(2003) Overtaken (26 page)

‘No.’

‘What
are you going to do then?’
Sidney
asked. ‘She said I should leave him at a bus stop.’

‘Which
one?’

‘I
don’t think she meant it literally.’

We sat
in thoughtful silence until
Sidney
said, ‘I’ll take him then.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll
take him. You say I’m responsible for him being like this, so I’ll take him.’
With a strange sort of dignity he said, ‘I’d like you to drive us to my house
now, please.’

Again
there was silence between us until we passed through the gates of his farm.

I got
out and opened the back door so that Adam fell into my arms.
Sidney
came out the other side and helped
me to get him upright. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s put him in one of the ostrich
sheds.’

‘Aren’t
you going to have him in the house?’

‘No,
fuck off,’ he replied. ‘He’s a fooking junkie. I’m not having him in the same
house as me kiddies.’

So we
dragged the boy, his trainers trailing through the wet grass, to a breeze-block
shed with a corrugated plastic roof and a metal door. Inside,
Sidney
switched on a single harsh neon
light to reveal a bare concrete —floor and in one corner a pile of hessian
sacking. ‘Over there,’ said
Sidney
, indicating the sacking. We dumped him down on to the mound then
the older man squatted beside him and began to cover the boy with spare sacks.
Without looking up at me he said, ‘I’d like you to go now.’

‘Er …
right, okay,’ I said, straightening. When I got to the door I turned back and
saw that
Sidney
was still
staring down at the recumbent teenager.

I
didn’t hear from him after that. I suppose I didn’t expect to. I phoned Paula a
few times to see if she knew anything: she told me she’d received a couple of
picture postcards featuring views of Preston town centre on which her son had
scrawled that he was okay and would be in touch at a later date, then there’d
been nothing.

So much
of my life had been devoted to those two that now I had a lot more free time.
And I had to admit that I sort of missed Sidney, not in a good way or anything,
or that I thought there was anything to like about him. I told myself I missed
him more in the way that some recovering alcoholics miss their addiction in
that they still have a vague sense that there’s something they should be doing:
that something being getting drunk, falling down in the gutter and vomiting
blood on a trolley in casualty.

In
January Florence packed her truck, said goodbye to the cirKuss and came to live
with me. As we had pulled out of the cirKuss ground for the last time in
Florence’s behemoth I caught a glimpse of Valery standing where from my swaying
passenger seat only I would see him. He made a strange gesture, one of those
continental ones involving his arms, head, shoulders, three fingers and a thumb
that seemed to. convey an enormous number of things unsaid. This gesture
expressed, as far as I could decipher it, loss, resignation, a certain wry
amusement and mild seasickness, but I could have been wrong.

By then
Florence had decided she didn’t want to be an inventor but couldn’t think of
anything else; still, we had plenty of time. She drove her truck down to the
local Ford dealers and was outraged when they wouldn’t buy it for eight
thousand pounds or swap it for a brand-new Ford Fiesta. In the end she donated
the vehicle to a land-mine clearing charity based in Fleetwood and I bought her
the Fiesta anyway.

As far
as I could tell
Florence
didn’t
miss her old friends or performing in the cirKuss at all. She seemed to be
happy at my house without a job of any kind, watching daytime TV and going down
to the shops or taking long walks in the countryside while wearing her
Disability Experience Suit. Often she would get home from these trips after I
did, returning with tales of how people had been kind or wicked to her that
day, how she’d got stuck between the checkouts at Safeway’s or a child had
helped her on to a bus or how she’d fallen into the Leeds — Liverpool Canal and
been rescued by some gypsies.

There
was a ‘French’ restaurant in our little town that went by the name of Monsieur
Le Frog. I liked it because it was a really old-fashioned, typically provincial
place. English provincial, I mean, not French. The thing about successful
restaurants in small places is that having nowhere else to go the clientele
keeps coming back week after week; for that reason they have to have very long
menus or pretty soon the punters have eaten everything on offer. At Monsieur Le
Frog the menu was a leather-bound document longer than the Treaty of
Versailles. Over the years the two Egyptian owners had adapted to local tastes
so amongst the classics like duck a l’orange, boeuf bourguignon and steaks with
fifty-two different sauces, they also did a nice meat and potato pie with
cabbage and parsnips. I was one of their regulars, which ensured that when I
turned up one night with
Florence
there was a big welcome and we were seated in the nearest thing our
small town had to a ‘hot’ table, the one they would have seated Robert de Niro
at if he’d somehow taken a wrong turn off the M62.

While
she seemed perfectly content watching TV and wandering the countryside dressed
as an arthritic fat woman, I considered that
Florence
was wasting herself. The woman was so talented, so beautiful, so
extraordinary in her thinking, I thought it important that she expressed
herself artistically. Congratulating myself that I wasn’t the sort of man who
selfishly wanted to keep his beautiful girlfriend at home like some delicate
flower, I’d been thinking hard about what
Florence
could do next.

The
waiter came and asked if we were ready to order; like the owners he was an Arab
and in the days when my friends were alive I would have been unable to stop
myself taking on a version of his accent, dropping in a couple of the odd words
of. Arabic that I knew, saying ‘a fwan’ and ‘shukran’ while I requested my
food; now I did none of that. I chose French onion soup with pesto ciabatta
wedges followed by bacon ribs and a baked potato in my own voice, then said to
Florence
, ‘Back in ‘95 me and my mates
went on a clubbing weekend to
Prague
. There was a mental club scene there then, mostly run by the
Ukrainian mafia, good drugs made by ex-East German sports scientists, naked
girls in cage who’d do pretty much anything for ten dollars, excellent
three-course meals for under two pounds. Anyway, this Czech girl I met told me
that in the old Communist days the Communist Party that they had there running
everything would decide what everybody should think about everything: pets,
art, furniture. Apparently then they had these people called Political
Commissars who would come down to work and tell you what you should think about
pets, art, furniture. At the time it didn’t sound that bad to me, to have
somebody tell you what you thought all the time; it’s a fucking pain sometimes
having to think for yourself all the time.’

She
said, ‘Sure we had similar thing in my country but mind control isn’t as much
fun as you think; it was like everyone have to have two brains, “official
thinking brain” for when in public and at school and so on and “private
thinking brain” for when you with friends. It gets very confusing.’

Changing
the subject I said to her, ‘
Florence
, I was thinking, you remember when we did that play at the pub in
the Crystal Quarter? Christie in Love? Well, I was thinking originally to have
it —just as a bar and restaurant but then I said to myself, what if there was a
permanent performance space there with a nightly show, a cirKuss-type show,
with you starring in it?’

‘My own
show?’ she gasped, her eyes wide.

‘That’s
right. You could either devise it yourself or get somebody else to do it and
you could hire some other performers, other acts. I think it would make the
restaurant really unique.’

‘It
might cost a lot of money,’ she said, suddenly doubtful. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll
finance it, I seem to have the magic touch right now. I heard today from
Laurence Djaboff that Christie in Love is going to open in
London
’s
West End
at one of the big theatres.’

I could
see the idea was taking root. ‘My own show…’ she mused. ‘You know I have
had an idea lately, while I was out walking, a story from my country about an
eagle whose soul is stolen by a princess, then I think he becomes a train
driver … anyway is great story. I could do it as a dance, acrobatic kind of
thing.’

‘Great,
let’s go and look at the space tomorrow.’

The
next morning, early while it was still dark, my mobile phone rang: the caller
ID showed it was
Sidney
’s home
calling; for a second I thought about not answering.

When I
did it was Adam who spoke. ‘Hi, Kelvin,’ he said.

‘Hello,
Adam,’ I replied cautiously. ‘How you doing?’

‘I’m
good, Kelvin.’

‘Great,
I … we’ve been worried about you.’

‘That’s
good of you.’ Then he said, ‘I’ll get to the point. I was wondering if you
could come out to
Sidney
’s
place, like maybe today if that’s possible. There’s something I’d like to say
to you.’

I said,
‘Yeah, sure, I can be there in a couple of hours.’

‘Great,
I’ll see you there then.’

‘Great.’

Telling
Florence
I’d meet her at the
pub later that afternoon, I got into my car and gingerly steered it along the
black-iced lane. The sun had arthritically edged its way into the sky and now
shone bright on the frost-rimed fields as I drove along the familiar roads that
led towards
Sidney
’s farm.
There was little other traffic: though it was late February, increasingly it
seemed people didn’t get back from wherever they went for their Christmas
holidays till round about mid March.

As I
drove I tried to examine my feelings. As far as I could tell I realised that I
was happy, all the last terrible vestiges of the fear that had followed me for
so long had crumbled and blown away. I was healthy, prosperous and living with
the most wonderful woman who was exciting, bold, beautiful.

I
pictured what Adam had to say to me: supposing he wanted to thank me for what
I’d done for him, all the money I’d spent, all the time I’d expended. I also
thought that
Sidney
might be
there and might want to say something similar. In my mind I rehearsed the
gentle magnanimity with which I would accept their apologies.

After
all, I had put a lot of effort into those two and if I was frank with myself,
as I was trying to be, then I had to admit I sort of missed both of them. Of
course it was
Florence
who
meant the most to me, it was her love that had healed me, yet I wanted more — I
wanted my cracked little family all back together again, Adam and
Sidney
and
Florence
.

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?’