(2003) Overtaken (20 page)

‘We’ll
play small arts centres,’ said Laurence, now in full flow, ‘maybe the odd
derelict warehouse — that’s very fashionable.’

‘Oh, I
can help you out there,’ I said enthusiastically, then paused. ‘There’s only
one other thing.’

‘What
is it?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘No,
nothing to worry about. Only when the play gets to the north, when I come to
see it there’ll be a man sitting next to me in the audience. I want you to
direct the whole play at him.’

A few
hours later after many more drinks the whole thing was planned. I would provide
twenty thousand pounds: this would buy me a tour of provincial arts centres and
a possible
London
premiere at a
theatre pub. My money would pay for a big van that the cast of three and two
technicians and the set that the cast would put up would travel in. Laurence
was going both to direct and star as the older policeman, the inspector. All in
all it was a pretty good deal; that sort of money would only buy you shutting
down Bury town centre for a fortnight at most.

My
intention had been to take the afternoon train back to.
Liverpool
from Euston but the evening found
me still at the drinking club. At some point Laurence said to me, ‘Old man, do
you think you could lend me three hundred pounds?’

‘Sure,’
I said, drunkenly fumbling for my wallet (developers always carried plenty of
cash). ‘I didn’t think you were so hard up that—’

‘No,
no!’ protested Laurence. ‘It’s just I need the cash right now. I’ve had a few
drinks and when I’ve had a few drinks that often makes me want to go and …’
He paused.

Here we
go, I thought, coke, prostitutes, boys, girls. Here’s the problem.

‘Makes
me want … makes me want to go and buy a yo-yo.’

‘A
yo-yo?’ I squawked.

‘Yes, a
yo-yo. I’m a big collector of yo-yos. There’s a lot more to yo-yos than you
think; you think they’re just a fucking toy but you’re a cunt if you think
that. I bet you don’t know this but the yo-yo was once a mighty weapon. A sort
of oriental boomerang, a skilled hunter could bring down a flying bat with a
well-aimed yo-yo. Then there were the bigger spiked war yo-yos of the Tang and
Ming dynasty …’

So
after a trip on two buses and the Docklands Light Railway, I found myself in a
council flat in a place called Mudchute where an old man was unwrapping a
selection of bejewelled and gold-plated yo-yos while a Chinese woman served us
glass after glass of clear oriental spirit.

‘I
think you’ll like this one, Mr D,’ the old man said. ‘Only silver plated but
the string is pure silk with a lovely balanced action.’ And a little while
later as we walked through a council estate a couple of teenagers tried to mug
us but Laurence knocked them both out with the yo-yo that he’d bought.

7

She pulled me through the
bushes, leaves and branches slapping me in the face and getting in my mouth
till we came out on the other side; now we were on the pavement of the A road
that ran alongside the cirKuss campsite.

‘See,’
she said, pointing to a grey speed camera which was sited right by where we had
emerged. Then she said, ‘Watch this,’ and quick as a squirrel climbed on to the
top of the camera and squatted there, folding her limbs over in impossible ways
and making herself very small. ‘Get back in the bushes,’ she hissed, so I
retreated into the foliage, crouched under a laurel bush and watched and
waited. A couple of cars sped past driving slightly over the limit but not
quite fast enough to trigger the camera, then finally an old Montego appeared
puffing along the road obviously sticking exactly to the 40 miles an hour
limit. As soon as the car passed her Florence took out the two disposable
pocket cameras that she’d bought in the petrol station earlier and one after
the other let them off as the car passed, so that there was a double flash
exactly as if the speed camera had been tripped. Florence quickly pocketed the
cameras and slid sinuously down the pole of the speed trap as the Montego
fishtailed to a stop in a cloud of tyre smoke, and as the driver, a fat man in
his fifties, came running back to the camera she slithered alongside me in the
humid undergrowth and lay there racked with silent laughter.

‘What
the fuck are you talking about,’ the driver shouted at the one-eyed metal troll
that squatted by the roadside. ‘I was fucking doing forty! That’s the fucking limit,
I was doing the fucking limit. What did you take my fucking picture for?’

Lying
there laughing and laughing, I slid my hand down the back of
Florence
’s jeans, slipped my fingers
inside her pants and began stroking her between her legs. We got up and ran
back, crouching low through the bushes, to her van. On the couch quickly she
undid her jeans and I pulled them off, then I turned
Florence
over and slid myself into her from behind.

This
time as I came my orgasm was accompanied by the sound of an old Montego
reversing into a traffic camera at high speed.

Later,
inside the van, we lay in her bed as thin autumn rain drifted on to the roof.
Though my body was relaxed and spent, my mind was working late at the office;
the problem was that I longed to know more about her. It made me uneasy that I
still possessed only the faintest idea of the things in her past that had
formed her and she rarely added to the scanty pile of information I held. It
was only in moments of complete satiation such as this when her muscles
slackened into my softer flesh and her breath stirred the few hairs on my chest
that I was able to ask her carefully crafted pre-prepared questions designed to
elicit precious biographical details.

Casually
I queried, ‘
Florence
, do you,
you know, think people can change?’

Oh
yes,’ she said. ‘I do, definitely.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh
sure. You know I think it is one of the most amazing things about humans that
there always seem to be some person, somewhere, who wants to do every single
job that needs doing. Don’t you think it amazing that there are always more or
less enough men and women who really, really want to be undertakers, or
cleaners of suicides off railway tracks, or bicycle messengers, or technicians
who shove little TV cameras up old people’s bottoms in the hospitals?’

‘Right,
I guess …’ I said. ‘So?’

‘Okay.
So you know those dolls they sell to the tourists in
Russia
?’

‘Yes.’

‘My
country is like that, a country inside another country inside another country
which is inside yet another country. This make everybody want to fight with
everybody. So civil war breaks out once communists go and quick as porridge
many people are ready and willing to consider a mid-life change of career,
really happy to change. They suddenly eager not to be teachers or greengrocers
or small farmers or technicians who shove little TV cameras up old people’s
bottoms any more but they want to be torturers, rapists, black marketeers, DJs
who call for genocide over the radio, snipers hidden in the rubble and waiting
patiently for days until the right little girl comes along to get water from
the one standpipe; they turn out to be really good at it. And there even seem
to be just exactly the right number of people who are eager to offer themselves
as victims of the torturers and the snipers and the rapists by making defiant
stand in the market place or sending their little girl to get water from the
one standpipe or hiding people of the wrong religion in their lofts. So people
can change, definitely yes.’

I felt
awestruck to be in her presence like I imagined somebody might be on meeting
Gandhi, though I doubted if their feelings of awe would be mixed with a desire
to flip Gandhi on to his stomach and take him again right there and then, as
mine were. That she could have been a victim of such things and still remain so
lovely was amazing to me.

Then she
said, ‘I had a husband once … I think he died. But, darling, I cannot talk
any more about it right now. When the time is right, then I tell.’

Leaving
her truck in the early morning, a low mist lapped at my ankles as I searched
for the key to unlock my bike; sensing a presence behind me I turned and saw
Valery standing hunched in the lee of one of the wagons, his jacket wet with
dew, staring hard at me. ‘Don’t marry her, you will be killed,’ he called to me
softly. I fumbled with the lock, jumped on my bike and rode away. ‘You will be
killed,’ I heard again.

Laurence
Djaboff had told me the quickest he could have the play Christie in Love ready
to’ begin its national tour would be a couple of months. Until it was ready I
had plenty of time to introduce Sidney Maxton-Brown to the concept of empathy
to give him an inkling of how another human being felt.

And yet
despite using a great deal of my energy I had no success at all in getting him
to read books, attend concerts or go to art exhibitions; even if I said
Florence was coming along he remained remarkably stubborn and simply refused to
go. The one thing he would do was watch films with me, so in the end I devised
a curriculum of movies that I thought might go some way to elevating a person.
Once or twice a week I got him to come round t6 my house to watch movies. Many
nights Sidney and me and Florence would sit in front of the plasma screen
watching Broadcast News, the entire canon of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx
Brothers, Almodóvar’s Live Flesh but none of his other films, ET, the original
Rollerball, Peter Yates’s Breaking Away, Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, Paul
Verhoven’s Robocop and Starship Troopers, the complete works of Eisenstein, Buñuel
and Billy Wilder.

Sidney
certainly enjoyed himself immensely but I didn’t really sense that
these masterpieces of the cinema were causing any noticeable increase in his
empathy. There was, though, something else that did really seem to be
unsettling him and that was friendship itself.
Sidney
told me after he’d sat blithely smiling through Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s Theorem that the day before he’d informed the many members of his
family to universal astonishment that he had a friend and that he went places
with his friend. He said they couldn’t see the sense in it.

Having
a friend didn’t seem to make him happy either. He took to phoning me six or
seven times a day to ask anxiously what I was doing and did I know what
Florence might be doing, and he was constantly demanding guidance on how he
should behave in front of people: what sort of a fork should you eat avocados
with? Was it bad manners to take an Alsatian dog to a wedding? Should you tip a
rabbi?

The
police still kept a close watch over Sidney: a couple of crackheads who grabbed
the money he’d just taken out of an ATM machine in the town centre were
astonished that four officers were on them before they had got five feet, but
by and large he seemed to have got used to it.

One
night early in November I slept over in
Florence
’s truck.

The next morning when I
got back to my house there was a message from Paula on the answerphone.
‘Kelvin,’ I heard her say in a tight voice, ‘can you come round? I need to talk
to you urgently.’

Oh
fuck, I thought.

‘It’s
Adam,’ she said as I seated myself in her living room.

‘I
guessed as much. He never set up that direct debit you know.’

‘Yes,
yes. I’ll get you the fucking money,’ she retorted impatiently.

‘I
wasn’t saying…’I gave up. ‘So what’s wrong? Where is he?’

‘He’s
upstairs. God, it’s been awful. He’s been doing like an enormous amount of
cocaine and now he’s become convinced that the fridge in the kitchen is trying
to kill him.’

I
couldn’t help laughing at this. ‘The fridge?’

‘It’s
not funny, Kelvin.’

‘Sorry,
nerves.’

‘Okay,
I know it sounds stupid. People think coke’s harmless but it can give you
terrible paranoia. There’s a lad in the next street who cut one hand off
because he thought it was trying to take money out of his bank account. Adam’s
been cutting himself as well.’

‘Cutting
himself?’

‘Slashing
his arms with kitchen knives, burning his skin with cigarettes, all the fun of
the fucking fair. He’ll kill himself if he doesn’t get help right away. The
GP’s been round and tranquillised him for about ten hours. Reason I called you,
see, I’ve spoken to this addicts’ treatment centre down south, a place called
Muddy Farm. They say that they can take him in right away, it’s only …’

‘What?’

‘It’s
three grand a week …’

‘Jeez…’ I said.

‘I
know.’

‘Well,
I guess I can pay that. I mean they’ll cure him, right?’

‘Oh,
I’m sure they will, I mean that’s what it’s there for. These people know what
they’re doing and I promise I’ll pay you back.’

‘Don’t
worry, if it gets him better …’

‘The
other thing: can you, could you, drive us down there now?’