by Alexei Sayle
I drove out to Sidney’s farm and collected him. Never one, to look after his appearance, he had for a while when feeling good made an effort at looking sharp; now he’d gone backwards, passing the state of greasy dishevelment he’d been in when I’d first met him. Today he was wearing saggy black tracksuit bottoms, dirty tartan slippers and a T-shirt that’d shrunk to expose a crescent of his distended belly; the T-shirt had printed on it: ‘November 9th. British Sausage Week’ and below that a big picture of a sausage. Pulling on a faded stonewashed denim jacket, he followed me out to the car.
Thirty minutes driving from Sidney’s place, under a cold grey sky pendulous with snow, country roads gave way to an almost untravelled dual carriageway. In due time I turned off this: all the road signs had been burned down, but fortunately I knew my way to the New Town. This was a truly misbegotten place, built in the 1960s when ‘New’ seemed to have been another word for ‘cheap’, ‘shoddy’ and ‘grim’. The town reminded me of those fake settlements I’d seen on the Discovery Channel constructed on army bases for the SAS to practise their house-to-house fighting in; any second I expected a cardboard terrorist to pop up in a glassless window. A narrow road carpeted with glass took us to a small estate of houses built on dead-end streets: breeze-block walls and a brick skin with no insulation between, guaranteeing greeny-black mould on the walls; cheap single-glazed steel windows dripping —with condensation on the inside, and, behind the cracked, peeling white fascia board, there’d be a flat asphalted roof with no covering so in the summer it would heat up then cool down, creating fissures through which the winter rain was now leaking.
On the way Sidney, sunk into silence, suddenly enquired, ‘So where we going?’
When I told him the name of the town he said, ‘He’s not some sort of therapist, is he? I’m not seeing no therapist and telling him my secrets.’
‘No, not a therapist, no.’
On the dead-end estate street the only other car was a silver BMW 3 series convertible that was parked outside one particularly beat-up-looking house. We pulled up next to it. The driver, one of Machsi’s, a little bantam in bomber jacket and baseball cap, got out. I had the feeling he’d been allowed to borrow the car for the afternoon.
‘He’s in ‘ere,’ he said, led us up the path of one house and hammered on the door. A huge black guy in a vest and satin boxer shorts opened it. ‘These are the ones who’ve come for the kid,’ then he added, ‘all right?’ with just enough threat in it to make the guy who opened the door back down from any objections he might have made. Turning to us, the little man said, ‘You shouldn’t ‘ave no trouble,’ and walked back to his car, started it up and drove away.
We entered the hall, the black guy closed the door behind us. He said, ‘The lad’s upstairs in one of our executive doubles.’
I snorted through my nose in acknowledgement of the joke but Sidney whined, ‘I don’t like this, what’s going on?’
‘Hey,’ I said, grabbing his arm, ‘do you want to be better or not?’
‘Yes, I suppose …’
‘Come on then.’
The hall still contained relics of the last normal ones to occupy the house: a wrought-iron telephone table and an orange plastic lampshade on the dead light fitting. Elsewhere there was nothing at all. Through the doorless doorways I could see inside the downstairs rooms stained mattresses spread around on the floor with bedspreads pinned across the windows to keep the light out. On each mattress lay a slumped form, each one looking more like clothes left outside a charity shop than a person.
Upstairs it was the same. In a back bedroom beneath a torn poster for N’ Sync the custodian indicated one form, Adam; in the other corner a junkie, noting a change in the air pressure in the room, sat up and looking straight at me said, “Scuse me, mate, I’ve run out of petrol and I need to get me daughter to her ballet lesson. Do you think you could lend me seventy-eight pence for a litre of unleaded?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Fair enough, please come again,’ replied the junkie and collapsed back on to the mattress.
I turned to Sidney. ‘This is him,’ I said, indicating Adam. ‘Eh?’
‘This is him.’
‘How can ‘ee make me better?’
‘Well,’ I said, feeling dizzy anticipation, like I was about to step on to a frightening theme park ride, ‘you know that accident you told me about that you had last year? The one where you killed those people?’
‘Yeah, I’ve been a bit—’
I cut him off. ‘This is the son of one of those you ran into. Before you killed his dad he was a fine boy, good student, nice lad. This is what you made him, a fucked-up junkie … you made him.’
‘I didn’t! I didn’t!’ he shouted. Then in a quieter voice, ‘How’s that going to make me feel better?’
‘I didn’t say feel better, you cunt, you don’t deserve to feel better. I said “make you better” — a better person, better than the selfish, fucking murdering shite that you are now!’
‘Why are you telling me this, why are you telling me this?’ he pleaded, looking around for a way out. Then, after a perplexed pause, ‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘Because they were my friends that you killed,’ I yelled, going right up to him, screaming into his face. ‘It was me driving behind them, it was me saw you hit them! It. was me saw you kill them. Why do you think I had so much time to hang around with a fat, shabby creep like you?’ .
‘I thought you were my friend,’ Sidney said in a sad little voice, staring down at the ground. ‘I thought you were my friend.’
‘No, I only pretended to be your friend to get you to see the fucking horror of what you done.’
‘Oh, that’s a very cold thing to do,’ he said, then, struggling for breath, ‘Well, congratulations.’ Tears welled up in his eyes. ‘I feel horrible now, are you happy?’
‘Yes I am,’ I stated, ‘I certainly am,’ though in truth I wasn’t entirely sure what I was feeling. ‘I’m very, very happy’
Then we just stood there staring at each other. After a good two minutes had passed I finally said, ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ asked Sidney, looking bewildered.
‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I thought you might run off or something.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’ he enquired confusedly, spreading his arms wide. ‘I’m stuck out here in bandit country in me slippers.’ Then paused before adding, ‘Anyway, I presume you need some help with the lad. You weren’t planning to leave him here?’
‘I guess so,’ I answered, feeling vaguely discomfited like I’d somehow lost the initiative.
Slung between the two of us, Sidney and I hauled the comatose teenager down the narrow stairs and into my car.
The drive to Paula’s house was spent in silence — like a married couple who’d had a row. I parked outside, got out and knocked on her door. She answered it looking drained and ill.
‘Hi,’ I said, ‘I’ve found him … Adam, I’ve got him in the car.’
She looked for a long time at her son slumped against the back window.
‘I don’t want him,’ she said. ‘What?’
‘I don’t want him,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve had enough, I can’t take any more. He’ll kill the two of us if we go on like this. He’s going to have to sort himself out or to die. I don’t know which; either way there’ll be an end to it.’
‘Well, what am I supposed to do with him?’ I quavered. ‘Leave him at a bus stop,’ Paula said. ‘I don’t care. Just take him away from me.’ With that she turned and slammed the door.
‘She won’t take him,’ I said once back in the driving seat. ‘She won’t take him?’
‘No.’
‘What are you going to do then?’ Sidney asked. ‘She said I should leave him at a bus stop.’
‘Which one?’
‘I don’t think she meant it literally.’
We sat in thoughtful silence until Sidney said, ‘I’ll take him then.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll take him. You say I’m responsible for him being like this, so I’ll take him.’ With a strange sort of dignity he said, ‘I’d like you to drive us to my house now, please.’
Again there was silence between us until we passed through the gates of his farm.
I got out and opened the back door so that Adam fell into my arms. Sidney came out the other side and helped me to get him upright. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s put him in one of the ostrich sheds.’
‘Aren’t you going to have him in the house?’
‘No, fuck off,’ he replied. ‘He’s a fooking junkie. I’m not having him in the same house as me kiddies.’
So we dragged the boy, his trainers trailing through the wet grass, to a breeze-block shed with a corrugated plastic roof and a metal door. Inside, Sidney switched on a single harsh neon light to reveal a bare concrete —floor and in one corner a pile of hessian sacking. ‘Over there,’ said Sidney, indicating the sacking. We dumped him down on to the mound then the older man squatted beside him and began to cover the boy with spare sacks. Without looking up at me he said, ‘I’d like you to go now.’
‘Er … right, okay,’ I said, straightening. When I got to the door I turned back and saw that Sidney was still staring down at the recumbent teenager.
I didn’t hear from him after that. I suppose I didn’t expect to. I phoned Paula a few times to see if she knew anything: she told me she’d received a couple of picture postcards featuring views of Preston town centre on which her son had scrawled that he was okay and would be in touch at a later date, then there’d been nothing.
So much of my life had been devoted to those two that now I had a lot more free time. And I had to admit that I sort of missed Sidney, not in a good way or anything, or that I thought there was anything to like about him. I told myself I missed him more in the way that some recovering alcoholics miss their addiction in that they still have a vague sense that there’s something they should be doing: that something being getting drunk, falling down in the gutter and vomiting blood on a trolley in casualty.
In January Florence packed her truck, said goodbye to the cirKuss and came to live with me. As we had pulled out of the cirKuss ground for the last time in Florence’s behemoth I caught a glimpse of Valery standing where from my swaying passenger seat only I would see him. He made a strange gesture, one of those continental ones involving his arms, head, shoulders, three fingers and a thumb that seemed to. convey an enormous number of things unsaid. This gesture expressed, as far as I could decipher it, loss, resignation, a certain wry amusement and mild seasickness, but I could have been wrong.
By then Florence had decided she didn’t want to be an inventor but couldn’t think of anything else; still, we had plenty of time. She drove her truck down to the local Ford dealers and was outraged when they wouldn’t buy it for eight thousand pounds or swap it for a brand-new Ford Fiesta. In the end she donated the vehicle to a land-mine clearing charity based in Fleetwood and I bought her the Fiesta anyway.
As far as I could tell Florence didn’t miss her old friends or performing in the cirKuss at all. She seemed to be happy at my house without a job of any kind, watching daytime TV and going down to the shops or taking long walks in the countryside while wearing her Disability Experience Suit. Often she would get home from these trips after I did, returning with tales of how people had been kind or wicked to her that day, how she’d got stuck between the checkouts at Safeway’s or a child had helped her on to a bus or how she’d fallen into the Leeds — Liverpool Canal and been rescued by some gypsies.
There was a ‘French’ restaurant in our little town that went by the name of Monsieur Le Frog. I liked it because it was a really old-fashioned, typically provincial place. English provincial, I mean, not French. The thing about successful restaurants in small places is that having nowhere else to go the clientele keeps coming back week after week; for that reason they have to have very long menus or pretty soon the punters have eaten everything on offer. At Monsieur Le Frog the menu was a leather-bound document longer than the Treaty of Versailles. Over the years the two Egyptian owners had adapted to local tastes so amongst the classics like duck a l’orange, boeuf bourguignon and steaks with fifty-two different sauces, they also did a nice meat and potato pie with cabbage and parsnips. I was one of their regulars, which ensured that when I turned up one night with Florence there was a big welcome and we were seated in the nearest thing our small town had to a ‘hot’ table, the one they would have seated Robert de Niro at if he’d somehow taken a wrong turn off the M62.
While she seemed perfectly content watching TV and wandering the countryside dressed as an arthritic fat woman, I considered that Florence was wasting herself. The woman was so talented, so beautiful, so extraordinary in her thinking, I thought it important that she expressed herself artistically. Congratulating myself that I wasn’t the sort of man who selfishly wanted to keep his beautiful girlfriend at home like some delicate flower, I’d been thinking hard about what Florence could do next.
The waiter came and asked if we were ready to order; like the owners he was an Arab and in the days when my friends were alive I would have been unable to stop myself taking on a version of his accent, dropping in a couple of the odd words of. Arabic that I knew, saying ‘a fwan’ and ‘shukran’ while I requested my food; now I did none of that. I chose French onion soup with pesto ciabatta wedges followed by bacon ribs and a baked potato in my own voice, then said to Florence, ‘Back in ‘95 me and my mates went on a clubbing weekend to Prague. There was a mental club scene there then, mostly run by the Ukrainian mafia, good drugs made by ex-East German sports scientists, naked girls in cage who’d do pretty much anything for ten dollars, excellent three-course meals for under two pounds. Anyway, this Czech girl I met told me that in the old Communist days the Communist Party that they had there running everything would decide what everybody should think about everything: pets, art, furniture. Apparently then they had these people called Political Commissars who would come down to work and tell you what you should think about pets, art, furniture. At the time it didn’t sound that bad to me, to have somebody tell you what you thought all the time; it’s a fucking pain sometimes having to think for yourself all the time.’
She said, ‘Sure we had similar thing in my country but mind control isn’t as much fun as you think; it was like everyone have to have two brains, “official thinking brain” for when in public and at school and so on and “private thinking brain” for when you with friends. It gets very confusing.’
Changing the subject I said to her, ‘Florence, I was thinking, you remember when we did that play at the pub in the Crystal Quarter? Christie in Love? Well, I was thinking originally to have it —just as a bar and restaurant but then I said to myself, what if there was a permanent performance space there with a nightly show, a cirKuss-type show, with you starring in it?’
‘My own show?’ she gasped, her eyes wide.
‘That’s right. You could either devise it yourself or get somebody else to do it and you could hire some other performers, other acts. I think it would make the restaurant really unique.’
‘It might cost a lot of money,’ she said, suddenly doubtful. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll finance it, I seem to have the magic touch right now. I heard today from Laurence Djaboff that Christie in Love is going to open in London’s West End at one of the big theatres.’
I could see the idea was taking root. ‘My own show…’ she mused. ‘You know I have had an idea lately, while I was out walking, a story from my country about an eagle whose soul is stolen by a princess, then I think he becomes a train driver … anyway is great story. I could do it as a dance, acrobatic kind of thing.’
‘Great, let’s go and look at the space tomorrow.’
The next morning, early while it was still dark, my mobile phone rang: the caller ID showed it was Sidney’s home calling; for a second I thought about not answering.
W
hen I did it was Adam who spoke. ‘Hi, Kelvin,’ he said.
‘Hello, Adam,’ I replied cautiously. ‘How you doing?’
‘I’m good, Kelvin.’
‘Great, I … we’ve been worried about you.’
‘That’s good of you.’ Then he said, ‘I’ll get to the point. I was wondering if you could come out to Sidney’s place, like maybe today if that’s possible. There’s something I’d like to say to you.’
I said, ‘Yeah, sure, I can be there in a couple of hours.’
‘Great, I’ll see you there then.’
‘Great.’
Telling Florence I’d meet her at the pub later that afternoon, I got into my car and gingerly steered it along the black-iced lane. The sun had arthritically edged its way into the sky and now shone bright on the frost-rimed fields as I drove along the familiar roads that led towards Sidney’s farm. There was little other traffic: though it was late February, increasingly it seemed people didn’t get back from wherever they went for their Christmas holidays till round about mid March.
As I drove I tried to examine my feelings. As far as I could tell I realised that I was happy, all the last terrible vestiges of the fear that had followed me for so long had crumbled and blown away. I was healthy, prosperous and living with the most wonderful woman who was exciting, bold, beautiful.
I pictured what Adam had to say to me: supposing he wanted to thank me for what I’d done for him, all the money I’d spent, all the time I’d expended. I also thought that Sidney might be there and might want to say something similar. In my mind I rehearsed the gentle magnanimity with which I would accept their apologies.
After all, I had put a lot of effort into those two and if I was frank with myself, as I was trying to be, then I had to admit I sort of missed both of them. Of course it was Florence who meant the most to me, it was her love that had healed me, yet I wanted more — I wanted my cracked little family all back together again, Adam and Sidney and Florence.