(2003) Overtaken (7 page)

In the
lobby of the Crown Court in Liverpool on the first day of the trial I kept
looking around in confusion at the dwarfish, stunted creatures who swarmed
about me, their baseball-capped heads about a foot below mine, smoke chuffing
out of their mouths as if they were miniature trains at the seaside and I would
think, Who are these people? Then I would recall where I was with a jolt and I
would say to myself, Oh, yes, they’re criminals.

Inside
the hot wood-panelled courtroom itself I sat with the relatives of the dead.
Across the other side of the public gallery it was easy to spot members of the
extended MaxtonBrown family, seeing as each of the male Maxton-Browns had
inherited the family squint, so they sat waiting for the show to begin with
their eyes shooting off all over the place like fireworks. Occasionally the
accused’s family would dart angry stares at the relatives as if it were their
offspring who were on trial for deliberately and recklessly driving themselves
into the path of an innocent tipper truck. At one point I noticed a crop-headed
fifteen-year-old MaxtonBrown girl making stabbing and throat-cutting motions
at Sage Pasquale’s seventy-five-year-old granny.

Inside
the court there was that air of a show about to begin. I wondered if there was
a backstage like at the theatre; perhaps the judge was at that moment peeping
through a curtain, asking the clerk of the court, ‘What are they like today?’

Except
it never did begin, the show. I’d experienced similar decompression a couple of
times before: once I remember when the Prodigy had failed to turn up for a
concert at the City Hall in
Leeds
and once during a play in
Liverpool
when an actress kept forgetting her lines. First there was the same
impatient murmuring and muttering from the audience, then you could see the
backstage staff self-consciously having whispered consultations with each
other, then finally there came the announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen,
unfortunately Keith Flint says he simply can’t be fucked coming up here so…’;’Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see one of our cast has been having
problems so I am afraid tonight’s performance is cancelled. If you wish …’

Back in
the well of the court I suddenly noticed that Sidney Maxton-Brown’s barrister
was the lawyer whom I’d sold the house in
Upper
Parliament Street
to, the one who’d been bugging me
about the brushed aluminium light switch. I’d gone round and fitted the correct
light switch a week and a half after the accident; I think he was a bit
surprised to see me there on his doorstep at
4 a.m.
with a screwdriver in my hand
continually breaking down and sobbing while I fitted it but I think he was
pleased.

Since
the accident I’d completed all those sort of tasks that I’d previously been
avoiding. The day-to-day lies and evasions of the builder were poison to me
now; I found it hard to stand lies any more in any context and again, though it
wasn’t my intention, this trustworthiness did my business nothing but good. I
had discovered I was no longer able to be dishonest in any way. Now, reflecting
on it much later, I think in the back of my mind, which was as crowded with
guilty thoughts as the smoky backroom of an old-fashioned pub, there was the
vague feeling that one of the reasons the crash had happened was because of my
former dishonesty.

 The
clerk of the court was passed a folded note, he stood and announced to us all:
‘The trial of the Queen versus Sidney Maxton-Brown is suspended and will resume
at two this afternoon.’

In a
hubbub of mystery we swarmed and fought our way out of the trying room. The
relatives collared the Merseyside — Police families liaison officer outside in
the shabby corridor. Standing at the back of the group, I heard him say to
their frantic questioning, ‘What’s happened is his solicitors have finally
persuaded him to plead guilty to “Causing Death by Reckless Driving”.’

‘What
does that mean?’ asked Siggi’s dad. ‘He’ll be sentenced this afternoon.’

‘What’ll
he get?’ asked Colin’s brother.

‘Ten
years I imagine will be the sentence,’ said the policeman.

‘Yeah,
but what does that mean in reality? He won’t be out for …?’

‘At
least five, could be more,’ he replied. All the relatives started shouting:

‘It’s
not enough!’

‘He
should be there for fucking life!’

‘You
fuck off, he’s done nothing! He’s being persecuted is what it is. We’re going
to launch an appeal, then we’ll get compo like all them paddies.’ This came
from a fat-legged Maxton-Brown woman.

‘I
don’t think you can have an appeal if you’ve pleaded guilty,’ said the police
family liaison officer.

‘You
can fuck off too, you Jew pouf!’ she shouted.

I was
so lonely I said to the policeman, ‘Do you fancy going for a drink?’ I didn’t
want to lose him but I suppose his job was done now and his training told him
he needed to disengage to maintain his boundaries.

‘Oh,
thanks, Kelvin,’ he said warmly like he really wanted to do it, ‘but I got to
get going, get home. They’re digging up the
Dock Road
and it’s added about thirty minutes to my journey. Fucking
bastards, every time I go past there’s no sod working on it.’

‘I
know, it’s bonkers,’ I replied, tutting sympathetically. ‘I mean what’s going
on with that?’

‘I’ve
no idea,’ he said. But I did.

Perhaps
a month after the accident, having just managed to drag myself back to work,
wearing odd shoes and an unwashed pullover with stains all down it — an office
conversion it was on the edge of
St Helens
city centre still in a terrible state, hardly able to stand for
misery, an awful fear was following me around. Something completely ordinary
like the sound of wind in the trees could pitch me into such an appalling
terror that I shook until my legs gave way and I had to clutch on to a road
sign for support.

That
day the building’s enormous new air-conditioning unit was being lifted inside
the structure by a mobile crane. As I stood there, simply watching and getting
in the way (my highly competent site agent handled everything so there was no
good reason for me to be there, it was just loneliness), I suddenly had the
sense that there was something missing. Not able to figure out what it was, I
looked all about me before it dawned that the absence was inside rather than
out: while in no way could I say it had gone, my awful anxiety had lessened to
a considerable degree.

I
surveyed the site to find out why this was. In order to make space for the
crane to do its work we’d blocked off the road with barriers and traffic was
being routed around the site via narrow side streets causing complete chaos;
car’s and vans were stacked up in all directions, unmoving as far as could be
seen. Oddly I realised it was this chaos that was making me calm: all the
drivers and passengers in the cars were safe as long as they were stuck in this
traffic jam I’d created. It was me who was making them safe; as long as my
crane kept them stuck here nobody could possibly run into them and kill them.
I was saving their lives.

What
had made me fearful of everything over the past months was the terrifying truth
that you had absolutely no control: my friends had been killed and there wasn’t
a single tiny thing I could have done about it. I was helpless like we all are.
Yet here in
St Helens
my
roadblock was making people safe, I was keeping them from killing themselves in
their cars.

Pretty
soon the one interference I would make in my smoothly flowing business was to
suggest to my people using mobile cranes where there really was no need for
them. Since this was virtually my sole input they were happy to humour me.
After a while this wasn’t enough; next I began getting my sites expanded into
the roads they bordered, on various unlikely pretexts so that they blocked off
or narrowed major arteries all over the north-west of
England
. And the thing I learned was they let you do it, the councils, the
police and the highway agencies; if you told them you wanted to block off the
roads, they said okay, take all the time you want, do what you have to do.
After the first few times wondering if I’d get caught out, the realisation
dawned that I was able to barricade the streets at will. We would put in an
application to place a crane at some vital road junction, my men would put up
the barriers, then they’d go, the driver would park the crane then he too would
go. For a few days I’d leave it there screwing everything up, then the crane
driver would come and take his sixteen-wheeled behemoth away again and nobody
would know that it had lifted nothing at all.

After
that, becoming bolder, I started digging the roads themselves up. See, they all
assumed, the authorities that is, that if you wanted to spend money digging up
the highway then you must have a good reason to do it. It was inconceivable to
them that somebody would part with cash for any other reason. So I would send
my men out (usually I got official permission though sometimes I didn’t even
bother with that), they’d take their jackhammers and their picks, my men, and
they’d smash up the fucking killing tarmac, put a fence round it then leave it
for a day or a week or a month or a year, before coming back and filling it in
so badly that it was absolutely impossible to drive over at any speed.
Thousands more lives saved.

That
hole in the
Dock Road
, the one
that was holding up the copper — that was one of mine, now coming up for its
six-month birthday. And, do you know, it really didn’t cost that much at all.

The
year I spent in
London
(Loyd
once told me Colin had said I talked about it as if I’d had twenty years before
the mast on the
Valparaiso
run)
had been my first year at a famous central
London
art school.

I’d
always been crap at exams. Admittedly the private school in
Cheshire
that my dad sent me to wasn’t
what you’d call academic, none of the kids were particularly posh, just had
parents who wanted their kids to grow up being hard-working and honest, who
thought suing the council over imaginary back injuries was not a viable career
path. Come to think of it, I guess not all the parents wanted their kids to
grow up exactly honest since a sizeable minority of the pupils were the sons of
the big
Liverpool
crime
families, the Gorcis, the Mukes, the Pooles. Still, they weren’t going to need
any A levels with what they’d be doing.

I guess
my work must have been okay because they took me. In 1988 at the age of
eighteen going down to the capital I’d been full of happy confidence, assuming
I would start making good friendships that would last a lifetime within the
week, make that two tops. Back home in
Liverpool
I’d always been one of the popular kids. I was the funny one, sure,
but not a kid you fucked with, okay at sport and able to look after myself.
Looking back I suppose a lot of what went wrong was plain bad luck but at the
time the world seemed to have turned suddenly and unexpectedly malevolent:
firstly the hall of residence where the college put me was one that was shared
with a load of different schools and universities in central London. I never
met anybody from my own college there, it seemed to be entirely full of
homesick Africans weeping in the laundry room.
Liverpool
humour didn’t work at all — my Thunderbirds impression just
frightened them.

Still,
not to worry, I thought, knowing for certain that I would make friends once
college started. I’d always had no trouble making friends, I was the popular
guy.

Except
that my uneasiness about being away from home seemed to infect everything
around me. Normally you would expect each day in an unfamiliar situation that
things would become less unfamiliar. I mean that’s like a law of science or something,
but for me every day of college was still accompanied by the same disturbed
strangeness as I’d experienced on my very first hour there. Nothing about the
place seemed to stick in my memory: the college building was as impenetrable a
labyrinth on my last day as on my first. The cleaners began to suspect some
strange voyeuristic motives when they found me for the fourth time crouching in
their stores cupboard waiting for an art history tutorial to begin. I often
couldn’t even recollect where the place was and would catch the tube to some
district where I was fairly certain it was situated, then wander the streets
looking for it.

On the
odd occasion when I did find my way to the college and then found the studio
space where I was supposed to be doing my work, things were no better.
Painfully I’d manage to get going on a painting, scratching a few reticent
marks each day until at least there were some tentative beginnings on the
canvas, then a visiting lecturer would come along, he’d look at my painting for
a second or two and then say to me, ‘No no no, that’s complete fetid rubbish,
it’s weak weak weak, derivative and weak. Anyway, carry on, I’ll be back again
in nine months.’ I mean my art teacher back at school had been really
encouraging, telling me how good I was and inviting me round to his house to
look at art books and listen to records, but here the staff seemed to regard
their primary role as being to stop you painting. I told one of the weeping
Africans that I was starting to suspect the staff weren’t interested in
students unless you were a pretty girl they could shag or your work was exactly
like theirs but not as good.