‘I annotated library books in pen’

I’m always a bit wary when I read a tribute that suggests “so-and-so would have loved that”; too often it can simplify a person, reduce them to a cartoon sketch, a dozen lines on a sheet of A4. Thinking about Jackie Hagan, I’d rather go the other way and recall something she hated.

I once tagged along as she and a group of friends went to see a play at an arts centre in Hulme. It may well have been the worthiest play put on anywhere in Greater Manchester that year; didactic, with one-dimensional characters and clunky dialogue. As we walked out afterwards, just about out of earshot of the performers, Jackie spoke. “That was shit,” she said, furious at how the working class had been romanticised by the sort of people Jarvis Cocker warned you not to become.

If there’s one thing I learned from her as a writer, it’s to observe the world around you as it really is, rather than as you’d like it to be.

I hadn’t seen Jackie for years, but I knew her illness had been getting worse. On Friday, her long-term partner posted on Facebook to announce that she’d died. She was only 43. In the hours since, hundreds have paid their own tributes, shared memories, posted old photos. It feels like a whole community gathering to help each other put together a giant jigsaw, except that it doesn’t matter if the pieces don’t quite fit. And it’s probably better if they don’t.

This is my bit of the jigsaw. If it hadn’t been for Jackie, I probably wouldn’t have become a blogger, or tried writing comedy, or helped edit a couple of creative writing anthologies, or stood up at an open mic night and performed poetry. To be honest, I shouldn’t have been encouraged to do the open mic stuff, but we all make mistakes.

I met Jackie in 2005, at a performance night held in an upstairs room at Trof, a café in Fallowfield. I was just there to watch; I would never have considered taking the mic at that stage. I think she was performing, a bundle of energy from Skelmersdale who could be angry with a smile; I’m pretty sure I bought a self-produced collection of her writing, a few photocopied sheets stapled together as a booklet. In it was a picture of her as a child, wearing a giant paper helmet in the style of The Man With The Stick, Bob Mortimer’s character from Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out. This was someone with a sense of humour I could get on with, I thought.

Maybe then, maybe shortly after then, she started to call me Chocolate Cake Mike, as I had a habit of getting myself a slab of cake from the bar downstairs whenever I turned up at Trof, and she encouraged me to submit some writing to Citizen 32, a magazine she was guest editing. The theme for that issue was Sexuality.

I’ve still got a copy of the magazine at home. On the cover is a very detailed, highly sexualised illustration of a dominatrix and a submissive doing housework; inside are pages and pages of poetry exploring all different types of desire, some subtly, most graphically. Amid all of this, tucked away at the back, is my contribution: A short story in which the narrator tries to pluck up the courage to post a Valentine’s card.

That story, in that magazine, is a perfect representation of what I was in the mid-2000s; awkward, diffident, dimly aware that others were having fun, no idea how to get involved, no idea what I’d do if anyone asked me to. To a degree, that’s still me now, albeit with less self-consciousness these days.

At nearly 20 years’ distance, I’m astonished my story was allowed anywhere near the Sexuality issue of Citizen 32. Jackie, I think, was being kind. And it made a huge difference to me that she was, because it was the first piece of creative writing I’d ever had published, or been paid for. I’d had some very shaky experiences on a creative writing module as an undergraduate at Lancaster University a few years earlier, which had wrecked my confidence – as a person, as well as a writer – and was only just starting to feel my way back into doing it as a hobby. Jackie gave me belief that I was OK. And when, a few months later, the Manchester Evening News asked me to go to Germany to write a blog for the 2006 World Cup, that gave me the confidence to try to be off the wall with it. So what if my colleagues thought it was shit? Just get out there and give it a go.

Years later, I asked Jackie to perform for nothing at an event to raise money to publish an anthology I was helping to edit. She was well-known by then, and had no need to say yes. But she did. And when she had to pull out because of what turned out to be the start of her long illness, she found another performer for us, who also agreed to work for nothing, and who stormed it.

Jackie had APS, an immune system disorder that causes an increased risk of blood clots, and a rare chronic disease called systemic sclerosis. She had to have her right leg amputated. She would create characters by drawing faces and putting tiny wigs on her stump. She decorated her false leg with bright colours and glitter. She went on tour with a show called Some People Have Too Many Legs. She had to have her left leg amputated. She learned to walk again.

In 2020, she wrote and performed one of six shorts for BBC Four called Crip Tales, dramatic monologues about the experiences of people with disabilities. Unlike the dreadful play we’d seen in the Hulme arts centre, Crip Tales wasn’t worthy; its episodes were funny, edgy, weird, sad. Jackie played a character trying to find romance as an amputee. “People love symmetry,” her character says. “People freak out if something’s a bit wrong. If I had one leg, I wouldn’t be symmetrical. I’d be unshaggable.”

I felt so proud to know her.

But these are only a few pieces of a jigsaw.

I’m always a bit wary when I read a tribute that sanctifies a person. Nobody is a saint.

Jackie knew that, and acknowledged it in her writing. On the table in front of me as I write this is my copy of Shut Your Eyes And Put Out Your Hand, a thick booklet of poems she brought out in 2006, with the sub-heading: ‘The story of a 20-something bisexual head-the-ball.’ Glossy cover (partially represented at the top of this blog post), good quality paper, high quality writing. Inside is a poem titled I Managed To Annoy You In Ten New Ways (On Moving In With A Lover). It’s written with awareness that some of the behaviours listed will annoy some of its audience too – and it plays with the knowledge that different ones will grate with different people. It doesn’t appeal for understanding, or attempt to set out mitigation. Most importantly, it’s funny, it’s sharply observed, and it rings true.

“I annotated library books in pen,” is number two. “I thought Morrissey was his first name,” is number five. “I put cups of tea on the arm of the chair and sometimes they fell off,” is number seven.

“I smiled when I left you,” is number ten.

I’m glad I knew her. I was also a bit scared of her. That was no bad thing. She was awesome.