(2003) Overtaken (8 page)

And
then if that wasn’t bad enough there was the city of London itself. That
Underground they’ve got down there, the map’s supposed to be dead clear, isn’t
it? A miracle of graphic design, they say, but I never got the hang of it the
whole time I was there. Sometimes I’d catch a train on a yellow-coloured line,
change three times on to routes of various hues, then walk for miles along
smelly tiled corridors only to emerge above ground and see the station I’d
started off from about a hundred yards up the road. On other occasions I would
get on the tube in the middle of London, travel for perhaps only a stop or two,
then it would halt and all the power would glimmer off. I’d look around and see
I was alone in the carriage, so get off to find I was at a country halt with a
white picket fence, hanging baskets of geraniums and big zinc milk churns
stacked on the platform. I never even attempted to take a bus.

Then
there were my fellow students at the art school who. were as impenetrable to me
as the tube network. They were either incredibly posh or, if one of the few
working-class kids, then they were crude unconvincing stereotypes, like English
characters played by American actors in a US sitcom. I recall I did get to a
few art history seminars: there would be about twenty-five of us sitting in a
circle in an airtight room. I remember this one time the tutorial was about Van
Gogh and the lecturer showed. us a slide of a painting and he said how you had
to see it in a gallery because you couldn’t conceive of the richness of the
colours from a reproduction and a girl I’d been thinking of maybe talking to
one day sitting next to me said, ‘You don’t have to go to a gallery. Oh, I know
that painting; it’s hanging in the entrance hall in our flat in Rome. Yes, it
really is lovely, the colours really are …’ And I just thought, Fucking
hell, these people have a Van Gogh, and it’s not even in the living room it’s
in, the fucking hall! That girl is never, ever, ever, going to want to talk to me,
never mind be my friend or fuck me in her entire life …

The
only person I knew in a city of ten million people was a sort of cousin of
mine, who lived not in Lewisham but near it in a place that didn’t seem to have
a name, who was not exactly an accountant but something near it. This place
where he lived, to get there you had to take an overground train smelling like
a wet dog from a big railway station then walk for miles through grey roads
where the streetlights seemed to hose colour out of the night.

I used
to get on the train to visit without checking whether my sort of cousin was in,
because if he wasn’t in at least another empty evening had passed. On one blank
winter) Tuesday I travelled over there to find no reply to my ringing on the
bell (though the idea had begun to form that the not cousin had started hiding
when he suspected it might be me at the door). Turning around, head drawn in, I
shambled back towards the station. When I’d got off the overground train I’d
bought and eaten four Yorkie bars at a newsagent’s in the adjacent parade of
shops, but on my return there was only a Chinese takeaway open. I ordered a
sweet and sour pork and sat on a plastic chair to wait for it to be ready.

When it
came and I peeled back the cardboard lid of the foil container I realised I’d
made a mistake. In Liverpool your Chinese food comes on a bed of chips or rice
with a plastic fork for you to eat it with but in London it was all the pork
stuff with no chips and no fork so that I was trying to eat this orange goo
with my fingers, while standing in the street.

With a
shudder I threw the food into the gutter and got on a train that was going to
Victoria Station. I got off, walked round to the coach station where I bought a
ticket on the overnight bus back to Liverpool and was in my dad’s house asleep
in my old bed by 8 a.m. and in the pub that afternoon with Loyd and Colin.

In the
saloon bar of the pub Colin said to me, ‘We couldn’t believe it when you said
you were going to study in
London
. What the fuck did you want to go down to that shithole for?’

‘I
don’t know now,’ I replied.

‘I’m
not even going to move out of me mum and dad’s house for five years,’ said Loyd.

‘You
didn’t say anything,’ I whined.

‘Kelvin,
we thought you had a plan,’ said Loyd. ‘No plan,’ I said.

‘Let’s
face it, you’re no Siggi,’ said Colin. ‘No Siggi,’ I said.

The
year before, when we’d all been seventeen, Siggi had gone for an audition
without telling anyone and then got a place at the
Bristol
Old
Vic
Drama
School
. We had a
party to see her off and said we’d all visit but somehow didn’t, especially not
me who was stuck in
London
. So
the first time we saw her after her first term was in the pub at Christmas
time. The only thing we noticed that seemed different was she had come back
from drama school with a long ‘A’ so that she would say ‘barth’ where before
she’d said ‘bath’ like the rest of us. This we all ignored; the only other
thing they seemed to have taught her in
Bristol
was how to fall over. Every half-hour or so she’d punch herself in
the chest and drop to the fag-end-strewn floor, then jump up again, but we
pretty much ignored that too and after that a chasm seemed to grow between us
until she stopped coming back for the holidays and stayed in Bristol.

Occasionally we got
reports from her family that she was doing really well down there but families
always say that. Even if she’d come back I wouldn’t have wanted to see her. I
thought myself a failure at eighteen like some not quite good enough teenage
footballer. Considering my future was over, I miserably took a job as a
labourer at my uncle’s building firm. And there on the building sites I found
everything I’d been expecting art school to be. In a pasteurised, safe world I
found the sites to be the last refuge of the true individualist: the wild
characters I met on the building made my fellow art students seem as
distinctive from each other as sausages. I hadn’t known, behind those hoardings,
how fucking clever and funny and kind everybody was. Everywhere I worked I
encountered inarticulate men who could hardly write but whose thoughts were in
such a profound form of 3D that they could solve the most complex problems
without resorting to any kind of drawing or plan.

Then
there is the work itself: think about it, what we builders do is nothing less
than we reshape your world. Where you are now, where you are right now this
minute, reading this, stop. Look around you — a builder made it. Wonderful men
conspired to put it together: labourers you dismiss as thickos built it; guys
you step over in the street now they’re old and fucked up solved all the
problems you didn’t know were there; a developer you consider as only one step
up from a maggot conceived of it, fought to get permission for it, destroyed
rare archaeological artefacts, covered up dangerous chemical spoil to get it
constructed on time. Now doesn’t that seem as profound as making cakky marks on
squares of canvas? And what’s more the money is fucking fantastic. At first I
was a general labourer. Those outside the building think the labourer is the
lowest rank on the sites but it’s much more complex than that; the other
trades, sparks, chippies, plumbers, come and go when their task is completed
but the labourer is there right throughout the job from beginning to end so if
he wants to, the labourer, he starts to take responsibility for things when the
foreman isn’t around, deliveries, minor problems, that sort of thing. Then if he’s
clever he starts to see the opportunities: with my wages I bought a derelict
house in the South End of Liverpool, did it up and sold it, made a tiny profit.
The next one I split into flats using guys I’d met on other jobs to do the
work. The return I made on that place gave me a profile with the .bank, which
meant they were happy to lend me some money. That money meant that the
buildings I bought could be bigger, the risks greater, the profit larger.

Even
before I’d gone to
London
I had
learned to drive in my dad’s old 1973 Vanden Plas Princess 1300 and could soon
afford my own car, a black Volkswagen Golf GTi I bought at a bankruptcy
auction.

Colin
said to me, ‘Kelvin mate, you should think yourself lucky you didn’t get a
higher education. I mean studying for an English degree has put me off fucking
books for life, but you, because you’re self-taught you love reading, man, you
devour it all voraciously — classical literature, detective fiction,
biographies, comic books, modern feminist writing — you don’t shove stuff in
artificial boxes, you don’t worry whether its ‘good’ or not, you’re just wide
open to new ideas, man.’ Patronising bastard.

One
weekend in what I guess must have been towards the end of her third year, on a
Saturday morning when I was supposed to be doing some repairs for an orphanage
near
Manchester
, I instead
stayed on the motorway and drove my black car to
Bristol
, having got Siggi’s address from Paula, with whom she still
fitfully corresponded.

When I
rang at the door of the grey terraced house which Siggi shared with two other
girls from the drama school, it was answered by a pretty little redhead, still
in her dressing-gown though it was the afternoon. She seemed recently to have
been crying.

‘Hi,’ I
said. ‘I was wondering if Siggi was in.’

‘She’s
at a tap class,’ snuffled the girl. ‘She’ll be back in half an hour, wanna come
in and wait?’

‘Sure,
I guess.’

The
girl showed me into the living room, which I noticed with a silent internal
shudder was the usual student landfill site; in this case it was made even more
untidy by the fact that there were pictures of movie stars torn from magazines
and books strewn all over the floor and all over the ratty brokendown
furniture. As soon as she got back in the room the girl started crying again. It
struck me that there was already a gap between me and this girl, even though if
she was in the same year as Siggi she must be more or less the same age as me.
I felt like I was an adult and she was a child, albeit one with spectacular
tits visible inside that dressing-gown. I stood there enjoying the feeling of
being like a grown-up in my narrow dark blue trousers and my cream jumper
bought from the Emporio Armani shop that had just opened in
Manchester
, spinning my car keys round my
finger.

The
girl continued to sniffle miserably as she made me a horrible cup of instant
coffee.

‘Erm,
is there something the matter?’ I finally felt forced to enquire.

 In
response the girl stuck both her thumbs up at me, which seemed an oddly
positive gesture for somebody who was sobbing wretchedly.

She
quavered, ‘Do you see anything wrong with these?’

‘Your
thumbs?’

‘Yes.’

‘No,
they seem fine to me.’

‘Exactly,
that’s what I thought. Well, we had a film workshop at college yesterday with
Szigismond Wajeckej; he was the cameraman on The Laughter o f Larks. Did you
see it?’

‘Not
yet,’ I said.

‘Well,
anyway, he took one look at my thumbs and he said they were too broad for me
ever to be a success in films. So I’ve been looking through all these pictures
of movie stars and I can’t see any difference between their thumbs and mine. Do
you want to have a look?’ she said, holding out a giant magnifying glass.

‘Er,
sure.’

For the
next twenty minutes I studied the thumbs of the highest grossing film stars of
1991: Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep,
Chevy
Chase
. I could see no difference between their thumbs
and those of the redhead. I told her this and she calmed down a little. As she
said, ‘It’s not as if you can get plastic surgery on your thumbs. Not even in
Ecuador
. I’ve asked their embassy and they
said definitely not. Honestly, the fucking criticism you have to put up with if
you’re an actress; how are we supposed to live with stuff like that?’

Surprising
myself, I found I could see her point, not entirely sure if it was simply
because I wanted to fuck her or not but I felt I could understand how horrible
and intimate and wounding such criticism must be. Where I worked, in the
building game, if you were displeased with someone you might sometimes come up
behind them with a length of pipe and smack them with it but there was nothing
personal about your actions, it was simply one of a range of options that were
open to everyone. But to have a go at a girl’s thumbs, now that did seem way
too cruel.

Siggi
came back from her dance class a little later looking sweaty and dishevelled.
At first there was some awkwardness between us about what my motives were for
being there, so we were forced to energetically send out signals to each other
like ironclad battleships cutting through the grey sea on manoeuvres off
Jutland Sound until we had sorted out what I was doing there. ‘I j-u-s-t
c-a-m-e f-o-r a v-i-s-i-t i-n m-y c-o-o-l c-a-r, I’m n-o-t a-f-t-e-r a s-h-a-g
o-f-f y-o-u h-o-n-e-s-t. T-h-o-u-g-h I m-a-y b-o-i-n-k y-o-u-r l-i-t-t-l-e
f-r-i-e-n-d,’ the semaphore flags flapped.