(2003) Overtaken (21 page)

I felt
a shiver of fear. I said, ‘I haven’t driven since the accident.’

‘I
know,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ask you but I don’t know anybody else or I …’

‘Yeah,
all right.’ I didn’t think it was true that she didn’t know anybody else who
could help her, at least with the driving part. I sensed even in the middle of
her misery that it was a part of my punishment that she gave me these tasks. I
actually felt no guilt, knew I wasn’t obliged to help her but I did anyway. It
came to me that I might as well use this opportunity as a way to get back in a
car. I said, ‘I think I’ll be okay to do it.’

I left
her house and walked the mile into town, to where there was an Avis office and
rented a Ford Mondeo. I asked but they didn’t have anything smarter like a Merc
or something. When I looked I was surprised to find my driving licence was
still in my wallet, though when they asked for it at the rental desk, taking it
out the photo looked nothing like me. A youth delivered the car to the front
door of the office with a screech of tyres, the girl behind the desk handed me
the keys, I went outside, unlocked the door, climbed behind the wheel.
Adjusting the seat and the mirrors, that took up a few minutes, waiting for the
walls of the car to come in and crush me used up another five; when nothing
happened, the ignition fired up like all the cars I’d ever driven, put it in
gear and drove away from the kerb. What did I feel? There was certainly a
greater vigilance in my mind. I knew driving would never be the forgetful,
automatic activity it had once been; I had a vague sense that every car coming
towards me was planning to veer into my path but it was nothing I couldn’t cope
with.

On
returning to Paula’s house we went upstairs together to get her son; the
drugged bandaged boy was just about able to stumble down the stairs with me and
his mother holding him under the arms. I opened the back door of the car and we
tipped him in; he fell sideways and slumped insensible across the rear seat.

Late
morning had arrived by the time we got going. With the low winter sun shining
in my eyes I stuck to quiet country roads, easing myself in gently to the
business of driving.

‘Kelvin,’
Paula said, ‘we’ll never get there at this rate. Get on the fucking motorway.’

As she
spoke we passed a junction. sign for the M6. I didn’t give myself time to think
about what was happening as I swerved up the slope, crested the rise, we
rolled. down the ramp and joined the deluge of traffic heading south. As I
swung into the middle lane to overtake a truck a Skoda Fabia driven by a
middle-aged woman went past me in the outside lane. I guessed she was doing at
least 95 miles an hour. In the split second that we ran parallel I glimpsed all
along the top of the car’s dash she’d arranged fluffy animals and brightly
coloured stuffed furry toys.

‘That’s
better,’ Paula said.

Somehow,
despite its grim purpose, the drive turned into a happy excursion for the two
of us. Sealed in that metal shell, stopping at motorway services, so that one
of us could run in, use the toilet, grab a coffee and a pack of sandwiches
trapped in a plastic triangle and run out again, we somehow lost the edginess
that had been between us and became friends once more.

She
said, ‘You know the Friends and Family Group is campaigning for a memorial?
Apparently, though, you have to have at least ten deaths before the authorities
will even consider it. Wanna help with a petition?’

‘I
dunno, maybe,’ I said. ‘I’m sort of working on a memorial of my own.’ Then in
case I’d revealed too much enquired, ‘Still leaving the flowers?’

‘Yeah.
Colin’s brother says it’d be cheaper for us all to buy our own florists. And of
course we can’t stop on the hard shoulder to leave them at the site of the …
so we have to park in a country lane and then walk across four fields, one with
a bull in it and the farmer is starting to turn nasty. It’s hard to know
whether we’re doing the right thing.’

I said,
‘Yeah, I know what you mean. We’re not used to coping with death any more. I
mean our ancestors had tons of practice, people were pegging out all the time,
half their children didn’t survive to adolescence, pimples could be fatal in
the Victorian age. And belief of course, they had that as well, the whole
community knew what to do but … well, like Siggi’s funeral that was
particularly … awful … her friends from drama school singing “Wake Me Up
Before You Go-Go”. I don’t remember her ever saying that was her favourite
song.’

Paula
laughed. ‘No, I think we’re pretty much connoisseurs of funerals now and I
have to say I reckon you’re better off sticking with a straight Church of
England in my opinion. Unless you’re a Muslim or something.’ Then she said
suddenly, ‘I’ve joined a road campaign organisation as well.’

‘Well,
that’s good, isn’t it?’ I replied; wishing to keep on her good side now that we
were mates again.

‘I
dunno, in a way, there’s four thousand people killed on our roads every year
and we just sort of put up with the situation; it’s fucked up if you think
about it. But you know I keep saying to myself, in a way it’s selfish, you join
this organisation because this thing has happened to you — but if I’d been a
decent person I should have been in it already, I should have noticed all these
people getting killed. I mean they do get mentioned in the papers: once you
start looking, you see it all the time, whole families killed, groups of
friends wiped out, children orphaned yet I did nothing. Like those people
collecting in the pub to buy a scanner for the local hospital because their
nephew’s got leukaemia but they didn’t give a fuck about leukaemia before
somebody they knew got ill, did they? If they were really moral they would have
cared about the scanner before. I should have cared without my husband being
killed by that one-eyed bastard Sidney Maxton-Brown.’

Over
the phone Paula had been told the treatment centre was just a mile and a half
after you passed through a village called Poulsen in the
county
of
Surrey
. As we drove slowly through this place it seemed to contain an
extraordinary number of pubs, wine bars, bodegas, hotels and off-licences: one
after another they were strung out along the main road, their jaunty neon signs
illuminating the black night.

Since
turning off the motorway half an hour earlier no other inhabited place we’d
been through had contained more than one gloomy pub or shuttered-up liquor shop
but as we passed the post office in Poulsen I saw that even it had a big poster
in the window offering twenty alcopops for five pounds. Initially unable to
recall where the
village
of
Poulsen
reminded me of, I realised
eventually it was a place we had visited on our holiday in LA: the Mexican
border town of
Tijuana
.

Exactly
a mile and a half further on by the car’s trip computer there was a tiny wooden
sign which read ‘Muddy Farm’ stuck in the grass at the mouth of a long,
tree-lined, potholed drive. An iron gate hanging off one hinge was pushed back
into the laurel bushes.

As I
gingerly drove down the track we could see hunched figures in the darkness
walking furiously up to the gateway puffing on cigarettes; when they got there
they spun round angrily and stalked back.

At the
end of the drive there was a long, low Queen Anne farmhouse, its doorway
surrounded by coloured light bulbs which only served to make it seem even more
mournful. On the broad gravel square in front of the house a number of
Porsches, Jaguars, Audi TTs and an antique Bentley were parked all askew with
tyres half flat, their expensive paintwork streaked with tree sap, bird
droppings, twigs and leaves as if they had been stalled there for quite some
time.

I put
our rental car next to one of the Porsches whose sloping bonnet was half buried
in a hedge and between me and Paula we managed to half drag, half carry Adam to
the porch. We propped him against a wall, Paula unlatched the carved oak door, then
again we both took an arm and carried the boy inside.

A cube
of hot air hung inside the reception area of Muddy Farm; it reminded me of any
number of the disappointing country house hotels that me and my mates had
stayed in over the years gone by; linen-fold oak panelling halfway up the
walls, an artificial ficus plant in the corner and a desk with a grease-smeared
obscurely branded computer on it. Behind the desk sat an enormously fat woman
dressed in what looked like a Mongolian yurt. She looked up as we dropped Adam
like a bag of shopping into an armchair. ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling warmly,
rose, steered her bulk round the desk, knocking some pencils on the floor, and
came towards us holding out her hand. ‘I’m Klinky Poon, senior counsellor.
Welcome to Muddy Farm. I assume you’re Paula and this is Adam, we’ve been
expecting you.’

We all,
except Adam, said hello.

‘Now
first of all let’s get the formalities over with,’ Klinky said. She went back
and sat behind the desk. Drawing a form out from a filing cabinet she indicated
we should sit at the two chairs facing her.

‘Now
first of all we have to get down a few details. Here at Muddy Farm in a
supportive atmosphere of love and trust we try to shepherd the addict towards
recovery and sobriety. So first of all does Adam have health insurance?’

‘Er …
no,’ said Paula. ‘My friend here, his godfather, Kelvin, is going to pay.’

‘Right,’
said Klinky, immediately picking up a phone and pressing an internal line,
‘well in that case he should talk to our financial officer Akbar Akbar. Kelvin,
you can use my desk, while us girls go into the lounge and get on with the
pastoral stuff.’ Then into the handset, ‘Akbar, can you come to the front desk
please.’

I was a
bit surprised: you could understand nurses being on call round the clock but that
there would be a financial officer available at
nine thirty
on a Tuesday night seemed a
little mercenary. Then I dismissed the thought from my mind; I was sure these
were good people.

While
Paula gave details of Adam’s health and his drug taking I filled out a cheque
for six weeks’ shepherding towards recovery and sobriety which came to eighteen
thousand pounds, made payable to ‘Monastery Group Health Facilities PLC’. I’d
heard of the Monastery, it was a famous treatment centre in
London
; I hadn’t known they owned Muddy
Farm too. It was a lot like pubs where you thought you were drinking in some
little country inn but when you looked at their sign it turned out to be owned
by a giant corporation. I suppose when you thought about it pubs and Muddy Farm
were in the same business.

From
where I sat with Akbar emptying my current account I glimpsed, hidden out of
sight from normal view under Klinky’s desk, its maw gaping open to reveal its
ravaged insides, the biggest bag of Fun Sized Bounty Bars that I’d ever seen.

Adam
was then taken off to see a nurse to begin his detox while me and Paula were
given a tour of the rest of the house. Up and down narrow stairs through
plywood fire doors we went. We were shown the rooms where the addicts slept:
again they reminded me of bed and breakfast hotels in provincial towns, except
here there were six or eight beds squeezed into the space where there would
normally only be a queen-sized double and a trouser press.

Klinky
said that for the first week Adam would not be allowed to contact anybody
outside. After that he could use the payphone in the cabin off the reception
area.

She
also showed us the lounge, the lecture room and the gym in the stables
opposite: not very well equipped, it was like one I used to go to in the late
eighties when a bench press seemed as miraculous a contrivance as a time travel
machine. Klinky told us most of the addicts weren’t allowed to use the gym
anyway because if they couldn’t get drink or drugs they’d become hooked on
exercise.

There
was a dining room where the patients were served three stodgy meals a day and
Klinky said they had to sit at the table for at least half an hour because the
food addicts ate very slowly, if they ate at all, and always under supervision
because they either tried to steal the meals of others or attempted to hide
their own dinners down the back of the sofa.

Back at
reception Klinky, picking up the phone, her podgy fingers hovering over the
numbers, told us they had an approved hotel in the village and would we like her
to book us a room for the night? I told her no because I had to get back to
Liverpool
for the premiere of a play.

Notwithstanding
that it was November the terraced houses all around Liverpool’s football ground
had draped themselves in bright Christmas lights that chased each other up and
down the PVC double glazing and around the flimsy wooden front doors, plastic
Santas and reindeer balanced insecurely on their satellite dishes rocking
backwards and forwards in the wind pixilating the pictures on the TVs below. It
was an idea they’d picked up from holidays in
Florida
, though it made their houses look more like
Blackpool
.

It
seemed to be my week for walking through entrances draped with lights. Across
the road the site entrance to Kelvinopolis — now named the Crystal Quarter by
the estate agents who’d won the contract to pre-sell the apartments — was also
adorned with lights. The rows of bulbs reminded me of Muddy Farm but also, with
a familiar, though diminishing stab of memory, of the trip to see cirKuss with
my friends in that prelapsarian time when the world seemed free of danger and
doubt.