(2003) Overtaken (16 page)

‘Well,
I use the nephews sometimes, but between you and me I’m still driving meself’ —
here he became heated — ‘even though, even though, and the courts never took this
into account, I’ve been suffering flashbacks since the crash. Well, I think
they’re flashbacks, they’re a bit too short to tell really, somethin’ to do
with a field and some mud and a donkey as far as I can sort it out. I mean all
the family say I should apply for compensation like they tell you to on the
telly but I wouldn’t do that, Kelvin, I’m no freeloader. Sidney Maxton-Brown
pays his own way in the world.’

‘So,’ I
persisted, ‘you’re still driving?’

‘Oh
aye, what am I supposed to do living out here? I gotta drive, ain’t I, how can
I ged about otherwise? It’s victimisation to make a man with cancer … well, I
always thought it was victimisation, whatever. I’m not going to get caught, am
I? There’s not much chance of the coppers checking, is there? Especially since
I keep to the quiet roads. You ever been stopped? I certainly ‘aven’t and I
been driving like a right cunt on many an occasion.’

‘That’ll
be eight quid, mate,’ demanded the taxi driver (not the same one as before) who
dropped me back at my house. Then, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a horse. I feel my
whole life has been an empty lie because of it, I wish somebody would put a
saddle on me and ride me through the … two quid change, there you go.’

I
phoned Paula as soon as I got inside.

‘Oh,
it’s you, what do you want?’ she snapped.

Unable
to come straight out with it I lied. ‘I was just ringing to find out how Adam
is … You know, since that night.’

‘How do
you think he is? I fucking wish you hadn’t let him go to the fucking pub.’

‘But
you let him go to the pub all the time,’ I whined.

‘I know
but I trusted you to look after him, you should have more sense.’

‘So how
is he?’ I persisted, now suddenly needing to know.

She
sighed. ‘Well, since you asked, not too good. He hasn’t gone back to school,
he’s really moody and he’s been hanging round with all these losers in the
neighbourhood. They’ve nicked his mobile phone and he pretends not to care.’

‘Oh …
er … oh.’

‘Does
that make you feel better?’

‘No,
not really, I dunno, maybe he’ll straighten out, kids do.’

‘And
kids don’t. Was there anything else?’

‘Yes
actually. Look, I wanted to talk to you about that Sidney Maxton-Brown.’

Here
came the other element in my plan — to try and make the tipper driver live in a
moral universe, a universe where his actions always had consequences.

Anger
crept into her voice. ‘You know the police never told us he was out. I mean I’m
glad the bastard is dying but the coppers’ first response was to make feeble
threats to arrest Adam and his mates ‘cos it was them who had initially assaulted
Sidney
’s nephews. The Friends
and Family have been raising holy shit with them; they’re desperate now to make
amends.’

‘Well,
that’s good because get this,’ I told Paula. ‘Somebody told me they’d seen him
and he’s driving again, cars and trucks. I think the authorities would be eager
to make amends by ensuring that that doesn’t continue, don’t you think?’

‘That
bastard! That fucking bastard,’ she shouted. ‘He won’t be doing much driving.
I’ll make sure of that. Thank you for that, Kelvin. You know it made us feel
powerless to know he was out, at least to stop him driving will be something.’

‘Yeah,
that’s something.’

‘It’ll
be a year you know since the … since the … next week, we’re holding a
sponsored swim, will you be coming?’

I said,
‘I’ll think about it.’

6

A crescent moon hung over
the cirKuss ground. The grey wagons had been formed into a sort of town square,
in the centre of which the performers and stage hands queued to get their pay
for the week. Behind a pine trestle table one of the older clowns took notes
out of a tin box and handed them over with an ungracious grunt. Florence had
whispered to me as we sat on the steps up to her truck, me feeling like a
conspicuous intruder, ‘See Cronko the Clown, he is boss; the older ones say it
was the same in Soviet circus days, clown was always boss and clown was always
KGB. See now it all makes perfect sense that nobody likes clowns. I suppose all
American clowns are CIA.’ Then she skippingly took her place in line. Tonight
Florence
was wearing tight camouflage
pants low down on her hips to show the curve of her lower belly, a short
olive-green top that painstakingly outlined her breasts and big polished black
army boots.

As I
admired. her lovely behind I thought about the eight girls I’d had sex with: it
struck me there’d always been some flaw in their physical make-up; say they
would have a wonderful pretty face and terrific upper body but then it would
end in one thick stumpy leg and one chopstick thin one, or she’d have great
tits stuck on one of those rippling bony chests, or a perfect body but hair
like Ken Dodd’s. This hadn’t stopped me being in love with several of them and in
fact a girl with the perfect arse but a neck like a WWF wrestler had broken my
heart.

I
worried that if I had sex with
Florence
for the first time tonight would I get the full benefit of seeing
her flawless face and body? The problem, I realised, was that you can’t get far
enough back if you are in the process of fucking them to appreciate what they
look like: what you ideally need, I thought, is a cock that is, say’ seven foot
long, though obviously you would only insert the first foot or so but then with
a seven-foot cock you’d be able to get far back enough to get a good look at
them and to relish their body while you were doing them. Of course with such a
long cock you’d have nothing to do with your hands, you wouldn’t be able to
fondle anything unless your arms were also seven foot long but that would be
ridiculous.

Once
everyone was paid, from out of their trucks women began to carry large pots of
hot spicy food which they laid out on the trestle table. A lot of the men
lounged about pouring viscous drinks for each other from clear glass bottles
with no labels on them, but other more industrious males threw together instant
barbecues out of bricks and twisted wire on which they were soon cooking
skewered cubes of meat, red peppers and chunks of onion. In the meantime a
couple of the younger men had set up twin record decks hooked up to huge
speakers from the cirKuss PA; they began by playing Coldcut featuring Lisa
Stansfield, followed by KLF ‘What Time is Love?’ then a further string of hits
from my teenage years.

Florence
had conspicuously taken no part in the catering; instead she had
lounged beside me on the steps of her truck with a vaguely sneering expression
on her face. A couple of times older women seemed to address sarcastic remarks
at her in a variety of languages to which she would spit back short epithets.
At one point, from across the square Valery seemed to try and approach her but
a girl with long red hair ran over, caught him by the arm and dragged him
reluctantly backwards while her eyes shone hatred at a simpering
Florence
. I felt like I was an extra in one
of those giant open-air productions of Carmen that we’d seen at
Earls Court
back in the mid 1990s.

Except
the soundtrack for this show was from the early days of acid house rather than
Bizet. Even before all the food was ready there had been a brief knife fight
between two acrobats and a few minutes later the red-haired girl ran diagonally
across the plaza weeping, with her mane streaming out behind her like a fighter
jet on reheat. ‘Is always fucking like this,’ said Florence, then, ignoring
further pointed remarks from fellow cast members, she pushed her way through
the crowd at the pine table, now piled its whole length with stews, salads,
grilled fish, hunks of bread, piles of rice and cracked wheat. Taking two
plates, she loaded them with food and brought them back to me. ‘Let’s go inside
to eat,’ she said. As I mounted the steps I saw, emerging purposefully from the
shadows, the acrobat who had lost the fight; in his hands he held an AK47
assault rifle.

We both
sat on the floor,
Florence
with
her back against the couch, me leaning on the armchair as we ate our food.

I said,
‘Quite a party out there.’

‘Yeah,
first fifty times is fun,’ she replied, ‘then it start getting on your nerves.
Those people got a lot of problems, it makes them kinda tiring.’

‘How do
you mean?’

‘All
this passion all the time. Crying and fighting and stealing things from shops.
When you live in the middle of it it’s exhausting. Nobody here can simply get
themself something like an index-linked pension for old age: they have to buy a
big diamond from a Chinese man in Newcastle, then their brother steals the
diamond, then turns out diamond is fake so two brothers get together to kill
Chinese man in Newcastle.’

‘That’s
just hypothetical, right?’

‘Sure,
imaginary scenario but you get the picture?’

‘Yes,
but maybe their behaviour is because of the terrible things that happened to
them … to all of you.’

‘Oh,
all that was years ago, they need to get over it,’ she said indifferently.

I
thought, She pretends she’s not damaged but I’m sure deep inside there’s some
terrible pain, and this made me want to have sex with her more than ever.

Inside
the van the lighting came only from the fringed standard lamp. We both put our
food down and I slid across the carpet to Florence. I took her in my arms and
we began to kiss, our faces greasy with food. I felt like a teenager on a date
years ago when I’d got a girl in my parents’ front room with the gas fire
going, rolling around on their patterned carpet. A while later as I came inside
her, from outside there was a volley of rifle shots and some high-pitched
screaming.

It was
a warm early autumn day in Kelvinopolis as its progenitor, that’s me, turned
his face to the sun and waited for Sidney Maxton-Brown to appear for our first
site meeting. This was a month after our initial lunch at the log cabin. The
trucker was forty minutes late arriving but I was happy to spend the time
walking my streets, making my plans. Finally Sidney appeared looking
preoccupied in the passenger seat, his grumpy-looking wife at the wheel of the
Mercedes four-wheel drive. As they rolled into the empty street I could see he
kept staring over his shoulder, looking out of the back window in a distracted
fashion. Sidney got out of the car, shook hands with me and as his wife bounced
the ML up on to the pavement and took off, said, staring back towards the main
road, ‘Sorry we’re late like, there was a huge bloody crane blocking off both
lanes of the East Lancs road with no bastard working on it that I could see.
That wasn’t it though’ — looking nervously around him once more — ‘I think
they’ve gone.’

‘Who?’
I asked.

‘Fucking
coppers. There was a Lancashire unit followed us from me farm and they handed
over to a Merseyside vehicle at the city limits.’

‘I
thought you said the coppers didn’t bother you?’

‘They
don’t … didn’t, I should say, but it was the strangest thing, the day after I
saw you I think it was, I was on me way to a bit of hare coursing over Parbold
way, on a tiny back road, when I looks in the mirror and there’s a bleeding cop
car. I couldn’t fooking believe it, pulled over by the sodding police. They
knew I was a disqual … managed to give them a yarn about me being on me way
to urgent chemotherapy and all the nephews falling ill at once, but they said I
was being watched and if I was found driving again for any reason whatsoever
I’d be back in Walton Jail.’

‘Fuck,
that’s bad luck,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Dunno.’
He looked genuinely upset. ‘I’ve got to get around. It’s bin a nightmoor this
past month, the wife and the nephews driving me everywhere.’

As if
I’d just thought of it I said, ‘Have you ever considered a bicycle?’

‘A
bike? Fook off!’

‘I
don’t drive, I ride a bike.’

‘Oh
sorry, mate. No offence but I never thought of it, bikes are for kids like.’

‘Not
any more
Sidney
, you can get
real quality machines, disc brakes, full suspension, stuff like that.’

‘Er …
right.’ He looked around. ‘So it’s quite a site this; you should make a few bob
from these places.’

‘I
suppose so,’ I replied indifferently.

‘You suppose
so?’ he exclaimed. “Aven’t you done cost benefit analysis, resale projections?’

‘Naw, I
don’t bother with any of that, I think if it feels right—’

‘You’re
fookin’ mad!’ he shouted angrily, then tried to turn it into a joshing thing by
added on a strange chortling laugh, ‘Gnooorft …’ .

I
didn’t wish to let such a useful philosophical point go so I said calmly, ‘Look
at me, Sidney, look at how rich I am, look at the size of the things I can do
and I do them without ever, ever, thinking about how I do it. You never know, I
might give some of these houses away to strangers I meet on a ferry or
something.’