(2003) Overtaken (11 page)

The
woman continued — I’d learned not to interrupt them by now — ‘… the kid’s
dad was this man at work whose wife has motor neurone disease and he’s been
suffering from clinical depression, so I felt sorry … a bit sorry for him and
I suppose it showed because then I think he put something in my drink at the
firm’s Christmas par …’

Enduring
thirty-five minutes of this, rain had begun to fall and I was in farming
country. The town I lived in was where the line terminated. The station was on
the edge of the old town centre, down a steep cobbled lane ranged with railway
workers’ stone cottages.

Along
with the Saturday evening crowds returning from the big city shops I toiled up
the rain-polished lane; at the top I was forced to stop and rest for a while;
memories were again pummelling me: over the road was where somebody had said
this, in the park we’d all taken that. I was compelled by misery to lean
against the wall of the Station Hotel, a steadfastly rough pub at the top of
the lane. My vision would often go out of focus on these occasions; when clarity
returned my eyes were looking at a bright little poster in the window of the
pub. Looking closer, as figures performed a shadow play of drunkenness beyond
the frosted glass, I saw that the poster was advertising a new show from
cirKuss, apparently called Clamdango!. The poster told me that they would be
performing for a week, starting that night and that their cirKuss tent was
pitched on a patch of common land located on the edge of town where such things
as fairs, circuses and transient homosexual encounters were traditionally held.
For some minutes I stared hard at the poster and then slowly walked home.

My
route took me along the main shopping street where there were a surprising
number of butchers, bakers and greengrocers still surviving. At this hour the
shop assistants were folding up their trestle-tables, putting the sausages in
the freezer and bringing in the fibreglass, life-size jolly Butcher figures as
I passed.

Going
out of the centre walking along a busy road lined with sandstone Victorian
villas; cars and trucks swishing past, I eventually came to the lane halfway up
which was my house. This lane was where the wealthy of our town lived. My place
was a large 1920s semi that I kept in entirely authentic condition. Rather than
replace the slender curved metal windows with brutish PVC as many others had
done, I had kept the ones that remained and had restored them where they had
been removed. Inside the house the honey waxed parquet floor was totally
genuine and the door fittings and light switches were the original Bakelite.

In
deliberate contrast my furniture was modern Italian, stylish items from the
Memphis Group and Atalanta and in the living room was a Loewe plasma
flat-screen TV complete with surround sound. I let myself in and lay down on
the wooden floor.

About
two and a half years ago Sage Pasquale’s sister had married her husband; at
that time he was employed as a vivisectionist at a laboratory outside
Northampton and lived in a dead, silent village in the nearby countryside with
the blackened shapes of his last two firebombed 4 x 4s still parked on the
drive.

They
held the party after the wedding in the hospitality suite of the laboratory,
the disco only just drowning out the screams of monkeys with wires in their
brains. Our gang put up in the big Edwardian rectory opposite the converted
railway station where Sage Pasquale’s anorexic sister and her fiancée lived.
Now the rectory was a bed and breakfast hotel run by a disgraced couple by the
name of Major and Mrs Marvin. Or rather it was Major Marvin who was disgraced,
Mrs Marvin was just disgraced by marriage. Sage Pasquale’s sister got drunk on
a small glass of water, then she told us the story. ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ she
said emaciatedly, ‘but the major was once something really important in Scottish
tropical fish administration until he did something or failed to do something
with a person or a fish or some money that meant he lost his job and they had
to move four hundred miles to avoid the shame and they had to let out the big
house they bought for bed and breakfast.’

In
every room in the house there was either a stuffed fish of some kind or a
picture of a fish on the wall. None of us had really noticed the Marvins the
night before, simply checked in, unpacked our stuff and gone out again to the
village pub for Sage Pasquale’s sister’s fiancée’s stag night. But the next
morning we all met up in the dining room to be served breakfast by the Marvins.

It was
like being in a fish mausoleum so many stuffed poissons were on display. The
six of us sat round a big table in a bay window out of which we could see
Colin’s Jaguar S, Sage Pasquale’s BMW 735i, Siggi’s Lexus IS zoo and my Range
Rover filling up the gravel forecourt and denting the Marvins’ herbaceous
borders. Mrs Marvin had already been in and taken our orders for breakfast and
the major had popped in for a stilted chat about what the fuck we were doing in
his village.

A few
minutes later Mrs Marvin returned, bringing in our breakfasts two at a time; as
she was serving the second load Loyd suddenly started to act incredibly scouse.

‘Eh
luv,’ he said to her, waving a bit of bacon about on the end of his fork, ‘dis
bacon is da biz, y’know worra mean.’ The rest of us picked it up in an instant.
‘Oh, an’dem eggs,’ said Colin, ‘they look cracker.’

‘Oh,
dis is da gear dis brekkie,’ said Sage Pasquale, who wasn’t even from
Liverpool
but came from Harpenden. ‘Dese
eggs is friggin’ ace, girl,’ said Siggi.

When
Mrs Marvin returned, stepping cautiously as if she were on the edge of a tank
filled with poisonous puffer fish, with the last two breakfasts in her hands,
Kate said, “Ere, hon, could ya get da major to do us another couple a dem
fantastic kippers? Dey’re dead moreish, honest.’

I said,
‘Yiz stars, Mrs M, you an’dat major yiz stars. We’re gonna come ‘ere on our
‘olidays ain’t we, mates? Fuck Aya Napa dis is da go.’

They
all shouted their assent.

‘Yere
right der, Kelvin,’ yelled Loyd. ‘Mrs Marvin, we’s gonna come’ere every year,
won’t dat be da fuckin’ biz?’ I remembered as we drove away on the Sunday
afternoon, after I’d written ‘very nice’ in their comments book, that the
Marvins stood on the porch to see us off. In my rear-view mirror I saw the hard
plaster smiles they had been wearing switch off with an almost audible click as
my Range Rover trickled across their gravel and turned the corner into the
lane.

At the
time I’d thought it was a brilliant laugh rubbing the Marvins’ faces in the
fact that all their
Eton
,
Cheltenham Ladies,
Oxford
and
the Scots Guards had brought them to this, serving fried food and kippers to a
pack of grinning, thirty-year-old morlochs. We had laughed about it often
between ourselves since then but now recollecting that weekend I felt ashamed;
I thought the pack of us had been too cruel tormenting the poor old couple.

That
night I searched through my office files until I found the number of the
Marvins’ house. I dialled it but an auto-, mated voice told me their phone had
been disconnected. The negotiations took three months for me to buy the land in
Liverpool
which would become
what I was already calling in my own mind ‘Kelvinopolis’. The city councillors
I was dealing with would have liked to drag things out for a good deal longer
but recently several of the leading Liverpool crime families, the Gorcis, the
Pooles and the Mukes, had put it about that they were becoming unhappy with the
levels of home help that their old mums were getting from social services, so
the council needed to find extra money fast or the councillors knew they would
be held to account and by a more unforgiving figure than the local government
ombudsman.

Coming
back on the Mersey Link train following the formal hand over of the site, an
electrical storm hung like an airship over
Liverpool
Bay
and the scent
of lightning rippled through the long grass that grew unattended between the
railroad tracks. A man came and sat uncomfortably close to me while relating in
a high-pitched voice the violent abuse he’d suffered at the hands of a
succession of priests. However, fortunately he had to get off at Aintree Station
as he was planning to throw himself in front of a horse so it was quite an
uneventful journey really.

Walking up the lane from
the station I noticed that there was another cirKuss poster stuck in the window
of the Station Hotel: it told me that Clamdango! had been such a success on
their last visit that they’d brought it back for another two weeks, the run
beginning the previous Monday.

On the
doorstep of my house stood a teenage boy, tall and muscular with gingery blond
hair cut en brosse, wearing a padded jacket, huge baggy jeans with a chain
looping low from the back pocket to the front. As I approached a small red
hatchback started up with a clatter and took off, driving fast away from me in
a cloud of diesel smoke. ‘I’m a bit early,’ the boy said.

‘Was
that your mum?’ I asked as I let him in, indicating the red car turning the
distant corner of my lane on two wheels. ‘Yeah.’

‘She
could have come in, said hello.’

‘Yeah,
she didn’t want to.’

‘Why
not?’

‘You
know why. She thinks you’re a cunt.’

Fifteen
years ago when we’d found out the eighteen-yearold Paula was pregnant, her and
Colin had had to work very hard to reassure us all. ‘We’re not going to let
having a kid affect us going out,’ they said.

‘We can
all still go clubbing,’ they said. ‘We can all still go on holiday,’ they said.

‘Well,
all right,’ we said, though we weren’t entirely convinced. Colin and Paula
would need to make a real effort to show us they were still fun people.

After
uneasy congratulations, I asked, ‘What’s the kid going to be called?’

‘Adom,’
Paula replied.

‘You
mean Adam?’ said Siggi.

‘No,
“Adom”,’ said Colin. ‘It’s the new thing all the parents are doing, to change
just one letter of your child’s name.’

‘Oh,
right,’ said everybody.

It was
a new thing that became an old thing very quickly and lasted for little more
than a year: now if you came across a kid called ‘Christike’, ‘Stanleg’,
‘Puter’ or ‘Margarot’ you know they were born in 1988.

‘Oh, go
on and tell me what she really thinks,’ I said to Adom, trying to laugh it off.

‘No,’
he replied solemnly, ‘that would upset you too much.’

‘That
your stuff for the weekend?’ I asked, indicating his backpack.

‘Yeah.’

Once we
were seated in the living room I said, ‘So how you doing, Adom?’

He
looked up, annoyed. ‘You can call me Adam now: I changed it legally once Dad
died, you know that.’

‘Okay,
sorry, I forgot.’ His mother’s attitude was still bugging me. ‘Isn’t she
grateful to me for taking you so she can have a nice long weekend away in
Worthing
?’

‘She
thinks you’re my godfather so you’re supposed to do stuff like that.’

‘Well,
I was going to take you to a kindly prostitute when you was sixteen but apart
from that I thought it was just a fashion thing, godparenting.’

‘Well,
it turns out it isn’t,’ he said unforgivingly. ‘She says she lost you all
twice, once when you all dropped her in favour of Dad and again when they was
all killed.’

‘Right,’
I said. ‘And er … how’s the er … the Friends and Family Group going?’

‘All
right I guess,’ he replied. ‘I know you think it’s odd because her and Dad were
divorced that she’s the secretary of the Friends and Family Group.’

‘I did
a bit at first but whatever helps I guess.’

Looking
at me straight he asked, ‘Did you know Dad … he still would come round by
himself you know, secretly to see her, to sleep with her. Did you know that?’

Here,
though, I think he didn’t give me the jolt he wanted. ‘Yeah, actually I did.
Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband phoned me up one night about six months before
the accident and told me.’

‘It
doesn’t matter now does it?’ he said.

‘Not
really, no,’ I replied. ‘And are you, you know, okay?’

‘Oh
yeah, I’m absolutely fine.’

I made
dinner for Adam and myself. Not being aware of how much teenagers ate and my
own appetite having shrunk so much, I had to cook a whole second dinner before
the kid was full. He then went upstairs and did his homework; once that was
finished he came back down and asked politely if he could go out and meet his
mates at a pub in town. I couldn’t see why not; though he was only fifteen most
of the pubs in town seemed exclusively for the use of fifteen-year-olds.

After
Adam left the house seemed suddenly empty. I wandered about tidying up
magazines and stuff. At about
eleven o’clock
I went into my cold empty garage, took the Marin mountain bike down
from its bracket on the wall; using the remote control I clanked the garage
door open and rode out into the night. Despite the cirKuss ground being dark
and unlit, the tiny tent and the hulking sinister grey trucks all seemed
intensely familiar. I had an idea where she might be; well, to be honest, when
they’d been here three months before I’d come to the site several times at this
time of night until I’d found where she was and I’d watched her from a distance
hidden by the trees but never approached.