble her. She puts a shop down on Fishergate and when she looks again it’s disappeared. And where one shop used to replace another, now there are too many gaps. And some of the pieces must have been smudged by rain because the names are running into each other: Top Times, Earlystone’s, Lushtucky. Then there are all the pieces that don’t fit anymore – misshapen mills and smokeless chimneys. And all the pieces she’s lost.

At least on her bench on the island of trees she can sit in peace and try to put things where they should be. She just has to remember not to look beyond the branches to where the buildings of the square shift and change.

v.

After rain, the strata of the city are disturbed. Cotton dust, the shine of gaslights, soot and gold thread get caught in the treads of people’s shoes. The girl with the camera walks along pavements slick with reflections. She isn’t photographing buildings or people, but the imprints people made on the street the night before: names tied together with yellow spray paint, the remains of a kebab that could have been partially digested. She stops to take a picture of broken glass scattered outside a pub, a constellation shining in the late afternoon light. When she looks at the photograph later, she sees each fragment is a window and there are faces looking through each other behind every pane of glass.