The absence of Robinson

We sat embarrassed after Robinson had gone. The earnest conversation killed the evening like a slaughterman's bolt and we left. In the rain we found that we were walking in the same direction. Neither of us had the energy to say an excuse and, like prisoners around a yard, we walked looking ahead and not at each other.

One or the other of us would mention him. Robinson in West Street bars. Robinson reading in the Peace Gardens. Robinson sitting under the mirror that now reflects nothing.

We thought we saw Robinson in a car coming off the ring road but he didn't wave, didn't stop. Crossing the Porter Brook, a phone rang, either yours or mine. We looked at it, hoping for Robinson, but the number was withheld. I answered it, or you did, and we listened silently to a recorded message about payment protection insurance. Press 1 to speak to our helpdesk. We hung up.

I saw Robinson again, walking the streets, alone in the dark by the derelict factories and the converted warehouses of the Cultural Industries Quarter. He stopped to light a cigarette by the entrance to a yard under smokeless chimneys and dark windows, mourning the absence of something, memories of a city that used to work.

Hole in the ground

Our future awaits us in the past. Our present doesn't look like the future we were promised. Our past is in the future.

This wonderful hole in the ground is now an old-fashioned road.

Nighttime in the little city

It's nighttime in the little city. A man thinks about the things that she said. A light drizzle hangs in the air. A man wishes he was sleeping in her bed.

Eating a plum in the park

"Is there anything as joyous as eating a plum in the park?" I asked, as the juice dribbled down my chin. The woman didn't respond but I could tell from the look on her face as she ran away from me that she didn't agree, or that she wasn't in the mood to consider the joys of eating a plum in the park, or that she was of the opinion that eating a plum in the park is a joy to be embraced alone on a bench and not talked about, just a silent man and his plum.

I ate my other plum alone on a bench in the park, just a man and his simple joy on a sunny autumn afternoon. The juice dribbled down my chin and I wondered silently if there is anything as joyous as eating a plum in the park.

Riding the paternoster

Nighttime in the little city

It's nighttime in the little city. A single woman cuts pictures of wedding dresses out of a magazine. The leaves fall from the trees. A man goes home to nothing.

Crimewatch

I had run a few clicks on the treadmill and was damp and aching with the vigour of the young man I remain to be. I left my sweaty clothes in a little pile on top of my trainers whilst I used the shower. When I returned, my underpants had gone. Nothing else. Just my underpants.

There was nobody around, so the scoundrel had already escaped with his prize. I didn't see who was hanging about before my shower because I wasn't wearing my glasses. This wretch could have been watching me for weeks, plotting his grand theft, choreographing his movements to minimise his risk. Perhaps it was a gang of them like in Rififi, each with a special skill, working together to grab my precious gruds with the hooked handle of an umbrella and stuff them into a tupperware hidden in the false bottom of a briefcase.

I returned to the scene of the crime a week later, hoping that the depraved rotter would be a man of regular habits. I had written the falsehood "I have a fungus and crabs" on the label of my pants just in case he struck again and, instead of having a shower, I hung around the hairdryers looking as inconspicuous as a large man in a small towel can look whilst peeping round a corner. Sadly, my stakeout was a blowout. The underpant thief remains at large. Don't have nightmares.

The city in the sky

Nighttime in the little city

It's nighttime in the little city. A crying woman walks home shoeless and drunk. Water leaks from a burst pipe. A man realises he is no longer in love.

Robinson at the party

Walking home after midnight, I thought I saw Robinson ahead of me, as dark and worn as the city he inhabits. I passed him on The Moor. He was looking at red-ticketed sale items through the windows of Atkinsons and when he saw me he shouted my name. “I'm going to a party,” he said. “It'll be wild.”

On the way he took me to his house. He needed a grapefruit and bottles of rum and maraschino to make Papa Dobles. I sat on a stool while he changed his shoes and played Johnny Ray though a pair of tiny speakers. We drank shots of whiskey before leaving.

The party was in a proper Sheffield house. It was up a hill, on a terrace built into a hillside, with twenty or so steps up to the front door. Only Robinson and me were not in fancy dress. Robinson put his bottles in the fridge and stole a can of Dr Pepper to drink. He introduced me to four Charlie Chaplins, two named Jake and two named Tom, and went upstairs.

The Jakes and Toms were on coke and acting it so I went to look for Robinson. I walked up some stairs and found myself level with the terrace built up the slope of the garden, a floor up from the back door. Robinson was outside talking to a man who had the lumpy, tense silhouette of a snooker referee.

I went back down and, just as I opened to kitchen door, I saw Robinson jump over a low gate and run into the ginnel under the house. A dog barked. I heard a man mumble of violence and Robinson. Without looking at anyone, I turned and walked through the house, taking a bottle of red wine as if it was my own, and left through the front door.

Robinson was hiding behind a trade bin at the end of a row of shops. He paid for our taxi and gave me a copy of a JG Ballard book through the cab window before the driver drove away.

Two weeks later, walking home after midnight, I thought I saw Robinson ahead of me. I followed him down The Moor but he didn't stop. He walked into the subway under the ringroad and when I got to the corner where I had last seen him, he was gone. The city, as dark and worn as Robinson, filled the space where Robinson had been, and I walked home on my own.

The Jesus bunker

The place to be when Satan hits you like an atom bomb.

All we need is glove

Glove is all we need.

Nighttime in the little city

It's nighttime in the little city. A man has a raspberry pip stuck between his teeth. A drunkard accuses a stranger of stealing his wallet. There are no stars in the sky.

Castle Market

Castle Market sits embarrassed on the edge of the city centre, sliding down towards the commuter hotels on the ring road. It's fascinating - tired and bonkers, hiding it's function well behind the concrete and wired glass of our past's future.

Outside, redundant bridges connect the upper levels to locked gates and ghostly shuttered shops above my head. The entrances, hidden in corners, around corners and god-knows-where, open to stairwells that lead wherever you aren't going. Signs promise goods that no longer exist, sold in sellotaped paper bags.

There may or may not be natural light inside. Above are false frosted celilings and grills; between stalls, prisms of smoked glass and tight netting. The lower levels are staged at half-storeys downwards, a food market first and then a bottom part that made me ask, oh lord why did I bother walking down here? A pigeon with a cankered foot waddles past a cobbler's. An old man coughs. It is noon.

After a £5 wet shave I go up to the Rooftop Cafe, a tight, wide pod on a landing that seems to arrive too soon for the stairs that take me there. Its space age feel reminds me that the space age is over. My breakfast, delicious and cheap, is served by a woman in a tabard. I close my eyes and listen to the radio and know that in the future our Castle Markets will be gone and whatever we see on every other street in every other city will be all we will have and I will sit in a more comfortable chair and remember Castle Market.

The city in the sky

Nighttime in the little city

It's nighttime in the little city. A man regrets eating a fajita. The moon goes behind a cloud. My shirtless neighbour gets up, gets down and gets it together to a Eurythmics song.

The friendly city

I have experienced the dark, friendly underside of the Steel Village. In Sheffield, naked men talk to me in the changing rooms of my gym.

One mastermind asked me how to use the hairdryer. I suggested that the red button next to his finger would be a good place to start the investigation. He pressed the red button and, impressed at my expertise, used the hot gust to dry his disgusting feet. At least that whack-job could construct a full sentence. Another eagle-eyed not-right pointed at my foot and shouted “Primark socks!” as I put on a sock bought in Primark. And it just keeps happening. Yesterday, I had a remarkable exchange with a man who looked like both Ant and Dec.

“Tell me if this is weird.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Yes. It is weird.” We were both nude and it was definitely weird.

“I haven't said anything yet.”

“You've said enough. I'm drying my thighs with a very small towel. It's weird.”

“Not that. Is it weird that I want to fuck my step-sister?”

I gave him an old-fashioned look.

“Er, possibly, but it's somehow still less weird than starting a personal conversation with a naked stranger.” I was now mimicking the “teapot” stance of an exasperated nudist, with one hand in the classic naked-hand-on-hip position, the other gesturing like an Italian cleaning an imaginary window.

He told me his story anyway. After confirming that his step-sister is an adult, that she became his step-sister after they both went through puberty and that they never lived in the same household as children, I gave him my almost-sincere naked blessing to make glorious, animal, consensual whoopee with the daughter of his father's bride. Be sure, I told him, to tell her how you feel just after she gets out of the shower. She'll welcome that conversation as much as I welcomed this one.

Day one

The day was fine until I reached the ring road and it rained. I waited in the underpass for the weather to break. There was a human tooth by my foot.

The ring road cuts the centre away from the rest of the city like a garotte. There are no crossings above ground and in the tunnel the sour and salty smell of piss is as immediate as my perception of the blood on the beige tiles in the fluorescent light.

Past the ring road the city centre is buffered by office blocks that could be occupied or not. There is a large concrete building with no windows and a pathetic retail park with only two shops. Then, The Moor.

Walking up The Moor is like being a man left behind in the vale of tears. The pedestrianised street is typical of tatty post-war British shopping precincts. Its austerity is fitting for the world we are living in. As I step to avoid a sausage roll on the ground, I see a busker dancing with the unrestrained movements of a dog driving a bus. This is the southern gateway into the proud city of Sheffield. It feels like both my past and my future.