T.I.E

We always walked home this way. Through The Industrial Estate - T.I.E. It was not one of your ordinary, corrugated, breeze block villages but an old style TIE - one with stinking, billowing chimneys that seemed to reach into the heavens as far as you could see, the smoke spewing orange, red and yellow in the early hours of the morning against a clear, pitch-black sky. It was a place filled with cobbled, broken pavement and rounded, crumbling bricks that looked like they shouldn't fit together anymore. Almost like they had been forced into a picture by a determined puzzle-doer who had rammed the pieces in any old how. It was still alive, alive and whirring. The low drone of activity a constant accompaniment to the long trudge through it's dark alleys. There were lights on here and there, intermittently lighting our perilous path home. Each building was half derelict, half functioning - as if someone had switched everything off and moved into the next room as another part had disintegrated and ceased to tick the boxes on the health and safety check list.

It didn't matter how many times we walked through it, we never went the same way twice - not by choice - it just happened that way. Often we would break our drunken, sniggering march and run off in different directions, shouting, screaming and jumping through broken doorways and over rubble piles. The only point that remained the same on our journey was the bridge that marked the entrance to this neverland... we would trot over it, *trip trap trip trap*... nervously eyeing the thick, dark water swirling underneath. Blue-painted iron would yawn and swoop it's arc overhead, but we didn't look up until we got to the other side.

We would be made to look up eventually of course. Dickhead would always climb over the top of the frame. We didn't really know who he was, just that he always seemed to follow us home. He would stop at the top and wiggle his arse to symbolise his victory at reaching the summit of his weekly conquest. We watched him every week, never tiring of waiting for his potential demise.

Many's the time I had walked through TIE on my own. On Fridays usually. Fridays were *priviledged* nights. We would all walk from our various corners of the city and converge on the club. Brandishing our shiny, black VIP cards, we'd get in for a quid and proceed to get shitfaced on half pints of cheap whiskey and coke. Saturdays were different - they were *anybody* night - which usually meant students and the odd townie who had wandered dangerously away from the zone. The door price tripled, space was short and we bought 5 drinks at a time because we couldn't be arsed to queue at the bar. Those were the nights when we had our corner - *Goth's corner* (it's still there now) - with a good half a metre of personal space surrounding it.

Anyway, Dickhead never fell off the bridge, a few others fell into the water and didn't fair so well, but I was never around to see it (must've happened on the few saturdays we copped out and got a taxi home)

It's Friday and we're crawling through TIE's alleys again. I've already lost my dress in a *who can walk in a straight line on top of the petrol station wall* competition. It was latex and I'd fallen off the aforementioned wall half way across, snagging the hem. That's the thing when you're dressed in two pieces of rubber that are glued together crudely at the sides - one wrong move and you're fucked! I can only describe the moment my dress left my body, with the speed of a deflating, untied balloon, as a right *Carry On!*  Cackles of laughter and wolf whistles ensued from my good friends, with the odd "OOOOoooh Saucy!" thrown in for good measure. I stood up boldly, dressed only in my underwear and a pair of pointed, heeled, buckled boots. The boots were the sort that had every type of fastening known to man on them - eyelets, zips, hooks, press-studs, laces & buckles - I regularly slept in them after a good night out as my drunken mind could not coordinate my body sufficiently enough to be able to take them off before I passed out on my bed. After muttering such things as "Bugger", "fuck" and "bollocks" a few times, I proceeded to wrestle Dean's shirt from his back. Like a true gentlemen he surrendered his Army & Navy Stores standard issue and I threw it on quickly, wrapping it around myself and folding my arms in way that was partly a defensive gesture and partly a "fuck me it's parky!" move. I held my head high and stomped (*cough* staggered) off, further into TIE. I can still see myself indignantly disappearing into the mists at 3am.

TIE didn't scare us, it should have done, being the creepiest place to be at stupid o clock, but that didn't matter to us. It seemed to protect us and guide us. It appeared to shift and change to accommodate our needs. Eventually we'd emerge through the other side on to the main road and the cold would hit us harshly, from out of nowhere. We would pack ourselves into our favourite take away for chip butties. Run by elderly women and cheaper than anywhere in the world, it was perfect. We could satiate our alcohol induced hunger and warm through before we started the rest of our journey home. Many is the time I would cover the counter in ketchup, being unable to focus on my buttie and missing it completely. The women would just look over and *Tsk* with sly smiles and one of them would amble over to clean it up.

I'm sitting on a wall looking at that takeaway right now. It's not *there* anymore - just an old, faded shop sign and a few pieces of hardboard covering the windows remain - but I can see it as it was.

TIE sits quietly behind me, still breathing, reminding me of the last time I felt invincible and how long ago that time was.



Copyright Charlotte Sometimes aka SRWB 2010