by Alexei Sayle
‘All kinds of what?’ I asked.
‘Accidents.’
‘Yeah, accidents,’ I said. ‘They must see some terrible things, coppers, at all those accidents, people with their guts hanging out, heads stove in, squashed flat by trucks and that …’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sidney, ‘I feel a bit odd … something I … I think I’d better go home. Will you phone the nephew to bring the APC round the front?’
‘Sure I will. Yeah, you go home,’ I said.
‘Will you ring me a couple of times tomorrow?’
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ I replied, and for the first time in our relationship I meant what I said.
As promised, I called Sidney twice on the day following the premiere of Christie in Love and all through the week until I was free enough of business concerns and able to take the time off to go and visit. On the phone he wasn’t able to be specific about what was upsetting him, indeed I doubt whether he quite knew what it was himself.
A concerned-looking Barbara Maxton-Brown was waiting on the verandah to greet me.
‘Sidney’s in bed,’ she said. ‘It’s not like him. Now you’re here I’ll try and get him up.’
I went into the lounge and waited. Eventually Sidney emerged still in his pyjamas with a crumpled tartan dressinggown badly tied around him.
In person Sidney was even less his former bumptious self; he had the air of a man who had been unexpectedly turfed off his charter plane into a vast and puzzling country, filled with sights and wonders but whose rituals and manners were entirely strange and unfamiliar.
‘Hi, how you doing?’ I asked.
‘Oh, not too good,’ replied Sidney in a weary, tentative voice. “Ere,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘You know you told me to watch that QVC shopping channel because they had loads of great bargains on there?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
‘Well, you didn’t tell me it’s fooking depressing; it seems to me a lot of those people on there, they’re just buying stuff because they’re lonely and they’re desperate for somebody to talk to and the only ones they can think of to talk to is this fooking home shopping channel that’s abusin’ their misery. It’s really upsetting me but somehow I can’t stop watching and I can’t stop buying Beanie Owls.’
‘Hmm, is that so?’ I said. ‘Well, I’m sorry you’re not feeling too good. What are you doing during the day?’
‘I’m watching too much telly and it’s all upsetting me; there was this couple on a home make-over TV show and they just couldn’t find the right wallpaper and they got really upset about it and then I got really upset about it, then I started crying. It’s stupid, isn’t it, getting upset about wallpaper.’
‘Do you think?’ I said. ‘I’ve wondered a lot about this and the thing is, we have no way to measure pain, do we? I sometimes think that maybe the rich lady who can’t find the right handbag or whatever and she gets really distressed, maybe the amount of pain she’s feeling to her it’s the same as somebody who’s … oh, I don’t know, lost all their friends in some kind of accident. Do you think it’s the same or do you think there’s some quality to massive suffering that’s different? What do you think, Sidney?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sidney, ‘I don’t know.’
I said, ‘Well anyway, it’s not good for you hanging around the house all day getting all lethargic, I think what you need is a little holiday. That’ll perk you right up. So how about you and me take a little mini break to Amsterdam?’
I bought myself a car, a silver one. I couldn’t recollect what make it was and often I’d forget where I’d left it in supermarket car parks. I didn’t use it much but guessed it was handy to have around. Mostly it stayed parked outside my house.
In bed one night, Florence and I were talking when she suddenly said, ‘You know when you get new mobile phone then the battery lasts maybe five, six days, how that make you feel?’
‘It makes me feel like I can use my phone?’
‘No, fool.’ She laughed. ‘It make you feel good. When your phone battery is strong you feel strong.’
And here I thought of what I hadn’t thought of for days: the accident, how I’d imagined I could keep Loyd alive with my mobile phone. For such a long time they’d been a strong constant in the front of my mind and now they were getting indefinite and wispy like a faint fog, impossible to hold and grab on to.
Not noticing my absorption Florence went on, ‘Now when you have your phone for a long time, maybe a year or two and you have to recharge it every day, how you feel then?’
‘Bad?’
‘That right! When your battery weak you feel weak, so what I think would be a great thing to have is a thing about size of small phone, small black box and you charge it up and it stay charged for long time like twenty days.’
‘And what else does it do?’
‘Nothing — it just stay charged so you feel charged, you feel strong.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘Well, I been thinking I might like to be an inventor when I get too crippling with arthritis to perform in the cirKuss and maybe I invent such a thing.’
I asked, ‘Do you have arthritis?’
‘No, now I got to go pee,’ she said, sliding out of bed. I watched her exquisite back as she disappeared into the bathroom.
As if it knew we’d been talking about it my mobile phone, which was lying by the side of the bed, starting vibrating until it fell off the bedside table and on to the floor. Idly I picked it up. “Ello?’
‘Keep away from her,’ a voice said.
‘Hi, Valery,’ I replied. ‘How’s it going?’
‘You keep away or you die …’
‘Yeah, yeah, this is getting old … goodbye.’ And I broke the connection.
‘Who was that?’ she asked, wriggling back under the sheets and rubbing herself against me.
‘Just business,’ I said.
It rained a lot in early December, soaking the thick black soil to the consistency of Christmas pudding. I could really have done without taking a trip to the Netherlands but I wanted to capitalise on Sidney’s wobbly state so I cleared some space in my busy developer/arts entrepreneur schedule. Even so, in the end our trip would have to be midweek because one of the few things I couldn’t cancel was my first visit to Adam at the addiction treatment centre in Surrey.
The boy had been at Muddy Farm for five weeks and they were talking about letting him out after seven or, to put it another way, after twenty-one thousand pounds.
Paula had already made a couple of visits by train and taxi which she said had taken most of a day. Even driving it, when there wasn’t an emergency, was such an undertaking that me and Paula decided we would travel down on the Saturday morning and stay overnight at one of the many hotels in Poulsen, in rooms that were done in a similar chintzy style to the treatment centre except that they only had one bed in them. Then we would drive back to the north on the Sunday night after the final compulsory group interaction, hopefully late enough to avoid the traffic round London.
It was one of those rare mornings when only the good drivers seem to be out, no fucking trucks, no ten up Bangladeshi families in two-hundred-year-old Toyotas, no old geezers dreaming up the middle lane in a permanent vegetative state. Just the big silver German sports saloons riding low on their springs snicking in and out of the inside lane at 99 miles an hour, blipping their lights to move you over and flashing thank you with the hazards. So we reached the village of Poulsen earlier than planned, about lunchtime. No point in hanging around: we dropped our bags at the hotel and drove straight on to Muddy Farm.
There were many more cars parked outside the house than there had been when I’d taken Adam there originally so I was forced to leave mine further down the potholed drive and walk back. All around, other weekend visitors were drifting towards the farmhouse; they had the same concerned, absorbed look on their faces as I’d seen on those attending an avant-garde performanc
e art event. Behind me as I was locking the car, two matching black BMW XS four-wheel drives pulled up with a crackle of gravel. A smartly dressed young man got out of each, blipped their locks and headed briskly towards the house: to me they looked like the most obvious drug dealers I’d ever seen.
‘Welcome to Alcotraz,’ said Adam with a twisted smile when we met him in the reception area.
Though I tried to hide my feelings the boy’s appearance was shocking. There were a number of large sores on his lips and forehead, his hair was lank and greasy, one eye was filmed over and cloudy and when I hugged him I felt his bones, he seemed terribly thin. In contrast, the teenager’s manner appeared extremely bright, overbright if anything, like a star about to burn out.
The drill at Muddy Farm was that we had a couple of hours of free time to chat uncomfortably with whichever addict we’d come to visit then at three o’clock prompt there was a compulsory group interaction: this was where all the patients and their guests sat in a big circle and talked about the wonderful world of addictions.
After a while I left Paula and Adam to talk and went outside to the silent, sodden trees at the rear of the house. Down a wood-chipped path I came to a bench by a large ornamental fish pond, the water of the pond entirely covered by a stout net, presumably to prevent the patients throwing themselves into it. At three I returned. The group interaction began with a reading of AA’s twelve steps. Klinky had told us previously that Muddy Farm was a therapeutic community utilising the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. When Adam had first gone completely off the rails, as is my way I’d read everything I could about AA. Knowing little about the organisation beforehand I had always thought of it as being a rather silly, mad, culty outfit but the more I read the more impressed I became. While some of the stuff about your God and your higher power seemed clunky and old-fashioned they still appeared to have found a way to navigate around all the problems that bedevilled every other group of individuals who got together for any purpose, from the smallest fishing club to the Politburo of the Communist Party of North Korea. They held no money so nobody could embezzle, or abuse the funds; they took no position on anything and endorsed nothing so their principles could never be subverted by commercial sponsors; they had no permanent officials so no control freak was inclined to weasel their way into a position of power and they demanded total honesty from their members in all aspects of their lives. I had wondered briefly if I couldn’t somehow convince Sidney Maxton-Brown that he was an alcoholic, even though mostly he only drank the odd glass of wine or beer, then lure him to some AA meetings.
It was a pity in a way that Alcoholics Anonymous had nobody to speak for it. I would have liked to ask them how they felt, as an organisation that had worked out all this great stuff and gave it away for free, about their method being used by a place like Muddy Farm that charged its inmates three grand a week.
In the lecture room we formed a circle sitting on hard chairs, the patients and their guests; it reminded me of the few art history seminars I’d gone to when I’d been at art school in London. As a matter of fact now I looked closely I saw that one of the patients was actually the rich girl from the art history seminar fifteen years ago, the one who’d gone on about her flat in Rome with the Van Gogh painting hanging in the hall, the one who’d made me feel so bad; now she was grown up or rather shrunk down into a wizened, stick-thin woman, with obviously false breasts protruding from an emaciated frame. judging by what was said at the group meeting she’d spent the last few years whoring herself for crack cocaine so it wasn’t true that she would never want to fuck me after all: if I’d bumped into her before her family had got her into Muddy Farm and I’d had a ten pound rock on me she would have done it no problem. The two drug dealers were her visitors; they sat either side as she reeled off a decade and a half of pain in her posh voice. It was not the woman’s first time in a treatment centre; at one point she was saying, ‘When I was in the Monastery for the second time, which was after I was in the Pledge Centre and Shadows but before my six months at Rippling Pines…’ I figured, assuming those places cost roughly the same as Muddy Farm, that her family had spent maybe a hundred thousand pounds and, judging by what I saw, she was certainly nowhere near being fixed.
Most of the others in there were the same, having done time in many different places: it seemed that along with drugs, drink, sex, exercise, eating, vomiting, starving, cutting, they were also addicted to treatment centres.
I sort of had the idea that you went into one of these joints and they cured you; considering the amount of money they charged you would sort of expect it — that’s what happened in the movies: you went into rehab and you got better. I thought if they were charging so much and yet nobody was getting fixed then wasn’t it simply some sort of racket?
If these people were buildings, the trades and standards inspectors would be round in no time.
‘I don’t know about you,’ I said to Paula as soon as we got back to the hotel, ‘but I need a fucking drink!’
‘Yeah,’ she replied, laughing. ‘And a line of coke and a needle full of heroin and some paint stripper.’ Without bothering. to go up to our rooms and change or anything we went straight to the flock-wallpapered bar and ordered two triple gin and tonics and a bottle of strong lager each. A few minutes later the parents of a pretty anorexic girl about Adam’s age came in; they ordered quadruple Southern Comforts with ice. Seeing as we now knew every detail of the things their daughter did in the toilet it seemed only polite that we said hello to them and enquired whether they’d like to sit with us, which they did. In a, short while a lot more of the relatives and friends had drifted by and soon we had a party going. The mother of a heroin-smoking merchant banker, who’d been sitting at our table crying, slipped off upstairs with the two guys from the black BMWs and came back twenty minutes later looking a lot more animated, the brother of an alcoholic airline pilot went out to get the CDs from his car and was soon blasting Moby over the hotel’s feeble sound system and the girlfriend of a depressed and crack-addicted supermodel took her top off and danced wildly to the music on top of a table.
It was probably one of the best parties I’ve ever been to, sitting in a hotel lounge getting drunk and fucked up with a load of sad, worried people. I imagined it was the sort of party that World War One fighter pilots held.
As tables splintered and glass cracked Paula suddenly kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘Thanks, Kelvin, for doing all this.’
‘That’s all right,’ I replied. ‘It’s what friends are for.’
‘Is it, is that what they’re for?’ she asked, looking thoughtful. ‘I’m not entirely sure. Loving people just seems to cause upset, you’d be better off without it.’
‘Yeah, but you don’t have a choice,’ I said. ‘See, I reckon each person’s got their lifetime allocation of love, got a tipper truck’s worth and they have to dump it somewhere. If you don’t give your love to people you’ll just end up forming strange attachments to garden furniture or peculiar political parties or yachting.’
She asked, ‘How much cocaine did those two guys give you?’
I’d instructed Sidney to meet me at my place for our trip to Amsterdam. He arrived in a taxi, which surprised me because his wife usually drove him around during the day. ‘Where’s Barbara?’ I asked.
‘I think she’s left me,’ he said.
‘Left you?’
‘Well, no, she’s just gone to Makro for the day with her sister so not left me but we’re not getting on very well. I reckon it’s only a matter of time.’
‘Then it’ll be nice for you to give her a break from you and you might return transformed.’
Showing him into my garage I said, ‘I’ve got a present for you.’ In the centre of the floor, propped upright, were two brand-new Silver Marin Alp bicycles, carbon forks, top-of-the-range Shimano twenty-one-speed gears, complete with rear rack and waterproof panniers.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘Well, I thought
what we’d do is we’d ride these bikes to Liverpool Airport, load them on the plane, then ride them into Amsterdam from Schipol and then we can use them to get around the town like all the Dutch do.’
‘I can’t ride no fooking bike to Liverpool Airport, it’s like fifteen miles!’ he shouted.
‘It’s only thirteen,’ I said, ‘and you’ll enjoy it, mate, take your mind off things; exercise always improves a person’s mood, gives you a rush of endorphins to your brain.’
‘I don’t want a rush of dolphins in my brain … can’t do it, ain’t ridden a bike for years.’
‘It’s just like riding a bike, you never forget.’ Here I hardened my voice. ‘Sidney, I’ve gone to a lot of trouble over this, mate; it would really upset me if we didn’t do it.’
He paused; the calculations involved in pleasing a friend over pleasing just yourself were new to him. I could almost see the unused mental machinery clanking into life. When he spoke again the noises he made suggested a stalled apparatus uneasily grinding into renascence. ‘Gnfft, I ahh mnngrn, I yahnn, I yahnn …’
‘Look, I got these,’ I said, holding up two in-helmet walkie-talkies. ‘With these we can speak to each other as we ride along — won’t that be cool?’
‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ he muttered.
‘Great!’ I said. ‘Let’s get going then.’ And I began to transfer his belongings into the bike’s panniers, adding, ‘I bought you some special shoes to fit in the toe clips as well.’
For the first few miles I kept us to narrow back country lanes, a watery-eyed sun indifferently observing our efforts; cars here were few and those that passed swung out wide to give the wobbling, weaving Sidney as much room as possible. From time to time he pressed his ‘Talk’ button to try to speak to me but most of the time only a strained gasping would fill my helmet. I felt wonderful, this was easy for me; the susurration of the tyres on the road, the hedges and trees rolling past, the agreeable rhythm of my legs on the pedals, the sound of that bastard suffering behind me, all of it lulled me into a happy, reflective calm.
