(2003) Overtaken (3 page)

Siggi
and Sage Pasquale were extremely upset and said the whole thing put them in a
very difficult position: at first they tried to continue seeing Paula but that
made Colin very unhappy; he worried they were telling her secrets so in the end
the two girls started avoiding Paula. Now, she was no longer one of the group;
the girls said they found it easier that way.

That
remark that I mentioned before, Colin’s comment about Loyd and us having to do
everything when he wants, he made it about a month before we went to see the
cirKuss. Colin had booked a prominent table at a brand-new brassiere that had
opened in the centre of
Preston
and said he wanted everybody there because he and Kate had an important
announcement to make.

After
thirty minutes Loyd and Sage Pasquale still hadn’t arrived and then Loyd phones
up and says he can’t come because they are having problems at work with
malfunctioning runaway gypsy inmates on Auschwitz Kommandant 3 for the
Microsoft X box, but as Colin said, ‘It’s because he didn’t book the fucking
place himself and he knows we’ve got something really important to say.’

‘So go
on say it anyway,’ pleaded Siggi. ‘Yeah, go on,’ I added.

‘Well
all right,’ Colin mumbled sulkily. ‘It’s just that me and Kate have’ — he
paused —’decided to become inspectors for the Good Food Guide and this
restaurant was to be our first report.’

Kate
said, ‘We were particularly keen to find out what your thoughts were concerning
the “Platter of Pudlets” which we’d heard is a huge serving of tiny authentic
Welsh puddings in their individual ramekins presented on a wooden board.’

‘Now
it’s all a fucking mess because Loyd and Sage Pasquale aren’t here,’ whined
Colin.

‘No,
you mustn’t get disheartened,’ said Siggi. ‘It’s people like you two who can do
so much to raise the standard of dining out in the north-west.’

I said,
‘Yeah, who’d have thought it ten years ago: that these days there are
restaurants in the Golden Triangle’ — by this I meant the lands bounded by the
M62, M6 and M57 —’as good as any you’d find in Paris, Madrid or Rome.’

‘Thanks
to dedicated people like you two,’ chimed Siggi. ‘That’s right,’ I attested. ‘You
two.’

Me and
my friends, apart from Sage Pasquale, had all been born in the city of
Liverpool, but one by one in our twenties we’d migrated to a small Lancashire
market town about fourteen miles away. We all had lovely homes that, bought
during the low prices of the mid nineties, were completely paid for, giving us
plenty of disposable income. With the area’s excellent motorway links to the
north, south and east we could travel to see all kinds of cultural events that
were on in
Manchester
,
Liverpool
,
Southport
,
Lancaster
,
Preston
,
Bolton
. That year alone we’d already been in the audience for the Eels,
Eminem, Paul Weller playing an acoustic set at the Empire Theatre, Liverpool;
we’d stood in front of new works by Chris Ofili and Tracey Emin at the Lowry,
Salford; we’d gone to a poetry slam at the Lancaster Literary Festival;
witnessed touring productions of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, The Nutcracker,
Pina Bausch and her Dance Theatre of Wuppertal; seen comedians and operas; got
our cookbooks signed by two TV chefs at Waterstones in Manchester; not to
mention that at the age of thirty-three we were still clubbing it in Liverpool
and Manchester to top DJs most weekends.

In the
municipal car park on the front at Southport Loyd had slid the side door of the
Ford back and the other three were sitting around the fold-out table in the
dark interior drinking champagne and eating a plate of mini sashimi. ‘Hey
Kelvin, hey Siggi,’ they said and passed two glasses out.

Me and
Loyd were best mates from way back; he was a kid that came to live in our
street when we were five, the only black family for miles. We’d met when he
called my dad a ‘reactionary class traitor’.

Colin
and Loyd became mates at the comprehensive they went to. Siggi had been Loyd’s
girlfriend at school for a while; the other women came a bit later, after we’d
all left school.

For
Colin, school was still very real even though he’d left it fifteen years
before: he’d often talk about things that had happened to them there; he’d say
to Loyd, ‘You remember that time when we was all in the library and …’

One
time when we were staying in a villa on the island of Lanzarote he was going on
like this and I drifted off and started thinking about a thing on the telly I’d
seen the previous night on the satellite TV about ‘Tomb Raider’. They’d shown a
sequence out of Tomb Raider 2, the game not the movie. It was some bit where
Lara was swinging from rope to rope above a canyon then she dived into a cave
and inside the cave was a series of wood-panelled rooms that she had to run
through. Steadily through and through those rooms she ran. And the thing was
that to me those rooms were so, so familiar, more familiar and real than the room
I was in while I was thinking these thoughts, because when I’d been playing
that game I’d spent hours and hours, day after day, getting Lara through those
rooms and yet they were dreamlike and insubstantial, they were not real and
because they were not real I’d forgotten them utterly until I saw them again on
the TV and then they seemed realer than anything else. Well, to me school felt
like those suddenly remembered rooms on the one occasion when I’d gone back for
an adult visit. Come to think of it I recall Lara was being chased through
those rooms by giant slobbering dogs with the multiple heads of demons, and
school felt a bit like that too.

In the
summer darkness Loyd closed up the van and we walked in a group across the car
park and through the floral gardens to where on a large gravelled patch of land
was pitched a rather small grey tent. Much smaller than I had imagined it would
be, much smaller than you could really believe a circus could be performed in.
It didn’t look like it had been manufactured as a circus tent at all, it looked
more like something an army might take on manoeuvres for the generals to have
their dinners in.

Behind
the tent a strange collection of trucks were ranged in a precise line. As I
said before I know my cars and trucks. I was a man who occasionally bought
magazines about vans and commercial vehicles to read in the lavatory, and these
seemed to be of several different makes that I’d never seen before. The trucks
were of the same basic sort, raised high off the ground on two or three axles
clad with big chunky black tyres: the phrase that came into my mind was ‘border
patrol’ but I wasn’t sure why. The vehicles had all been painted a uniform matt
grey with the word ‘cirKuss’ stencilled on the side in white; most of them had
box bodies with small slit windows cut in their sides and steps leading up to
stout metal doors. Set slightly apart was another truck that had a large
generator on its back and was clattering quietly away to itself; thick black
cables led from the generator across the gravel and under the canvas of the
tent.

Round
the front of the canvas structure a string of lightbulbs ran either side of a
tiny avenue of sticky Astroturf that led up to the entrance of the cirKuss
tent; the doorway itself was a grinning mouth set in the leering
twenty-foot-high face of a demon. On the other side of the demon-head entrance
I noticed a sign embellished with a familiar blue and gold logo which read:
‘CirKuss acknowledges support from the EU fund for Strategic Vivication and Urbacity,
Lancashire Arts Council and the North Western Branches of Mr Tuffy Tune,
Exhaust Centres.’

A few
other clumps of people, some holding the hands of children, were drifting up
the walkway and buying their tickets at a booth set just inside the mouth, like
a tooth with a person in it. We didn’t have to visit the tooth booth because
Loyd had already booked our tickets over the internet at a discount, so we went
straight inside.

When
our gang went to see anything anywhere the six of us would invariably sit in
seats that were ten rows from the front to the left of the entrance; this was
compromise seating which had been agreed on after long and sometimes acrimonious
debate, because Colin, Kate and Sage Pasquale when left alone were
frontsitters, Loyd and Siggi were backsitters and myself, I was a middlesitter.
There were a couple of us who had asked why couldn’t we sit apart? where we
wanted? where we felt comfortable? but Sage Pasquale wouldn’t allow this.
Anyway the tent was so extraordinarily cramped that there were only five rows
of steeply raked seats inside it and we had to cram ourselves into the third
row with our knees drawn up like the gargoyles on Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Facing
us was the usual circus ring carpeted with sawdust but perhaps a third of the
normal size. Looking up into the roof I saw amongst the lights, which were
already starting to microwave the audience, a tangle of ropes and swings.

Directly
opposite the entrance, across the other side of the ring, there was a
proscenium arch about eight feet high and nine feet wide, red velvet curtains
drawn across it. Above the arch on to a tiny platform a trio of musicians
gingerly edged their way, the wooden scaffolding visibly swaying as they took
their places on rickety gilt chairs and began playing mournful music of some
Eastern European kind.

With
the house lights still undimmed some movement to the side drew my attention to
a clown or possibly a ‘clown’ who had quietly slid out from the side of the red
velvet curtains and was working his way round the ring; his costume and the
state of his make-up implied that he had recently been involved in some sort of
explosion. His clothes were charred and blackened and hung in strips off his
body, his clown make-up was smeared and smudged across his face. Though
staggering when he walked, still the ragged man was gamely trying to keep up a
cheery pierrot-like demeanour. What he would do, the clown, was to attract the
attention of a member of the audience with furious mad waving then when they
were focused on him he would very obviously and slowly throw them an imaginary
ball. Being malleable and eager to please as most audiences are, the crowd
member would mime catching the ball and then would mime throwing it back to the
singed clown with a determined grin on their face.

Sage
Pasquale, fearing what was about to happen, hissed at me, ‘Kelvin, don’t.’

‘What?’
I said. ‘What?’

‘Please
don’t fuck with the clown.’

Loyd
said, ‘He can’t do anything if the clown don’t throw him the ball.’

‘He’ll
make him though,’ she wailed, ‘he’ll make him throw him the ball.’

‘How
could he possibly do that?’ said Colin, just as the clown “caught my eye and
pulled a big enquiring face.

I
turned to my friends and shrugged. ‘Oh fuck,’ whispered Sage Pasquale.

I
turned back to face the ring and the clown threw the imaginary ball in my
direction. I caught it in a showy fashion but rather than pitching it right
back to where the clown expectantly waited, all eager expectation like a puppy,
I instead made a big play of studying the ball from every side while the others
sniggered around me apart from Sage Pasquale who hissed, ‘Just throw it back,
Kelvin, just throw it back.’

‘Okey-dokey,’
I said and with a grunt threw the imaginary ball straight through the entrance
and out of the tent. Right after that, even as the audience’s eyes were
following the non ball out of the tent, I noticed two things: firstly through
the rents in his outfit I saw that the clown’s muscles were the hawser-like
sinews of a man who .could pull and twist and punch things; secondly a faint
whimpering drew my gaze to the clown’s face. The man was genuinely upset at the
loss of his ball, staring about him in undeniable confusion. he looked
pleadingly at the audience, then he gazed at where the ball had gone, then he
looked at the ground, then finally he looked at me and as he looked at me I got
some idea of what it was like to stare down the barrel of a loaded
anti-aircraft cannon.

The
atmosphere in the tent was starting to sink into the sawdust; even the band who
up to that point had been sawing away at some Silesian funeral march clanked to
a ragged halt. There was no knowing what might have happened next but in the
embarrassed, imploding silence the red velvet curtain below the band suddenly
stirred and a girl stepped through.

‘Oh,’ I
remember saying out loud, for she was ever so beautiful. I guessed that she was
in her mid twenties with absolute black hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore
a white one-piece body suit which ran from long slender neck to pubic bone, she
had white skin and black eyes the shape of a cat’s, and on her long legs were
white tights and on her feet white ballet shoes. If that didn’t make enough of
an impression, hundreds of glass beads had been sewn to the suit she wore and
the powerful stage lights danced off them so that she sparkled and glinted. For
a second this girl stood taking in the scene as electromagnetic radiation in
the visible spectrum pinged off her, then she called out to the clown in a
foreign language and, hearing her voice, he turned to her, a big soppy smile
spreading over his countenance. The girl had been holding both hands behind her
back; now she brought one arm out and held it aloft, her hand holding the shape
of an imaginary ball. The clown eagerly cupped his hands in front of him and,
seeing this, the woman drew back her arm and pitched the ball in a clear and
powerful arc towards the clown; he leaped high in the air and caught it,
provoking a storm of relieved applause to break out from the audience, mixed
with many an angry and resentful glare in my direction. The clown, now happy
and smiling, capered off tossing his invisible ball, the girl gave an elaborate
bow and skipped back behind the curtain, the band began again with a new tune
which sounded like the Schizophrenia national anthem, the lights dimmed and the
show began.