(2003) Overtaken (12 page)

I rode
my bike along the tarmac paths that traversed the muddy grass until in a small
square car park bounded by rustic log fencing I glimpsed her. As before she was
leaning on the fence smoking a cigarette. I got off my bike, negotiating it
with great difficulty through a narrow gate — one of its pedals stabbed me in
the leg as I did so — and wheeled it over towards her. I know I could have left
the machine leaning against the other side of the log fence but felt that a man
with a bike was somehow less threatening: like a man with a dog, nobody ever
suspected ill of a man with a dog, unless it was one of those mad, dangerous
dogs of course. Not that she seemed like a girl who was worried by much.
Unmoving, she’d watched me wrestle my bike through the gate; now she said as I
got near her, ‘You have oil on your trousers.’

TV I
asked, already flustered.

‘From
da bike. You have oil on your trousers.’

‘Fuck!’
I said.

‘You
could have left it on de other side.’

‘Yeah,
you’re right.’

I
noticed that her English had improved dramatically since I’d last seen her; now
she spoke with very little trace of an accent.

‘So
where is your fancy car?’ she asked. ‘Did you lose it in a bet?’

‘Oh, so
you remember me then?’ I replied, pleased and blushing in the dark. I hadn’t thought
she would; it was nearly a year after all.

‘Yeah,
you had a car that was made in the place with all the lights and you were a lot
fatter before; it suited you better I think, jolly fat man. You don’t look so
well now, thin, miserable man. What happen, was it the bet, did you lose
everything in the bet as well as your car?’

‘Oh,
ah, no, not a bet … Well, I don’t know if you recall I … ah came to see
your show with a group of friends and, ah, the next time, ah … we were on our
way somewhere, ah, they were, ah … all killed.’

She
took this in without the usual expressions of regret that you got from most
people. Instead she asked, ‘What, by paramilitaries?’

‘No, it
was in a car crash.’

‘Yeah,
that happens too I guess.’

‘Yeah,
it does.’

‘Bummer,’
she said. ‘Yeah, bummer,’ I replied.

We were
silent for a while then she said, ‘Do you wish to join the cirKuss?’

‘No, I
don’t think so. Why?’

‘Well,
you know, a lot of the people here in the cirKuss that they are in the same
situation as you. Either, you know, they have to leave all their friends and
family behind, where they come from, and they never see them again or you know
everybody been killed.’

‘Fuck,
really?’

‘Yeah,
we don’t get many letters from der postman here.’

‘No, I
suppose you wouldn’t.’

‘Den on
de other hand the postman don’t know where we are ‘cos we move around so much,
so maybe it’s not so surprising. Probably post is mostly junk mail anyway and
catalogues from Viking Direct.’

‘Right.’

‘Still
is bad situation,’ she said, ‘having all your friends killed; that, you can
never, never get over, no point in trying. You understand that?’

‘I
think I’m getting there,’ I said.

‘If you
think that you’re getting there … I don’t suppose you are yet,’ she sniffed,
then went on, ‘Many I think it sends crazy. But you know what is best outcome?
Is a little like when you break leg and it is not set properly by drunken doctor.
So it grow back crooked and it always will give you pain but you know you still
able to hop about on it. So, you know, maybe in time you can get new friends
and a new family but they always grow kind of crooked, you know what I mean?
Not normal like before and they always give you pain and what you do, the way
you act is not like before, is kind of crooked too.’

‘Hopping
about.’

‘Sure,
hopping about; before friends killed everything is like one foot in front of
the other, normal, straight. And after is hopping about, sure. But, you know,
you still getting around. That is main thing even if it is in mad fashion.’

‘And
that’s the best outcome? Well, that’s great,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’d rather go
crazy instead.’

She
laughed. ‘You can’t choose to go crazy, it either happen or it don’t.’

There
was another pause. I realised I found it was rather exciting to be talking to
somebody who I didn’t already know everything about. With my tight little gang
there had been no surprises since somewhere in the early nineties and of course
there would be no more. In fact, I thought, remembering the last time we’d met,
I seemed to find out less about this girl the more I talked to her. In soft
voice that I thought sounded caring and sensitive I said, ‘Can I ask? Is that
what happened to you? Do your family … or are they?’

In a
not unfriendly way she replied, ‘Hey, pal, not so fast. You don’t get to learn
what happen to me. Not right now. Maybe at some other time. I’m a person not
some sad story.’

Which
seemed a bit mean since I’d been telling her my sad story. Still, I said,
‘Sure, I’m sorry I asked.’ Again we stood in silence for a while then I
enquired, ‘Can I ask you what your name is?’

She
sighed. ‘You wouldn’t be able to pronounce it. In my language I guess it sound
a little bit like “
Georgina
”.’

‘So
shall I call you
Georgina
then?’

‘No,
don’t call me that!’ she asserted with a sudden burst of ferocity; reflected
for several seconds then said, ‘Call me
Florence
.’

‘
Florence
?’

‘Dat’s
right, call me
Florence
.’

‘Hi,
Florence
,’ I said. ‘My name’s Kelvin.’

She
snorted through her nose when I said this. Smiling myself, I asked, ‘What’s so
funny?’

‘Where
I come from a “Kelvin” is … well, it’s something funny.’

‘What?’
I asked, laughing too. ‘Come on, tell me.’

She
could hardly get it out through her giggling. ‘A “Kelvin”,’ she said, ‘a
“Kelvin” is a telecommunications relay tower for land-based microwave
transmissions.’

‘Oh,
right.’

‘What
do you call them here?’

‘I
don’t know. I think telecommunications relay tower for land-based microwave
transmissions.’

‘Oh.’
She paused. ‘So anyway I think I go to sleep now.’

‘Right.
Okay.’ Then I said in a rush, ‘Look I was wondering would you like to go out
some time, with me somewhere?’

‘Well,
I work at nights …’

‘Sure,
stupid, forget it,’ I said.

‘No,
no, I’m just saying, the day would be better, like maybe next Tuesday.’

‘Oh
okay, great, where would you want to go then?’ I suddenly couldn’t think of
anywhere on the planet.

‘Well,
der is a shop in
Liverpool
called
Bell
and Banyon — do you
know it?’

‘No,
but I’m sure I can find it.’

‘Great,
well meet me here at maybe twelve and we can go and shop der and maybe do
something afterwards …’

‘Fantastic,
twelve here then.’

‘Twelve
here den.’

I
picked up my bike, wrangled it through the gate, getting more oil on my
trousers, and cycled off along the path. When I got home and looked up
Bell
and Banyon’s address in the Yellow
Pages I read in their half-page advert that they were the north-west’s largest
independent retailer of disabled and elderly products.

It was
after
midnight
when I got home,
Adam wasn’t in yet. I waited in the living room for him watching TV and didn’t
hear his key in the door until half past one. I called out, ‘I’m still up,
Adam!’ However I was disconcerted by the next sound which was a thump as if a
body had fallen to the floor. Rushing into the hall I found the boy lying face down
in the open doorway. ‘Oh fuck, oh Christ, Adam!’ I cried, turning the boy over:
blood was running over his face, one eye was already puffy, purpling and closed
and mucus ran in a stream from the boy’s flattened nose, causing him to talk in
a snuffling, gasping manner.

‘They
were laughing at me … his nephews,’ he said, his one working eye staring into
some scene of horror that he held inside his head. ‘So we jumped them because
there was more of us than them but they knew what they were doing … See, they
wanted to do me because they knew who my dad was and they were winding me up
because their uncle was out.’

‘Who
was out? Who was out?’ I shouted. ‘Fucking Sidney Maxton-Brown,’ gasped the
boy.

5

‘Stomach cancer,’ said
Sidney Maxton-Brown, patting his abdomen contentedly.

‘Really?’
I queried.

‘Yeah,
fucking awful it were, I were down to like five stone and the pain, Christ!
Four months they said I ‘ad to live. So you know they let me out on parole
like, on compassionate grounds, to die at home.’

‘And
then?’ I asked.

‘And
then,’ replied Sidney Maxton-Brown, ‘it went away.’

‘It
went away?’

‘That’s
right; the doctors couldn’t believe it, “a miracle” they said I was, “almost
unheard of” they said, but it went away. “In remission” is actually what they
call it but I know it’s gone for ever, you can tell some’ow, if it’s inside
your body or not. Of course I haven’t really, you know, felt the need to inform
the coppers or the court or anything, that it’s gone. I mean I don’t know
whether they’d put me back inside but I’d certainly lose me disabled parking
badge.’

When
Adam came back from the pub all beat up and collapsed half in and half out of
the hall, I left him only for the few seconds I needed to grab the phone and
with trembling hands to dial 999. Again I was connected immediately, as I had
been on the night of the big crash; the woman I spoke to might even have been
the same one I’d spoken to on that evening. She told me the paramedics would be
there soon and not to move the boy, so we sat in the open doorway, the summer
breeze blowing over us, an older man holding a keening teenager in his arms.

The two
of us passed most of the rest of the night in the casualty department of the
town’s general hospital amongst the wounded of a quiet Friday, the impalings,
the clubbings, the stabbings, the gougings. To me none of the wounds looked
real, rather I felt like I was in the middle of one of those historic
re-enactments staged in the grounds of a stately home, this one representing
the gory aftermath of some medieval battle. We liked to go and see those in the
summer, me and my friends, to laugh at the divvies in their silly outfits, fat
clerks from
Bolton
pretending
to be soldiers in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard.

I’d
tried to phone Paula but her mobile wasn’t answering and I didn’t know the name
of the boarding house where she was staying. After Adam was lethargically
examined by a series of exhausted-looking young doctors and pronounced only
superficially injured, we got a taxi home at five in the morning. Without
saying another word the boy went to bed and stayed there till his mum arrived
to take him home. I tried to explain what had happened, when she came rushing
over in response to the hysterical answerphone message I’d left eighteen hours
earlier, but she wouldn’t let me speak, just angrily led him away.

Unexpectedly,
then, I had the weekend to myself. While I could have gone walking on the moors
or visited a steam fair in Parbold, what —I did instead on that Saturday was
sit on the couch and think. Afterwards I felt like I’d thought a whole lifetime
of thoughts in a single day.

I recall, perhaps falsely,
who knows, that I remained in exactly the same position, unmoving apart from
the occasional spasm that rippled across my cheeks until the evening of that
Saturday, until the streetlights came on, until the men and women from the
surrounding houses returned from their weekend trips to the supermarket, the
ski slope, the squash courts, and the smell of salad began to fill the evening
air.

I sat
on my couch and thought and thought and thought, the tumblers of my mind
clicking over like the lock of an elaborate, well-lubricated Edwardian safe.

In the
first hours my visions were all of revenge. One thing I was absolutely certain
of was that affairs could, not be left as they were: that this Sidney Maxton-Brown
would somehow be allowed to escape even the vastly inadequate punishment the
law had given him was simply not an option.

Something
was going to be done, the only question was what. Some violent act could
certainly be arranged; nobody got very far in the building game without
understanding that an industry which encompassed sharp implements, quick-drying
concrete, sudden profits, sudden losses, penalty clauses, an itinerant
workforce that was inclined to settle disputes without reference to the small
claims court, grinding, chomping, mashing machines and deep, deep, dark holes,
occasionally did involve the odd abrupt disappearance in the middle of the
night.