by Alexei Sayle
‘Yes of course,’ she said in her loud voice. ‘We will ask the Stampsons, Rabbi Kroll and his wife and maybe Captain Archer and some of the other female pilots from the airbase.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘these people are actually really real; it’s a guy called Sidney Maxton-Brown and his wife.’
‘I suppose that would work too,’ she answered.
The date was set for the next Monday night. When she thought about it Florence stated that she was very excited at the idea of this domestic activity, hosting a suburban dinner party, except she said she didn’t want to do any shopping or cooking. I did all that.
A few minutes before Sidney and his wife arrived my home phone had rung. ‘Hello?’ I said. There was a hissing silence on the other end. ‘Hello?’ I asked again.
A heavily accented voice croaked, ‘Stay away from her … you really stay away from her …’
‘Valery?’ I enquired, but the other end of the line had already gone dead.
Oh fucking great, I thought. A fucking big strong clown who’s jealous of me and Florence is now bugging me on the phone, but putting the handset down I actually felt a bit pleased that Valery was so annoyed about us that he was moved to make threatening phone calls. It was a similar guilty little thrill to the one I experienced when men ogled Florence in bars and at the supermarket.
Before the accident, if I got bored during the day, sometimes I’d drive to the college where Siggi worked and slip into one of the media studies lectures she gave. They weren’t hard to follow or anything since they seemed to consist mainly of watching ancient films and old telly programmes from the 1960s then talking crap about them. Back then, forty years ago, there used to be this thing called a Wednesday Play that they made everybody in the country watch because there was nothing else on the TV. A great number of these plays they transmitted appeared, from the ones we saw in the lectures, to be set at dinner parties, where these over-excited couples, who seemed to always work in something called ‘publishing’, would get drunk and bicker with each other and say terrible things and hold terrible secrets and throw stuff about and then events would end anticlimactically. My dinner with Sidney was a bit like that. I wondered if it made any difference in the old days, the telly being all plays about bickering publishers and discussion programmes with bishops, compared with the terrible fake reality shite we watch now. I don’t suppose it did. I mean look at them places like where Florence comes from: the only thing they had on their TV was the ballet and folk singing yet they were still at each others’ throats the first chance they got.
The Maxton-Browns arrived in a taxi right on 7.30, the exact time when they had been invited. Sidney was wearing black trousers with pockets high up on the legs stuffed with junk, overflowing with grimy handkerchiefs and big bunches of keys so that they increased the width of his already wide hips; as a top he wore a clinging green nylon roll-necked jumper that rippled over his corpulent body so that it not only emphasised his prominent man breasts but was so clingy that it made him appear as if he had man breasts on his back as well.
Sidney had brought a large plastic torch as a gift. Thrusting it at me he said, ‘I don’t know nothing about wine so I brung this … the batteries are inside. I knew you had to bring summat but I ain’t never been to a dinner party before.’
‘Well, that’s very kind of you.’
‘You know we don’t actually have any friends whose houses we’d visit like, well we didn’t before you come along … Barbara and me don’t, you know, really mix with anybody outside the family so … My dad always says a friend is just a stranger who hasn’t done you over yet. I bet you have loads of friends don’t you, Kelvin? You seem the type, popular, well off.’
‘Oh,, friends, yes, lots of friends,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got space for a few new ones at the moment.’
Ushering them into the living room they sat perched on the edge of my Atalanta couch. ‘Can I get you some drinks?’ I enquired.
‘What do you recommend?’ asked Barbara like I was a wine waiter at a Brewers Fayre Restaurant.
‘They say a white wine is always nice,’ I replied.
‘That would be lovely then, thank you,’ she said primly. ‘The same for me, thank you,’ said Sidney.
As I brought the drinks in I said, ‘So, Sidney, you say you don’t know anybody but family. I assume Barbara isn’t family?’ But then I thought maybe she was.
‘Oh no,’ said Sidney, smiling. ‘It’s a romantic story how we met. You remember those two lads, Venables and the other one who killed that Jamie Bulger kiddie? Well, one day I was down at the court when they was being tried, shouting and throwing eggs at the van they was in as they went into the court, you know, and Barbara happened to be next to me with a banner she’d made and we got chatting about how we hated people who hurt little kiddies and such, and one thing led to another …’
‘That is romantic,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think, though, that Venables and the other one were themselves just k—’
At that opportune moment Florence appeared wearing a short, low-cut, black dress. With one hand she was juggling three red peppers from the kitchen while the other held a tennis racquet with no strings that she’d found in the garage. Without stopping juggling she passed the racquet over her head and wriggled through it; as it travelled over her chest it nearly pulled one breast out of her dress.
Finally she stepped out of the racquet, caught all three peppers and gave an elaborate bow. Everybody clapped.
‘I really like juggling, it’s my favourite thing,’ said Florence, smiling happily.
‘Why can’t you juggle?’ Sidney said with some asperity to his wife. Then he said to me, easily loud enough for Barbara to hear, ‘Fooking hell, she’s a looker your girlfriend. Fooking hell she is.’
I was the one who did the cooking. As we ate I said to the two Maxton-Browns, ‘See, Barbara, the meal you cooked me was great, all different stuff sort of fighting with each other, but you know there’s a lot to be said for local produce and for restraint in cooking. What I’ve done is I’ve done us a vegetable soup made with produce bought from pensioners’ allotments, no chemicals, see? Lancashire free-range organic pork from a farming cooperative near Burscough and apple pie from local apples, with Lancashire Tasty cheese under the crust, which I’m sure you know, Barbara, is a local recipe, topped off with ice cream from the farm shop.’
‘Do you hear that, Barbara?’ said Sidney Maxton-Brown. ‘I want nothin’ but organic local thingummy from now on. Then you might look a bit more like Florence.’
We sat down to eat. One of the things about Florence, she hated eating with cutlery, she said it was too heavy; the first time I’d cooked for her I’d put out my prized David Mellor cutlery, and she’d groaned when she saw it, then wearily lifted a fork as if it were made of atomically compacted vanadium. After a few minutes she’d thrown it down on to the table shouting, ‘Ach, I can’t eat with this, it’s too fucking heavy!’ So now while the rest of us ate with stylish pewter designer knives and forks, she consumed her entire meal from beginning to end with a tiny silver salt spoon. I thought it was one of the cutest things I’d ever seen but at one point Mrs Maxton-Brown nodded in Florence’s direction and whispered something to her husband.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
She added another few words.
‘No,’ he hissed, ‘I don’t think she’s got weak wrists from all her juggling.’
‘Wow, Kelvin,’ said Sidney, starting on his second bottle of my Gewurtztraminer, ‘that meal was really first rate. We’re going to eat like that from now on definitely; you’re not left with that chemical taste that you get in your mouth when you eat one of Barbara’s meals.’
Then Sidney told us why he didn’t like the Freemasons for thirty minutes, because apparently they had everything fixed for themselves and there was this bloke he’d known whose brother had invented a formula for turning water into petrol but the Freemasons had murdered him and destroyed the formula. Then
he asked Florence if she wore pants and if she’d like to do some acrobatics for him, which was the point when Sidney’s wife quietly began crying but he hardly noticed.
As he was standing on the step about to get into the waiting taxi with Barbara already inside, arms crossed over her chest, a sour expression on her face, Sidney suddenly said, ‘Kelvin, can I have a quick word?’
‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘What is it?’
‘Something weird’s been happening.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘One of the nephews who’s been driving for me told me, so I went with him to look for myself.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You know I told you we were going to fly tip some of your rubble?’
‘I remember.’
‘Well, the nephews dumped the first load like we agreed …’ I noted his attempt to implicate me in his dishonesty but didn’t interrupt.
‘… but when they got back the next day with the second load, it was gone.’
‘What was gone?’
‘The rubble, your, our rubble. Somebody’s came in the night and took it away.’
‘What, like the authorities?’
‘No, not the fookin’ authorities, they never do nowt; no, I reckon someone’s stolen it.’
‘That’s mad, who’d want to steal rubble?’ I said.
‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ he squawked, suddenly agitated.
I said, ‘Do you think somebody was so morally offended by the mess you made that they hired a truck and took it away themselves?’
With difficulty Sidney composed himself, though still with a worried expression he went on, ‘I maybe just think some bastard has found a way to make money out of flytipped rubble and I can’t figure out how. I tell you it’s freaking me out. I don’t mind if I know what’s happening, I’ll take on any foocker, it’s the mystery I can’t stand.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’m not going to fly tip no more, I’ll tell you that. I’ll pay the landfill fees before I let some other fucker at my rubble. Do you think there’s a rubble-powered car? No, that’s ridiculous.’
‘Sidney,’ I said, ‘I was wondering if some time in the future you wanted to come and see a play with me.’
‘A play?’
‘Yeah, you know I was saying about making money, how it’s easy for me. Well, I give it away too, I sponsor all sorts of arts events.’
Momentarily distracted from the mystery of the vanishing rubble by an even stranger thing, he asked, ‘What do you want to do that for?’
‘I think it makes the world a better place.’
‘That’s mad. You don’t know all the world, they’re strangers. I bet if you had a family you wouldn’t give your money away.’
‘I do have a family. Parent, sister in New Zealand, cousins, hundreds of them, that I don’t ever see. They can look after themselves. I’d rather sponsor the arts.’
‘I can’t understand that but I suppose I’ll come and see your play since you ask me. Will Florence be there?’
‘I’m sure she will.’
‘I’ll come then.’
As he was about to get into the taxi, a police car turned into the end of my road and slowly cruised past, both officers in the front seats staring hard at Sidney. He turned to me, a look of panic in his eyes. ‘See, see! They’re still following me!’ Then he shouted at the police car which was slowly and deliberately turning around a few metres further on up my road, ‘I’m getting a cab, look, I’m getting a fooking cab! Leave me alone!!!’
After they’d gone Florence said, ‘What a nice man. I think his wife had good time too; a pity she wanted to go home early with headache …’
Do you remember when that ferry sank? I think it was called something like The Price of Free Enterprise. (Was it really called that? It seems a bit metaphorical.) Anyway they found that there were two male passengers that drowned who were living complete double lives who had wives and kids and houses both in England and Holland, plus there were two other men that drowned whose papers were totally fake and they still have no idea who they were. So if you do a rough calculation, on average every ferry has at least four men on it living secret lives, men taking trips without explanation, who were vague about their movements and who didn’t answer their mobile phones but always rang you back; every plane had maybe two, every train three and every vehicle with me in it at least one because I had not told Florence anything about the thing involving Sidney. To myself I said I wanted to keep her uncontaminated by what I was doing, figuring that she had been through too much already in her short life. I might have meant it, though there was something about having a secret mission that brought out the boy spy in me. Likewise there was no way to let Paula or any of the other relatives in on what I was up to; they definitely wouldn’t understand.
As I’ve said there were many nights at the theatre from which I had got nothing at all, yet I still had this strong feeling that if I just could find the right play there would be something about the elemental, timeless nature of humans performing in a darkened room for other humans that might begin to connect Sidney with the empathy I hoped lay just below his skin. After all, that time Siggi forgot her lines was a night at the theatre that was going to stay with me for ever so it could happen.
However, realising I needed specialist help in choosing the right play, after making a few phone calls and telling Florence I was going to a conference on new developments in concrete, I took the train down to London. Not having taken an intercity train for years, I could see why people preferred to drive. Okay, in first class on the train they did come round with a trolley every five minutes offering you free stuff: sandwiches, booze, tortilla wraps, naanwiches, but there was a guy down the other end of the carriage listening to music on an MP3 player so loud it sounded as if his brains were being fried, every five seconds some idiot would get a call on their phone and three times the woman opposite me asked the trolley guy if he had a tomato but he didn’t.
Since my unhappy year at college I had hardly visited London. My attitude to the place was a kind of defensive ‘Who needs it?’ type of stance. We had said to each other it was big and dirty and smelly, yet as I walked out from Euston into the arid little park where packs of drug addicts scurried away from the station in their stiff-legged, purposeful gait as if a commuter train had recently got in from Junkietown I suddenly understood why people said they liked the anonymity of the place. There was nobody in this gigantic city who knew me, I could be whoever I chose to be — now all I needed to do was think of somebody.
Walking south across central London through the university district and then the hi-fi and furniture shop district to my meeting, almost every road I tried to get down was blocked either by unattended flimsy plastic barriers, abandoned muddy, litter-filled trenches, stalled immobile cranes or roped-off mysterious piles of gravel in the middle of the pavement: whoever was responsible for all this disruption must have experienced a loss on the size of genocide to be digging up London on such a scale.
In the years since we had last met, on the day that Siggi had forgotten her lines, things had gone very well for Laurence Djaboff and then they had gone very, very badly. I’d followed his trajectory in the movie magazines that I read, the usual story of being lured to Hollywood, then of slowly being stripped of every precious principle and scruple and of being returned a broken and humiliated man. Now he was back in London and looking to return to the theatre, which wasn’t proving as easy as he’d hoped, having made far too many enemies in that small introverted world.
We’d arranged to meet in one of those members-only clubs that they have in London so people in the entertainment business don’t have to have anything to do with the public. Like some of the supermarkets I’d passed the club had its own beggar outside: sitting with his knees drawn up under a dirty pink blanket, he pleaded with me, looking up from the pavement with sad eyes, ‘Got any spare change, mate?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I�
�m always looking for workers in my business. I could give you my business number and guarantee you a good wage, maybe a place to stay, really get you back on your feet.’
From under his blanket came the James Bond theme rendered in tinny electronic tones; he fumbled about trying to smother it.
‘Have you got a mobile phone under there?’ I asked. ‘Just fuck off will you, mate?’ he said.
I always offered beggars a job when they tried to tap me for cash — I’d never met one yet who took me up on my offer. Inside, the club was like one of those Escher prints, all narrow staircases that seemed to join up with each other so that you were going down when you thought you were going up. I gave my name to a slender French girl with a clipboard. Looking her up and down, I thought, My girlfriend’s ten times better looking than you. After asking what my name was four times she told me Laurence was in the Reading Room. Shouting Room would have been a better name. The bar, all squeaky leather couches and hunting prints, reminded me of the ancient souk in Damascus; everybody seemed to be trying to sell something to the person they were with, frantically pulling ideas out of the air and yelling them at their companions.
He was sitting with a nearly finished drink in front of him. On this ordinary day Laurence Djaboff was dressed in a one-piece olive-green cotton jumpsuit like a tank commander might wear, thigh-high leather boots, a sleeveless untreated woollen waistcoat that smelled like a hot camel and a brown suede baseball cap worn backwards over his thinning grey hair.
After we’d ordered more drinks from a waiter I said, ‘Your agent made it pretty hard for me to meet you.’
‘Yes, sorry about that,’ he replied, ‘but you know I’ve had a lot of nutters pursuing me over the years. Presumably you’d be suspicious of an actor who came along and said he wanted to build some houses. So some builder no matter how successful wanting to finance a theatre tour…’
‘I know,’ I answered, ‘but like I said to your agent, it will be in the nature of a memorial.’
‘To Siggi who used to be in my company?’
