(2003) Overtaken (15 page)

Off the
A road we turned, down a long high-hedged lane that took us suddenly past a
ten-foot-high studded black metal gate set in a towering bramble and elder
hedge. The driver braked and without for a second interrupting his
Dostoyevskian narrative, reversed to skid backwards into the entrance. This
abrupt arrival set howling an indeterminate number of big dogs. ‘I’m not
fucking going in there,’ mumbled the driver, who only seconds before had been
telling me that every second of every day all he wanted to do was to lie down
and die, but now seemed all of a sudden to have discovered a wish to live.

So I
paid him off, watched him drive away and stood alone on a sunny afternoon in
front of a metal gate in a country lane waiting to meet Sidney Maxton-Brown.
There was a steel entryphone set into a pillar at the side of the gate. I
pressed a button, and after a few seconds a girl’s voice answered. I said,
‘I’ve come to see Sidney Maxton-Brown.’

‘Right,’
she replied. ‘You’ve come to see the Dad.’ And with a zizzing sound the gate
swung open.

While
the unseen hounds continued to bay, I was presented with a vision that caused
me to laugh out loud. Straight ahead across a patch of worn grass about the
size of a tennis court was the most gigantic log cabin I’d ever seen. I had
read about them in building trade magazines, complete kits built in
Canada
or northern
United States
, shipped over and assembled
in situ, but had never actually stood in front of one until now.

This
was two storeys high, with a massive glass prow front in the centre and to one
side a wide pine staircase leading from the grass up to a wooden deck supported
on pillars running around the entire front of the house at the first-floor
level.

At the
top of the staircase stood the man I supposed was Sidney Maxton-Brown. Remember
he had not been brought up into the court when the trial was suspended and I
had not returned to witness him being sentenced so I didn’t know what he looked
like. In the intervening days since making the phone call I had many times
imagined what this man might look like: one of my images had been of an
overweight, balding, thick-spectacled man looking all of fifty-five years old,
wearing a green cardigan over greasy shirt and green pants that his belly had
turned over at the top to show his white underpants and the grimy grey trouser
lining, and I’d been entirely right, except his trousers were brown. Next to
him stood a woman of about the same age; she had flat, greasy, muddy-coloured
hair streaked with grey, a scoopnecked turquoise T-shirt and a grubby floral
skirt whose elasticated waist rested just below her flabby flat breasts.

Several
times in and out of the building game I had met people who each morning
splashed on the authentic perfume of evil. Men from whom you wanted to run
every second that you were laughing and joking and dancing in their company;
for instance most members of the Gorci and the Muke families that I’d been at
school with made me feel exactly like that, even though I’d always. been
extremely popular with all of them. One of the conversations me and my friends
had had every few years was what our special gift was; we thought each of us
had one. Sage Pasquale’s special gift was that she never ever stepped in dog
shit; she could be walking down a pitch-black alley at night but somehow her
foot would always swerve away from any pile of canine crap lying in ambush.
Colin could invariably tell what people’s pets were called, Loyd could always
guess a person’s shoe size; they all agreed that my gift was that I got along
with absolutely everyone. I supposed that quality must come in useful when you
were about to meet someone who had killed your five best friends. Except that I
didn’t think I was like that any more, that friendly fellow had gone. Well, I
needed to call him up again for this task.

The
sulphurous stench drifting from the adjacent cabbage fields even conspired to
lend the air a demonic odour so that the man standing at the top of the pine
staircase, the man who had ruined my life with his indifference, seemed even
more utterly banal than if he’d been encountered under more normal
circumstances. Behind
Sidney
was
a thin silent girl of perhaps fifteen holding a baby and a young boy and girl
with runny noses holding the older woman’s skirt. Fighting the simultaneous
impulses both to run and to launch myself at the man’s throat, I waved and
smiled,
Sidney
waved back and I
mounted the stairs to meet him.

‘All
right?’ said
Sidney
in a thick
Lancashire
accent. ‘The is me daughter
Susam and me wife Barbara’ (the smaller youngsters never rated an introduction).
‘I thought we’d have, a bid of lunch while we talked so sid down, sid down.’

‘Yes,
you boys sid down and I’ll ged you dinner,’ said Barbara.

On the
verandah there was a long pine table on which had been laid two places facing
each other; alongside each plate was a small quarter-litre bottle of fizzy pop.
The women and children went off inside the log house and me and
Sidney
sat at the table.

‘This
is quite a house,’ I said.

‘Oh
aye, the “
Wounded Knee
” model.
‘Ad it shibbed over from Canada, not strictly allowed to build a house on this
land zoned for agriculture but I got away with it, claimed it was an ostrich
fattening shed, temporary agricultural structure see? Got a EC subsidy for the
ostriches as well.’ Behind his thick-lensed brown spectacles Sidney’s single
good eye shone with glee while the other faulty one stared off towards the tree
line with a cynical and bored insouciance as if to say to me, ‘I know what
you’re up to, darling, you can’t fool me.’

‘Now
I’ve got four bedrooms,’
Sidney
continued. ‘Sure I’ve got to keep an ostrich in one of them but it’s a small
price to pay. Double height living area; kitchen up here and the offices of me
haulage firm downstairs; that’s not strictly legal either but you can tie the
council up for years with appeals so they usually give up.’ As Sidney talked, a
litany of planning wheezes, bribed officials, unsound structures, my gaze
wandered; from this first-floor eyrie I could see off to the left in a slashed
and burned patch of ancient woodland and rare orchids, five extremely battered
four-axle tipper trucks of various vintages and makes, a Mercedes four-wheel
drive and a Jaguar with, for some reason, Monaco number plates. These were not
the vehicles that really caught my eye however, because parked in a neat row at
right angles to the civilian trucks were a couple of German World War Two
Kubelwagen scout cars, a German half-track and, looming over them all, the long
barrel of its 75mm cannon casting a lengthy shadow across the grass, was a 1943
Panther Mark 4 tank. All of these were painted in grey camouflage and carried
the twin lightning strike symbols of an SS Panzer Regiment.

‘Interested
in my liddle army are you?’ said
Sidney
, following my gaze.

‘I
don’t know many people that have their own Panther Mark 4 tank.’

‘You
know your armour,’
Sidney
said
approvingly. ‘Oh aye, I’m in one of them historical re-enactment groups, the
first British SS Leibstandart Division. We do World War Two battles and our
massacre of Polish civilians is very popular. There’s actually a group who
specialise in being massacre victims, they do some lovely pleading for their
lives. I don’t want you to think it’s anythin’ fascist mind, we’ve got a couple
of darkie lads in our regiment … come to think of it they might be a bit
fascist, certainly don’t seem too keen on the Jews; still, they god their own
Mark 6 Tiger in lovely condition, armed with the rare 88mm gun it is.’

‘Black
SS officers?’

‘Well,
they wear big helmets and goggles to cover them up so the audience can’t see
they’re darkies. We’re all ‘oping to go to western Russian next year to
re-stage the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle of all time, against
collectors of Soviet tanks.’

‘What,
Russians? I’m surprised they can afford it.’

‘No,
no, not Russians, they’re nod interested, Americans mostly. The largest
regiment of Red Army T34s, the Ninth Guards Armoured is actually based in
Los Angeles
.’

Barbara Maxton-Brown
served us lunch, which was a single pork chop garnished with half a pear lying
on a plate accompanied by a pile of hummus, boiled carrots, some Chinese
noodles and next to it tinned peas mixed with tartare sauce served in a
porcelain teacup.

From
time to time while we ate and talked another different teenager with I suppose
a different baby would wander out on to the verandah then go back inside and
some other little ones would wander in a line across the spartan grass as if in
a mini version of one of
Sidney
’s
re-enactments.

Since I
had conceived it, my plans for Kelvinopolis had grown as I realised that my way
to forming a relationship with Sidney Maxton-Brown was to get him involved in
its construction. I needed there to be such a large amount of rubble and dirt
that required shifting that I could keep him working for me for a long time and
I wanted it to be such a large tempting job that he would be forced to put up
with all the strange things I might ask him to do. I said, ‘Now this
development is six terraced streets, thirty houses each side in a street; we’ll
strip out every house which should be enough rubble for two twelve-yard tipper
trucks. I’ll pay one hundred and eighty-five pounds per truck. It’s going to be
at least a one-year contract: there’ll be site waste to shift as well as the
rubble stripped out from the houses. That’s not all though. We’re going to
demolish the central streets so there’ll be a big open area that I’m going to
plant an eco forest in. Now you probably know the thing every upscale
development needs is a water feature: there’s no canal nearby and the river’s
two miles away so I’m going to dig my own. I’m going to call it the River
Anfield. That means there’ll be a lot of soil from that that’ll need taking
away. Of course you’ll have to pay dump fees out of the price but it’s still a
tidy profit.’

‘It’s
an even tidier profit if you fly tip one load in four,’ simpered Sidney
Maxton-Brown.

‘Well,
that’s up to you,’ I replied. ‘But isn’t fly tipping a bit risky these days?’

‘Oh,
don’t you worry about that,’ said Sidney. ‘I know an out-of-the-way place. I
mean, nobody visits those national parks anyway.’

So far
so obvious. I had already figured out that one of the many corners, roundabouts
and contraflows that Sidney Maxton-Brown would cut would be the avoidance of
landfill fees by a bit of fly tipping: he would simply unload his trucks at any
quiet spot he could find.

In
anticipation of this I had already spoken to the boss of the reputable quality
firm that usually handled my tipping. ‘So what you’re saying,’ said the
incredulous boss, ‘is that you want me to pick up the rubble from the job that
this cowboy will be fly tipping and take it to the proper dump.’

‘That’s
right.’

‘And
you’ll pay top rate for this?’

‘Two
hundred pound a truck.’

‘But
I’m not getting the job itself.’

‘Well
in a manner of speaking you are since you’ll be taking a fair portion of the
waste from the job to the tip.’

‘That’s
fucked up.’

‘Look,
all right,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll also find another better, bigger job for
you somewhere else. Satisfied?’

‘No,
not really, no. It’s fucking mad.’ A thought struck the contractor. ‘Here,
you’re not having a nervous breakdown are you?’

‘No,’ I
said, ‘nothing so simple.’

Over
dessert of digestive biscuits, whipped cream and Smarties
Sidney
said, ‘Kelvin, I have to tell you
that I recently served a term in prison.’

‘Oh
really?’ I said, acting all innocent. ‘What for?’

‘A
miscarriage of justice,’ replied
Sidney
.

‘Really,
how come?’ I said, twisting a fork out of sight under the table to stop myself
stabbing him with it.

‘Pure
and simple, I was involved in a road accident where some people god
accidentally killed, yet it was me got put in prison. See I never set out to
kill those people, now how can it be a crime if I never set out to kill them? A
crime is beating up pensioners or those sick bastards who go around molesting
little kiddies that’s what makes me mad, that’s who the police should be after,
nod somebody like me. All I do is I put my family first but everybody does
that, don’t they? I try to make a little money, to get by, to put food on my
family’s table, to pay for my daughter’s operation … if she ever needs one
that is.’

‘So
have they let you out on appeal or something?’ I enquired, and it was at this
point that
Sidney
told me about
his lucky stomach cancer.

‘I
assume you’re still banned from driving,’ I said to stop himself tearing the
haulier’s lying, self-righteous throat out with my hands. ‘So who does your
driving now that you’re banned?’