(2003) Overtaken (18 page)

Though
the cirKuss performers generally had nothing to do with the .ordinary
inhabitants of the towns they visited, backstage there would sometimes be a
local, generally a dusty-looking middle-aged man. One time in
Bolton
I asked one of them, ‘What do you
do?’

‘I own
a psychic shop,’ he replied.

In
Stockport
I asked a similar-looking guy the
same question and he said, ‘I own a psychic shop.’

The
cirKuss’s day off was a Monday so after the show on Sunday night Florence would
drive over to my place in her truck and we could play house till Tuesday
afternoon with her in the role of the suburban English girlfriend. First thing
on a Monday morning she would shake me awake, coerce me up and dragoon me into
a forced march to the Safeway Superstore even if we didn’t need any groceries.
Ideally for her we would have gone there in some sort of small hatchback but I
still wouldn’t drive and her truck was too big for our tiny town centre,
knocking over road signs and flattening parking meters the one time we tried
it.

In the
aisles of the supermarket she would make up stuff about our imaginary suburban
life together. ‘Oh, I think these eggs will be ideal for the omelettes I will
make when your boss and his black mistress come for dinner,’ she would say in a
loud voice, or ‘I need to buy home pregnancy kit for our daughter Flinka, where
would I find that?’ After shopping we would have the all-day breakfast in the
Cafe Fresco that was attached to Safeway’s.

One day
when we were in there I said to
Florence
, ‘I’ve been thinking I might throw a dinner party for a couple of
friends of mine.’

‘Yes of
course,’ she said in her loud voice. ‘We will ask the Stampsons, Rabbi Kroll
and his wife and maybe Captain Archer and some of the other female pilots from
the airbase.’

‘No,’ I
said, ‘these people are actually really real; it’s a guy called Sidney
Maxton-Brown and his wife.’

‘I
suppose that would work too,’ she answered.

The
date was set for the next Monday night. When she thought about it
Florence
stated that she was very excited
at the idea of this domestic activity, hosting a suburban dinner party, except
she said she didn’t want to do any shopping or cooking. I did all that.

A few minutes before
Sidney and his wife arrived my home phone had rung. ‘Hello?’ I said. There was
a hissing silence on the other end. ‘Hello?’ I asked again.

A
heavily accented voice croaked, ‘Stay away from her … you really stay away
from her …’

‘Valery?’
I enquired, but the other end of the line had already gone dead.

Oh
fucking great, I thought. A fucking big strong clown who’s jealous of me and
Florence
is now bugging me on the phone,
but putting the handset down I actually felt a bit pleased that Valery was so
annoyed about us that he was moved to make threatening phone calls. It was a
similar guilty little thrill to the one I experienced when men ogled
Florence
in bars and at the supermarket.

Before
the accident, if I got bored during the day, sometimes I’d drive to the college
where Siggi worked and slip into one of the media studies lectures she gave.
They weren’t hard to follow or anything since they seemed to consist mainly of
watching ancient films and old telly programmes from the 1960s then talking crap
about them. Back then, forty years ago, there used to be this thing called a
Wednesday Play that they made everybody in the country watch because there was
nothing else on the TV. A great number of these plays they transmitted
appeared, from the ones we saw in the lectures, to be set at dinner parties,
where these over-excited couples, who seemed to always work in something called
‘publishing’, would get drunk and bicker with each other and say terrible
things and hold terrible secrets and throw stuff about and then events would
end anticlimactically. My dinner with
Sidney
was a bit like that. I wondered if it made any difference in the
old days, the telly being all plays about bickering publishers and discussion
programmes with bishops, compared with the terrible fake reality shite we watch
now. I don’t suppose it did. I mean look at them places like where
Florence
comes from: the only thing they
had on their TV was the ballet and folk singing yet they were still at each
others’ throats the first chance they got.

The
Maxton-Browns arrived in a taxi right on 7.30, the exact time when they had
been invited. Sidney was wearing black trousers with pockets high up on the
legs stuffed with junk, overflowing with grimy handkerchiefs and big bunches of
keys so that they increased the width of his already wide hips; as a top he
wore a clinging green nylon roll-necked jumper that rippled over his corpulent
body so that it not only emphasised his prominent man breasts but was so clingy
that it made him appear as if he had man breasts on his back as well.

Sidney
had brought a large plastic torch as a gift. Thrusting it at me he
said, ‘I don’t know nothing about wine so I brung this … the batteries are
inside. I knew you had to bring summat but I ain’t never been to a dinner party
before.’

‘Well,
that’s very kind of you.’

‘You
know we don’t actually have any friends whose houses we’d visit like, well we
didn’t before you come along … Barbara and me don’t, you know, really mix
with anybody outside the family so … My dad always says a friend is just a
stranger who hasn’t done you over yet. I bet you have loads of friends don’t
you, Kelvin? You seem the type, popular, well off.’

‘Oh,,
friends, yes, lots of friends,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got space for a few new ones
at the moment.’

Ushering
them into the living room they sat perched on the edge of my Atalanta couch.
‘Can I get you some drinks?’ I enquired.

‘What
do you recommend?’ asked Barbara like I was a wine waiter at a Brewers Fayre
Restaurant.

‘They
say a white wine is always nice,’ I replied.

‘That
would be lovely then, thank you,’ she said primly. ‘The same for me, thank
you,’ said
Sidney
.

As I
brought the drinks in I said, ‘So,
Sidney
, you say you don’t know anybody but family. I assume Barbara isn’t
family?’ But then I thought maybe she was.

‘Oh
no,’ said
Sidney
, smiling.
‘It’s a romantic story how we met. You remember those two lads, Venables and
the other one who killed that Jamie Bulger kiddie? Well, one day I was down at
the court when they was being tried, shouting and throwing eggs at the van they
was in as they went into the court, you know, and Barbara happened to be next
to me with a banner she’d made and we got chatting about how we hated people
who hurt little kiddies and such, and one thing led to another …’

‘That
is romantic,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think, though, that Venables and the other one
were themselves just k—’

At that
opportune moment
Florence
appeared wearing a short, low-cut, black dress. With one hand she was juggling
three red peppers from the kitchen while the other held a tennis racquet with
no strings that she’d found in the garage. Without stopping juggling she passed
the racquet over her head and wriggled through it; as it travelled over her
chest it nearly pulled one breast out of her dress.

Finally
she stepped out of the racquet, caught all three peppers and gave an elaborate
bow. Everybody clapped.

‘I
really like juggling, it’s my favourite thing,’ said
Florence
, smiling happily.

‘Why
can’t you juggle?’
Sidney
said
with some asperity to his wife. Then he said to me, easily loud enough for
Barbara to hear, ‘Fooking hell, she’s a looker your girlfriend. Fooking hell
she is.’

I was
the one who did the cooking. As we ate I said to the two Maxton-Browns, ‘See,
Barbara, the meal you cooked me was great, all different stuff sort of fighting
with each other, but you know there’s a lot to be said for local produce and
for restraint in cooking. What I’ve done is I’ve done us a vegetable soup made
with produce bought from pensioners’ allotments, no chemicals, see? Lancashire
free-range organic pork from a farming cooperative near Burscough and apple pie
from local apples, with Lancashire Tasty cheese under the crust, which I’m sure
you know, Barbara, is a local recipe, topped off with ice cream from the farm
shop.’

‘Do you
hear that, Barbara?’ said Sidney Maxton-Brown. ‘I want nothin’ but organic
local thingummy from now on. Then you might look a bit more like
Florence
.’

We sat
down to eat. One of the things about Florence, she hated eating with cutlery,
she said it was too heavy; the first time I’d cooked for her I’d put out my
prized David Mellor cutlery, and she’d groaned when she saw it, then wearily
lifted a fork as if it were made of atomically compacted vanadium. After a few
minutes she’d thrown it down on to the table shouting, ‘Ach, I can’t eat with
this, it’s too fucking heavy!’ So now while the rest of us ate with stylish
pewter designer knives and forks, she consumed her entire meal from beginning
to end with a tiny silver salt spoon. I thought it was one of the cutest things
I’d ever seen but at one point Mrs Maxton-Brown nodded in
Florence
’s direction and whispered
something to her husband.

‘I
don’t know,’ he said.

She
added another few words.

‘No,’
he hissed, ‘I don’t think she’s got weak wrists from all her juggling.’

‘Wow,
Kelvin,’ said
Sidney
, starting
on his second bottle of my Gewurtztraminer, ‘that meal was really first rate.
We’re going to eat like that from now on definitely; you’re not left with that
chemical taste that you get in your mouth when you eat one of Barbara’s meals.’

Then
Sidney
told us why he didn’t like the
Freemasons for thirty minutes, because apparently they had everything fixed for
themselves and there was this bloke he’d known whose brother had invented a
formula for turning water into petrol but the Freemasons had murdered him and
destroyed the formula. Then he asked
Florence
if she wore pants and if she’d like to do some acrobatics for him,
which was the point when
Sidney
’s
wife quietly began crying but he hardly noticed.

As he
was standing on the step about to get into the waiting taxi with Barbara
already inside, arms crossed over her chest, a sour expression on her face,
Sidney suddenly said, ‘Kelvin, can I have a quick word?’

‘Sure,’
I replied. ‘What is it?’

‘Something
weird’s been happening.’

‘Oh
yeah?’

‘One of
the nephews who’s been driving for me told me, so I went with him to look for
myself.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You
know I told you we were going to fly tip some of your rubble?’

‘I
remember.’

‘Well,
the nephews dumped the first load like we agreed …’ I noted his attempt to
implicate me in his dishonesty but didn’t interrupt.

‘…
but when they got back the next day with the second load, it was gone.’

‘What
was gone?’

‘The
rubble, your, our rubble. Somebody’s came in the night and took it away.’

‘What,
like the authorities?’

‘No,
not the fookin’ authorities, they never do nowt; no, I reckon someone’s stolen
it.’

‘That’s
mad, who’d want to steal rubble?’ I said.

‘I
don’t know! I don’t know!’ he squawked, suddenly agitated.

I said,
‘Do you think somebody was so morally offended by the mess you made that they
hired a truck and took it away themselves?’

With
difficulty
Sidney
composed
himself, though still with a worried expression he went on, ‘I maybe just think
some bastard has found a way to make money out of flytipped rubble and I can’t
figure out how. I tell you it’s freaking me out. I don’t mind if I know what’s
happening, I’ll take on any foocker, it’s the mystery I can’t stand.’

‘So
what are you going to do?’

‘I’m
not going to fly tip no more, I’ll tell you that. I’ll pay the landfill fees
before I let some other fucker at my rubble. Do you think there’s a
rubble-powered car? No, that’s ridiculous.’

‘
Sidney
,’ I said, ‘I was wondering if some
time in the future you wanted to come and see a play with me.’

‘A
play?’

‘Yeah,
you know I was saying about making money, how it’s easy for me. Well, I give it
away too, I sponsor all sorts of arts events.’

Momentarily
distracted from the mystery of the vanishing rubble by an even stranger thing,
he asked, ‘What do you want to do that for?’

‘I
think it makes the world a better place.’