(2003) Overtaken (4 page)

Like my
friends I was no stranger to the modern animal-free circus, and considered that
the acts in this one were pretty standard, not up there with Cirque du Soleil
or the show at the Millennium Dome with music by Peter Gabriel, but not down
there like the performers outside the Pompidou Centre in
Paris
. Excepting that the one extra
element a night at the cirKuss had was the horrible intimacy. The cirKuss
performers weren’t as close as if they were in a crowded lift, say, but I felt
I was really much closer than I had ever wanted to be to anyone performing
anything. There was juggling, there was clowning, there was acrobating, the
black-eyed girl did some juggling then performed on the trapeze, the wind rumpling
the audience’s hair as she somersaulted past only centimetres above our
upturned goggling heads with a shower of glass beads slowly raining down into
our eyes.

So
close were we to each other that it was possible to see the extraordinary
effort it took to perform each of these tasks: the groans of the strongmen were
uttered in our ears as if for us alone, the sweat of the acrobats drifted in a pungent
mist on to the skin of the crowd, the smell of the clowns sizzled in our noses
and the closeness, the intimacy, the nearness, made it all seem to me
completely and utterly pointless. With a start I thought, Where’d that come
from? I felt ashamed of myself as if I’d been caught out dreamily contemplating
the long legs of a girl in a wheelchair, because it was an unspoken rule of me
and my friends that we tried very hard not to dislike things: we had a feeling,
one of those dangerous ones that hovers just below the surface of ever being
articulated, that once we started not liking things we couldn’t know where it
would end; better to assume that by and large if somebody had gone to the
effort of putting something on, or if they were famous and could fill a big
venue then they had something that was worth saying. Yet the thought was there
now and I couldn’t dislodge it that these performers were going to such effort,
such exertion, such rare skill to what end? There didn’t seem to be any story
that was being told. I looked around, not at the cirKuss folk straining in the
centre of the ring but instead at the rest of the audience: were they enjoying
it themselves? It was hard to tell. I had been in so many audiences that I knew
they can be liars to the performers and to themselves; it was always very hard
for them to admit that what they had come to see was a terrible waste of time,
so each new routine was greeted with greater applause than the one before,
building to an actual standing ovation at the climax of the first half.

Sage
Pasquale liked us to stay in our seats during the interval and discuss what we
had seen so far but in one of my many acts of petty rebellion against her I
always insisted on struggling out, clambering and trampling over people. I
pretended to have a mild case of claustrophobia which somehow only seemed to
affect me during the intervals of shows.

I told
my friends I only stood in the foyer or on the pavement outside but really it
was a little secret pleasure of mine to get far away from my mates for a few
minutes: to leave the venue entirely and to visit a pub or bar as distant as I
could safely run to and still get back in time for the second half. While in
the pub or bar I indulged myself in fantasies of aloneness: that I was a
mysterious stranger refuelling my mud-streaked Camaro in a dusty Mexican border
town or a man with frightened eyes and forged papers changing cross-continental
trains at some sinister Balkan rail depot under the obsidian eyes of
Kalashnikov-toting paramilitaries. While in reality I was in a hotel cocktail
bar in
Wigan
.

On this
occasion as I stepped down out of the banked seating area and into the tiny
foyer of the tent, wondering whether I was still fit enough to sprint to the
Yates’ Wine Lodge on Lord Street in my personal best time of two minutes and
eighteen seconds, I saw standing by the entrance to the big mouth the girl from
the trapeze, dressed now in a short blue skirt, blue high heels, stockings and
a low-cut blue top with a tray strapped to her front on which I could see were
arranged tubs of some kind of snack food.

Nobody
else was buying as, coldly, she watched me approach. ‘Ah, the funny man,’ the
girl said when I got up to her, speaking in a thick foreign accent. ‘You know
you really upset Valery, trowing his ball away like dot.’

I was
hoping she hadn’t noticed I’d been the one who’d messed with her friend’s head
but I still said defensively, ‘Well, it wasn’t a real ball.’

‘It was
to Valery,’ she sniffed.

I didn’t really want to
get into an argument with a woman whose friend was a very strong clown, who had
the muscles of a decent middleweight herself and who up close was the most
blistering-looking fucking bird I’d ever seen, so I thought it best to put on a
contrite voice. ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just showing off to my
friends. It’s not my fault, it’s the group dynamic, honest. For a minute there
I thought Valery was going to kill me.’

‘Wouldn’t
be first time,’ she said, refusing to bend to my apologetic tone.

I
thought a change of subject might come in handy. ‘Hmm. What is that, is it food
that you’re selling?’ I said in a stiff voice that suddenly sounded odd to my
own ears. Unable to stop myself, I realised what I was doing, taking on her
accent. Anybody with a strong inflection could have me talking like them in no
time at all. In Chinese restaurants I would often get nasty looks from the
waiters because I had suddenly acquired a Chinese accent, though I thought in
all fairness that they should appreciate it was not a crude one. I didn’t do
any of that ‘velly solly’ stuff but rather spoke in the accent of the indulged
only son of wealthy traders from Xi’an Province who had been educated at a
Western private school and then had gone on to USC in San Francisco to study
mechanical engineering or something like that.

In
answer to my question about her tray the girl looked down as if surprised that
she was holding it. ‘Is Khabapchivi,’ she said.

‘Dah, I
see. Vat is that dat exactly?’ I replied.

She
thought about it hard, screwing her face up and staring towards the roof of the
tent. ‘Umm, dar … Well… is like Gobubchaki but slightly less vortery.’

‘bat’s
hard to reeseest,’ I said, handing over two pounds for a small polystyrene tub
that had a plastic spoon sticking straight up in the food. Smilingly I put a
small globule of Khabapchivi into my mouth and chewed. It tasted like
Birmingham
. ‘Hmm…’ I said. ‘There’s
certainly sometink—’ Before I could say anything more the girl interrupted.

‘Show
starting again. You better get back to your chair, funny man.’ Then she darted
through a flap in the canvas and was gone, leaving me to dispose of my
Khabapchivi in a council rubbish bin. Just as I was going back in to the show I
saw a stray dog go up to the bin, sniff it then run off whimpering.

In the
second half of cirKuss there was a lot more tumbling, flying through the air
and knife throwing, pretty much what would be happening outside in the centre
of town by now, I thought. Then the band got out of second gear for the first time
that night and clanked into ‘Last Train to
Clarksville
’, by the Monkees, for what was obviously meant to be the climax.
The girl came on again dressed in an orange boiler suit, carrying three nail
guns of the type I knew they used on American building sites. By the girl’s
side was Valery, also an orange boilersuit, carrying a huge gas cylinder on his
shoulders which he dumped in the centre of the ring, raising a cloud of sawdust.

As the
band played he took a packet of different coloured balloons from his pocket,
selected one, filled it with gas then ;twisted it into the shape of a bird. All
the while the girl had % been juggling with the nail guns; she was amazingly
adroit, ;pinning and catching the unwieldy objects with effortless ease then
sending them flying back up into the dome of the tent. As he created each bird
Valery tucked it under his arm till he had quite a flock there. Also during all
the juggling and the balloon folding the rest of the cast had come on,
slithering along the ground clad in skin-tight, multicoloured outfits with
their faces painted, possibly to resemble lizards — it was hard to tell.

Now
that he had a lot of birds Valery released one into the air and when it got
about ten feet high, without missing a beat, the girl shot it down with a nail,
causing the lizards to emit a low moan and to writhe about; another bird went
up to meet the same fate as the first. Each time the girl nailed a balloon bird
the lizards would wriggle around in simulated agony and plead with her to stop
her destruction of rubber bird life but she carried on, doing a little dance of
rejection while still tossing the nail guns about. I was familiar with those
nail guns myself and reckoned the girl had them set on hair trigger, for though
I didn’t think anybody else noticed quite a few of the nails went flying off
into the darkness, and finally I was certain I saw a lizard take one in the
thigh, though fair play to the fellow he kept on dancing and didn’t flinch for
a second. Another reptile pulled the nail out quickly and a dark stain began to
spread under his costume. After the show we left our cars parked where they
were’ and walked down to the dark beach. We were going to eat at a restaurant
which was on a boat anchored out in
Southport
Bay
. The
restaurant was called the Gravy Boat and it was reached by a World War Two
amphibious landing craft which was waiting for us on the sands, its diesel eng
. chuntering blackly to itself. We climbed a ladder into the open back of the
olive-green wheeled boat.

‘To me
the birds represented hope, which was destroyed by the West’s failure to act in
Bosnia
,’ said. Kate as the machine
sped across the sands and plunged into the black waters of the
Irish Sea
.

On the
way back Colin said, ‘My prawns were a bit tough.’

When we
got back to the car park it was
1 a.m.
; my car in the moonlight looked low and sinister, like some kind of
half-glimpsed sea monster. We all said goodbye and the others drove off. I was
just about to get into my vehicle when I saw the girl from the cirKuss who was
leaning against a sea-rusted balustrade sucking on a cigarette in a continental
fashion.

‘Nice
karr,’ she said to me in a friendly manner, the previous frostiness seemingly
having melted. ‘I not seen before, what is?’

‘TVR
Cerbera,’ I replied, then pointed out to the bay. ‘You see that next town up
the coast, where the lights are twinkling?’

‘Yah.’

‘That’s
Blackpool
, that’s where they
make these TVRs.’

‘
Blackpool
, is that where you come from?’

‘No,
I’m from
Liverpool
— that’s the
other way,’ and I pointed. ‘East.’

‘Oh
yah, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, dey are from
Liverpool
.’

‘Well,
Birkenhead
actually, but yeah that’s close.
So where do you come from?’ I noticed that for some reason I was talking in my
own voice and not imitating her accent. ‘Luzhney,’ she replied immediately.

‘Right,’
I said. ‘And where would that be exactly?’

‘Ermm,’
she said, thinking hard, ‘is near
Lake
Lucik
, on de
eastern side by da big boatyard.’

 ‘Right,’
I said again.

Then
there was a long pause until she said, ‘Maybe one day you take me for drive in
your nice karr.’

‘Erm,
yes, one day yes, maybe I will one day, yes I will maybe,’ I said, hurriedly
unlocking and wriggling into the driver’s seat.

‘Well,
goodnight,’ I called as I closed the door and started up the big clattery
straight six.

‘Goodnight,
funny man,’ I heard back through the imperfectly fitting canvas roof.

As soon
as the hands-free was connected I told Siggi about it. She said, ‘So you think
she was coming on to you?’

‘I
guess.’

‘And
you ran away despite the fact that you’ve seen for certain that she can put
both legs behind her head?’

‘I know
but … I just thought a girl like her was too …’

‘Beautiful?
Talented? Exotic?’

‘Serious
… I don’t want to get involved with somebody who’s seen whatever it is
she’s seen. You know my motto: a few bob, a few larfs and nobody gets hurt.’

‘Maybe
you’re ready to give serious a try.’

‘No, I
don’t think so, I’d have grown a beard or something if I was.’

‘You
think there’d be some outward sign?’

‘Yes,
there’d be some outward sign.’ Changing the subject I asked, ‘So when are we
going out again?’

‘Saturday,’
she said. ‘Frank Skinner at the
Manchester
Evening News Arena
Manchester
.’

‘Oh
yeah.’