by Alexei Sayle
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.
The decoration of the building site wasn’t premature Christmas illumination but rather signalled the Liverpool premiere of Laurence Djaboff’s startling new production of Howard Brenton’s play Christie in Love; a production which had been drawing ecstatic reviews in every town it had so far played in. Ticket touts who usually worked six streets over around the gates of Anfield Football Ground were wheedling at the invited guests for spare tickets. In much the same way as my business had prospered through my inattention, so it seemed that my investment in the play, though made for ulterior motives, was also starting to turn a profit. Moreover, though my backing was supposed to be anonymous, word was already starting to spread in the arts world of a hot new impresario operating around the north-west: after all, they said, who would have thought of backing a played-out old cunt like Laurence Djaboff and inspiring him to do such remarkably good work?
More strings of light bulbs led the excited, twittering, first-night audience across duckboards to the pub, now hollowed out and waiting to be refitted with its smart new architect-designed interior. For the next two weeks the space would be arranged as a hundred-and-fifty-space theatre, the banked seating surrounding on all sides the chicken-wired set inside which the police constable was already in place, inexorably digging his way through the knee-deep, screwed-up newspaper.
Feeling like some provincial Irving Thalberg with the most beautiful girl in town on my arm, I stood at the entrance to the pub welcoming the long snaking line of my invited audience. Florence had taken the night off from the cirKuss and stood beside me, my consort, dressed in a grey Jill Sanders suit I’d bought her in Manchester.
It had been an effort at first getting a lot of the arts establishment of Liverpool here, but now that they were they felt a thrill go down their trousers when they saw that Machsi Gorci and most of his family were also present. The Gorcis sat imperiously looking about them as if they were at a boxing match, pleased to have stolen a march on the other crime families and to. be getting their pictures in the papers for something other than murder and mayhem. The remaining crime families, seeing these photos the next day, assumed the Gorcis had found a new area to expand into, were getting some financial rake-off or tax write-down from the show and for a while after. that touring plays, comedians and dance companies received sinister visits from frightening men. I’d had to do some lying in order to ensure that Paula and the other relatives were invited for another night as they couldn’t be allowed to see the person I regarded as the guest of honour, Sidney Maxton-Brown, who was at that moment arriving at the site gate in an armoured personnel carrier bearing the markings of Zhukov’s Soviet Sixth Guards Army.
‘Where’s Barbara?’ I asked as he came towards me across the duckboards.
‘Oh, I told her not to come, I said she wouldn’t understand it or know anybody. Hello, Florence, blurry hell you look lovelier than ever.’
When he looked at my girlfriend like that, one good eye shining with naked lust while the other stared off into the corners of the world with a Noel Coward-like ennui, I had to repress a violent internal shudder. All the time I’d spent with Sidney had not made me like the man any more than I had the first time I’d met him. I reflected that my recent experience couldn’t be one that many people had. Perhaps girls who worked for escort agencies would understand what I was going through, spending, my time going to plays and watching films with somebody that I hated and despised. Except even the men those girls went out with hadn’t killed five of their friends, so really the only escort girls who might understand something of what I was experiencing would be ones who’d spent a few evenings with the Yorkshire Ripper.
I showed Sidney to his reserved seat right on the front row, I sat on one side of him, Florence on the other: With childish eagerness he kept wriggling on the
edge of his seat. ‘I’m really looking forward to …’ he said, but never got to finish as suddenly the constable’s head spun round to fix Sidney with maniacal staring eyes, the house lights snapped out and the policeman pinned in a single cold spotlight began to speak his filthy limericks.
I had read enough biographies of Irving Berlin and Terence Rattigan to know that the impresario threw a glittering after-show party on the first night. Mine was held in a big tent across the other side of the site: I made a little speech and presented Laurence with a gold Louis XIV yo-yo, there was free champagne and the latest style of canapé — tiny sausages split with mashed potato piped into the slash, quails eggs with slivers of toast sticking out of them, mini Yorkshire puddings stuffed with beef and gravy.
Sidney had been strangely quiet during the interval and afterwards I’d been too busy receiving the congratulations of the many new friends I’d just made to find out what effect the play had had on him. When things got a bit quieter I went searching in the press and found him standing alone in a corner staring into his flute of flat champagne. I said to him, ‘Hello, mate, are you all right?’
There was a pause, a sort of freezing you sometimes get when your satellite TV picture is hit by sunspots. Sidney looked up as if seeing someone he didn’t know. ‘Oh, hi; Kelvin … yeah, sure, fine. Where’s Florence?’
‘I think last time I saw her she was asking Machsi Gorci’s mum why all her kids were different colours.’
‘Right…’Then he said, his voice shaking a little, ‘Blimey, Kelvin, I know I’ve never seen a play before but those three blokes have got to be fucking brilliant actors! Do you know I had this weird feeling that they were doing like their whole performance to me alone? As if they was doing it all just for me … I suppose everybody feels that. But they really got the play over. I mean I’ve always hated the police, well you would, yet I never realised before what it must be like being a copper: interviewing nonces, telling people their kids are dead, digging up bones at murder sites, going to all kinds of a-’ Here he stopped.
