by Alexei Sayle
‘Yeah, I know,’ replied Sage Pasquale, with some asperity. ‘Like obviously some parts of LA are too dangerous to walk in, we all know that for Christ’s sake!’
Yes we did, we knew there were many areas of Los Angeles where no one ever walked; we’d been there before, but when we looked at the maps there still seemed to be huge stretches in the prosperous parts of the west of the city, Hollywood, Westwood, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills in which it must surely be safe to be a pedestrian.
And the thing was, we were entranced with how us it was — quirky, individual, original. We were already thinking of the stories we’d tell other people even before we’d bought the airline tickets to fly there. Thinking back now there were probably little groups of Europeans doing exactly the same thing up and down the boulevards of LA that summer. I’ fancy now that I saw them off in the distance. Some of them are probably still there, their bleached bones lying in the concrete drainage ditches of the LA River where they had their throats cut.
So in the brown heat of a California summer we trod the sticky streets of LA, along Fairfax Avenue to the Farmers Market we went, down Wilshire Boulevard to the famous La Brea tar pits we shuffled. (‘La Brea means “Tar Pits” so they’re called the Tar Pit tar pits,’ moaned Siggi.) Up 107th Street to the famous Watts Towers we limped.
Yet rather than being the quirky fun we imagined it would be, the whole thing was a horrible, unpleasant experience right from the start. See, it turns out you cannot tell what Los Angeles is like from a map; all those streets, even in the nicest areas that had appeared benign, even on those streets, the sidewalk would suddenly run out and an evil-smelling culvert would cut across our path forcing us to step into six lanes of hurtling traffic, or there would be a new mini mail that had erupted where the map said was sidewalk, with high razor-wired walls that we had to scale if we wanted to get round it to the identical mini mall on the other side.
But we couldn’t stop. Every morning when we gathered in the lobby of our hotel Sage Pasquale would hand out complex route maps and photocopies of points of interest and if anybody suggested we had a day off her face would go all closed and tight and we were more frightened of her than we were of the Crips and Bloods and lone maniacs who were waiting out there for us.
One day, our sixth, while we were sheltering from the sun under an overpass of the I-405 on Santa Monica Boulevard and Colin was emptying blood out of his shoe, a Range Rover did a U-turn and stopped next to us; the driver pushed the passenger door open: it was the English actor Ian McShane, his hair painted the same black as the Range Rover. He said, ‘I knew you had to be English, nobody else white would be walking here without pushing a shopping cart full of cans. Would you perhaps like a lift to somewhere less terrifying?’
But Sage Pasquale shouted, ‘No, we’re on our holidays, go away!’
He looked pityingly at the rest of us and he went away. Later on that day we were walking a particularly alarming stretch of La Cienaga Boulevard: a lowrider crammed to the roof with massive crack-confused Tongans had just crawled past us for the third time when, passing a car lot with rows of triangular plastic flags hanging in the limpid air, Loyd spotted a black V8 Ford Econoliner van with tinted windows, six velour-coated swivelling captains’ chairs, folding tables, carpet up the walls, a fridge and electricity sockets, its sinister bulk rising above the Lincolns, Pontiacs and over-bumpered Volkswagens. Loyd gave a cry and said he simply just had to have it right there and then. We all immediately said, ‘Oh yes, it’s fantastic!’ and, ‘That’s the greatest van I’ve ever seen!’ The salesman in the orange blazer and the polyester trousers with the belt buckle that spelled out ‘Handguns’ never had an easier sale. From then on we were able to ride the freeways to the beaches and the deserts without it seeming like a bad idea that we had once thought we could walk it.
After the holiday the van was shipped back to Britain on a container ship and Loyd forced the computer games design company he worked for to let him keep it as his company car. Loyd’s bosses absolutely hated seeing it there in his named parking place looking like some sort of Syrian taxi — they’d much rather he drove a black Audi TT like they all did; Loyd said it really was rather surprising how conservative nineteen-year-olds could be.
When one of us wasn’t present, if you’d heard us talking :about them, sometimes you’d have thought we hated each other. ‘Him and his wife already buy most of the tickets for most of the shows, choose the restaurants, suggest the holidays,’ Colin said. ‘Now since he’s got that fucking van and he’s started driving us everywhere we have to do everything when he wants us to do it.’ Colin was always a bit overheated in those days. He had until, recently been married to Paula who was thirty-three, exactly the same age as the rest of us. Paula and Colin seemed as happy a couple as Loyd and Sage Pasquale, though admittedly their life was o bit more complicated because they’d given birth to the only child that we’d managed to produce between us, a boy of fourteen whose existence we were barely conscious of. The idea that Colin and Paula were married seemed to be a fact as solid as that Chester was up the M56 or that golf was shit; when they split up I had to go to Chester to check it was still there. Colin had not seemed at all unhappy being married to Paula but then he’d met Kate, a student teacher at a school he’d been inspecting; pretty soon he was also inspecting Kate and had a permanently dazed, distracted air about him. Siggi said the Australians had a phrase for the state Colin was in: they called it ‘cunt struck’.
One person bringing in another who was ten years younger, was prettier, sexier than the rest of .the gang meant there was now a slight but persistent buzz, like a faulty neon light. in what we’d thought was the perfect flawless bubble of our group, but by ignoring it and never speaking of it we managed after a while to stop noticing.
As well, though he was the one who’d wrecked the marriage, Colin was being really difficult with Paula and his kid. I thought at first that Kate might have been a steadying influence on Colin but instead she was behaving even more mental than he was. Say a situation would come up with Colin and his ex-wife where he would be supposed to be picking up his boy for a weekend stay at his new flat. At the last minute he would either not turn up or would suddenly say he had to change the time, then he would get on the phone and scream abuse at Paula, how she was a conniving slut, how she had ruined his life, how she had cooked a particularly unpleasant casserole in 1997, stuff like that. Then Kate would take over the phone and she would scream much more creative and hurtful abuse as told from the woman’s viewpoint. Both Colin and Kate told Paula that they couldn’t ever reliably say a time when they would be able to see Colin’s son because their lives were so busy and important, but they somehow still found the time to sit outside Paula’s house in a rented van for half the night, only driving off when Paula ran out and threw a microwave oven through the front windscreen.
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 we
re 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.