by Alexei Sayle
Once we had passed the point of no return I started to ease us on to busier and busier thoroughfares until, seemingly without warning, we were cycling along the East Lancashire Road, an extremely busy dual carriageway that leads to the northern edges of Liverpool. Every minute or so an articulated truck or an overloaded tipper would rocket past, the driver oblivious to the vulnerable little creatures grinding along in the gutter. The bellow of the truck’s engines and the thunder of their many tyres tore at our ears, the vacuum dragging in their wake caused even me to have to fight with the bike’s controls as these gigantic blocks of rushing metal exploded past us.
I heard Sidney’s desperate panting in my ears. ‘Christ!’ he heaved. ‘Those fucking trucks … I never knew … the size of them.’
‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘they’re bastards, aren’t they; they don’t care whether you’re there or not, they don’t look.’
‘Bastards …’ he just about managed to hiss.
From the East Lancs I led him along the Queens Drive ring road heaving with smoky old Toyotas and dented Nissan vans. He was a game old sod, I had to give him that: though from time to time he would whine to me over the walkie-talkie about the pains in his legs, he kept going. From Queens Drive in a brief faux rural idyll we cycled through Sefton Park, passing the aged silent trees, the huge sandstone mansions and the dead flowers tied by a dirty faded ribbon to a bough against which a young girl student had been crushed by joyriders five years before. Out of the park it was a straight eastwards run to Speke and Liverpool John Lennon Airport (‘above us only sky’).
A mile or so before the turning to the airport road we passed an area of factories and a low-rise warehouse shopping complex. For a while, apart from cars and trucks, we had been being overtaken by various rattling old buses that looked like they had been bought from Bombay City Council after they’d judged them unroadworthy. Red traffic lights forced us to stop at the junction of the access road to the shopping complex. I had briefly let Sidney go ahead as the lights turned to green and a grimy, rattling single-decker bus came churning alongside; without signalling it slowly began to turn left across our path into the trading estate, black smoke gouting from the slats of its ancient diesel engine. I heard Sidney yelling, ‘No, hey no, hey, hey!’ as the side of the bus began implacably driving him into the kerb, his bike being drawn inexorably under the wheels: it would have crushed him if he hadn’t managed to wrench his feet from the toe clips and instead he was thrown in an arc through the air, to bounce down on to the rock-hard pavement.
The rear wheels of the bus passed over the bike, popping open the panniers and contorting its frame into tangled metal, then once round the corner it sped up in a cloud of black smog. I caught a glimpse of the driver gabbling away on his mobile phone as the bus disappeared from sight behind the corner of Allied Carpets.
As soon as I’d seen what was happening I had braked. Now I jumped my bike up on to the pavement and rode towards Sidney’s unmoving body. Laying my Marin down on the ground and bending over his sprawled form I heard him groan, ‘Oh, my fooking wrist.’
Uncertain whether I was relieved or not that he wasn’t dead, I asked, ‘Can you stand?’
He tried but gave a yelp of pain. ‘No, I think my fookin’ leg’s broken as well.’
For the third time in my life I dialled the emergency services and was again connected with the same woman: I wondered if she recognised my voice as once more I requested that an ambulance be sent.
8
The Christmas shopping crowds surged this way and that, loaded down with carrier bags of straining plastic containing things they couldn’t remember buying; I thought they could have all swapped shopping with each other and it wouldn’t have made any difference. The Big Issue seller’s dog had a Santa hat on and outside the Adelphi Hotel on Lime Street there was a man, some sort of Balkan refugee I guessed, wearing a flashing red nose and tinsel worn like a scarf round his neck, who stood tending to a battered metal cart from which a little later he was hoping to sell long sausages in doughy buns to drunk people.
The aroma of frying onions wafted over me and Florence as we climbed out of our chauffeur-driven Mercedes in front of the hotel. As I stood telling the driver what time to return to pick us up I saw the refugee look at Florence and Florence look back at the refugee, both of them scenting some sort of shared history. The asylum-seeking sausage seller was wearing a dirty grey sweatshirt with a big logo of Harvard University printed on it in black. Florence, noticing his shirt, said, ‘Kelvin, I don’t think that man been to Harvard University. Or if he did go der then that university certainly don’t guarantee the good job it supposed to.’
I said, ‘When I went to art school in London for that year our college scarf was a pickled conger eel.’
‘Oh, har har, it’s the funny man,’ she said.
The penetrating scent of onions followed us through the revolving door and into the crowded foyer of the Adelphi, if anything making it smell a bit better than it had done moments before.
We eased a path through the drunken mob of revellers and the hotel’s combative staff until we reached the entrance to the ballroom, inside which the annual dinner dance of the Merseyside Association of Builders and Developers was being held.
As we walked down the steps into the darker noise of the ballroom and picked our way between the many round tables, a number of fat builders started shouting remarks at us such as, ‘Ready for inspection over here, Sergeant Major,’ and ‘Officer present! Hands off cocks grab your socks.’ They called these things not at me, though I was very smart in my Hugo Boss dinner jacket but because of Florence, looking even more resplendent, wearing as she was the dress uniform of a major of horse in the regiment of the 14th Caucasian Mountain Lancers: her sabre in its scabbard shimmying on the hip, black boots shining like molten tar beneath her knee-length dark blue skirt, the row of medals across her breast reflecting back light like anti-aircraft beams from the mirrorballs which hung over the dance floor and her cap pulled low over her eyes giving her a mysterious military veiled look. Her in that outfit excited me terribly; I felt like I’d found a whole new different level of sexual desire, as if I’d suddenly discovered my house had another entire floor I’d not been aware of before.
At the cost of a thousand pounds I had paid for a whole table for the night which seated eight people and entitled them all to dinner, dancing and self-congratulatory speeches by a succession of fat arses. When booking the table I’d informed Florence that the dinner dance was formal; almost my sole reason for doing it was because I really wanted to see her in an evening dress, a dress I wanted to pay for, a dress to show off her beautiful, taut body, to make all the other builders in Liverpool jealous of the quality of woman that was letting me fuck her.
‘What is formal?’ she asked.
‘Well, you know, dinner jackets for the gentlemen, ball gowns for the ladies, that sort of thing.’
‘I’m not wearing no fucking balls gown, I look like fucking pedigree pig.’
‘You’ll look lovely.’
‘No … don’t want.’ She thought for a minute then said, ‘Wait, at these things, do soldiers wear their dress uniform?’
‘I guess,’ I replied. ‘I’ve only seen them do it in films but I guess you could.’
‘Then I wear my old regimental dress uniform.’
‘Your old regimental uniform?’
‘Yes, see when I start to show promise as gymnast, back home when I was kid they make me squad leader in the young pioneers, get use of all the best facilities, then when I am sixteen I get commission in the army for same reason. They make me officer: Major of Horse in 14th Caucasian Mountain Lancers, the famous “Chimps”; that their nickname they got after the Battle of Lunjberg when they ran out of ammunition and pelted the Russians infantry with animals from the zoo.’
I’d already bought Florence her main Christmas present: a thing called a ‘Disability Experience Suit’. This was a onepiece boiler suit-type garment int
o the lining of which had been sewn a series of jointed rods hinged where the wearer’s limbs hinged; at each connection was a screw and bolt arrangement which could be tightened and stiffened, thereby giving the person dressed in the suit the experience of having a range of disabilities connected with rigidness and old age such as arthritis, rheumatism, osteoporosis and so on; at the screw’s tightest setting, apparently, the salesman at Bell and Banyon had told me it was just like having motor neurone disease. There were in addition metal bands at the neck, wrists and ankles which could be tightened to cut off the blood supply to those limbs in order to feign multiple sclerosis. Also in this top-of-the-range model there were a number of pouches in the arms, legs and body into which could be slipped special bags filled with birdseed and lead shot to replicate what it was like for the wearer to be morbidly obese. I’d had the suit gift-wrapped and it was now waiting in my wardrobe like a beribboned and headless circus strongman. As I said, I had looked on the dinner dance as the opportunity to show off Florence as well as a rare night away from Sidney Maxton-Brown. After the ambulance had taken him away from the site of the accident, I called my dad to come and pick up the wreck of Sidney’s bike. He threw the tangled metal and wire into the back of his Volvo estate and though there was room in the passenger seat I cycled the mile and a half to his house. I made myself some cheese on toast in my. father’s spartan kitchen, then we watched a bit of horse racing on the TV, sitting side by side in his armchairs. After a while as the horses galloped round my dad asked, ‘Son, anyone you fancy for the National next year?’
I replied, ‘Well, they say Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Cherry Orchard, should be the one to watch.’ We did this joke every time we watched horse racing together so that we hardly noticed we were doing it. Nevertheless I had always taken care to update my references over the years. I seemed to remember when we started doing it, it had been Richard Eyre’s production of The Government Inspector that I’d used.
‘So he’s a mate of yours is he, that —Sidney bloke?’ my father asked.
‘Yeah, he’s a mate … we go cycling together and that.’
‘Funny-looking fella,’ said my dad, ‘knows an awful lot of swear words.’
‘Well, he was in pain.’
‘There’s still no call for that kind of language.’
I left my bike in his shed and took a taxi the whole fourteen miles home. It was only after I paid the taxi driver off-that I recalled he hadn’t told me a terrible story: in fact now that I thought of it, no stranger had confided in me for weeks; the flood of awful reminiscences seemed to have stopped.
Sidney had no broken legs, simply a fractured wrist and torn ligaments in both knees. He spent a night in the Royal Liverpool Hospital, then his wife had come and driven him back to the farm. I let him stew for a few days before going to visit at his log house.
He lay propped up in bed, eyes staring out of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows at the bare trees and frozen ground along the edges of his land.
‘How are you, mate?’ I asked. ‘Barbara says you’re a bit low.’
‘I do feel a bit low,’ he replied, still not looking at me. ‘I been crying a lot.’
‘That’s not like you,’ I said, secretly thrilled.
‘No, well, I been thinking about things…’Sidney paused. ‘Kelvin, do you think you’re a nice bloke?’
‘Well, yeah, I guess so,’ I replied.
Sidney went on, ‘They say “even Hitler thought he was a nice bloke” but I wonder sometimes about me … these days, if I’m worth knowing. I used to think I was a great bloke, now I dunno so much. Honest, Kelvin, sometimes I think it’s only having a mate like you keeps me sane.’
Along with Florence I’d decided I wanted to invite Paula and Adam to the dinner dance at the Adelphi as a way to celebrate the young man’s release from Muddy Farm; the other four guests for the night were my two best employees and their wives, the men crammed into cheap dinner jackets, the women dressed in ball gowns that made them look like baroque Belgian cathedrals. My employees had been there since the doors opened; Paula and Adam arrived a little while after me and Florence.
Rapidly we were served the sort of Christmas dinner you might get in a reasonably well-run open prison. As Adam sipped at a mineral water and chatted to my site manager’s wife about her whippets, Paula and I talked, for the first time sober, about the old days.
I said as my desiccated dinner was thrown down in front of me with a thump, ‘Can you remember all the terrible pretentious restaurants we used to go to?’
‘Not all of them,’ she replied, ‘who could? I do recollect the big Cajun cooking explosion of ‘92, remember that? We all went to a restaurant in Clitheroe called Mississippi Burning, and Colin said if he wanted his catfish blackened he’d move to a polluted part of the Ukraine, thank you very much.’
On my other side Florence said, ‘You know when I first came to England and I see a sign saying “Pub Grub” I think that the pub have some kind of weevil that they were really proud of.’
‘Having eaten in a lot of pubs I wouldn’t be surprised if they had been serving weevil,’ Paula said.
After the meal and the speeches the Kevin Stuart Eleven played for us; as it got later they were replaced by a DJ spinning the more melodic chart stuff. My beautiful girlfriend suddenly stood and said across the table, ‘Hey, Adam, you want to dance with me?’
‘Only if you take your sword off,’ he retorted, though clearly delighted at the prospect.
‘Sure,’ she said, unbuckling the scabbard and throwing it down amongst the wine bottles and coffee cups. She then took off her cap, shaking her black hair loose and undid the top of her tunic down to a lacy bra that showed the round tops of her breasts. Taking the boy’s hand she led him beaming on to the dance floor.
‘So Adam’s great now,’ I said.
‘Yeah, he seems fine,’ Paula responded. ‘And Florence, wow, what a girl! She’s wonderful, you’ve got somebody very special there, Kelvin.’
‘I know.’
As we watched her son dancing with Florence, Paula said, ‘Hey, do you remember how people used to get ratty with us because we talked all the way through films and plays and stuff?’
‘I know it used to upset Sage Pasquale tremendously but the rest of us felt we had such interesting things to say it would be a shame to keep them to ourselves, or worse still to hold them in till the interval by which time we might have forgotten them.’
There was a pause while we recalled our younger ghosts.
Then I said, ‘You know, Paula, if I met us now I’m not sure I’d like us much, never mind that we would all become friends.’
‘No, I guess we might have come across as kind of smug and annoying,’ she said. ‘We were drawn to each other at first then once somebody is your friend and they change in ways you don’t like you sort of make excuses for them simply because they’re your friend.’
‘That’s right!’ I said. ‘And now I just think maybe that I ended up with the wrong friends. You know when I … when they were alive I think as a person I was a sort of vacuum that they filled up. I got all my ideas from them, mentally checked my beliefs against what they would say even before I expressed them, even if they weren’t around they were a little advisory panel in my head. Now, though, I feel that at last I’m me, my thoughts, my opinions come only from me. Even if Florence and Si … the other new friends I’ve made all disappeared, I don’t think I’d change now. This is me now and this is how, in essence, I will remain.’
‘What, you wouldn’t miss Florence if she went?’
‘Of course I would. Jesus, she’s one of the chain reasons I am the way I am, she’s shown me how to be myself. When you look at her, she’s suffered so much and yet it hasn’t spoiled her,. she’s totally original. Yet if she went my belief is I would still be me, sad but me, there’s nothing that can happen to me now that would change me.’
‘Well that’s great.’
“ Florence returned
to our table, sweat plastering her hair down.
‘Hi, where’s Adam?’ she said.
‘We thought he was with you,’ replied Paula, stiffening.
‘No, he left me ten minutes ago. I’ve been dancing with some quantity surveyors.’
We searched all over the public rooms of the hotel for Adam but couldn’t find him anywhere. We recognised at the start that it was pointless. Had known from the outset that he was outside somewhere, in the city looking for drugs, just as I’d known all along, but had chosen to bury the knowledge, that there had been something fake in his recovery.
You get a routine in these things quite quickly, who to call, where to look. Machsi phoned back two days later to let me know where Adam could be found: it wasn’t a good place.
Telling his mother he was more or less safe, I said I supposed I’d go and fetch him. She told me to do whatever I wanted in a flat emotionless voice. Not understanding her tone, I would have talked to her further but suddenly an idea began to form in my mind. I quickly rang off then called Sidney.
‘Sidney,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to go somewhere and I thought you might like to come with me.’
‘I don’t know, mate,’ he replied, ‘I’m not feeling too good.’
‘A little run out, mate, it‘ll do you the world of good and there’s somebody I want you to meet. I don’t want to say too much but I’ve got a feeling this person can make you better.’
He perked up at this. ‘You sure?’ he asked, suddenly some faint eagerness entering his voice.
‘I think there’s a good chance,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ll come and get you in the car.’
‘Oh, I suppose so,’ he grudgingly agreed, a few seconds’ enthusiasm having tired him out.
