(2003) Overtaken (27 page)

‘That’s
right, we do.’

‘The
two of you?’

‘Yes,’
said Sidney, speaking for the first time since we’d sat down.

‘What
the fucking hell have you got to forgive me for?’ I yelled, standing up. ‘You,
Adam, all I ever did was look after you and pay for you to go to treatment
centres and worry about you.’

‘That’s
what I’ve got to forgive you for,’ the boy said, and it struck me right there
and then what cruel little pricks young people could be. ‘When you looked after
me and sent me to Muddy Farm. I’m afraid my mum wasted your money there, Kelv.’

‘Thanks,’
I said, noticing he didn’t mention anything about paying any of it back.

‘See,
you were delaying my recovery by doing all that. When you rescued me all the
time, dusted me down and stood me up, you only enabled me to get back into
taking drugs all over again. It was only Sidney who helped me to hit my rock
bottom.’

‘The
point from which he could bounce back,’ added the older man, in exactly the
same tone of voice. It was like they had been taking Linguaphone lessons
together in how to talk like a patronising cunt.

‘He put
you in an ostrich shed!’ I shouted.

‘Calm
down, Kelvin,’ Adam said in this incredibly annoying voice, ‘and sit down.’

I had
to force myself to control the rage I felt but did so. ‘That’s right,’ he
continued, ‘Sidney did nothing for me thus allowing me to find my own
recovery.’

‘All
right, okay, all right,’ I said, my chest feeling tightly clamped so that my
voice came out all taut and reedy. ‘I can just about understand that I might
have been doing the wrong thing for you — from the right motives I might add —
but’ — and here I pointed towards Sidney —’I don’t see what that cunt has got
to forgive me for.’

‘Maybe
I should let
Sidney
answer that
himself,’ replied Adam, and I swear the two of them smirked at each other. ‘Yes
I will, Adam,’ the older man said, then, turning to me, ‘You see, Kelvin, first
of all I have to tell you that Adam has explicitly told me he doesn’t hold me
at all responsible for what happened to his father; he’s made it very clear to
me that that was your shit, your shit that you were laying on me and him.’

‘But
you killed five people!’

‘Did I,
Kelvin?’ he said. ‘Or do you just think I did? I admit you had me convinced for
a while. After all, you went to incredible lengths to make me think it was so
and for a while I admit you made me feel extraordinarily bad. That’s what I
forgive you for. I hated you for a long time because you pretended to be my
friend then you turned on me. I was devastated, but me and Adam have talked
about it a lot’ and we now realise that you were taking out your guilt on us.’

‘What
fucking guilt?’ I yelped. ‘What fucking guilt?’
Sidney
said, ‘When a person comes through something that’s killed others,
then sometimes they feel bad that they didn’t die too. Especially if their
feelings for those people were … what’s that word?’

‘Ambiguous,’
Adam chipped in. ‘It’s called survivor guilt, Kelvin,’ said the boy.

‘It’s
called horse shit,’ I said, standing again. ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m going
now.’

‘Of
course,’ I heard
Sidney
saying,
‘but we’re not going to let you go, you know. You made me your friend and I’m
going to continue that friendship. We’ll call you in a couple of days.’

‘I
might not answer,’ I said petulantly.

‘I
think you will,’
Sidney
responded with confidence; for the first time his two eyes seemed to agree —
they both expressed a supercilious contempt for me.

‘Goodbye,
Kelv,’ said Adam.

I
walked out of that pine coffin of a house and got in my car.

I stood
on a small hill I’d had built and surveyed it all. Phase One of the Crystal
Quarter had been completed. The terraced houses around the forest were
occupied, curtains and blinds in their windows, cars parked outside. There were
a pair of skaters skittering loops on the frozen River Anfield and a man walked
his dog on the cobbled path that meandered across the development. A small
unthreatening sculpture was scheduled to be placed on the peak of the hill
within a month.

Work on
Phase Two, the new Victorian warehouses and the gym building, had begun, the
foundations were dug and the concrete was due to be poured tomorrow.

My
mobile phone rang — the site agent with a query. After I’d dealt with the call
and rung off it suddenly occurred to me that another phenomenon that had ceased
was the threatening messages from Valery. It had certainly been weeks now since
he’d called. Perhaps because the intimidation seemed to have stopped I began to
think about what he’d said in a different way; it struck me that even though I
knew he was capable of it, he’d never taken any action. ‘If he wasn’t
threatening me then what did he mean?’

Winter
darkness seemed to come on as I walked across the site and squeezing past Florence’s
Fiesta entered the cold, empty pub: the bare plaster walls still exuded
something of the wet clay smell of every building site but the kitchens were
now in, the bar counter with its scrolled supports had been newly varnished and
the electrics, water and gas would be connected in a couple of days.

She
wasn’t in the main space. I shouted, ‘
Florence
! It’s me!’

‘Upstairs,
sweetheart.’ Her voice came from somewhere upstairs. Climbing the railless
stairs took me to the second floor; up there we had retained the original room
plan and the corridors were dark and unlit. A narrow staircase behind a
propped-open tongue-and-groove door led upwards again into one of the four
conical towers of the pub. She was there in the last of the twilight. Out of
the curved windows were the lilac-grey ripples of
North
Wales
and the flat aluminium expanse of the river
estuary. Beyond the building site the orange balls of sodium light were
glimmering on.

She
stood by the window in the dissolving light. I felt I had never loved her more
than at that moment, the one solid thing in my life. Work had still not been
quite completed up here; where she stood the floor was littered with planks of
wood, strips of plastic and broken bricks.

Without
looking at me she said, ‘Darling, you have given me so much with the money to
do my show that I think I have to give you something back.’

‘No,’ I
said, ‘you don’t need to.’

‘Yes, I
will give you the whole of me now, it’s time I finally told you my story. It’s
time that you know the things that happened to me, the reasons I left my
homeland, time for all that.’

Feeling
thrilled and apprehensive at the same time I thought, This’ll make this awful
day better. I can stand anything with
Florence
at my side to see me through it.

She
turned from the window and looked at me for the first time. ‘So,’ she said, then
returned to the view, except I felt she wasn’t seeing Merseyside but rather the
distant hills of her own land. ‘One day some government soldiers came to our
village. They told us that the Muslims in the next village had killed all the
Christians like us the day before, so the men go and get their hunting guns and
the soldiers give us some other guns and grenades, then we go and we get all
the Muslims in our village and we put them all in their mosque and they all
saying, please don’t hurt us and we say, of course we don’t hurt you, we know
you since schooldays. Then we lock the doors and we set fire to the mosque and
they start coming out of the windows and the men shoot them and throw in the grenades.
I walk a bit away then I see down by the river a Muslim woman and her daughter
I was at school with and they submerged so the tops of their heads only
showing, so I go to our house and I get an axe then I go back to the river and
I always hating her because they have a Volkswagen Golf that they swank about
in and she see me and she stand up all wet and say please don’t hurt me and
please don’t hurt my daughter but I hit them both with the axe over and over
and over until they dead.

‘Then a
bit later the Christians come from the other village and they not dead after
all but they say they will go back and kill their own Muslims now. Anyway now
we killed all our Muslims and my husband go with them but some Muslims know
they are coming maybe and ambush them on the path in the forest and my husband
I think is killed. He don’t come back anyway and then I think perhaps I have to
leave.’ She paused. ‘It was a very very bad situation. I glad I told you
everything now. Ah, this is so beautiful,’ she said. ‘I truly think I like to
spend the rest of my life here.’

I
imagined there might be a simple plastic switch in some dark basement and if
you flipped this switch then everything in the world would stop. I knew that
desire was not to be granted as sounds from outside were merging with the
crackling in my head — a distant rumble of traffic, the barking of a dog. Well
if the world was doomed to continue perhaps I would see to it that I never
spoke again I considered the idea that if I retreated towards the steep stairs
that led to the turret I could throw myself backwards down them. In addition to
my real injuries I could pretend to have brain damage that prevented me
speaking; I would never talk again, shut up and not say another word ever. I’d
indicate through hand signals and pencilled notes that I wasn’t unhappy or
anything, smiling and gesturing like a soft lad. Once a little time had passed
Florence
, my dad, my employees, they’d
come to accept it; that would just be me — my thing, the one who didn’t talk.

Unfortunately
what you wish for doesn’t always appear to come true so, remaining upright and
upstairs, I said, ‘Here,
Florence
, I heard this joke the other day. How do you kill a circus?’

‘I
don’t know,’ she replied absentmindedly, her thoughts all still on the view or
her past or fuck knows what.

‘Go for
the juggler,’ I said.

‘I
don’t get it, funny man,’ she replied.

I now
stood at
Florence
’s back. There
was a big deep hole over the way scheduled to be filled with concrete first
thing tomorrow morning that she would fit in nicely. I looked at her white
neck, stretched my shaking hands out towards it then stopped; instead, from
behind I put my arms around her waist and kissed the back of her head, burying
my face deep in her black, black hair. The pies, the pies, I thought, the pies,
the pies.