(2003) Overtaken (2 page)

I said,
‘Stop fucking flashing me, will you, I know you’re behind me.’

Back
then I was the sort of man who didn’t take much notice of living things apart
from people. Not even most people. I was only really interested, really engaged
with my small group of five friends; everybody else seemed fuzzy round the
edges. Other than my friends, what I liked and what I could name every species
and sub-species of were: cars, buildings, guns, bridges, aeroplanes, clothes,
motorcycles and kitchen appliances. What I had no idea about were animals,
flowers, trees, shrubs, fish and rock formations.

If I
had a contract out in the countryside I would often navigate my way around by
the cars that were parked in the villages I went through. When giving
directions I’d say to people, ‘You turn left at the village that’s got the
Mitsubishi Shogun parked on the corner by the church, you keep going till you
see an old burned-out Bedford CF van then take a left and stop opposite the
metallic blue Ford Focus.’ Of course if anybody moved their car I was fucked.

So when
I pulled up next to Loyd’s van in the municipal car park on the seafront at
Southport and Siggi slotted her sports car next to my sports car I ignored the
radiant, showy, seaside sunset, the ornate floral borders and an extremely rare
kind of kestrel and instead I enjoyed looking at the sinister hulking bulk of
Loyd’s van in the descending darkness. It really was a cool-looking van,
probably the only one of its kind in the country. Loyd had bought it during a
walking holiday we’d taken in
Los Angeles
.

There
were six of us who were the closest friends there could possibly be. My name’s
Kelvin. I persist in thinking that I was named after the editor of the Sun
newspaper, a man called Kelvin McKenzie, who was revered in our house. I
persist with this idea even though that can’t possibly be right because I was
born in 1970 which was long before he was around. I’ll tell you what, though,
when I was growing up in the late seventies, early eighties, when
Liverpool
was run by militant socialists,
having right-wing parents was a disturbing experience. I remember once we had
to hide a Young Conservative in our attic after he’d been chased down the
street by bomber-jacketed heavies from Councillor Hatton’s ‘Static Security
Force’.

My mum
left us when I was ten so it was just me and my dad after that, plus his
occasional girlfriends. He continually went on at me about self-reliance, not
being a scrounger, paying your own way in the world and it always made perfect
sense to me. In our street there were kids whose parents never seemed to work
but always had plenty of money, who sat on the step all day through the summer
in their shell suits drinking beer; still their kids got the newest Star Wars
trooper figures before anybody else and wore those big red Converse baseball
boots then threw those out and got the latest Nikes with the weird laces
everybody used to put in. I didn’t want to be like them.

Not to
say we were rich or anything — my dad ran a cafe near to
Liverpool
’s football ground. It was called
the Kop O’Koffee and we lived above the place, the smell of bacon leaking into
my bedroom as I slept. The cafe made enough money, mostly from match days, for
me to be sent at the age of eleven to a private school in Cheshire. The uniform
they forced us to wear made me even more conspicuous in a neighbourhood where
self-improvement was considered a form of fascism. There’s not many kids that
got into fights in the street because some other kid calls your dad a
‘reactionary class traitor’. It was like living in one of them books written by
Chinese women about life during the Cultural Revolution.

So
that’s me, at the time this story starts. I’d say I was of above average
height, dark hair, definitely overweight though not morbidly obese yet. There
was my best girl friend Siggi, tall, sharp-featured with a blonde crew cut;
Loyd, my best mate — the nerdiest black man you’d ever meet, he had one of
those combined palm PC/phones that he wore clipped on the belt of his cargo
pants, along with a Maglight torch and a Swiss Army penknife in a pouch. Loyd’s
wife Sage Pasquale was also a big woman, almost strapping you might say, but
very attractive; there was Colin, Jewish, thirty-twoish, gingerish, and finally
there was Colin’s much younger girlfriend Kate who, surprisingly given his
relative ugliness, was a very, very pretty little brunette.

We were
very close, all went together to see plays, films, exhibitions at least a
couple of times a week, talked all the time on the phone, e-mailed and texted,
took at least four holidays a year together. I’d say we’d been pretty much
everywhere in the world where you could easily get a drink. Only a couple of
years ago Colin had introduced a previously unknown type of cerebral malaria
into the north-west of England after a beach holiday we’d taken in Cambodia. As
Colin said, that country was great when we went there but really it’s been
ruined now. In the last couple of years it has somehow lost its innocence.

So the
walking holiday in Los Angeles? Well, about four years ago we all abruptly one
day desperately wanted to get into walking. It’s funny, you think when you get
an idea like that that it’s all your own, it’s unique to you, you’ve plucked it
out of the air; only when you look back on it a year or two later do you see
all the magazines you read at the time included big features on walking boots,
Gore-Tex jackets, the fun lives of hill shepherds and how walking is the new
thing.

So
where were we going to go on our walking holiday? The six of us would go round
to each other’s houses excitedly clutching the beers and street vendor foods of
the country whose brochures we were poring over that week. Still it was hard to
decide: would it be exploring the canal towpaths of the Black Forest? Fourteen
days rambling the lakesides of the Argentinean pampas? Or three weeks falling
off the goat tracks and down the steep crevasses of the High Atlas Mountains?
Nothing really appealed to us until Sage Pasquale suddenly said, ‘Do you
remember. that Michael Douglas film Falling Down?’.

‘Yeah.’

‘Directed
by Joel Schumacher,’ said Colin.

‘In
that film, he abandons his car, Michael Douglas, and he walks right across LA
to the sea at
Santa Monica
.’

‘Where
Robert Duvall shoots him,’ said Colin.

Sage
Pasquale ignored that. ‘I’ve always thought it would be amazing to walk down
some of those boulevards of LA.’

‘But
didn’t the guy in that film get attacked by gangs and stuff before he was shot
by Robert Duvall?’ asked Siggi.

 ‘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.