by Alexei Sayle
I wasn’t surprised by this, since about a week after the accident complete strangers, without any sort of encouragement, had begun coming up to me and telling me the most awful, sad stories from their terrible lives. I supposed that there must have been something in my manner which provoked them or perhaps I gave off some hormone, some distillation of misery which alerted other desperate souls to a particular sufferer in their midst. This did not mean these people considerately chose to leave me alone in my pain; instead they decided to add to it by recounting their own desperate tales.
The woman continued — I’d learned not to interrupt them by now — ‘… the kid’s dad was this man at work whose wife has motor neurone disease and he’s been suffering from clinical depression, so I felt sorry … a bit sorry for him and I suppose it showed because then I think he put something in my drink at the firm’s Christmas par …’
Enduring thirty-five minutes of this, rain had begun to fall and I was in farming country. The town I lived in was where the line terminated. The station was on the edge of the old town centre, down a steep cobbled lane ranged with railway workers’ stone cottages.
Along with the Saturday evening crowds returning from the big city shops I toiled up the rain-polished lane; at the top I was forced to stop and rest for a while; memories were again pummelling me: over the road was where somebody had said this, in the park we’d all taken that. I was compelled by misery to lean against the wall of the Station Hotel, a steadfastly rough pub at the top of the lane. My vision would often go out of focus on these occasions; when clarity returned my eyes were looking at a bright little poster in the window of the pub. Looking closer, as figures performed a shadow play of drunkenness beyond the frosted glass, I saw that the poster was advertising a new show from cirKuss, apparently called Clamdango!. The poster told me that they would be performing for a week, starting that night and that their cirKuss tent was pitched on a patch of common land located on the edge of town where such things as fairs, circuses and transient homosexual encounters were traditionally held. For some minutes I stared hard at the poster and then slowly walked home.
My route took me along the main shopping street where there were a surprising number of butchers, bakers and greengrocers still surviving. At this hour the shop assistants were folding up their trestle-tables, putting the sausages in the freezer and bringing in the fibreglass, life-size jolly Butcher figures as I passed.
Going out of the centre walking along a busy road lined with sandstone Victorian villas; cars and trucks swishing past, I eventually came to the lane halfway up which was my house. This lane was where the wealthy of our town lived. My place was a large 1920s semi that I kept in entirely authentic condition. Rather than replace the slender curved metal windows with brutish PVC as many others had done, I had kept the ones that remained and had restored them where they had been removed. Inside the house the honey waxed parquet floor was totally genuine and the door fittings and light switches were the original Bakelite.
In deliberate contrast my furniture was modern Italian, stylish items from the Memphis Group and Atalanta and in the living room was a Loewe plasma flat-screen TV complete with surround sound. I let myself in and lay down on the wooden floor.
About two and a half years ago Sage Pasquale’s sister had married her husband; at that time he was employed as a vivisectionist at a laboratory outside Northampton and lived in a dead, silent village in the nearby countryside with the blackened shapes of his last two firebombed 4 x 4s still parked on the drive.
They held the party after the wedding in the hospitality suite of the laboratory, the disco only just drowning out the screams of monkeys with wires in their brains. Our gang put up in the big Edwardian rectory opposite the converted railway station where Sage Pasquale’s anorexic sister and her fiancée lived. Now the rectory was a bed and breakfast hotel run by a disgraced couple by the name of Major and Mrs Marvin. Or rather it was Major Marvin who was disgraced, Mrs Marvin was just disgraced by marriage. Sage Pasquale’s sister got drunk on a small glass of water, then she told us the story. ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ she said emaciatedly, ‘but the major was once something really important in Scottish tropical fish administration until he did something or failed to do something with a person or a fish or some money that meant he lost his job and they had to move four hundred miles to avoid the shame and they had to let out the big house they bought for bed and breakfast.’
In every room in the house there was either a stuffed fish of some kind or a picture of a fish on the wall. None of us had really noticed the Marvins the night before, simply checked in, unpacked our stuff and gone out again to the village pub for Sage Pasquale’s sister’s fiancée’s stag night. But the next morning we all met up in the dining room to be served breakfast by the Marvins.
It was like being in a fish mausoleum so many stuffed poissons were on display. The six of us sat round a big table in a bay window out of which we could see Colin’s Jaguar S, Sage Pasquale’s BMW 735i, Siggi’s Lexus IS zoo and my Range Rover filling up the gravel forecourt and denting the Marvins’ herbaceous borders. Mrs Marvin had already been in and taken our orders for breakfast and the major had popped in for a stilted chat about what the fuck we were doing in his village.
A few minutes later Mrs Marvin returned, bringing in our breakfasts two at a time; as she was serving the second load Loyd suddenly started to act incredibly scouse.
‘Eh luv,’ he said to her, waving a bit of bacon about on the end of his fork, ‘dis bacon is da biz, y’know worra mean.’ The rest of us picked it up in an instant. ‘Oh, an’dem eggs,’ said Colin, ‘they look cracker.’
‘Oh, dis is da gear dis brekkie,’ said Sage Pasquale, who wasn’t even from Liverpool but came from Harpenden. ‘Dese eggs is friggin’ ace, girl,’ said Siggi.
When Mrs Marvin returned, stepping cautiously as if she were on the edge of a tank filled with poisonous puffer fish, with the last two breakfasts in her hands, Kate said, “Ere, hon, could ya get da major to do us another couple a dem fantastic kippers? Dey’re dead moreish, honest.’
I said, ‘Yiz stars, Mrs M, you an’dat major yiz stars. We’re gonna come ‘ere on our ‘olidays ain’t we, mates? Fuck Aya Napa dis is da go.’
They all shouted their assent.
‘Yere right der, Kelvin,’ yelled Loyd. ‘Mrs Marvin, we’s gonna come’ere every year, won’t dat be da fuckin’ biz?’ I remembered as we drove away on the Sunday afternoon, after I’d written ‘very nice’ in their comments book, that the Marvins stood on the porch to see us off. In my rear-view mirror I saw the hard plaster smiles they had been wearing switch off with an almost audible click as my Range Rover trickled across their gravel and turned the corner into the lane.
At the time I’d thought it was a brilliant laugh rubbing the Marvins’ faces in the fact that all their Eton, Cheltenham Ladies, Oxford and the Scots Guards had brought them to this, serving fried food and kippers to a pack of grinning, thirty-year-old morlochs. We had laughed about it often between ourselves since then but now recollecting that weekend I felt ashamed; I thought the pack of us had been too cruel tormenting the poor old couple.
That night I searched through my office files until I found the number of the Marvins’ house. I dialled it but an auto-, mated voice told me their phone had been disconnected. The negotiations took three months for me to buy the land in Liverpool which would become what I was already calling in my own mind ‘Kelvinopolis’. The city councillors I was dealing with would have liked to drag things out for a good deal longer but recently several of the leading Liverpool crime families, the Gorcis, the Pooles and the Mukes, had put it about that they were becoming unhappy with the levels of home help that their old mums were getting from social services, so the council needed to find extra money fast or the councillors knew they would be held to account and by a more unforgiving figure than the local government ombudsman.
Coming back on the Mersey Link train following the formal hand over of the site, an
electrical storm hung like an airship over Liverpool Bay and the scent of lightning rippled through the long grass that grew unattended between the railroad tracks. A man came and sat uncomfortably close to me while relating in a high-pitched voice the violent abuse he’d suffered at the hands of a succession of priests. However, fortunately he had to get off at Aintree Station as he was planning to throw himself in front of a horse so it was quite an uneventful journey really.
Walking up the lane from the station I noticed that there was another cirKuss poster stuck in the window of the Station Hotel: it told me that Clamdango! had been such a success on their last visit that they’d brought it back for another two weeks, the run beginning the previous Monday.
On the doorstep of my house stood a teenage boy, tall and muscular with gingery blond hair cut en brosse, wearing a padded jacket, huge baggy jeans with a chain looping low from the back pocket to the front. As I approached a small red hatchback started up with a clatter and took off, driving fast away from me in a cloud of diesel smoke. ‘I’m a bit early,’ the boy said.
‘Was that your mum?’ I asked as I let him in, indicating the red car turning the distant corner of my lane on two wheels. ‘Yeah.’
‘She could have come in, said hello.’
‘Yeah, she didn’t want to.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why. She thinks you’re a cunt.’
Fifteen years ago when we’d found out the eighteen-yearold Paula was pregnant, her and Colin had had to work very hard to reassure us all. ‘We’re not going to let having a kid affect us going out,’ they said.
‘We can all still go clubbing,’ they said. ‘We can all still go on holiday,’ they said.
‘Well, all right,’ we said, though we weren’t entirely convinced. Colin and Paula would need to make a real effort to show us they were still fun people.
After uneasy congratulations, I asked, ‘What’s the kid going to be called?’
‘Adom,’ Paula replied.
‘You mean Adam?’ said Siggi.
‘No, “Adom”,’ said Colin. ‘It’s the new thing all the parents are doing, to change just one letter of your child’s name.’
‘Oh, right,’ said everybody.
It was a new thing that became an old thing very quickly and lasted for little more than a year: now if you came across a kid called ‘Christike’, ‘Stanleg’, ‘Puter’ or ‘Margarot’ you know they were born in 1988.
‘Oh, go on and tell me what she really thinks,’ I said to Adom, trying to laugh it off.
‘No,’ he replied solemnly, ‘that would upset you too much.’
‘That your stuff for the weekend?’ I asked, indicating his backpack.
‘Yeah.’
Once we were seated in the living room I said, ‘So how you doing, Adom?’
He looked up, annoyed. ‘You can call me Adam now: I changed it legally once Dad died, you know that.’
‘Okay, sorry, I forgot.’ His mother’s attitude was still bugging me. ‘Isn’t she grateful to me for taking you so she can have a nice long weekend away in Worthing?’
‘She thinks you’re my godfather so you’re supposed to do stuff like that.’
‘Well, I was going to take you to a kindly prostitute when you was sixteen but apart from that I thought it was just a fashion thing, godparenting.’
‘Well, it turns out it isn’t,’ he said unforgivingly. ‘She says she lost you all twice, once when you all dropped her in favour of Dad and again when they was all killed.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And er … how’s the er … the Friends and Family Group going?’
‘All right I guess,’ he replied. ‘I know you think it’s odd because her and Dad were divorced that she’s the secretary of the Friends and Family Group.’
‘I did a bit at first but whatever helps I guess.’
Looking at me straight he asked, ‘Did you know Dad … he still would come round by himself you know, secretly to see her, to sleep with her. Did you know that?’
Here, though, I think he didn’t give me the jolt he wanted. ‘Yeah, actually I did. Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband phoned me up one night about six months before the accident and told me.’
‘It doesn’t matter now does it?’ he said.
‘Not really, no,’ I replied. ‘And are you, you know, okay?’
‘Oh yeah, I’m absolutely fine.’
I made dinner for Adam and myself. Not being aware of how much teenagers ate and my own appetite having shrunk so much, I had to cook a whole second dinner before the kid was full. He then went upstairs and did his homework; once that was finished he came back down and asked politely if he could go out and meet his mates at a pub in town. I couldn’t see why not; though he was only fifteen most of the pubs in town seemed exclusively for the use of fifteen-year-olds.
After Adam left the house seemed suddenly empty. I wandered about tidying up magazines and stuff. At about eleven o’clock I went into my cold empty garage, took the Marin mountain bike down from its bracket on the wall; using the remote control I clanked the garage door open and rode out into the night. Despite the cirKuss ground being dark and unlit, the tiny tent and the hulking sinister grey trucks all seemed intensely familiar. I had an idea where she might be; well, to be honest, when they’d been here three months before I’d come to the site several times at this time of night until I’d found where she was and I’d watched her from a distance hidden by the trees but never approached.
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?’
