Welcome readers to the first part of the serialised book THE MANCHESTER TALES, a complete book of stories linked in time and space but, I plan, to be readable as separate tales. I have planned out most of the book and written a great portion of it. Those damn characters though: they seem to want to take the stories where they will.
It’s reserved for paid subscribers, but everyone will get a preview. Paid subscribers will also get behind the scenes notes and the opportunity to chat on site.
I hope you like it. This is a big thing for me.
The Storyteller of Sale Moor
Chapter 1 of The Manchester Tales
In which we meet our tour guide and impresario, Gary Fent. Gary has seen a thing or two and lives to share it all with a wider public. Our dramatis personae widens a little: some we will meet again, some we will forget. Let me begin in the middle…
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It’s called Greater Manchester for a reason - it’s better than any other British city or more correctly, conurbation.
If you search online for stories of Manchester you will find 20 Stories. Not an anthology of juicy anecdotes of this fair city, but a swanky restaurant high above Deansgate in Beetham Tower. From one of its windows, you could see 1,000 stories going on under your feet, but you would never get inside any of them, or Manchester away from the swank and the prattle. Take a vertiginous descent in one of the lifts, then a back street and you can touch Manchester: hear her, smell her. Walk half a block north and you’ll find the matt-black windowless door to Tempus Fugit, a restaurant of sorts, but mainly a meeting point where different walks of life cross paths.
Tempus has pretensions, don’t misunderstand me, but the owners, Marcus and husband Gio, never got the high value clientele they craved from the Hilton or Hotel Gotham etc. On this damp Thursday evening, I had been called to meet a young lady who I hoped had a story for me. Me? I’m Gary Fent, a jobbing journalist at the Chronicle. I write my column Manc About Town to tease and tittilate my readers so they don’t have to get their shoes dirty schlepping round to Marcus’s place and risking his lasagne.
I’m unfashionable, I know. The phrase “young lady” is passé but I like to project the image of being an old hack even though I’m only 48. I am wearing a creased beige raincoat and a slightly greasy Homburg hat though – I wouldn’t like my readers to be disappointed. Marcus nodded me over to a table in the darkened rear, where Elena Prishtina was waiting, puzzling over the menu. She was maybe 22, blonde, slightly built and she had made her face up lightly but skilfully so there wasn’t any trace of the few acne scars she had. She wore an incongruous business suit and a filigree silver bracelet that she might have owned since she was 12. Elena looked straight into my eyes and I saw that she was shit-scared. That made me scared too.
Marcus came over with two drinks. “On the house.” he said, “I know this girl Gary, she’s above board, straight-up.”
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