(2003) Overtaken (13 page)

I knew,
if I wanted to go down that road, that it would be possible to pay someone to
have the tipper man kidnapped and tortured, or beaten up or just shot on his
doorstep by a figure in a crash helmet. Of course you could never absolutely
guarantee that things would go the way you wanted them to go. I discerned from
things I’d heard that even big crime families like the Gorcis and the Mukes,
with all their resources and their minds that looked at everything as an
opportunity for crime, could come unstuck trying to kidnap rivals, intimidate
prosecution witnesses, kill people who had spilled drinks on them in pubs and
so on.

Also,
if you started on that sort of violent retribution route then the other party
or the relatives of the other party were capable of embarking on it too and it
was already clear that Sidney Maxton-Brown came from the sort of tribe that
didn’t appreciate the other person’s point of view, who wouldn’t view a beating
up as fair retribution for his evil behaviour.

Not to
mention the moral angle, which nobody did much any more.

And
somehow paying out a pile of money or calling in a load of favours simply to
have somebody who had wronged you whacked seemed at the end of the day to be
too … I don’t know, it seemed to be too … unoriginal. A ten-year prison
sentence and some flowers nailed to a fence had seemed an inadequate enough memorial
to my five friends but a shabby hit was nowhere near what they were entitled
to.

It
wasn’t in the night but round about teatime when I came to the conclusion that
for all those reasons I didn’t want to resort to violence and yet I knew that
the most important thing in my life was that I needed to take revenge on Sidney
Maxton-Brown. This revenge was to be my memorial to my friends and therefore it
needed to be worthy of them, it needed to embody their qualities of
originality, their humour, their thirst for great art. Through building their
memorial I realised I was also hoping that my life might begin again.

What I
wished for, I thought, was that Sidney MaxtonBrown should feel a little of the
terrible pain, a fraction of the awful terror that my friends had felt as they
died and that their friends and relatives experienced to this day. Except, I
mused, even if you did kidnap and torture him he still wouldn’t be feeling what
they had felt; if you worked him over, if you pulled his fingernails out he’d
still be feeling only his own pain. What was really desired, I reflected, was
for
Sidney
to understand just
some tiny part of what he had done, to comprehend even to the minutest degree
the awful effect he had had on the lives of so many innocents. But how could a
thing like that be achieved?

What
was needed, I thought, was a way to prick a hole in the bubble of
Sidney
’s biosphere of self-pity and let in
the corrosive outside air. Yet how the hell could you make one person
understand how another person felt?

I
pictured my friends, thought about what it was that we did together; mostly we
went and saw things. So I tried to remember all the performances we’d seen
together. I tried to recall all the movies we’d seen, all the plays we’d
attended, the computer games we’d played, the novels we’d read and what we’d
learned from them.

Well, a
lot of them had been crap and we’d learned nothing at all. I had kept the
programmes of every play I’d ever seen; now flicking through them there were
many nights at the theatre from which I could not recall a single detail. I
mean what the hell was Old Bollocks at the Octagon Theatre Bolton, starring the
late Michael Elphick that I apparently sat all the way through in March 1996? Or
Quonk, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, or Stuvitsky’s Rehearsal at the Theatre
Clwyd Mold. Somebody had spent a year writing these things, actors had been
cast, sets had been built, I’d gone to see it and there wasn’t an atom of
memory remaining of what had gone on. What was the point? I thought about all
the comedians we’d seen over the years with their banal unsights into the human
condition: ‘Men are like this, women are like that, isn’t it annoying when your
teapot …’ I remembered the bit a lot of comedians did about what wimps men
were, a bit that I’d laughed along with but now I thought, What men? Nelson
Mandela, did he go all piteous when he got a cold while he was imprisoned on
Robben
Island
? Rupert Brooke in the trenches? Victor Jara being tortured by the
Chilean junta?

On the
other hand my memory of some events we’d attended was more ambiguous. I thought
about the last art exhibition that we had all been to together, at the Tate
Liverpool. Sage Pasquale had said, ‘Dan Flavin worked solely in neon tubes. Hundreds
of ordinary coloured tubes in different groups and arrangements. Though Flavin
was credited with being one of the creators of minimalism he once joked that he
would rather it was called “maximalism”.’

Though
I looked grimly at the tubes and concentrated ever so hard and strove to find
some meaning in it, all I kept thinking was, With all these neon tubes buzzing
away has the gallery’s electricity bill gone up? And secondly, How has the
gallery coped with the different voltages? Because when I’d looked closely at
the tubes I’d noticed that these were US neon tubes and seeing as the US was on
110 volts with 50 cycles A/C compared to the UK 240 volts system, did they have
a different transformer for each artwork or one big transformer for the whole
gallery? But then I thought, No if they’ve put this stuff in this gallery and
all these critics have praised it then there must be some worth in it. So I
forced myself to look harder and then I did see meaning in it though I’m not
entirely sure what it was, but the shapes were beautiful and the colours were
pure.

None
the less I did believe that there had been times when we’d undoubtedly been
truly transported by something we’d seen; without any conscious introspection
we’d all know right away that we were witnessing something profound. Such as he
Protection Racket DJ’ing at
Glastonbury
, or when our book group had read Zhao Zhi Zhu’s When the Bamboo
Flowers: that was amazing. Bamboo only flowers once every hundred years and the
book is a chronicle of four generations of one Chinese family between one
flowering and the next, from the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, civil war,
the Long March, the early years of communism, the Cultural Revolution, ending
at the handover. of
Hong Kong
.
Those Chinese, man, they went through a lot; we were so moved by this saga that
we tried to get the guy that delivered our sweet and sour pork to tell us his
family’s turbulent story, but he said they were all from
Nottingham
and nothing much had ever
happened to them. There was that musical we saw based on Primo Levi’s stories
and of course the Hats o f the Pharisees exhibition at the
Royal
Academy
. Anyway, what I’m saying is that when we’d seen these things all of
us had experienced a collective sense of having pushed through some curtain
into a greater understanding of what it was like to be human.

Most of
all, I remembered a weekend trip the six of us had taken to
Amsterdam
in 1999. Air miles from
Liverpool
Airport
. We got there on a Friday evening, checked into our hotel then
piled right out again, went round the drug cafes and had an Indonesian
Rijsttafel. On the Saturday evening after a busy day of shopping for antiques
at the Spiegelwartier and a visit to Anne Frank’s house, an indifferent meal
at the Michelin-starred Excelsior, a sex show in the red-light district, we danced,
high on MDMA powder till four in the morning at a club called Bunnies in the
Leidseplein area. Having only had four hours’ sleep Sage Pasquale forced us up
at
8 a.m.
so as to be first in
line at the
Van Gogh
Museum
. Tired and drugged and groggy, we
paid our money and joined the crowds of tourists drifting through the stuffy
concrete rooms. Sage Pasquale rented one of those tape and earpiece things so
she was able to provide a running commentary on the paintings: she got quite
angry at it and said why didn’t they do a concealed version with one of those
tiny transparent earpiece things so other people would think she was a
tremendous authority on art history.

The
pictures at the
Van Gogh
Museum
were presented in chronological
order so that slowly we were taken through the fevered illustrations to
Vincent’s sad, desperate, short life. From the muddy browns of The Potato
Eaters, we travelled with him to Paris to the brighter, happier colours and
Japanese influences of Self Portrait At Easel, then south we went to the house
in Arles that he shared with Gauguin for a while and the painting of Sunflowers
so powerful in the flesh that it transcended its too-copied life.

The
last painting of all was Crows in the Wheatfield, the bleak dismal birds
struggling to get off the ground like the painter’s own black thoughts. Sage
Pasquale, her voice cracking with sorrow, choked out, ‘A few days after he
finished this painting Van Gogh went into those same fields and … and shot
himself …’ She turned away from the painting to see the five of us were all
weeping too, at what it was hard to say: for ourselves, for Vincent, because we’d
taken too much ecstasy, who knows? ‘Oh God, the poor man,’ she said, then,
‘Hold me, Kelvin,’ so I took her in my arms and held her tight and Colin did
the same with Siggi and Loyd with Kate till our tears had dried and it was time
to get the shuttle bus to the airport.

At
first I got excited by the idea that if I could somehow simply put this killer
in front of great works of art then that would humanise him; it took only’ a
few minutes for that notion to go cold, well, not cold but there was a sense
I’d need something more. Just showing Sidney Maxton-Brown stuff or getting him
to read stuff (if he could read) or watch stuff couldn’t possibly be enough,
there would need to be something else. What it was I couldn’t think right now
but I was confident it would come to me in time.

Monday
morning I got on the phone.

A
couple of times I had to put the handset down with shaking hands before being
connected, but finally I managed to hold on to myself long enough until a young
woman with a Lancashire accent said, ‘Maxton-Brown Tipping.’

I told
her my name then said, ‘I’m a developer. I’ve got a job on in
Liverpool
that’ll need big tipper work. I’d
like to talk to the boss of your firm.’

‘That’d
be the Uncle,’ she said.

‘Can I
come and see the Uncle then?’

We
agreed on a time and a date towards the end of the week and she gave me the
address of a farm about five miles outside our town.

The
prospect of meeting with the man who had killed my friends lent the rest of the
day an agitated quality. In a way I found myself welcoming this agitation, it
felt healthy, like the pins and needles of blood returning to a limb that had been
lain on for too long. I realised all round I was in for a funny week: not only
was I wound up over my assignation with
Sidney
, there was my daytime date with
Florence
too. She was waiting for me when I got to the common, standing in
the same smoking spot where we had talked late on the previous Friday night.

I’d
fallen in love before and I hadn’t particularly liked it. It had felt like
being an indoctrinated citizen of some country run by a terrible dictator; the
object of my love had become the Beloved Leader, appearance flawless, morals
perfect, beliefs exemplary, every dazzling utterance endlessly fascinating,
every brilliant statement needing to be endlessly dissected for meaning and
subtext. No matter whether I liked it or not, I knew as soon as I saw her that it
was happening to me again: I experienced the tumbling sensation in my mind that
told me my feelings for
Florence
had shown their papers to the border guards and had crossed over
the barbed wire into the country of love.

One of
the few ways I’d found to protect myself from total gawpishness was to look for
defects in the girl’s appearance and thus to diminish slightly her perfection.

I
realised I’d never seen Florence in daylight so hoped perhaps to see some
blemish in her skin but when I got up to her and kissed her on the cheek it was
flawless like the rest of her. She looked a little smaller perhaps, but that
was it and in fact her smallness made her seem even cuter.

For the
ordinary civilian their body was merely something to go down to the shops in
but for a performer such as Florence it was as if her body was a beautiful
dress that she had just that minute put on; she was aware of every brush of its
fabric against her, a beautiful dress that she knew staggered the onlooker and
that she deliberately turned in the light so its diamonds and pearls sparkled
and hummed. On top of that the dress she was actually wearing was quite
something too: an old-fashioned ballet skirt, layer after layer of black
netting down to her knees with black satin petals laid on the top, a black
Adidas top zipped up to her neck, black fishnet tights on her long legs and
white Reebok trainers with a blue stripe down the centre. When she saw me a big
smile spread across her face and she jumped up and down with excitement, making
her skirt bounce in harmony and making me smile too. I put my hands on her
waist and kissed her on the cheek.