(2003) Overtaken (10 page)

He told
us if we applied to the box office the audience could get their money back. So
we found ourselves on the street two hours earlier than expected; it wasn’t
even dark yet. Sage Pasquale and Paula went round to the stage door to find out
if Siggi was okay but they were told an ambulance had already taken her to a
hospital.

A few
months later when Siggi came out of the mental home she took a place on a
training course that taught you how to be a further education lecturer; this
lasted for a year and then straight out of that college she got a job in the
burgeoning field of media studies at one of the many educational institutions
that seemed to be opening up in our little Lancashire town and again she became
one of the gang as if she’d never been away.

Siggi
had once told me that there was an actors Equity rule that if there were more
actors on the stage than there were people in the audience then they didn’t
have to do the play, they could go home, the show didn’t have to perform. Well
here, I thought, there was one actor still yabbering and flapping and gimping
about on the empty stage but there was absolutely nobody in the audience. Yet
the show seemed to be grinding on regardless, though what the point now was I
couldn’t say.

4

The only possessions
belonging to Loyd, Colin and Siggi which their relatives fought violently over
were their season tickets to Liverpool FC. I had not felt like going to a match
since the crash but this was the last game of the season and I thought I might
as well use my own season ticket one last time. It would be terribly painful,
almost beyond bearing, that I would no longer be sitting amongst my friends and
I’d readied myself for that, but when I got to my own seat, which I naturally
expected to be empty, I found an old man I didn’t know sitting in it.

‘Oohr
you?’ I said.

‘Oohr
you?’ replied the pugnacious little old man angrily, stretching up his sinewy
bantam neck.

‘You’re
in my seat,’ I said.

‘Fuck
off. This is my seat,’ retorted the old man. Looking around in confusion, right
then Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband came down the concrete steps with a
hamburger in his hand: when he saw the two of us facing off a faint look of
embarrassment crossed his face.

‘Oh hi,
Kelvin,’ Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband said and took me in an awkward hug
without putting his burger down. Releasing me he continued, ‘Ah, oh, we, ah,
didn’t know you was coming today, we, erm … this is Oswald,’ he said,
indicating the little old man who still sat bristling in my seat. ‘We been
letting Oswald sit in your seat ‘cos he’s been supporting the Reds for fifty
years, you know, but his seat is right up the back, you know and you wasn’t
around to …’

‘That’s
right, fifty years,’ said Oswald. ‘Billy Liddle … Ronny Yeats and “the Saint”
… Shankly’s boot room.’

I
leaned forward. ‘Well, that’s great, Oswald,’ I said, ‘but I’d like my seat
back now.’

‘Ian
Rush, Kenny Dalglish, Hysel Stadium, Hillsborough,’ said Oswald, showing no
sign of moving.

‘Look,
I don’t have time for this. just fuck off up the back, you scrawny old cunt,’ I
heard someone say in a voice full of genuine menace. Looking around I realised
it was me who’d spoken.

‘There
was no call for that,’ said Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband’s best mate who’d
arrived just as Oswald was angrily shuffling off up to the back of the stand
muttering under his breath about the ‘86 cup final. ‘He’s been coming here for
fifty years.’

At
first, still shaken at my sudden eruption, his words didn’t go in. I remembered
that once, a long time ago, I had had quite a temper but over the years Sage
Pasquale’s fear of confrontation had meant it had been gradually suppressed,
but now I thought, with a familiar clenching of the guts, Sage Pasquale wasn’t
around so it didn’t matter any more. At that thought I abruptly felt like my
head was full of popping corn.

Turning
to Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband’s best mate I said simply, ‘And you shut it
too,’ in a way that made the man go white. Then I stared hard at the battered,
muddy, end-of-season pitch.

As the
game began, squeezed uneasily between Colin’s cousin, Sage Pasquale’s sister’s
husband and Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband’s best mate, I felt confused; I
hadn’t expected to sense the old joy, of course that would be ridiculous, but I
was still surprised by the extreme feeling of contempt that swept over me, not
for the players — they just seemed silly, jumping and running and falling over
— no, it was the crowd who made me feel sick with disdain. Around me the fans
seemed to cycle rapidly through a range of emotions, all of them entirely fake;
one second they would be engulfed in operatic ecstasy over some shot sailing
wide of the goal and the very next they would be vomiting rage at an opposition
player they’d taken a dislike to. Actually, I thought as the mob howled with
relish as one of their defenders prematurely ended the career of a promising
opposing youngster, it’s only the ecstasy that seems false, the rage appears to
be real enough. That I should want to submerge myself into these awful people
seemed completely ridiculous. I was reminded of footage I’d seen of Hindu
pilgrims submerging themselves in sacred rivers bobbing with sacred corpses,
sacred raw sewage and sacred containers of nuclear waste.

Abruptly
I got up from my seat, edged my way past all the fans too engrossed in the game
to pay me any attention; eventually I got to the concrete steps, slowly
climbing them till I reached the dark exit where I stopped and turned to take
one last look at the muddy grass where the little men ran and jumped. As I
wheeled to descend into the cool gloom of the interior I saw Oswald rise from
his seat against the very back wall and crouch low on the steps like a spider.
The old man’s eyes stared hard into mine, and as I began to descend towards the
turnstiled my final image was of Oswald scuttling down the steps towards my
vacated seat. Stumbling towards the grey river and the electric rail line that
would take me home, the roaring of the crowd pursued me like a mugger
whispering vile threats in my ear.

Since
the accident, I’d not been able to bring myself to drive a car but the town in
Lancashire
where I lived was connected to
Liverpool
by the Mersey Link electric
railway. The station we had always used to get to Anfield, amusingly called
Sandhills, was in a district of refineries, large areas of rubble, car
dealerships and abandoned warehouses that ran down to the river.

Above
it on a plateau were the red-brick terraced houses amongst which
Liverpool
’s football ground squatted. In a
couple more years it was rumoured the club would be moving to a new stadium
hacked out of a Victorian park a few hundred metres away.

My
route to the railway line took me, first of all, past my dad’s old cafe, my
former home now a Chinese chippy, then through a few streets of terraced homes
that ran along the edge of the plateau balanced above the steep drop to the
distant river. All these dwellings in a grid pattern of six streets were empty
and neatly sealed up with perforated steel grilles. The Trotskyist town council
which had run
Liverpool
in the
1980s had bought them all up with plans to build a museum of revolutionary
feminism but my Dad said the councillors had spent all the money on trips to
Cuba
and smart suits instead so the houses
had stood empty for over twenty years. From the silent streets I could see clear
across to the bilingual hills of
North Wales
.

A
sudden terrible fatigue seized me, memories of all the times I had passed
through these streets with my friends and I sank to my knees in weariness and
misery.

There it was in those
streets that I found my
Thebes
.
The Greek hero Cadmus searching for his sister Europa in desperation consulted
the oracle at
Delphi
. The
oracle ordered Cadmus to drive a cow across the age-old lands into the
province
of
Boeotia
. Cadmus should mercilessly impel the poor beast forward, never
allowing it to rest for a second, and at the spot where the creature finally
collapsed from exhaustion there he should found his mighty. city of
Thebes
. I don’t know what that had to do
with finding his sister but I suppose you had to do what the oracle said if it
bothered to speak to you. Anyway I was both Cadmus and my own cow.

Slumped
against a wall, I began to idly speculate on how little these houses would cost
to buy from the desperate cash-famished council; the whole network of streets
could be mine for the price of a couple of Porsches but then I thought, Where
would the profit be? Terraced streets all over the north could be had for
nothing because people with money didn’t want to live in terraced streets. The
ordinary ones dreamed of E-fit houses in the suburbs and the
out-of-the-ordinary ones wanted lofts. Sure, everybody was looking for the new
loft, but lofts offered big open minimalist spaces, not the front parlours,
kitchens, sculleries and back boxrooms of these tight little terraces. More
importantly, the big converted warehouses with their solid entrances promised
security from the wolves that roamed outside. I’d always imagined it was
impossible to make a street secure: suddenly I thought, Is it?

Now I
was not one of the big national companies in the developing game but I was
doing better than okay. For a start, all the pointless digging up and the crane
parking that I was doing meant that my firm’s logo was all over the place; this
in turn meant everybody in the construction industry imagined I was making a
fantastic profit, thus advantageous projects came to me first and I never had a
problem financing them since the bank rang me more or less daily offering to
give me your money to do what the fuck I wanted with it. I’d always had an edge
when finding development sites: the way I did it was partly by having a small
regiment of runners, estate agents, commercial agents, people like that, who
were constantly on the lookout for properties for me to develop; they got a 2
percent fee if the deal went ahead. Besides which I bribed a couple of local
government workers in the council’s Valuers Department with cars and holidays,
women and drugs to let me know about the many fine buildings the council had
forgotten they owned; it also helped that my stooges were able to fix the price
at which the council sold these buildings to me.

Yet
nobody had told me about these streets: they didn’t think even I’d be
interested in terraces. No one was interested in terraces.

But why
not? Seeing as you would be able to buy the network of streets entire it would
be possible, I calculated, to wall off certain access points topped with
historically correct spikes and on others you could install gates, perhaps
modelled on those of famous
Princes
Park
, all of it
surveyed by CCTV cameras and rapid-response rentabizzies always on call. Then I
thought, Seeing as they would be so cheap, why restrict each buyer to one
house? Why not take, say, three houses and knock them into one big space, like
where the Beatles lived in the film Help!. At the ends of several of the
streets were empty shops and on the corner of one I could see there was a huge
four-storey abandoned pub. I got unsteadily to my feet and hobbled towards it.
It was a marvel, built in the Gothic revival style with etched glass windows
for the four separate bars on the ground floor, above that large rooms for
billiards, meetings and perhaps a restaurant, the third floor was staff
quarters and above them attic rooms and cupolaed towers that must give fantastic
views south to Wales and west into Liverpool Bay. With the new football stadium
being built, I thought excitedly, there would be plenty of wealthy buyers, fans
from outside the area, who, rather than endure Liverpool’s appalling hotels
with their surly staff and shabby surroundings, would be eager to buy a luxury
apartment in a secure neighbourhood with its own restaurant housed in a
refurbished pub and if they didn’t want to eat out maybe the restaurant would
deliver. The development could have its own delis and clothes shops, all of it
within walking distance of the football ground. Maybe I could sell timeshares
there, who knew?

My head
full of thoughts, I left the silent streets and walked to the railway station.
At first on the rocking train I had four seats to myself but a few stops
further down the line a thin blonde woman in a beige raincoat boarded and
without seeming to look came and sat on the seats facing me, her knees
interlocked with mine, and said in a flat, dull voice, “Ee keeps punching me in
the stomach, so of course I lost deh baby. Mind you it was probably for the
best because it wasn’t ‘is …’

I
wasn’t surprised by this, since about a week after the accident complete
strangers, without any sort of encouragement, had begun coming up to me and
telling me the most awful, sad stories from their terrible lives. I supposed
that there must have been something in my manner which provoked them or perhaps
I gave off some hormone, some distillation of misery which alerted other
desperate souls to a particular sufferer in their midst. This did not mean
these people considerately chose to leave me alone in my pain; instead they
decided to add to it by recounting their own desperate tales.