by Alexei Sayle
Unfortunately, though, I couldn’t go in the van because in the afternoon about two hours before I was due to meet the others I’d got a phone call telling me that someone I knew had just been taken in to the Royal Liverpool Hospital and I had to go and visit them. This man had been waiting a year and a half for me to restore a single piece of lead flashing that had fallen off his roof and he had finally tried to replace it himself. The man had inevitably slipped and fallen off, the roof, breaking his arm plus his femur in three places and suffering severe concussion.
When I got to his hospital bed the man was full of apologies. ‘I’m sorry, Kelvin,’ he said. ‘What was I thinking of? I know you were going to do it, I just thought…’
‘Honestly, Dad,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to start trusting me. I was actually going to do your roof today. I’ve actually got the piece of lead flashing in the boot of the car, I was actually, literally on my way round to your place when the hospital phoned.’
‘I know, I know, please forgive me, son, please, I’m so sorry.’ Then he started crying.
So what with stopping off at the wholesalers in Liverpool to pick up a strip of lead flashing, time was moving on. It would be impossible for me to get home, park the car, change and make our rendezvous so I had to phone Loyd and tell them to set off without me, I’d try and catch them up on the M62 so we could drive into Manchester together.
As soon as I topped the flyover in my TVR at the Rocket pub where the motorway starts, even though it was a late summer evening, the sky suddenly went black with stormclouds and a few seconds later rain began to fall. Big heavy drops that quickly formed puddles and then when the drops landed in the puddles each made a little bubble, a perfect glassy dome as it hit.
Again I phoned Loyd. The first thing my friend did after he got behind the big steering wheel of the Ford was to slip a bulky microphone headset affair on to his head, he then plugged this into his phone which in turn he clipped into a bracket protruding from the dashboard. Loyd had even bought a woodgrain cover for his Nokia which matched the fake wood veneer inserts on the van’s dashboard, so he needed to take off the shiny metal façade which his phone normally had and replace it with the woodgrain one. After all that he was ready to start driving, about five minutes after he’d first got behind the wheel. Like I said, he was the nerdiest black man you could ever meet.
‘Where are ya?’ I asked Loyd.
‘We’re just turning off the ‘57 on to the ‘62.’
‘Not too far then. I should be able to catch ya if I put me foot down though this rain’s a bit of a pig. What’s the traffic like where you are?’
‘Solid but moving.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Put me on speakerphone and let me give a big shout out to everyone.’
Loyd switched me over and the gang all shouted, ‘Hi! Hi, Kelvin! See ya soon, Kelvin!’ I heard all their different voices. Every one of them.
I shouted back, ‘Hi, gang!’ and then rang off.
Slowly I pressed the big drilled aluminium accelerator pedal and turned the windscreen wipers to their most rapid setting, adding the sound of their flack-flacking to that of the rain zizzing off the canvas roof and the wail of the big straight six as the sodium lights clicked by on the M62.
Round about junction 10, with the humps of the big old bomber hangars at Burtonwood like whales in a grey sea, I came up behind the Ford van. My friends were travelling in the outside lane, my TVR was about three car lengths back on the inside when we hit the flashing orange lights, the big yellow boards and the so mph warnings blinking on the overhead matrix signs which told drivers that we were about to be switched into a contraflow system. Everybody dropped back from 8o/85 mph to the 6o mph tradition agrees you do when the signs say so.
A few seconds later row on row of cones, and arrows made up of hundreds of flashing bright orange bulbs, led us across into the westbound path from which we had been separated seconds before by concrete reinforced armoured steel barriers; these had now been replaced only by a tranche of plastic magicians’ hats. By this time I had leapfrogged the two cars in front of me and was off the nearside of the van: I could see Colin and Siggi in the rear seats leaning forward to join in with what the others were saying. After perhaps half a mile the flow both east and west was swapped back to the left-hand bore of the M62 by more signs and another sinuous ribbon of cones, which came immediately after we passed under a bridge whose cover for a second eerily stopped the sound of the rain drumming on the taut roof of the TVR.
Indeed this silence seemed to last much longer than it really could have done, for, as the snake of cars entered the curve, I saw a big four-axle tipper, one of the Japanese ones that had never really caught on in Britain, coming towards us at a speed well over the so limit, spray flaming out from its sides. The driver, realising he was never going to make the sharp turn to his left, tried to brake instead, forcing all the weight from the full load he was carrying on to his leading wheels. One tyre failed to take the sudden weight and exploded. I saw it go, a colourless explosion followed, by ribbons of black rubber springing up into the air like joke snakes bursting from a can bought at a magic shop. All grip now gone and down to the spark-showering metal rims on its leading wheels, the tipper slewed out of its own lane, detonating through the cones, popping them aside like skittles and he hit Loyd’s van square in the side. The brute power of the truck was such that it took the van right across in front of me, the powerful headlamps of the tipper lighting up the inside of the Ford showing all my friends sitting calmly in their seats. Then I was past them and the motorway was as it always was, cars and cars and cars all the way to the North Sea a hundred miles away to the east.
Except that looking in my rear-view mirror I could see there was nobody behind me. I was the last one to come through, the two eastbound lanes of the contraflow were empty and on the opposite side the traffic was beginning to bunch to a halt, brake lights and hazards blinking on and off in the streaming rain. Because of the roadworks the hard shoulder was being used as one of the lanes but as there was no other traffic it didn’t matter when I stamped on the brakes and slithered to a stop in the middle of the carriageway. I dialled 999 on my mobile phone and it was only then, when connected to the emergency operator, that sound seemed to return, both inside and out, with a cacophonous rush. Speaking to the woman operator, a decade of watching police and hospital dramas on TV gave me the convincing jargon. Calmly I said, ‘There’s been a collision eastbound on the M62 approximately a mile east of junction 10. Tipper truck versus van, multiple casualties, I repeat multiple casualties and risk of fire.’
The operator, picking up on my tone, told me units were being despatched and would soon be on scene, then she broke the connection.
Clambering out of the TVR I fell to my knees for some reason, I didn’t know why. Remaining on all fours with stinging palms for a few seconds, I then got to my feet and stood for a little while longer on the tarmac swaying backwards and forwards; collecting myself, I began to run up the M62.
The tipper truck had been crammed to the top and above with a load of rubble, bricks and broken cement, making it tremendously heavy and giving it enough terminal velocity to drive Loyd’s van into the concrete side of the bridge at 70 miles an hour. After pushing the van against the wall the truck had then mounted it, ridden up over it, crushed it downwards, compacted it, before coming to a stop rearing up into the air resting its weight on the torn cadaver of the van.
All around on the motorway drivers from the stalled traffic were getting out of their cars and staring intently at the wreck, as if attempting to prise apart the ragged scraps of metal and glass, the battering oily girders, the rocks and stones, solely by the use of mind control.
A rescue party began to form, a camouflage-panted man pulled a fire extinguisher from his winch and aerial-adorned Land-Rover then ran over to the crash and squirted foam on to some wisps of smoke curling from under the wreckage. An elderly man wearing a tweed jacket and a dicky bow climb
ed out of a big BMW 7 series, said to the crowd gathering around the smash that he was a surgeon, don’t try and move anybody, clear the rubble, has somebody called the paramedics? Good, don’t try and move anybody, wait till the paramedics get here, I’m a surgeon. Then clambered to the back of the van and stuck his head through the hole where the rear window had been and started talking to somebody in there. A woman from an old Ford Fiesta said she was a nurse and inserted herself in the hole next to the surgeon. I sort of wondered why everybody was stating their jobs. I wondered if I should say, ‘I’m a builder.’ Then stick myself into a hole. I supposed I could of course mention that they were my friends in there under the metal, but it seemed like that would be pulling rank, grandstanding sort of, drawing attention to myself in an egotistical way and I didn’t want to do that.
So instead I walked around the other side of the truck and climbed up the slippery grass bank to where the tipper’s cab was hanging in the air. Another group of motorists, perhaps those who preferred a happy ending, were talking to the truck driver through the open hanging door of his cab. He seemed to be conscious and if not able to talk was at least able to swear.
‘Fuck, oh fuck,’ he said, ‘fuck, oh fuck, my fucking leg. Fuck, oh fuck.’
‘You’ll be all right, mate,’ said one of the drivers, ‘the paramedics are on their way.’
‘Fuck, oh fuck,’ said the truck driver by way of reply. In the distance I heard the first wailing of sirens cleaving the sodden air.
The first unit to arrive was a Lancashire Brigade fire engine coming the wrong way up the eastbound carriageway, then a St Helens ambulance, a Merseyside Police Range Rover, two more ambulances and another Lancashire fire engine. Soon there were enough flashing lights for a disco and a load of confident bossy men and women in reflective jackets ordering each other about. The second fire crew and a pair of paramedics, dragging a big square bag like they were planning a picnic, came clambering up the bank to attend to the truck driver. Clearly useless, I went back down the steep grass slope to hover near the wreck of the Ford van.
That’s when I noticed that there was a strange grow sound coming from the top pocket of my shirt: what: must have happened was that because Loyd’s was the last number I’d dialled on my mobile, at some point I had accidentally pressed the redial button and was now connected to my friend inside the mangled van.
I put the phone to my ear. ‘Hello, mate?’ I said.
‘All right, mate,’ I heard Loyd reply. An energetic enough reply though there was a wet, quavering quality to his voice that for a second made me feel dizzy. In the background, over the phone, I could hear the little man who’d said he was a surgeon murmuring to someone.
‘How you feeling?’ I asked.
‘A bit flat,’ Loyd said. Then he laughed, ‘Hee, hee, hee.’
‘How’s everybody else?’ I enquired. ‘How’s everybody else?’ I repeated, but Loyd seemed to not be listening any more and just kept going ‘hee, hee, hee’. In strange stereo I could now hear the fire brigade’s saws beginning to cut into the metal of the van both over his phone and a microsecond later floating towards me across the roadside grass.
I felt totally useless amongst all the competing emergency services going about their proficient work but then a thought came to me that as long as I didn’t hang up my phone I could somehow keep Loyd alive, like one of those machines that they hook you up to in the hospital that do the breathing for you, a life support kind of thing. Glad to be doing something, I checked the battery level on my Nokia: it was two-thirds full, good, plus signal strength was excellent out there in the open flat countryside so I reckoned it would easily be possible to keep Loyd breathing until the fire brigade managed to cut him out of the smash and got him and the others to the nearest hospital.
Now that I was a vital part of the rescue effort I felt able to get closer to the wreck of the Ford van. By now the fire crew had most of the side of the vehicle hacked away; briefly I looked inside; I thought it was like one of those motorised advertising hoardings that you get at busy road junctions where three different adverts are cut into strips and pasted on to triangular rollers the shape of Toblerone bars that pivot from one picture to another, except sometimes the rollers get stuck, the motor jams or something, so that one poster is mixed with another; say one advert is for a van and one is of some models in swimsuits and one is for some jagged strips of metal maybe, so they’re all jumbled up with strips of the people and strips of the van and strips of the jagged metal arms and wheel and head and hand and seat and gearstick.
Slightly behind the straining fire crew and the bright green overalled paramedics there was a big traffic cop, a sergeant judging by the stripes on his uniform. He was holding a bright spotlight over his head so that the firemen and the paramedics could see what they were doing.
I went over to this man also holding up my mobile phone in imitation of the way the policeman was holding the spotlight. I said to the policeman, ‘It’s all right, mate, I’ve got Loyd, he’s the driver, the driver, the driver of that van there, I’ve got him … he’s here on my mobi … it’s all right see? As long as I keep him connected, it’s sort of like a life support thing, you know what I mean? As long as I don’t hang up, right? It’ll be okay. Look, I’ve got battery power for hours yet so there’s no problem there and signal strength is excell—’
The sergeant —looked at me. ‘Do you know these people?’ he asked, indicating the insides of the van with a nod of his head.
‘Yeah, they’re my mates, I was behind, I saw it all happen.’
The sergeant called to another policeman. He said, ‘Max, take this …’ and he handed the lamp over to a younger constable, then he took me by the arm and led me a little way off from the grinding sounds and the flashing lights.
‘I’m sorry, son,’ he said, then again, ‘I’m sorry, son, but they’re all dead.’
3
There’d been so much for me to do in the first few days after the accident that a maniacal buzzing energy kept me going. I felt like the promoter of some sort of wildly out-of-control event, like a rock festival set in an inaccessible location where the leading acts had cancelled and only a fifth of the tickets had been sold. All the organising of the aftermath seemed to flow through me. As the main witness there were endless statements that I had to give to policemen who hadn’t spoken to the other policemen that I’d already done my act for. There were unending relatives who had to be sat with, comforted, tranquillised, disarmed while on their way to the truck driver’s hospital ward, multifarious and amazingly diverse undertakers who had to be dealt with, death certificates that had to be got, wills that had to be read and most of all funerals that had to be gone to.
Unfortunately it seemed that at some point in the twentieth century the art of holding a funeral, like the art of cooking and the art of tasteful interior decoration, was something that had deserted the ordinary people of Britain, from whose ranks the families of my five dead friends came. So that the funerals of Colin, Kate, Loyd, Sage Pasquale and Siggi were terrible mish-mashes of poetry reading, favourite tune playing, rambling reminiscing in front of congregations only a few of whom had dressed soberly. Only the most restrained were attired in what they considered to be appropriate funeral garb, i.e. black leather bomber jacket, white shirt, black tie, dark trainers.
I don’t think I would have got through it without my dad; he checked himself out of the hospital and, encased in plaster as he was, was more use than all the ineffectual vicars I met over those terrible days. His main contribution was to put me in touch with an older generation of female relatives who still knew a little about how to hold a funeral and who possessed special pickle dishes that were to be used only at wakes.
Nevertheless I think because I was doing so much and because the services were so shitty anyway, I failed to gain any of the catharsis that proper funerals are supposed to provide and instead a few days after the last of them all the activity stopped and I drove off a cliff of depr
ession.
First there was a sort of stunned non-feeling. I had never realised you could feel so much of nothing, so much nothing that the world outside me virtually ceased to exist; everything beyond the inside of my head appeared to be covered in a light haze, like smoke drifting across the motorway on an autumn morning. I felt utterly unanchored, unattached to a universe that existed without grief. Often I wondered idly why my body didn’t float up into the air, so unconnected did I feel to the real world.
All the separate orderly days that had been chopped up into such neat portions of time, the slices of life once firm and filled with phone calls, appointments, assignations, e-mails, text messages, conversations, plays, cirKusses, concerts, became rotten and runny and fluid so that night no longer followed day in orderly sequence but instead became random. Sometimes a row of short mornings, nothing too difficult to get through, were followed by a night that seemed to last for one hundred and seventy-two hours, a night filled with screaming and weeping and the jabber of the things that are screened on TV in the middle of an unendable night.
If I’d ever momentarily considered it I guess I’d thought that depression was pretty much like being very very sad. Now it was here it was nothing at all like that: instead there is a horrid, metallic, chemical quality, a level of internal pain that made life endless and very hard to get through.
Yet to my surprise I didn’t go completely insane, though I think that might have been a relief. Every day waiting apprehensively for full-blown madness to arrive, like a man expecting the last train home that he knows is packed full of football hooligans. Is this it? I’d think to myself every time a memory of my friends convulsed me in a knot of misery. Is this it? Is this the thought that does me in? But when the train came the hooligans pushed me about a bit, scared me, made me pee myself with fear then more or less left me alone.