(2003) Overtaken Read online

  Alexei Sayle

  Overtaken

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Patrick Devlin very much for spending so much time so eloquently answering my idiot questions on matters of architecture and the building trade and also for introducing me to Michael Scott whose insights into the world of construction were invaluable. Special thanks must go to Jocasta Brownlee at Sceptre and to my editor Rupert Lancaster, my agents Cassie Mayer and Robert Kirby at PFD. And of course, as ever, Linda.

  ‘Very nice.’ That’s what I always used to write in those comments books that they have on a little side table in churches, hotels and restaurants, for you to record your impressions in. ‘Very nice.’ No matter whether the place was good or more likely bad, I would inscribe it in a weak and tentative hand not wishing to cause any upset. Of course I could say that things then were by and large very nice.

  Now I scrawl long, ranting denunciations, using words like ‘gallimaufry’, ‘jackanape’, ‘poltroon’, ink splattering like black blood across the pages or I calligraphy poetical, elliptical, looping encomiums. Sometimes I might do a funny little drawing of a kangaroo, or on other occasions smuggle the comments book away with me under my coat to a quiet place where for a few hours I may compose a sad story; sometimes I simply write ‘the pies, the pies’.

  I remember I said, ‘So I’m woken by a phone call at the crack of half four in the afternoon. Do you remember about six months ago I bought a derelict house in Liverpool, a late Georgian townhouse on Upper Parliament Street, then sold it to a young couple, criminal lawyers, on the basis that I got the contract to renovate it to their specification?’

  Siggi asked me, ‘Is that the beautiful house the council hung on to for thirty years just to keep their old worn-out washing-up bowls in?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘it’s the beautiful house they donated to the fraudulent community arts centre. So anyway the job that I done on that house was meticulous.’

  ‘“Meticulous” — it’s your median appellation.’

  ‘Precisely. I’m a complete perfectionist. For example I fitted sash windows above what their architect required in the main specification, which ended up costing me money. Now their spec also happened to call for a particularly rare kind of brushed aluminium combined light switches and dimmers fitted throughout the house, which I did.’

  “Cept?’

  ‘Which I did ‘cept in a dogleg of a downstairs corridor of the very back of the back of a dark, distant, underground extension at the remotest rear of the house … where I fitted one single, plain, white, plastic, standard light switch.’

  ‘It’s what you do,’ said Siggi. ‘Like in Persian carpets, they always weave a deliberate flaw because only God can make things perfect.’

  ‘No, I just ran out of aluminium switches.’

  ‘You twat!’ Siggi suddenly shouted. ‘What, what is it?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘Toyota van just cut me up.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ I replied, relieved. ‘So anyhoo, it’s the bloke from the criminal couple on the phone and he’s whining…’ It sometimes seemed to me that most of the people I sold my homes to were lawyers. Crime and punishment was our industry, when you saw a documentary about prisons on the TV and they interviewed the head of the warden’s union in the prison he would often be a scouser and when they interviewed the prisoners they were all scousers too! As if Liverpudlians have boxed off both ends of the lower depths of the criminal justice system. The scousers don’t get to inhabit the upper depths though — QCs, barristers and judges, that’s reserved for white public schoolboys like my client. I’ve always thought it odd that all these solicitors and barristers and judges come from this rarefied world — private school, university, bowl of nuts on the sideboard, weekend cottage in the Dales, yet they spend all their working days side by side with the absolute used cat litter of society — junkies, pimps, thieves, murderers. I wonder how it affects their view of society, it doesn’t seem to give them any profound insights into the human condition that I’ve noticed, they all appear like dickheads, the ones I’ve met anyway.

  So anyway I’m doing this lawyer’s voice for Siggi and I say, ‘“It’s just, you know, the final thing, Kelvin mate,” he says. “We love the house, don’t get me wrong, mate, you and your guys, your builder guys, mate, did a fantastic job, mate, it’s just that that switch, white plastic switch is like the final detail. That white plastic switch is really like, you know, screaming at us, it’s spoiling the rest of the basement, well the whole house really, the entire neighbourhood in fact. It’s like we’ve got X-ray vision: even if we’re in the attic we feel like we can see it, down there at the back of the house. Honestly Michaela’s getting quite down about it; she’s spent the last couple of nights in an Executive Double at the Campanile Hotel by the Albert Dock.”‘

  ‘Oh, get over yourself, tosspot,’ Siggi said.

  I asked, ‘Are you talking to me or the tosser in the Toyota van?’

  ‘I’m talking through you to this lawyer guy.’

  ‘Right. So I says, “Of course, Mr Harris, a thing like that, while it’s small it can be an enormous irritant,” I says. “Look, give me twenty minutes to shoot round to the wholesalers and pick up the right switch, another fifteen to get to your place and then I’ll swap it over quick as you like.” The lawyer, he breathes out with this sort of tremble in his voice, “Whoo, thanks, that’d be great, Kelvin,” he says. “No problem, Mr Harris,” I replies. “I’ll be right there.”‘

  ‘Then what did you do?’ asked Siggi.

  ‘Then I put me coat on, I walked outside, I got in me car and I set off for the circus.’

  Siggi said, ‘It’s not a circus it’s a circus.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s spelled cee, eye, arh, capital kay, you, ess, ess. CirKuss, not a circus. Completely different kind of thing. Loyd read about it in a magazine he got free on a train. Not like we used to go to when we was kids: mentally ill lions, sexually suspect birds in high-cut spangly outfits showing their twats, a ringmaster in a top hat with a whip. I mean if that isn’t a symbol of patriarchal hegemony I don’t know what isn’t.’

  ‘No, neither don’t I.’ There was a sudden bleeping in my car. ‘Hang on, I’ve got call waiting…’

  It was our friend Loyd. ‘Where are ya?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m on the M57 ‘bout half an hour away from the circus,’ I said. ‘Where are yous?’

  ‘We’re there,’ he said. ‘We’re in the council car park, on the seafront, you know, by where the miniature railway runs. They always make me think of the trains that used to run to Dachau those trains, but you know … sort of smaller.’

  ‘It’d make a great ride at Legoland.’

  ‘Is Siggi wit ya?’ asked Loyd.

  ‘No, she’s in her own car, about five minutes behind me.’

  ‘Cool, we’ll see ya in thirty then.’

  I switched back to Siggi.

  ‘It was Loydy, him and the others, they’re there. So what did it say in this article about the circus?’

  ‘Did you say “circus” or “cirKuss”?’

  ‘I said “circus” but from now I’m going to say “cirKuss”.’

  ‘Mind that you do. So the article said that the cirKuss was a modern reinterpretation of the old thing in a ring and that they were a collective and that all the performers were drawn entirely from countries where there had been civil war or genocide or regicide or some other extreme kind of “cide”.’

  ‘Have you noticed the blue stuff they put the big razor in in the barber’s is called “Barbicide”? Is that a mass murder of Barbers? Or possibly Barbies?’ I’d been storing this up to tell her for a while. ‘Or the mass murder of Barbie dolls?’

  ‘No,’ Siggi said firmly, ‘they’re very
hard to kill are Barbie dolls. Every little girl knows that if you’re not nice to them it’s your Barbies that wake up at night, pick the lock of the toy cupboard and murder you while you sleep.’ I found it cute when she talked about when she was a kid.

  ‘Especially that Nazi Barbie doll —Klaus Barbie the Butcher of Lyon,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a collector’s item,’ she replied. ‘No, they meant that they were from, you know, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Zaire, Chechnya. Places where it was a bit difficult to put on a circus right now what with the mass killings and whatnot. Some of them, it said in the magazine, were trained acrobats, jugglers and so on from traditional circus families while others had no acquaintance of performing at all until they had joined the cirKuss. The show they put on is drawn from their collective experiences and one of the few features it has in common with the old, shitty, discredited kind of circus is that they are both in a tent.’

  ‘It makes no sense.’

  ‘What doesn’t?’

  ‘The pies, the pies.’

  ‘What the fuck you talking about now, Kelvin?’

  ‘You’ll pass it when you hit the slip road,’ I said. ‘There’s this green railway bridge that goes over the slip road on to the A59 and somebody’s written on it, like years ago, “The pies, the pies”.’

  ‘So what?’ she asked.

  ‘So what, it bothers me. I don’t know when I first noticed it, it was just suddenly there, “The pies, the pies”. It was certainly before I got the TVR, perhaps before I had the Porsche or the Range Rover or the XK8 or the Maserati 3200 GT, which would make it at least five years ago. Thing is that not only do the words make no kind of sense but that there’s also no single other piece of writing on the bridge, even though kids have written on everything else: walls, phone boxes, lamp poles, the odd squirrel that’s stood still for too long, yet apart from “The pies, the pies” the bridge remains unsullied.’

  ‘I think you just like saying, “The pies, the pies” all the time.’

  ‘True. So one theory I have is that either the bridge is incredibly dangerous to be on, so perilous that even the thickos who scrawl their tag everywhichwhere think better of it, or the guy that wrote it died and nobody’s been brave enough to go up there since, even to get his body: But here’s another thing: the maintenance schedule on that bridge must mean it’s repainted something like every four years yet “The pies, the pies” is always there. Now either the painters carefully paint round it or as soon as it’s covered over somebody reinstalls it.’

  ‘I’ve just seen it!’ she shouted, laughing. ‘I’ve just seen it and I’ve never noticed it before. Fuck you, Kelvin, I’ll never be able to pass it now without seeing it, you fucker.’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said, ‘you’re motoring ain’t ya?’

  Still laughing she said, ‘If your clock goes up to 160 mph I always reck that’s what the car’s manufacturers want you to do.’

  ‘Try telling the cops that.’

  There was a pause then she said, ‘I’ve got a theory for you. There’s this guy, right? Whose nickname in the drinking dens he inhabits is “The pies, the pies” and he’s so fucking hard this guy, I mean he’d have to be to climb on to that crocodile-infested railway bridge with the 150,000 volts running through it and the land-mines that litter the gravel; he’s so hard that once he wrote his name up there nobody else has ever dared to cover it up or add to it.’

  I said, ‘Could be. I sometimes think that I’d get up there and add to it myself, write my name “Kelvin” or something cryptic, maybe like “Make my meringue Mr Attlee”. Something like that. I’d almost certainly do it except for the fact that I always forget absolutely and totally about “The pies, the pies” once I’ve driven past it.’

  ‘Driven past what?’ she said.

  I said, ‘Stop fucking flashing me, will you, I know you’re behind me.’

  Back then I was the sort of man who didn’t take much notice of living things apart from people. Not even most people. I was only really interested, really engaged with my small group of five friends; everybody else seemed fuzzy round the edges. Other than my friends, what I liked and what I could name every species and sub-species of were: cars, buildings, guns, bridges, aeroplanes, clothes, motorcycles and kitchen appliances. What I had no idea about were animals, flowers, trees, shrubs, fish and rock formations.

  If I had a contract out in the countryside I would often navigate my way around by the cars that were parked in the villages I went through. When giving directions I’d say to people, ‘You turn left at the village that’s got the Mitsubishi Shogun parked on the corner by the church, you keep going till you see an old burned-out Bedford CF van then take a left and stop opposite the metallic blue Ford Focus.’ Of course if anybody moved their car I was fucked.

  So when I pulled up next to Loyd’s van in the municipal car park on the seafront at Southport and Siggi slotted her sports car next to my sports car I ignored the radiant, showy, seaside sunset, the ornate floral borders and an extremely rare kind of kestrel and instead I enjoyed looking at the sinister hulking bulk of Loyd’s van in the descending darkness. It really was a cool-looking van, probably the only one of its kind in the country. Loyd had bought it during a walking holiday we’d taken in Los Angeles.

  There were six of us who were the closest friends there could possibly be. My name’s Kelvin. I persist in thinking that I was named after the editor of the Sun newspaper, a man called Kelvin McKenzie, who was revered in our house. I persist with this idea even though that can’t possibly be right because I was born in 1970 which was long before he was around. I’ll tell you what, though, when I was growing up in the late seventies, early eighties, when Liverpool was run by militant socialists, having right-wing parents was a disturbing experience. I remember once we had to hide a Young Conservative in our attic after he’d been chased down the street by bomber-jacketed heavies from Councillor Hatton’s ‘Static Security Force’.

  My mum left us when I was ten so it was just me and my dad after that, plus his occasional girlfriends. He continually went on at me about self-reliance, not being a scrounger, paying your own way in the world and it always made perfect sense to me. In our street there were kids whose parents never seemed to work but always had plenty of money, who sat on the step all day through the summer in their shell suits drinking beer; still their kids got the newest Star Wars trooper figures before anybody else and wore those big red Converse baseball boots then threw those out and got the latest Nikes with the weird laces everybody used to put in. I didn’t want to be like them.

  Not to say we were rich or anything — my dad ran a cafe near to Liverpool’s football ground. It was called the Kop O’Koffee and we lived above the place, the smell of bacon leaking into my bedroom as I slept. The cafe made enough money, mostly from match days, for me to be sent at the age of eleven to a private school in Cheshire. The uniform they forced us to wear made me even more conspicuous in a neighbourhood where self-improvement was considered a form of fascism. There’s not many kids that got into fights in the street because some other kid calls your dad a ‘reactionary class traitor’. It was like living in one of them books written by Chinese women about life during the Cultural Revolution.

  So that’s me, at the time this story starts. I’d say I was of above average height, dark hair, definitely overweight though not morbidly obese yet. There was my best girl friend Siggi, tall, sharp-featured with a blonde crew cut; Loyd, my best mate — the nerdiest black man you’d ever meet, he had one of those combined palm PC/phones that he wore clipped on the belt of his cargo pants, along with a Maglight torch and a Swiss Army penknife in a pouch. Loyd’s wife Sage Pasquale was also a big woman, almost strapping you might say, but very attractive; there was Colin, Jewish, thirty-twoish, gingerish, and finally there was Colin’s much younger girlfriend Kate who, surprisingly given his relative ugliness, was a very, very pretty little brunette.

  We were very close, all went together to see pl
ays, films, exhibitions at least a couple of times a week, talked all the time on the phone, e-mailed and texted, took at least four holidays a year together. I’d say we’d been pretty much everywhere in the world where you could easily get a drink. Only a couple of years ago Colin had introduced a previously unknown type of cerebral malaria into the north-west of England after a beach holiday we’d taken in Cambodia. As Colin said, that country was great when we went there but really it’s been ruined now. In the last couple of years it has somehow lost its innocence.

  So the walking holiday in Los Angeles? Well, about four years ago we all abruptly one day desperately wanted to get into walking. It’s funny, you think when you get an idea like that that it’s all your own, it’s unique to you, you’ve plucked it out of the air; only when you look back on it a year or two later do you see all the magazines you read at the time included big features on walking boots, Gore-Tex jackets, the fun lives of hill shepherds and how walking is the new thing.

  So where were we going to go on our walking holiday? The six of us would go round to each other’s houses excitedly clutching the beers and street vendor foods of the country whose brochures we were poring over that week. Still it was hard to decide: would it be exploring the canal towpaths of the Black Forest? Fourteen days rambling the lakesides of the Argentinean pampas? Or three weeks falling off the goat tracks and down the steep crevasses of the High Atlas Mountains? Nothing really appealed to us until Sage Pasquale suddenly said, ‘Do you remember. that Michael Douglas film Falling Down?’.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Directed by Joel Schumacher,’ said Colin.

  ‘In that film, he abandons his car, Michael Douglas, and he walks right across LA to the sea at Santa Monica.’

  ‘Where Robert Duvall shoots him,’ said Colin.

  Sage Pasquale ignored that. ‘I’ve always thought it would be amazing to walk down some of those boulevards of LA.’

  ‘But didn’t the guy in that film get attacked by gangs and stuff before he was shot by Robert Duvall?’ asked Siggi.