by Alexei Sayle
The black gates swung back and I entered. Parking my car next to Sidney’s Panther tank, a thin layer of dirty snow made it appear like a relic from the siege of Stalingrad. Feeling a little like Von Paulus, doomed commander of Sixth Army, I drew the lapels of my leather jacket up over my ears and walked towards the lair of my former enemy, my breath befogging the air.
The two of them came out on to the balcony as I approached and stared expressionless at me while I mounted the icy stairs. Adam looked thin, his hair cropped close to his skull; he was wearing a Gap T-shirt and jeans, clothes as blank as his countenance.
Sidney too had cut his hair short, making him look a lot younger and was dressed in fawn chinos and a light blue denim shirt.
‘Hello, Kelvin,’ Adam said. Sidney grunted, ‘Kelvin.’
‘Guys,’ I replied.
‘Come inside,’ the younger man said and led the way into the big living room. Sidney smiled quietly at the boy, seemingly unfazed by his proprietorial air.
I had rarely been in this room; like the rest of the house the walls and floor were pine with big glass windows looking out on to the pale winter countryside. The furniture was the big gloomy stuff middle-class Italians were fond of, dark brown wood tortured into a variety-of swirls and curlicues, lots of marble and silk, gilt-framed paintings of non-existent forests. I sat down in an armchair, Sidney and Adam facing me on the couch. The teenager spoke.
‘So…’ He seemed both a lot younger and a lot older than his real age.
‘Me and Sidney …’ He paused then continued. ‘We thought it was important to get you out here to speak to you and to tell you that we both forgive you …’
I went deaf for a minute, so that when I came to he seemed to be saying something about cricket and was forced to say, ‘Whoa, whoa, back up a minute there. You forgive me?’
‘That’s right, we do.’
‘The two of you?’
‘Yes,’ said Sidney, speaking for the first time since we’d sat down.
‘What the fucking hell have you got to forgive me for?’ I yelled, standing up. ‘You, Adam, all I ever did was look after you and pay for you to go to treatment centres and worry about you.’
‘That’s what I’ve got to forgive you for,’ the boy said, and it struck me right there and then what cruel little pricks young people could be. ‘When you looked after me and sent me to Muddy Farm. I’m afraid my mum wasted your money there, Kelv.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, noticing he didn’t mention anything about paying any of it back.
‘See, you were delaying my recovery by doing all that. When you rescued me all the time, dusted me down and stood me up, you only enabled me to get back into taking drugs all over again. It was only Sidney who helped me to hit my rock bottom.’
‘The point from which he could bounce back,’ added the older man, in exactly the same tone of voice. It was like they had been taking Linguaphone lessons together in how to talk like a patronising cunt.
‘He put you in an ostrich shed!’ I shouted.
‘Calm down, Kelvin,’ Adam said in this incredibly annoying voice, ‘and sit down.’
I had to force myself to control the rage I felt but did so. ‘That’s right,’ he continued, ‘Sidney did nothing for me thus allowing me to find my own recovery.’
‘All right, okay, all right,’ I said, my chest feeling tightly clamped so that my voice came out all taut and reedy. ‘I can just about understand that I might have been doing the wrong thing for you — from the right motives I might add — but’ — and here I pointed towards Sidney —’I don’t see what that cunt has got to forgive me for.’
‘Maybe I should let Sidney answer that himself,’ replied Adam, and I swear the two of them smirked at each other. ‘Yes I will, Adam,’ the older man said, then, turning to me, ‘You see, Kelvin, first of all I have to tell you that Adam has explicitly told me he doesn’t hold me at all responsible for what happened to his father; he’s made it very clear to me that that was your shit, your shit that you were laying on me and him.’
‘But you killed five people!’
‘Did I, Kelvin?’ he said. ‘Or do you just think I did? I admit you had me convinced for a while. After all, you went to incredible lengths to make me think it was so and for a while I admit you made me feel extraordinarily bad. That’s what I forgive you for. I hated you for a long time because you pretended to be my friend then you turned on me. I was devastated, but me and Adam have talked about it a lot’ and we now realise that you were taking out your guilt on us.’
‘What fucking guilt?’ I yelped. ‘What fucking guilt?’ Sidney said, ‘When a person comes through something that’s killed others, then sometimes they feel bad that they didn’t die too. Especially if their feelings for those people were … what’s that word?’
‘Ambiguous,’ Adam chipped in. ‘It’s called survivor guilt, Kelvin,’ said the boy.
‘It’s called horse shit,’ I said, standing again. ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m going now.’
‘Of course,’ I heard Sidney saying, ‘but we’re not going to let you go, you know. You made me your friend and I’m going to continue that friendship. We’ll call you in a couple of days.’
‘I might not answer,’ I said petulantly.
‘I think you will,’ Sidney responded with confidence; for the first time his two eyes seemed to agree — they both expressed a supercilious contempt for me.
‘Goodbye, Kelv,’ said Adam.
I walked out of that pine coffin of a house and got in my car.
I stood on a small hill I’d had built and surveyed it all. Phase One of the Crystal Quarter had been completed. The terraced houses around the forest were occupied, curtains and blinds in their windows, cars parked outside. There were a pair of skaters skittering loops on the frozen River Anfield and a man walked his dog on the cobbled path that meandered across the development. A small unthreatening sculpture was scheduled to be placed on the peak of the hill within a month.
Work on Phase Two, the new Victorian warehouses and the gym building, had begun, the foundations were dug and the concrete was due to be poured tomorrow.
My mobile phone rang — the site agent with a query. After I’d dealt with the call and rung off it suddenly occurred to me that another phenomenon that had ceased was the threatening messages from Valery. It had certainly been weeks now since he’d called. Perhaps because the intimidation seemed to have stopped I began to think about what he’d said in a different way; it struck me that even though I knew he was capable of it, he’d never taken any action. ‘If he wasn’t threatening me then what did he mean?’
Winter darkness seemed to come on as I walked across the site and squeezing past Florence’s Fiesta entered the cold, empty pub: the bare plaster walls still exuded something of the wet clay smell of every building site but the kitchens were now in, the bar counter with its scrolled supports had been newly varnished and the electrics, water and gas would be connected in a couple of days.
She wasn’t in the main space. I shouted, ‘Florence! It’s me!’
‘Upstairs, sweetheart.’ Her voice came from somewhere upstairs. Climbing the railless stairs took me to the second floor; up there we had retained the original room plan and the corridors were dark and unlit. A narrow staircase behind a propped-open tongue-and-groove door led upwards again into one of the four conical towers of the pub. She was there in the last of the twilight. Out of the curved windows were the lilac-grey ripples of North Wales and the flat aluminium expanse of the river estuary. Beyond the building site the orange balls of sodium light were glimmering on.
She stood by the window in the dissolving light. I felt I had never loved her more than at that moment, the one solid thing in my life. Work had still not been quite completed up here; where she stood the floor was littered with planks of wood, strips of plastic and broken bricks.
Without looking at me she said, ‘Darling, you have given me so much with the money to do my show that I think I have to give you somet
hing back.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you don’t need to.’
‘Yes, I will give you the whole of me now, it’s time I finally told you my story. It’s time that you know the things that happened to me, the reasons I left my homeland, time for all that.’
Feeling thrilled and apprehensive at the same time I thought, This’ll make this awful day better. I can stand anything with Florence at my side to see me through it.
She turned from the window and looked at me for the first time. ‘So,’ she said, then returned to the view, except I felt she wasn’t seeing Merseyside but rather the distant hills of her own land. ‘One day some government soldiers came to our village. They told us that the Muslims in the next village had killed all the Christians like us the day before, so the men go and get their hunting guns and the soldiers give us some other guns and grenades, then we go and we get all the Muslims in our village and we put them all in their mosque and they all saying, please don’t hurt us and we say, of course we don’t hurt you, we know you since schooldays. Then we lock the doors and we set fire to the mosque and they start coming out of the windows and the men shoot them and throw in the grenades. I walk a bit away then I see down by the river a Muslim woman and her daughter I was at school with and they submerged so the tops of their heads only showing, so I go to our house and I get an axe then I go back to the river and I always hating her because they have a Volkswagen Golf that they swank about in and she see me and she stand up all wet and say please don’t hurt me and please don’t hurt my daughter but I hit them both with the axe over and over and over until they dead.
‘Then a bit later the Christians come from the other village and they not dead after all but they say they will go back and kill their own Muslims now. Anyway now we killed all our Muslims and my husband go with them but some Muslims know they are coming maybe and ambush them on the path in the forest and my husband I think is killed. He don’t come back anyway and then I think perhaps I have to leave.’ She paused. ‘It was a very very bad situation. I glad I told you everything now. Ah, this is so beautiful,’ she said. ‘I truly think I like to spend the rest of my life here.’
I imagined there might be a simple plastic switch in some dark basement and if you flipped this switch then everything in the world would stop. I knew that desire was not to be granted as sounds from outside were merging with the crackling in my head — a distant rumble of traffic, the barking of a dog. Well if the world was doomed to continue perhaps I would see to it that I never spoke again I considered the idea that if I retreated towards the steep stairs that led to the turret I could throw myself backwards down them. In addition to my real injuries I could pretend to have brain damage that prevented me speaking; I would never talk again, shut up and not say another word ever. I’d indicate through hand signals and pencilled notes that I wasn’t unhappy or anything, smiling and gesturing like a soft lad. Once a little time had passed Florence, my dad, my employees, they’d come to accept it; that would just be me — my thing, the one who didn’t talk.
Unfortunately what you wish for doesn’t always appear to come true so, remaining upright and upstairs, I said, ‘Here, Florence, I heard this joke the other day. How do you kill a circus?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied absentmindedly, her thoughts all still on the view or her past or fuck knows what.
‘Go for the juggler,’ I said.
‘I don’t get it, funny man,’ she replied.
I now stood at Florence’s back. There was a big deep hole over the way scheduled to be filled with concrete first thing tomorrow morning that she would fit in nicely. I looked at her white neck, stretched my shaking hands out towards it then stopped; instead, from behind I put my arms around her waist and kissed the back of her head, burying my face deep in her black, black hair. The pies, the pies, I thought, the pies, the pies.
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