(2003) Overtaken (23 page)

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 performance 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.

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.’