by Alexei Sayle
The single significant date in all my relentless future was the one set for the trial of the tipper truck driver. His name, I found out, was Sidney Maxton-Brown, a self-employed haulier and the owner of a small fleet of trucks; he was fifty-four years old, which made him the same age as Siggi’s dad. When the Lancashire traffic police crash investigators examined the vehicle he’d been driving they found that over half the tyres had a lot less than the required amount of tread on them, the truck was carrying almost twice the legal load of an amount of toxic waste for which there was no documentation — they still didn’t know where it was from or exactly what it was — record checks revealed that the man had never taken a test to be a heavy goods vehicle driver and a doctor’s report said one of his eyes didn’t work very well because of a pronounced squint.
On that basis he was vehemently pleading not guilty to manslaughter. Especially in times of stress I’d always had a bit of a thing for authority figures. I remember the college I went to in London backed on to a fire station and I’d often hang around when the firemen were playing volleyball hoping their ball would come over our wall so I could throw it back and talk to them. This time my uniformed substitute mum was the police families liaison officer, a kindly detective sergeant of about my own age. I suppose it was his job to be nice to me but still it seemed like it was also in his nature. He said, referring to Sidney Maxton-Brown, ‘Kelvin, the man really doesn’t get it, he genuinely thinks he’s done nothing wrong. I’ve watched the interview tapes; he keeps saying he was only trying to make a living for his wife and for his daughter Susam. He seems to think that the fact that he never signed on the dole allows him to kill people. He says that he always provided, when his family needed food or medicine or a tattoo or a new ringtone for their mobile phone.’
Over the months between the accident and the trial I paid almost no attention to my building business which you’d think would screw it up, so it surprised me and everybody else that my firm was doing better than ever. I went out with a girl once who’d been on that Prozac drug for a while: she said the main side effect was that the quality of her tennis game improved immensely; she reckoned this was because the numbing effect of the drug meant she didn’t give a damn whether she won or she lost. It was sort of the same with me: my almost complete inattention to my firm resulted in its ever increasing prosperity.
Over the years I had become as much a developer as a builder and if you were medium-sized like me you had to be innovative in your thinking, that’s how you stayed ahead: I’d been one of the first to notice that city centre office blocks from the 1960s didn’t have the ducting space in the floors and ceilings for the amount of cabling and air-conditioning the modern workplace requires, but that their narrow profiles were ideal for converting into stylish flats. I’d also got in on the ground floor of the mental hospital boom, as early as 1994, redeveloping a small former secure psychotics unit in Wigan as twenty-eight luxury duplex apartments. Lovely flats they were, only marred slightly for the inhabitants by the risk of them waking up with one of the former occupants in the bedroom wondering where their locked ward had gone. I’d converted churches, factories, deconsecrated pubs; now, after the crash, I absentmindedly bought properties — houses, schools, warehouses — and would by accident sell them, to a bloke I couldn’t remember meeting, for a massive profit: I acquired some land in payment of a debt and the next day the site was chosen as the location for the UK headquarters of a major television home shopping network.
As a result of my vagueness all my subbies — the chippies, sparks, plumbers — had to take greater responsibility; it was no good asking me for a decision about anything, I just stood there humming. I guess they liked me or felt sorry for me or something because they responded with amazing flexibility, showing initiative and conscientiousness, so that all my contracts were finished on time, on budget and to a very high standard, which was an almost unheard-of occurrence in the building game. I suppose if major business leaders want their corporations to do well they should consider offing their five best friends.
In the lobby of the Crown Court in Liverpool on the first day of the trial I kept looking around in confusion at the dwarfish, stunted creatures who swarmed about me, their baseball-capped heads about a foot below mine, smoke chuffing out of their mouths as if they were miniature trains at the seaside and I would think, Who are these people? Then I would recall where I was with a jolt and I would say to myself, Oh, yes, they’re criminals.
Inside the hot wood-panelled courtroom itself I sat with the relatives of the dead. Across the other side of the public gallery it was easy to spot members of the extended MaxtonBrown family, seeing as each of the male Maxton-Browns had inherited the family squint, so they sat waiting for the show to begin with their eyes shooting off all over the place like fireworks. Occasionally the accused’s family would dart angry stares at the relatives as if it were their offspring who were on trial for deliberately and recklessly driving themselves into the path of an innocent tipper truck. At one point I noticed a crop-headed fifteen-year-old MaxtonBrown girl making stabbing and throat-cutting motions at Sage Pasquale’s seventy-five-year-old granny.
Inside the court there was that air of a show about to begin. I wondered if there was a backstage like at the theatre; perhaps the judge was at that moment peeping through a curtain, asking the clerk of the court, ‘What are they like today?’
Except it never did begin, the show. I’d experienced similar decompression a couple of times before: once I remember when the Prodigy had failed to turn up for a concert at the City Hall in Leeds and once during a play in Liverpool when an actress kept forgetting her lines. First there was the same impatient murmuring and muttering from the audience, then you could see the backstage staff self-consciously having whispered consultations with each other, then finally there came the announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately Keith Flint says he simply can’t be fucked coming up here so…’;’Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see one of our cast has been having problems so I am afraid tonight’s performance is cancelled. If you wish …’
Back in the well of the court I suddenly noticed that Sidney Maxton-Brown’s barrister was the lawyer whom I’d sold the house in Upper Parliament Street to, the one who’d been bugging me about the brushed aluminium light switch. I’d gone round and fitted the correct light switch a week and a half after the accident; I think he was a bit surprised to see me there on his doorstep at 4 a.m. with a screwdriver in my hand continually breaking down and sobbing while I fitted it but I think he was pleased.
Since the accident I’d completed all those sort of tasks that I’d previously been avoiding. The day-to-day lies and evasions of the builder were poison to me now; I found it hard to stand lies any more in any context and again, though it wasn’t my intention, this trustworthiness did my business nothing but good. I had discovered I was no longer able to be dishonest in any way. Now, reflecting on it much later, I think in the back of my mind, which was as crowded with guilty thoughts as the smoky backroom of an old-fashioned pub, there was the vague feeling that one of the reasons the crash had happened was because of my former dishonesty.
The clerk of the court was passed a folded note, he stood and announced to us all: ‘The trial of the Queen versus Sidney Maxton-Brown is suspended and will resume at two this afternoon.’
In a hubbub of mystery we swarmed and fought our way out of the trying room. The relatives collared the Merseyside — Police families liaison officer outside in the shabby corridor. Standing at the back of the group, I heard him say to their frantic questioning, ‘What’s happened is his solicitors have finally persuaded him to plead guilty to “Causing Death by Reckless Driving”.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Siggi’s dad. ‘He’ll be sentenced this afternoon.’
‘What’ll he get?’ asked Colin’s brother.
‘Ten years I imagine will be the sentence,’ said the policeman.
‘Yeah, but what does that mean in real
ity? He won’t be out for …?’
‘At least five, could be more,’ he replied. All the relatives started shouting:
‘It’s not enough!’
‘He should be there for fucking life!’
‘You fuck off, he’s done nothing! He’s being persecuted is what it is. We’re going to launch an appeal, then we’ll get compo like all them paddies.’ This came from a fat-legged Maxton-Brown woman.
‘I don’t think you can have an appeal if you’ve pleaded guilty,’ said the police family liaison officer.
‘You can fuck off too, you Jew pouf!’ she shouted.
I was so lonely I said to the policeman, ‘Do you fancy going for a drink?’ I didn’t want to lose him but I suppose his job was done now and his training told him he needed to disengage to maintain his boundaries.
‘Oh, thanks, Kelvin,’ he said warmly like he really wanted to do it, ‘but I got to get going, get home. They’re digging up the Dock Road and it’s added about thirty minutes to my journey. Fucking bastards, every time I go past there’s no sod working on it.’
‘I know, it’s bonkers,’ I replied, tutting sympathetically. ‘I mean what’s going on with that?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. But I did.
Perhaps a month after the accident, having just managed to drag myself back to work, wearing odd shoes and an unwashed pullover with stains all down it — an office conversion it was on the edge of St Helens city centre still in a terrible state, hardly able to stand for misery, an awful fear was following me around. Something completely ordinary like the sound of wind in the trees could pitch me into such an appalling terror that I shook until my legs gave way and I had to clutch on to a road sign for support.
That day the building’s enormous new air-conditioning unit was being lifted inside the structure by a mobile crane. As I stood there, simply watching and getting in the way (my highly competent site agent handled everything so there was no good reason for me to be there, it was just loneliness), I suddenly had the sense that there was something missing. Not able to figure out what it was, I looked all about me before it dawned that the absence was inside rather than out: while in no way could I say it had gone, my awful anxiety had lessened to a considerable degree.
I surveyed the site to find out why this was. In order to make space for the crane to do its work we’d blocked off the road with barriers and traffic was being routed around the site via narrow side streets causing complete chaos; car’s and vans were stacked up in all directions, unmoving as far as could be seen. Oddly I realised it was this chaos that was making me calm: all the drivers and passengers in the cars were safe as long as they were stuck in this traffic jam I’d created. It was me who was making them safe; as long as my crane kept them stuck here nobody could possibly run into them and kill them. I was saving their lives.
What had made me fearful of everything over the past months was the terrifying truth that you had absolutely no control: my friends had been killed and there wasn’t a single tiny thing I could have done about it. I was helpless like we all are. Yet here in St Helens my roadblock was making people safe, I was keeping them from killing themselves in their cars.
Pretty soon the one interference I would make in my smoothly flowing business was to suggest to my people using mobile cranes where there really was no need for them. Since this was virtually my sole input they were happy to humour me. After a while this wasn’t enough; next I began getting my sites expanded into the roads they bordered, on various unlikely pretexts so that they blocked off or narrowed major arteries all over the north-west of England. And the thing I learned was they let you do it, the councils, the police and the highway agencies; if you told them you wanted to block off the roads, they said okay, take all the time you want, do what you have to do. After the first few times wondering if I’d get caught out, the realisation dawned that I was able to barricade the streets at will. We would put in an application to place a crane at some vital road junction, my men would put up the barriers, then they’d go, the driver would park the crane then he too would go. For a few days I’d leave it there screwing everything up, then the crane driver would come and take his sixteen-wheeled behemoth away again and nobody would know that it had lifted nothing at all.
After that, becoming bolder, I started digging the roads themselves up. See, they all assumed, the authorities that is, that if you wanted to spend money digging up the highway then you must have a good reason to do it. It was inconceivable to them that somebody would part with cash for any other reason. So I would send my men out (usually I got official permission though sometimes I didn’t even bother with that), they’d take their jackhammers and their picks, my men, and they’d smash up the fucking killing tarmac, put a fence round it then leave it for a day or a week or a month or a year, before coming back and filling it in so badly that it was absolutely impossible to drive over at any speed. Thousands more lives saved.
That hole in the Dock Road, the one that was holding up the copper — that was one of mine, now coming up for its six-month birthday. And, do you know, it really didn’t cost that much at all.
The year I spent in London (Loyd once told me Colin had said I talked about it as if I’d had twenty years before the mast on the Valparaiso run) had been my first year at a famous central London art school.
I’d always been crap at exams. Admittedly the private school in Cheshire that my dad sent me to wasn’t what you’d call academic, none of the kids were particularly posh, just had parents who wanted their kids to grow up being hard-working and honest, who thought suing the council over imaginary back injuries was not a viable career path. Come to think of it, I guess not all the parents wanted their kids to grow up exactly honest since a sizeable minority of the pupils were the sons of the big Liverpool crime families, the Gorcis, the Mukes, the Pooles. Still, they weren’t going to need any A levels with what they’d be doing.
I guess my work must have been okay because they took me. In 1988 at the age of eighteen going down to the capital I’d been full of happy confidence, assuming I would start making good friendships that would last a lifetime within the week, make that two tops. Back home in Liverpool I’d always been one of the popular kids. I was the funny one, sure, but not a kid you fucked with, okay at sport and able to look after myself. Looking back I suppose a lot of what went wrong was plain bad luck but at the time the world seemed to have turned suddenly and unexpectedly malevolent: firstly the hall of residence where the college put me was one that was shared with a load of different schools and universities in central London. I never met anybody from my own college there, it seemed to be entirely full of homesick Africans weeping in the laundry room. Liverpool humour didn’t work at all — my Thunderbirds impression just frightened them.
Still, not to worry, I thought, knowing for certain that I would make friends once college started. I’d always had no trouble making friends, I was the popular guy.
Except that my uneasiness about being away from home seemed to infect everything around me. Normally you would expect each day in an unfamiliar situation that things would become less unfamiliar. I mean that’s like a law of science or something, but for me every day of college was still accompanied by the same disturbed strangeness as I’d experienced on my very first hour there. Nothing about the place seemed to stick in my memory: the college building was as impenetrable a labyrinth on my last day as on my first. The cleaners began to suspect some strange voyeuristic motives when they found me for the fourth time crouching in their stores cupboard waiting for an art history tutorial to begin. I often couldn’t even recollect where the place was and would catch the tube to some district where I was fairly certain it was situated, then wander the streets looking for it.
On the odd occasion when I did find my way to the college and then found the studio space where I was supposed to be doing my work, things were no better. Painfully I’d manage to get going on a painting, scratching a few reticent marks each day until at least there
were some tentative beginnings on the canvas, then a visiting lecturer would come along, he’d look at my painting for a second or two and then say to me, ‘No no no, that’s complete fetid rubbish, it’s weak weak weak, derivative and weak. Anyway, carry on, I’ll be back again in nine months.’ I mean my art teacher back at school had been really encouraging, telling me how good I was and inviting me round to his house to look at art books and listen to records, but here the staff seemed to regard their primary role as being to stop you painting. I told one of the weeping Africans that I was starting to suspect the staff weren’t interested in students unless you were a pretty girl they could shag or your work was exactly like theirs but not as good.
And then if that wasn’t bad enough there was the city of London itself. That Underground they’ve got down there, the map’s supposed to be dead clear, isn’t it? A miracle of graphic design, they say, but I never got the hang of it the whole time I was there. Sometimes I’d catch a train on a yellow-coloured line, change three times on to routes of various hues, then walk for miles along smelly tiled corridors only to emerge above ground and see the station I’d started off from about a hundred yards up the road. On other occasions I would get on the tube in the middle of London, travel for perhaps only a stop or two, then it would halt and all the power would glimmer off. I’d look around and see I was alone in the carriage, so get off to find I was at a country halt with a white picket fence, hanging baskets of geraniums and big zinc milk churns stacked on the platform. I never even attempted to take a bus.
Then there were my fellow students at the art school who. were as impenetrable to me as the tube network. They were either incredibly posh or, if one of the few working-class kids, then they were crude unconvincing stereotypes, like English characters played by American actors in a US sitcom. I recall I did get to a few art history seminars: there would be about twenty-five of us sitting in a circle in an airtight room. I remember this one time the tutorial was about Van Gogh and the lecturer showed. us a slide of a painting and he said how you had to see it in a gallery because you couldn’t conceive of the richness of the colours from a reproduction and a girl I’d been thinking of maybe talking to one day sitting next to me said, ‘You don’t have to go to a gallery. Oh, I know that painting; it’s hanging in the entrance hall in our flat in Rome. Yes, it really is lovely, the colours really are …’ And I just thought, Fucking hell, these people have a Van Gogh, and it’s not even in the living room it’s in, the fucking hall! That girl is never, ever, ever, going to want to talk to me, never mind be my friend or fuck me in her entire life …