(2003) Overtaken (24 page)

‘Bastards
…’ he just about managed to hiss.

From
the
East Lancs
I led him along
the
Queens Drive
ring road
heaving with smoky old Toyotas and dented Nissan vans. He was a game old sod, I
had to give him that: though from time to time he would whine to me over the
walkie-talkie about the pains in his legs, he kept going. From
Queens Drive
in a brief faux rural idyll
we cycled through
Sefton
Park
, passing the aged silent trees, the
huge sandstone mansions and the dead flowers tied by a dirty faded ribbon to a
bough against which a young girl student had been crushed by joyriders five
years before. Out of the park it was a straight eastwards run to Speke and
Liverpool
John
Lennon
Airport
(‘above us only sky’).

A mile
or so before the turning to the airport road we passed an area of factories and
a low-rise warehouse shopping complex. For a while, apart from cars and trucks,
we had been being overtaken by various rattling old buses that looked like they
had been bought from Bombay City Council after they’d judged them unroadworthy.
Red traffic lights forced us to stop at the junction of the access road to the
shopping complex. I had briefly let
Sidney
go ahead as the lights turned to green and a grimy, rattling
single-decker bus came churning alongside; without signalling it slowly began
to turn left across our path into the trading estate, black smoke gouting from
the slats of its ancient diesel engine. I heard Sidney yelling, ‘No, hey no,
hey, hey!’ as the side of the bus began implacably driving him into the kerb,
his bike being drawn inexorably under the wheels: it would have crushed him if
he hadn’t managed to wrench his feet from the toe clips and instead he was
thrown in an arc through the air, to bounce down on to the rock-hard pavement.

The
rear wheels of the bus passed over the bike, popping open the panniers and
contorting its frame into tangled metal, then once round the corner it sped up
in a cloud of black smog. I caught a glimpse of the driver gabbling away on his
mobile phone as the bus disappeared from sight behind the corner of Allied
Carpets.

As soon
as I’d seen what was happening I had braked. Now I jumped my bike up on to the
pavement and rode towards
Sidney
’s unmoving body. Laying my Marin down on the ground and bending
over his sprawled form I heard him groan, ‘Oh, my fooking wrist.’

Uncertain
whether I was relieved or not that he wasn’t dead, I asked, ‘Can you stand?’

He
tried but gave a yelp of pain. ‘No, I think my fookin’ leg’s broken as well.’

For the
third time in my life I dialled the emergency services and was again connected
with the same woman: I wondered if she recognised my voice as once more I
requested that an ambulance be sent.

8

The Christmas shopping
crowds surged this way and that, loaded down with carrier bags of straining
plastic containing things they couldn’t remember buying; I thought they could
have all swapped shopping with each other and it wouldn’t have made any
difference. The Big Issue seller’s dog had a Santa hat on and outside the
Adelphi Hotel on Lime Street there was a man, some sort of Balkan refugee I
guessed, wearing a flashing red nose and tinsel worn like a scarf round his
neck, who stood tending to a battered metal cart from which a little later he
was hoping to sell long sausages in doughy buns to drunk people.

The
aroma of frying onions wafted over me and
Florence
as we climbed out of our chauffeur-driven Mercedes in front of the
hotel. As I stood telling the driver what time to return to pick us up I saw the
refugee look at
Florence
and
Florence
look back at the refugee, both of
them scenting some sort of shared history. The asylum-seeking sausage seller
was wearing a dirty grey sweatshirt with a big logo of
Harvard
University
printed
on it in black.
Florence
,
noticing his shirt, said, ‘Kelvin, I don’t think that man been to
Harvard
University
. Or if he did go der then that university certainly don’t guarantee
the good job it supposed to.’

I said,
‘When I went to art school in
London
for that year our college scarf was a pickled conger eel.’

‘Oh, har
har, it’s the funny man,’ she said.

The penetrating scent of
onions followed us through the revolving door and into the crowded foyer of the
Adelphi, if anything making it smell a bit better than it had done moments
before.

We
eased a path through the drunken mob of revellers and the hotel’s combative
staff until we reached the entrance to the ballroom, inside which the annual
dinner dance of the Merseyside Association of Builders and Developers was being
held.

As we
walked down the steps into the darker noise of the ballroom and picked our way
between the many round tables, a number of fat builders started shouting
remarks at us such as, ‘Ready for inspection over here, Sergeant Major,’ and
‘Officer present! Hands off cocks grab your socks.’ They called these things
not at me, though I was very smart in my Hugo Boss dinner jacket but because of
Florence, looking even more resplendent, wearing as she was the dress uniform
of a major of horse in the regiment of the 14th Caucasian Mountain Lancers: her
sabre in its scabbard shimmying on the hip, black boots shining like molten tar
beneath her knee-length dark blue skirt, the row of medals across her breast
reflecting back light like anti-aircraft beams from the mirrorballs which hung
over the dance floor and her cap pulled low over her eyes giving her a
mysterious military veiled look. Her in that outfit excited me terribly; I felt
like I’d found a whole new different level of sexual desire, as if I’d suddenly
discovered my house had another entire floor I’d not been aware of before.

At the
cost of a thousand pounds I had paid for a whole table for the night which
seated eight people and entitled them all to dinner, dancing and
self-congratulatory speeches by a succession of fat arses. When booking the
table I’d informed Florence that the dinner dance was formal; almost my sole
reason for doing it was because I really wanted to see her in an evening dress,
a dress I wanted to pay for, a dress to show off her beautiful, taut body, to
make all the other builders in Liverpool jealous of the quality of woman that
was letting me fuck her.

‘What
is formal?’ she asked.

‘Well,
you know, dinner jackets for the gentlemen, ball gowns for the ladies, that
sort of thing.’

‘I’m
not wearing no fucking balls gown, I look like fucking pedigree pig.’

‘You’ll
look lovely.’

‘No …
don’t want.’ She thought for a minute then said, ‘Wait, at these things, do
soldiers wear their dress uniform?’

‘I
guess,’ I replied. ‘I’ve only seen them do it in films but I guess you could.’

‘Then I
wear my old regimental dress uniform.’

‘Your
old regimental uniform?’

‘Yes,
see when I start to show promise as gymnast, back home when I was kid they make
me squad leader in the young pioneers, get use of all the best facilities, then
when I am sixteen I get commission in the army for same reason. They make me
officer: Major of Horse in 14th Caucasian Mountain Lancers, the famous
“Chimps”; that their nickname they got after the Battle of Lunjberg when they
ran out of ammunition and pelted the Russians infantry with animals from the
zoo.’

I’d
already bought
Florence
her
main Christmas present: a thing called a ‘Disability Experience Suit’. This was
a onepiece boiler suit-type garment into the lining of which had been sewn a
series of jointed rods hinged where the wearer’s limbs hinged; at each
connection was a screw and bolt arrangement which could be tightened and
stiffened, thereby giving the person dressed in the suit the experience of
having a range of disabilities connected with rigidness and old age such as
arthritis, rheumatism, osteoporosis and so on; at the screw’s tightest setting,
apparently, the salesman at Bell and Banyon had told me it was just like having
motor neurone disease. There were in addition metal bands at the neck, wrists
and ankles which could be tightened to cut off the blood supply to those limbs
in order to feign multiple sclerosis. Also in this top-of-the-range model there
were a number of pouches in the arms, legs and body into which could be slipped
special bags filled with birdseed and lead shot to replicate what it was like
for the wearer to be morbidly obese. I’d had the suit gift-wrapped and it was
now waiting in my wardrobe like a beribboned and headless circus strongman. As
I said, I had looked on the dinner dance as the opportunity to show off
Florence as well as a rare night away from Sidney Maxton-Brown. After the
ambulance had taken him away from the site of the accident, I called my dad to
come and pick up the wreck of Sidney’s bike. He threw the tangled metal and
wire into the back of his Volvo estate and though there was room in the
passenger seat I cycled the mile and a half to his house. I made myself some
cheese on toast in my. father’s spartan kitchen, then we watched a bit of horse
racing on the TV, sitting side by side in his armchairs. After a while as the
horses galloped round my dad asked, ‘Son, anyone you fancy for the National
next year?’

I
replied, ‘Well, they say Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Cherry Orchard,
should be the one to watch.’ We did this joke every time we watched horse
racing together so that we hardly noticed we were doing it. Nevertheless I had
always taken care to update my references over the years. I seemed to remember
when we started doing it, it had been Richard Eyre’s production of The
Government Inspector that I’d used.

‘So
he’s a mate of yours is he, that —
Sidney
bloke?’ my father asked.

‘Yeah,
he’s a mate … we go cycling together and that.’

‘Funny-looking
fella,’ said my dad, ‘knows an awful lot of swear words.’

‘Well,
he was in pain.’

‘There’s
still no call for that kind of language.’

I left
my bike in his shed and took a taxi the whole fourteen miles home. It was only
after I paid the taxi driver off-that I recalled he hadn’t told me a terrible
story: in fact now that I thought of it, no stranger had confided in me for
weeks; the flood of awful reminiscences seemed to have stopped.

Sidney
had no broken legs, simply a fractured wrist and torn ligaments in both knees.
He spent a night in the
Royal
Liverpool
Hospital
, then his wife had come and driven him back to the farm. I let him
stew for a few days before going to visit at his log house.

He lay
propped up in bed, eyes staring out of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows at
the bare trees and frozen ground along the edges of his land.

‘How
are you, mate?’ I asked. ‘Barbara says you’re a bit low.’

‘I do
feel a bit low,’ he replied, still not looking at me. ‘I been crying a lot.’

‘That’s
not like you,’ I said, secretly thrilled.

‘No,
well, I been thinking about things…’Sidney paused. ‘Kelvin, do you think
you’re a nice bloke?’

‘Well,
yeah, I guess so,’ I replied.

Sidney
went on, ‘They say “even Hitler thought he was a nice bloke” but I
wonder sometimes about me … these days, if I’m worth knowing. I used to think
I was a great bloke, now I dunno so much. Honest, Kelvin, sometimes I think
it’s only having a mate like you keeps me sane.’

Along
with Florence I’d decided I wanted to invite Paula and Adam to the dinner dance
at the Adelphi as a way to celebrate the young man’s release from Muddy Farm;
the other four guests for the night were my two best employees and their wives,
the men crammed into cheap dinner jackets, the women dressed in ball gowns that
made them look like baroque Belgian cathedrals. My employees had been there
since the doors opened; Paula and Adam arrived a little while after me and
Florence.

Rapidly
we were served the sort of Christmas dinner you might get in a reasonably
well-run open prison. As Adam sipped at a mineral water and chatted to my site
manager’s wife about her whippets, Paula and I talked, for the first time
sober, about the old days.

I said
as my desiccated dinner was thrown down in front of me with a thump, ‘Can you
remember all the terrible pretentious restaurants we used to go to?’

‘Not
all of them,’ she replied, ‘who could? I do recollect the big Cajun cooking
explosion of ‘92, remember that? We all went to a restaurant in Clitheroe
called Mississippi Burning, and Colin said if he wanted his catfish blackened
he’d move to a polluted part of the Ukraine, thank you very much.’

On my
other side
Florence
said, ‘You
know when I first came to
England
and I see a sign saying “Pub Grub” I think that the pub have some
kind of weevil that they were really proud of.’