(2003) Overtaken (5 page)

‘Oh
yeah.’

 Saturday
was not usually a big out night for us, firstly seeing as that was the night
every idiot went out, the ‘Bridge and Tunnel’ crowd; secondly because nearly
every other Saturday in the season Liverpool FC would be playing at home. If
Liverpool FC had been playing at Anfield then me, Colin, Loyd and Siggi, who
all had season tickets, would certainly have gone to the game. We would have
watched the match from our seats, seventeen rows back to the left of the main
Kop entrance, then we would have gone on a crawl around all the pubs that were
still standing from our school days, then we went to our own homes, had a
takeaway and went to bed early.

However
this weekend it was an away match. The Saturday before had been the first game
of the new Premiership season and the Reds had been up against one of those
London
teams composed entirely of
Frenchmen or Africans who spoke French. The cockney supporters sang:

In your
Liverpool
slums

In your
Liverpool
slums

You look in the dustbin for something to eat

You find a dead cat and think it’s a treat

In your
Liverpool
slums

In your
Liverpool
slums

In your
Liverpool
slums

Your mum’s on the game and your dad’s in the nick

You can’t get a job ‘cause you’re too’ fucking thick.

I said
to Loyd, ‘That year when I was in
London
I remember once I was standing on a corner in
Mayfair
or Kensington or somewhere and
every stopped car at the traffic lights was a Porsche 911 or a Ferrari, or a
Bentley.’

‘That’s
because there’s so many rich people down there,’ said Loyd.

‘Exactly.
Here in
Liverpool
if you’ve got
a smart car it’s a rare sight, other people notice you, it means something.’

Loyd
said, ‘In the country of the blind the GTi’d man is king.’

‘Exactly.’

Just
then the teams came running on to the pitch. I loved the colours you found at
the football match, colours of a purity you never got in real life, the
acid-clear reds and blues of the shirts the players wore, the impossible green
of the grass on which they ran, the total black and whiteness of the balls they
kicked and tossed and bounced off their heads. The only other time I had seen
colours of such otherworldly purity was on the tunics of a troop of Horse
Guards that had suddenly come riding out of the dawn mist in a street in St
John’s Wood when I was down in London for that year.

Then
after that for ninety minutes plus a fifteen-minute break I had no independent
thoughts at all, for I became part of that huge animal which is the crowd. As
if falling into sleep I let myself sink into the mass so that my individual
thoughts and movements were only one component in the bulk of a gigantic beast.
I was freed from the responsibility of conscious thought; I believed what the
crowd believed: that the penalty against us was unjust no matter how clear the
foul was, that the forward was onside no matter how great the gap was between
him and the opposing defenders, that the other supporters were a pack of lying
cockney cunts and their players were a bunch of untalented, shiftless, cheats
until the day when they came to play for Liverpool FC when they were somehow
transformed into the best players in the world.

2

The original plan for the
trip to see Frank Skinner at ‘the Manchester Evening News Arena had been for me
to go with the others in the van; if I’d gone in the van I would have been able
to have me a few drinks. Though in general I liked to drive myself in my own
car to things, I did think that seeing a comedian was miles better if you’d got
a few drinks inside you. The alcohol gave you more courage to shout stuff out,
which definitely made the whole show go better for everyone present. I knew for
absolute certain that comedians really loved it when they had somebody like me
in the audience, someone who talked back to them and yelled out witty comments
and took the piss out of their appearance and shouted out the punchlines to
their jokes a split second before they said them.

Unfortunately,
though, I couldn’t go in the van because in the afternoon about two hours before
I was due to meet the others I’d got a phone call telling me that someone I
knew had just been taken in to the Royal Liverpool Hospital and I had to go and
visit them. This man had been waiting a year and a half for me to restore a
single piece of lead flashing that had fallen off his roof and he had finally
tried to replace it himself. The man had inevitably slipped and fallen off, the
roof, breaking his arm plus his femur in three places and suffering severe
concussion.

When I
got to his hospital bed the man was full of apologies. ‘I’m sorry, Kelvin,’ he
said. ‘What was I thinking of? I know you were going to do it, I just thought…’

‘Honestly,
Dad,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to start trusting me. I was actually going to do your
roof today. I’ve actually got the piece of lead flashing in the boot of the car,
I was actually, literally on my way round to your place when the hospital
phoned.’

‘I
know, I know, please forgive me, son, please, I’m so sorry.’ Then he started
crying.

So what
with stopping off at the wholesalers in
Liverpool
to pick up a strip of lead flashing, time was moving on. It would
be impossible for me to get home, park the car, change and make our rendezvous
so I had to phone Loyd and tell them to set off without me, I’d try and catch
them up on the M62 so we could drive into Manchester together.

As soon
as I topped the flyover in my TVR at the Rocket pub where the motorway starts,
even though it was a late summer evening, the sky suddenly went black with
stormclouds and a few seconds later rain began to fall. Big heavy drops that
quickly formed puddles and then when the drops landed in the puddles each made
a little bubble, a perfect glassy dome as it hit.

Again I
phoned Loyd. The first thing my friend did after he got behind the big steering
wheel of the Ford was to slip a bulky microphone headset affair on to his head,
he then plugged this into his phone which in turn he clipped into a bracket
protruding from the dashboard. Loyd had even bought a woodgrain cover for his
Nokia which matched the fake wood veneer inserts on the van’s dashboard, so he
needed to take off the shiny metal façade which his phone normally had and
replace it with the woodgrain one. After all that he was ready to start
driving, about five minutes after he’d first got behind the wheel. Like I said,
he was the nerdiest black man you could ever meet.

‘Where
are ya?’ I asked Loyd.

‘We’re
just turning off the ‘57 on to the ‘62.’

‘Not
too far then. I should be able to catch ya if I put me foot down though this
rain’s a bit of a pig. What’s the traffic like where you are?’

‘Solid
but moving.’

‘Fair
enough,’ I said. ‘Put me on speakerphone and let me give a big shout out to
everyone.’

Loyd
switched me over and the gang all shouted, ‘Hi! Hi, Kelvin! See ya soon,
Kelvin!’ I heard all their different voices. Every one of them.

I
shouted back, ‘Hi, gang!’ and then rang off.

Slowly
I pressed the big drilled aluminium accelerator pedal and turned the windscreen
wipers to their most rapid setting, adding the sound of their flack-flacking to
that of the rain zizzing off the canvas roof and the wail of the big straight
six as the sodium lights clicked by on the M62.

Round
about junction 10, with the humps of the big old bomber hangars at Burtonwood
like whales in a grey sea, I came up behind the Ford van. My friends were
travelling in the outside lane, my TVR was about three car lengths back on the
inside when we hit the flashing orange lights, the big yellow boards and the so
mph warnings blinking on the overhead matrix signs which told drivers that we
were about to be switched into a contraflow system. Everybody dropped back from
8o/85 mph to the 6o mph tradition agrees you do when the signs say so.

A few
seconds later row on row of cones, and arrows made up of hundreds of flashing
bright orange bulbs, led us across into the westbound path from which we had
been separated seconds before by concrete reinforced armoured steel barriers;
these had now been replaced only by a tranche of plastic magicians’ hats. By
this time I had leapfrogged the two cars in front of me and was off the
nearside of the van: I could see Colin and Siggi in the rear seats leaning
forward to join in with what the others were saying. After perhaps half a mile
the flow both east and west was swapped back to the left-hand bore of the M62
by more signs and another sinuous ribbon of cones, which came immediately after
we passed under a bridge whose cover for a second eerily stopped the sound of
the rain drumming on the taut roof of the TVR.

Indeed
this silence seemed to last much longer than it really could have done, for, as
the snake of cars entered the curve, I saw a big four-axle tipper, one of the
Japanese ones that had never really caught on in Britain, coming towards us at
a speed well over the so limit, spray flaming out from its sides. The driver,
realising he was never going to make the sharp turn to his left, tried to brake
instead, forcing all the weight from the full load he was carrying on to his
leading wheels. One tyre failed to take the sudden weight and exploded. I saw
it go, a colourless explosion followed, by ribbons of black rubber springing up
into the air like joke snakes bursting from a can bought at a magic shop. All
grip now gone and down to the spark-showering metal rims on its leading wheels,
the tipper slewed out of its own lane, detonating through the cones, popping
them aside like skittles and he hit Loyd’s van square in the side. The brute
power of the truck was such that it took the van right across in front of me,
the powerful headlamps of the tipper lighting up the inside of the Ford showing
all my friends sitting calmly in their seats. Then I was past them and the
motorway was as it always was, cars and cars and cars all the way to the
North Sea
a hundred miles away to the east.

Except
that looking in my rear-view mirror I could see there was nobody behind me. I
was the last one to come through, the two eastbound lanes of the contraflow
were empty and on the opposite side the traffic was beginning to bunch to a
halt, brake lights and hazards blinking on and off in the streaming rain.
Because of the roadworks the hard shoulder was being used as one of the lanes
but as there was no other traffic it didn’t matter when I stamped on the brakes
and slithered to a stop in the middle of the carriageway. I dialled 999 on my
mobile phone and it was only then, when connected to the emergency operator,
that sound seemed to return, both inside and out, with a cacophonous rush.
Speaking to the woman operator, a decade of watching police and hospital dramas
on TV gave me the convincing jargon. Calmly I said, ‘There’s been a collision
eastbound on the M62 approximately a mile east of junction 10. Tipper truck
versus van, multiple casualties, I repeat multiple casualties and risk of
fire.’

The
operator, picking up on my tone, told me units were being despatched and would
soon be on scene, then she broke the connection.

Clambering
out of the TVR I fell to my knees for some reason, I didn’t know why. Remaining
on all fours with stinging palms for a few seconds, I then got to my feet and
stood for a little while longer on the tarmac swaying backwards and forwards;
collecting myself, I began to run up the M62.

The tipper truck had been
crammed to the top and above with a load of rubble, bricks and broken cement,
making it tremendously heavy and giving it enough terminal velocity to drive
Loyd’s van into the concrete side of the bridge at 70 miles an hour. After
pushing the van against the wall the truck had then mounted it, ridden up over
it, crushed it downwards, compacted it, before coming to a stop rearing up into
the air resting its weight on the torn cadaver of the van.

All
around on the motorway drivers from the stalled traffic were getting out of
their cars and staring intently at the wreck, as if attempting to prise apart
the ragged scraps of metal and glass, the battering oily girders, the rocks and
stones, solely by the use of mind control.

A
rescue party began to form, a camouflage-panted man pulled a fire extinguisher
from his winch and aerial-adorned Land-Rover then ran over to the crash and
squirted foam on to some wisps of smoke curling from under the wreckage. An
elderly man wearing a tweed jacket and a dicky bow climbed out of a big BMW 7
series, said to the crowd gathering around the smash that he was a surgeon,
don’t try and move anybody, clear the rubble, has somebody called the
paramedics? Good, don’t try and move anybody, wait till the paramedics get
here, I’m a surgeon. Then clambered to the back of the van and stuck his head
through the hole where the rear window had been and started talking to somebody
in there. A woman from an old Ford Fiesta said she was a nurse and inserted
herself in the hole next to the surgeon. I sort of wondered why everybody was
stating their jobs. I wondered if I should say, ‘I’m a builder.’ Then stick
myself into a hole. I supposed I could of course mention that they were my
friends in there under the metal, but it seemed like that would be pulling
rank, grandstanding sort of, drawing attention to myself in an egotistical way and
I didn’t want to do that.