(2003) Overtaken (6 page)

So
instead I walked around the other side of the truck and climbed up the slippery
grass bank to where the tipper’s cab was hanging in the air. Another group of
motorists, perhaps those who preferred a happy ending, were talking to the
truck driver through the open hanging door of his cab. He seemed to be
conscious and if not able to talk was at least able to swear.

‘Fuck,
oh fuck,’ he said, ‘fuck, oh fuck, my fucking leg. Fuck, oh fuck.’

‘You’ll
be all right, mate,’ said one of the drivers, ‘the paramedics are on their
way.’

‘Fuck,
oh fuck,’ said the truck driver by way of reply. In the distance I heard the
first wailing of sirens cleaving the sodden air.

The
first unit to arrive was a Lancashire Brigade fire engine coming the wrong way
up the eastbound carriageway, then a
St Helens
ambulance, a Merseyside Police Range Rover, two more ambulances and
another
Lancashire
fire engine.
Soon there were enough flashing lights for a disco and a load of confident
bossy men and women in reflective jackets ordering each other about. The second
fire crew and a pair of paramedics, dragging a big square bag like they were
planning a picnic, came clambering up the bank to attend to the truck driver.
Clearly useless, I went back down the steep grass slope to hover near the wreck
of the Ford van.

That’s
when I noticed that there was a strange grow sound coming from the top pocket
of my shirt: what: must have happened was that because Loyd’s was the last
number I’d dialled on my mobile, at some point I had accidentally pressed the
redial button and was now connected to my friend inside the mangled van.

I put
the phone to my ear. ‘Hello, mate?’ I said.

‘All
right, mate,’ I heard Loyd reply. An energetic enough reply though there was a
wet, quavering quality to his voice that for a second made me feel dizzy. In
the background, over the phone, I could hear the little man who’d said he was a
surgeon murmuring to someone.

‘How
you feeling?’ I asked.

‘A bit
flat,’ Loyd said. Then he laughed, ‘Hee, hee, hee.’

‘How’s
everybody else?’ I enquired. ‘How’s everybody else?’ I repeated, but Loyd
seemed to not be listening any more and just kept going ‘hee, hee, hee’. In
strange stereo I could now hear the fire brigade’s saws beginning to cut into
the metal of the van both over his phone and a microsecond later floating
towards me across the roadside grass.

I felt
totally useless amongst all the competing emergency services going about their
proficient work but then a thought came to me that as long as I didn’t hang up
my phone I could somehow keep Loyd alive, like one of those machines that they
hook you up to in the hospital that do the breathing for you, a life support
kind of thing. Glad to be doing something, I checked the battery level on my
Nokia: it was two-thirds full, good, plus signal strength was excellent out
there in the open flat countryside so I reckoned it would easily be possible to
keep Loyd breathing until the fire brigade managed to cut him out of the smash
and got him and the others to the nearest hospital.

Now
that I was a vital part of the rescue effort I felt able to get closer to the
wreck of the Ford van. By now the fire crew had most of the side of the vehicle
hacked away; briefly I looked inside; I thought it was like one of those
motorised advertising hoardings that you get at busy road junctions where three
different adverts are cut into strips and pasted on to triangular rollers the
shape of Toblerone bars that pivot from one picture to another, except
sometimes the rollers get stuck, the motor jams or something, so that one
poster is mixed with another; say one advert is for a van and one is of some
models in swimsuits and one is for some jagged strips of metal maybe, so
they’re all jumbled up with strips of the people and strips of the van and
strips of the jagged metal arms and wheel and head and hand and seat and
gearstick.

Slightly
behind the straining fire crew and the bright green overalled paramedics there
was a big traffic cop, a sergeant judging by the stripes on his uniform. He was
holding a bright spotlight over his head so that the firemen and the paramedics
could see what they were doing.

I went
over to this man also holding up my mobile phone in imitation of the way the
policeman was holding the spotlight. I said to the policeman, ‘It’s all right,
mate, I’ve got Loyd, he’s the driver, the driver, the driver of that van there,
I’ve got him … he’s here on my mobi … it’s all right see? As long as I keep
him connected, it’s sort of like a life support thing, you know what I mean? As
long as I don’t hang up, right? It’ll be okay. Look, I’ve got battery power for
hours yet so there’s no problem there and signal strength is excell—’

The
sergeant —looked at me. ‘Do you know these people?’ he asked, indicating the
insides of the van with a nod of his head.

 ‘Yeah,
they’re my mates, I was behind, I saw it all happen.’

The
sergeant called to another policeman. He said, ‘Max, take this …’ and he
handed the lamp over to a younger constable, then he took me by the arm and led
me a little way off from the grinding sounds and the flashing lights.

‘I’m
sorry, son,’ he said, then again, ‘I’m sorry, son, but they’re all dead.’

3

There’d been so much for
me to do in the first few days after the accident that a maniacal buzzing
energy kept me going. I felt like the promoter of some sort of wildly
out-of-control event, like a rock festival set in an inaccessible location
where the leading acts had cancelled and only a fifth of the tickets had been
sold. All the organising of the aftermath seemed to flow through me. As the
main witness there were endless statements that I had to give to policemen who
hadn’t spoken to the other policemen that I’d already done my act for. There
were unending relatives who had to be sat with, comforted, tranquillised,
disarmed while on their way to the truck driver’s hospital ward, multifarious
and amazingly diverse undertakers who had to be dealt with, death certificates
that had to be got, wills that had to be read and most of all funerals that had
to be gone to.

Unfortunately
it seemed that at some point in the twentieth century the art of holding a
funeral, like the art of cooking and the art of tasteful interior decoration,
was something that had deserted the ordinary people of
Britain
, from whose ranks the families of my five dead friends came. So
that the funerals of Colin, Kate, Loyd, Sage Pasquale and Siggi were terrible
mish-mashes of poetry reading, favourite tune playing, rambling reminiscing in
front of congregations only a few of whom had dressed soberly. Only the most
restrained were attired in what they considered to be appropriate funeral garb,
i.e. black leather bomber jacket, white shirt, black tie, dark trainers.

I don’t
think I would have got through it without my dad; he checked himself out of the
hospital and, encased in plaster as he was, was more use than all the
ineffectual vicars I met over those terrible days. His main contribution was to
put me in touch with an older generation of female relatives who still knew a
little about how to hold a funeral and who possessed special pickle dishes that
were to be used only at wakes.

Nevertheless
I think because I was doing so much and because the services were so shitty
anyway, I failed to gain any of the catharsis that proper funerals are supposed
to provide and instead a few days after the last of them all the activity
stopped and I drove off a cliff of depression.

First
there was a sort of stunned non-feeling. I had never realised you could feel
so much of nothing, so much nothing that the world outside me virtually ceased
to exist; everything beyond the inside of my head appeared to be covered in a
light haze, like smoke drifting across the motorway on an autumn morning. I
felt utterly unanchored, unattached to a universe that existed without grief.
Often I wondered idly why my body didn’t float up into the air, so unconnected
did I feel to the real world.

All the
separate orderly days that had been chopped up into such neat portions of time,
the slices of life once firm and filled with phone calls, appointments,
assignations, e-mails, text messages, conversations, plays, cirKusses, concerts,
became rotten and runny and fluid so that night no longer followed day in
orderly sequence but instead became random. Sometimes a row of short mornings,
nothing too difficult to get through, were followed by a night that seemed to
last for one hundred and seventy-two hours, a night filled with screaming and
weeping and the jabber of the things that are screened on TV in the middle of
an unendable night.

If I’d
ever momentarily considered it I guess I’d thought that depression was pretty
much like being very very sad. Now it was here it was nothing at all like that:
instead there is a horrid, metallic, chemical quality, a level of internal pain
that made life endless and very hard to get through.

Yet to
my surprise I didn’t go completely insane, though I think that might have been
a relief. Every day waiting apprehensively for full-blown madness to arrive,
like a man expecting the last train home that he knows is packed full of
football hooligans. Is this it? I’d think to myself every time a memory of my
friends convulsed me in a knot of misery. Is this it? Is this the thought that
does me in? But when the train came the hooligans pushed me about a bit, scared
me, made me pee myself with fear then more or less left me alone.

The
single significant date in all my relentless future was the one set for the
trial of the tipper truck driver. His name, I found out, was Sidney
Maxton-Brown, a self-employed haulier and the owner of a small fleet of trucks;
he was fifty-four years old, which made him the same age as Siggi’s dad. When
the Lancashire traffic police crash investigators examined the vehicle he’d
been driving they found that over half the tyres had a lot less than the
required amount of tread on them, the truck was carrying almost twice the legal
load of an amount of toxic waste for which there was no documentation — they
still didn’t know where it was from or exactly what it was — record checks
revealed that the man had never taken a test to be a heavy goods vehicle driver
and a doctor’s report said one of his eyes didn’t work very well because of a
pronounced squint.

On that
basis he was vehemently pleading not guilty to manslaughter. Especially in
times of stress I’d always had a bit of a thing for authority figures. I
remember the college I went to in London backed on to a fire station and I’d
often hang around when the firemen were playing volleyball hoping their ball
would come over our wall so I could throw it back and talk to them. This time
my uniformed substitute mum was the police families liaison officer, a kindly
detective sergeant of about my own age. I suppose it was his job to be nice to
me but still it seemed like it was also in his nature. He said, referring to
Sidney Maxton-Brown, ‘Kelvin, the man really doesn’t get it, he genuinely
thinks he’s done nothing wrong. I’ve watched the interview tapes; he keeps
saying he was only trying to make a living for his wife and for his daughter
Susam. He seems to think that the fact that he never signed on the dole allows
him to kill people. He says that he always provided, when his family needed
food or medicine or a tattoo or a new ringtone for their mobile phone.’

Over
the months between the accident and the trial I paid almost no attention to my
building business which you’d think would screw it up, so it surprised me and
everybody else that my firm was doing better than ever. I went out with a girl
once who’d been on that Prozac drug for a while: she said the main side effect
was that the quality of her tennis game improved immensely; she reckoned this
was because the numbing effect of the drug meant she didn’t give a damn whether
she won or she lost. It was sort of the same with me: my almost complete
inattention to my firm resulted in its ever increasing prosperity.

Over
the years I had become as much a developer as a builder and if you were
medium-sized like me you had to be innovative in your thinking, that’s how you
stayed ahead: I’d been one of the first to notice that city centre office
blocks from the 1960s didn’t have the ducting space in the floors and ceilings
for the amount of cabling and air-conditioning the modern workplace requires,
but that their narrow profiles were ideal for converting into stylish flats.
I’d also got in on the ground floor of the mental hospital boom, as early as
1994, redeveloping a small former secure psychotics unit in Wigan as
twenty-eight luxury duplex apartments. Lovely flats they were, only marred
slightly for the inhabitants by the risk of them waking up with one of the
former occupants in the bedroom wondering where their locked ward had gone. I’d
converted churches, factories, deconsecrated pubs; now, after the crash, I
absentmindedly bought properties — houses, schools, warehouses — and would by
accident sell them, to a bloke I couldn’t remember meeting, for a massive
profit: I acquired some land in payment of a debt and the next day the site was
chosen as the location for the UK headquarters of a major television home shopping
network.

As a
result of my vagueness all my subbies — the chippies, sparks, plumbers — had to
take greater responsibility; it was no good asking me for a decision about
anything, I just stood there humming. I guess they liked me or felt sorry for me
or something because they responded with amazing flexibility, showing
initiative and conscientiousness, so that all my contracts were finished on
time, on budget and to a very high standard, which was an almost unheard-of
occurrence in the building game. I suppose if major business leaders want their
corporations to do well they should consider offing their five best friends.