by Alexei Sayle
In a not unfriendly way she replied, ‘Hey, pal, not so fast. You don’t get to learn what happen to me. Not right now. Maybe at some other time. I’m a person not some sad story.’
Which seemed a bit mean since I’d been telling her my sad story. Still, I said, ‘Sure, I’m sorry I asked.’ Again we stood in silence for a while then I enquired, ‘Can I ask you what your name is?’
She sighed. ‘You wouldn’t be able to pronounce it. In my language I guess it sound a little bit like “Georgina”.’
‘So shall I call you Georgina then?’
‘No, don’t call me that!’ she asserted with a sudden burst of ferocity; reflected for several seconds then said, ‘Call me Florence.’
‘Florence?’
‘Dat’s right, call me Florence.’
‘Hi, Florence,’ I said. ‘My name’s Kelvin.’
She snorted through her nose when I said this. Smiling myself, I asked, ‘What’s so funny?’
‘Where I come from a “Kelvin” is … well, it’s something funny.’
‘What?’ I asked, laughing too. ‘Come on, tell me.’
She could hardly get it out through her giggling. ‘A “Kelvin”,’ she said, ‘a “Kelvin” is a telecommunications relay tower for land-based microwave transmissions.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘What do you call them here?’
‘I don’t know. I think telecommunications relay tower for land-based microwave transmissions.’
‘Oh.’ She paused. ‘So anyway I think I go to sleep now.’
‘Right. Okay.’ Then I said in a rush, ‘Look I was wondering would you like to go out some time, with me somewhere?’
‘Well, I work at nights …’
‘Sure, stupid, forget it,’ I said.
‘No, no, I’m just saying, the day would be better, like maybe next Tuesday.’
‘Oh okay, great, where would you want to go then?’ I suddenly couldn’t think of anywhere on the planet.
‘Well, der is a shop in Liverpool called Bell and Banyon — do you know it?’
‘No, but I’m sure I can find it.’
‘Great, well meet me here at maybe twelve and we can go and shop der and maybe do something afterwards …’
‘Fantastic, twelve here then.’
‘Twelve here den.’
I picked up my bike, wrangled it through the gate, getting more oil on my trousers, and cycled off along the path. When I got home and looked up Bell and Banyon’s address in the Yellow Pages I read in their half-page advert that they were the north-west’s largest independent retailer of disabled and elderly products.
It was after midnight when I got home, Adam wasn’t in yet. I waited in the living room for him watching TV and didn’t hear his key in the door until half past one. I called out, ‘I’m still up, Adam!’ However I was disconcerted by the next sound which was a thump as if a body had fallen to the floor. Rushing into the hall I found the boy lying face down in the open doorway. ‘Oh fuck, oh Christ, Adam!’ I cried, turning the boy over: blood was running over his face, one eye was already puffy, purpling and closed and mucus ran in a stream from the boy’s flattened nose, causing him to talk in a snuffling, gasping manner.
‘They were laughing at me … his nephews,’ he said, his one working eye staring into some scene of horror that he held inside his head. ‘So we jumped them because there was more of us than them but they knew what they were doing … See, they wanted to do me because they knew who my dad was and they were winding me up because their uncle was out.’
‘Who was out? Who was out?’ I shouted. ‘Fucking Sidney Maxton-Brown,’ gasped the boy.
5
‘Stomach cancer,’ said Sidney Maxton-Brown, patting his abdomen contentedly.
‘Really?’ I queried.
‘Yeah, fucking awful it were, I were down to like five stone and the pain, Christ! Four months they said I ‘ad to live. So you know they let me out on parole like, on compassionate grounds, to die at home.’
‘And then?’ I asked.
‘And then,’ replied Sidney Maxton-Brown, ‘it went away.’
‘It went away?’
‘That’s right; the doctors couldn’t believe it, “a miracle” they said I was, “almost unheard of” they said, but it went away. “In remission” is actually what they call it but I know it’s gone for ever, you can tell some’ow, if it’s inside your body or not. Of course I haven’t really, you know, felt the need to inform the coppers or the court or anything, that it’s gone. I mean I don’t know whether they’d put me back inside but I’d certainly lose me disabled parking badge.’
When Adam came back from the pub all beat up and collapsed half in and half out of the hall, I left him only for the few seconds I needed to grab the phone and with trembling hands to dial 999. Again I was connected immediately, as I had been on the night of the big crash; the woman I spoke to might even have been the same one I’d spoken to on that evening. She told me the paramedics would be there soon and not to move the boy, so we sat in the open doorway, the summer breeze blowing over us, an older man holding a keening teenager in his arms.
The two of us passed most of the rest of the night in the casualty department of the town’s general hospital amongst the wounded of a quiet Friday, the impalings, the clubbings, the stabbings, the gougings. To me none of the wounds looked real, rather I felt like I was in the middle of one of those historic re-enactments staged in the grounds of a stately home, this one representing the gory aftermath of some medieval battle. We liked to go and see those in the summer, me and my friends, to laugh at the divvies in their silly outfits, fat clerks from Bolton pretending to be soldiers in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard.
I’d tried to phone Paula but her mobile wasn’t answering and I didn’t know the name of the boarding house where she was staying. After Adam was lethargically examined by a series of exhausted-looking young doctors and pronounced only superficially injured, we got a taxi home at five in the morning. Without saying another word the boy went to bed and stayed there till his mum arrived to take him home. I tried to explain what had happened, when she came rushing over in response to the hysterical answerphone message I’d left eighteen hours earlier, but she wouldn’t let me speak, just angrily led him away.
Unexpectedly, then, I had the weekend to myself. While I could have gone walking on the moors or visited a steam fair in Parbold, what —I did instead on that Saturday was sit on the couch and think. Afterwards I felt like I’d thought a whole lifetime of thoughts in a single day.
I recall, perhaps falsely, who knows, that I remained in exactly the same position, unmoving apart from the occasional spasm that rippled across my cheeks until the evening of that Saturday, until the streetlights came on, until the men and women from the surrounding houses returned from their weekend trips to the supermarket, the ski slope, the squash courts, and the smell of salad began to fill the evening air.
I sat on my couch and thought and thought and thought, the tumblers of my mind clicking over like the lock of an elaborate, well-lubricated Edwardian safe.
In the first hours my visions were all of revenge. One thing I was absolutely certain of was that affairs could, not be left as they were: that this Sidney Maxton-Brown would somehow be allowed to escape even the vastly inadequate punishment the law had given him was simply not an option.
Something was going to be done, the only question was what. Some violent act could certainly be arranged; nobody got very far in the building game without understanding that an industry which encompassed sharp implements, quick-drying concrete, sudden profits, sudden losses, penalty clauses, an itinerant workforce that was inclined to settle disputes without reference to the small claims court, grinding, chomping, mashing machines and deep, deep, dark holes, occasionally did involve the odd abrupt disappearance in the middle of the night.
I knew, if I wanted to go down that road, that it would be possible to pay someone to have the tipper man kidnapped and tortured, or be
aten up or just shot on his doorstep by a figure in a crash helmet. Of course you could never absolutely guarantee that things would go the way you wanted them to go. I discerned from things I’d heard that even big crime families like the Gorcis and the Mukes, with all their resources and their minds that looked at everything as an opportunity for crime, could come unstuck trying to kidnap rivals, intimidate prosecution witnesses, kill people who had spilled drinks on them in pubs and so on.
Also, if you started on that sort of violent retribution route then the other party or the relatives of the other party were capable of embarking on it too and it was already clear that Sidney Maxton-Brown came from the sort of tribe that didn’t appreciate the other person’s point of view, who wouldn’t view a beating up as fair retribution for his evil behaviour.
Not to mention the moral angle, which nobody did much any more.
And somehow paying out a pile of money or calling in a load of favours simply to have somebody who had wronged you whacked seemed at the end of the day to be too … I don’t know, it seemed to be too … unoriginal. A ten-year prison sentence and some flowers nailed to a fence had seemed an inadequate enough memorial to my five friends but a shabby hit was nowhere near what they were entitled to.
It wasn’t in the night but round about teatime when I came to the conclusion that for all those reasons I didn’t want to resort to violence and yet I knew that the most important thing in my life was that I needed to take revenge on Sidney Maxton-Brown. This revenge was to be my memorial to my friends and therefore it needed to be worthy of them, it needed to embody their qualities of originality, their humour, their thirst for great art. Through building their memorial I realised I was also hoping that my life might begin again.
What I wished for, I thought, was that Sidney MaxtonBrown should feel a little of the terrible pain, a fraction of the awful terror that my friends had felt as they died and that their friends and relatives experienced to this day. Except, I mused, even if you did kidnap and torture him he still wouldn’t be feeling what they had felt; if you worked him over, if you pulled his fingernails out he’d still be feeling only his own pain. What was really desired, I reflected, was for Sidney to understand just some tiny part of what he had done, to comprehend even to the minutest degree the awful effect he had had on the lives of so many innocents. But how could a thing like that be achieved?
What was needed, I thought, was a way to prick a hole in the bubble of Sidney’s biosphere of self-pity and let in the corrosive outside air. Yet how the hell could you make one person understand how another person felt?
I pictured my friends, thought about what it was that we did together; mostly we went and saw things. So I tried to remember all the performances we’d seen together. I tried to recall all the movies we’d seen, all the plays we’d attended, the computer games we’d played, the novels we’d read and what we’d learned from them.
Well, a lot of them had been crap and we’d learned nothing at all. I had kept the programmes of every play I’d ever seen; now flicking through them there were many nights at the theatre from which I could not recall a single detail. I mean what the hell was Old Bollocks at the Octagon Theatre Bolton, starring the late Michael Elphick that I apparently sat all the way through in March 1996? Or Quonk, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, or Stuvitsky’s Rehearsal at the Theatre Clwyd Mold. Somebody had spent a year writing these things, actors had been cast, sets had been built, I’d gone to see it and there wasn’t an atom of memory remaining of what had gone on. What was the point? I thought about all the comedians we’d seen over the years with their banal unsights into the human condition: ‘Men are like this, women are like that, isn’t it annoying when your teapot …’ I remembered the bit a lot of comedians did about what wimps men were, a bit that I’d laughed along with but now I thought, What men? Nelson Mandela, did he go all piteous when he got a cold while he was imprisoned on Robben Island? Rupert Brooke in the trenches? Victor Jara being tortured by the Chilean junta?
On the other hand my memory of some events we’d attended was more ambiguous. I thought about the last art exhibition that we had all been to together, at the Tate Liverpool. Sage Pasquale had said, ‘Dan Flavin worked solely in neon tubes. Hundreds of ordinary coloured tubes in different groups and arrangements. Though Flavin was credited with being one of the creators of minimalism he once joked that he would rather it was called “maximalism”.’
Though I looked grimly at the tubes and concentrated ever so hard and strove to find some meaning in it, all I kept thinking was, With all these neon tubes buzzing away has the gallery’s electricity bill gone up? And secondly, How has the gallery coped with the different voltages? Because when I’d looked closely at the tubes I’d noticed that these were US neon tubes and seeing as the US was on 110 volts with 50 cycles A/C compared to the UK 240 volts system, did they have a different transformer for each artwork or one big transformer for the whole gallery? But then I thought, No if they’ve put this stuff in this gallery and all these critics have praised it then there must be some worth in it. So I forced myself to look harder and then I did see meaning in it though I’m not entirely sure what it was, but the shapes were beautiful and the colours were pure.
None the less I did believe that there had been times when we’d undoubtedly been truly transported by something we’d seen; without any conscious introspection we’d all know right away that we were witnessing something profound. Such as he Protection Racket DJ’ing at Glastonbury, or when our book group had read Zhao Zhi Zhu’s When the Bamboo Flowers: that was amazing. Bamboo only flowers once every hundred years and the book is a chronicle of four generations of one Chinese family between one flowering and the next, from the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, civil war, the Long March, the early years of communism, the Cultural Revolution, ending at the handover. of Hong Kong. Those Chinese, man, they went through a lot; we were so moved by this saga that we tried to get the guy that delivered our sweet and sour pork to tell us his family’s turbulent story, but he said they were all from Nottingham and nothing much had ever happened to them. There was that musical we saw based on Primo Levi’s stories and of course the Hats o f the Pharisees exhibition at the Royal Academy. Anyway, what I’m saying is that when we’d seen these things all of us had experienced a collective sense of having pushed through some curtain into a greater understanding of what it was like to be human.
Most of all, I remembered a weekend trip the six of us had taken to Amsterdam in 1999. Air miles from Liverpool Airport. We got there on a Friday evening, checked into our hotel then piled right out again, went round the drug cafes and had an Indonesian Rijsttafel. On the Saturday evening after a busy day of shopping for antiques at the Spiegelwartier and a visit to Anne Frank’s house, an indifferent meal at the Michelin-starred Excelsior, a sex show in the red-light district, we danced, high on MDMA powder till four in the morning at a club called Bunnies in the Leidseplein area. Having only had four hours’ sleep Sage Pasquale forced us up at 8 a.m. so as to be first in line at the Van Gogh Museum. Tired and drugged and groggy, we paid our money and joined the crowds of tourists drifting through the stuffy concrete rooms. Sage Pasquale rented one of those tape and earpiece things so she was able to provide a running commentary on the paintings: she got quite angry at it and said why didn’t they do a concealed version with one of those tiny transparent earpiece things so other people would think she was a tremendous authority on art history.
The pictures at the Van Gogh Museum were presented in chronological order so that slowly we were taken through the fevered illustrations to Vincent’s sad, desperate, short life. From the muddy browns of The Potato Eaters, we travelled with him to Paris to the brighter, happier colours and Japanese influences of Self Portrait At Easel, then south we went to the house in Arles that he shared with Gauguin for a while and the painting of Sunflowers so powerful in the flesh that it transcended its too-copied life.
The last painting of all was Crows in the Wheatfield, the b
leak dismal birds struggling to get off the ground like the painter’s own black thoughts. Sage Pasquale, her voice cracking with sorrow, choked out, ‘A few days after he finished this painting Van Gogh went into those same fields and … and shot himself …’ She turned away from the painting to see the five of us were all weeping too, at what it was hard to say: for ourselves, for Vincent, because we’d taken too much ecstasy, who knows? ‘Oh God, the poor man,’ she said, then, ‘Hold me, Kelvin,’ so I took her in my arms and held her tight and Colin did the same with Siggi and Loyd with Kate till our tears had dried and it was time to get the shuttle bus to the airport.
At first I got excited by the idea that if I could somehow simply put this killer in front of great works of art then that would humanise him; it took only’ a few minutes for that notion to go cold, well, not cold but there was a sense I’d need something more. Just showing Sidney Maxton-Brown stuff or getting him to read stuff (if he could read) or watch stuff couldn’t possibly be enough, there would need to be something else. What it was I couldn’t think right now but I was confident it would come to me in time.
Monday morning I got on the phone.
A couple of times I had to put the handset down with shaking hands before being connected, but finally I managed to hold on to myself long enough until a young woman with a Lancashire accent said, ‘Maxton-Brown Tipping.’
I told her my name then said, ‘I’m a developer. I’ve got a job on in Liverpool that’ll need big tipper work. I’d like to talk to the boss of your firm.’
‘That’d be the Uncle,’ she said.
‘Can I come and see the Uncle then?’
We agreed on a time and a date towards the end of the week and she gave me the address of a farm about five miles outside our town.
The prospect of meeting with the man who had killed my friends lent the rest of the day an agitated quality. In a way I found myself welcoming this agitation, it felt healthy, like the pins and needles of blood returning to a limb that had been lain on for too long. I realised all round I was in for a funny week: not only was I wound up over my assignation with Sidney, there was my daytime date with Florence too. She was waiting for me when I got to the common, standing in the same smoking spot where we had talked late on the previous Friday night.