(2003) Overtaken

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would
like to thank Patrick Devlin very much for spending so much time so eloquently
answering my idiot questions on matters of architecture and the building trade
and also for introducing me to Michael Scott whose insights into the world of
construction were invaluable. Special thanks must go to Jocasta Brownlee at
Sceptre and to my editor Rupert Lancaster, my agents Cassie Mayer and Robert
Kirby at PFD. And of course, as ever, Linda.

‘Very nice.’ That’s what I
always used to write in those comments books that they have on a little side
table in churches, hotels and restaurants, for you to record your impressions
in. ‘Very nice.’ No matter whether the place was good or more likely bad, I
would inscribe it in a weak and tentative hand not wishing to cause any upset.
Of course I could say that things then were by and large very nice.

Now I
scrawl long, ranting denunciations, using words like ‘gallimaufry’,
‘jackanape’, ‘poltroon’, ink splattering like black blood across the pages or I
calligraphy poetical, elliptical, looping encomiums. Sometimes I might do a
funny little drawing of a kangaroo, or on other occasions smuggle the comments
book away with me under my coat to a quiet place where for a few hours I may
compose a sad story; sometimes I simply write ‘the pies, the pies’.

I remember I said, ‘So I’m
woken by a phone call at the crack of half four in the afternoon. Do you
remember about six months ago I bought a derelict house in Liverpool, a late Georgian
townhouse on Upper Parliament Street, then sold it to a young couple, criminal
lawyers, on the basis that I got the contract to renovate it to their
specification?’

Siggi
asked me, ‘Is that the beautiful house the council hung on to for thirty years
just to keep their old worn-out washing-up bowls in?’

‘No,’ I
replied, ‘it’s the beautiful house they donated to the fraudulent community
arts centre. So anyway the job that I done on that house was meticulous.’

‘“Meticulous”
— it’s your median appellation.’

‘Precisely.
I’m a complete perfectionist. For example I fitted sash windows above what
their architect required in the main specification, which ended up costing me
money. Now their spec also happened to call for a particularly rare kind of
brushed aluminium combined light switches and dimmers fitted throughout the
house, which I did.’

“Cept?’

‘Which
I did ‘cept in a dogleg of a downstairs corridor of the very back of the back
of a dark, distant, underground extension at the remotest rear of the house …
where I fitted one single, plain, white, plastic, standard light switch.’

‘It’s
what you do,’ said Siggi. ‘Like in Persian carpets, they always weave a
deliberate flaw because only God can make things perfect.’

‘No, I
just ran out of aluminium switches.’

‘You
twat!’ Siggi suddenly shouted. ‘What, what is it?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘
Toyota
van just cut me up.’

‘Oh,
okay,’ I replied, relieved. ‘So anyhoo, it’s the bloke from the criminal couple
on the phone and he’s whining…’ It sometimes seemed to me that most of the
people I sold my homes to were lawyers. Crime and punishment was our industry,
when you saw a documentary about prisons on the TV and they interviewed the
head of the warden’s union in the prison he would often be a scouser and when
they interviewed the prisoners they were all scousers too! As if Liverpudlians
have boxed off both ends of the lower depths of the criminal justice system.
The scousers don’t get to inhabit the upper depths though — QCs, barristers and
judges, that’s reserved for white public schoolboys like my client. I’ve always
thought it odd that all these solicitors and barristers and judges come from
this rarefied world — private school, university, bowl of nuts on the
sideboard, weekend cottage in the Dales, yet they spend all their working days
side by side with the absolute used cat litter of society — junkies, pimps,
thieves, murderers. I wonder how it affects their view of society, it doesn’t
seem to give them any profound insights into the human condition that I’ve
noticed, they all appear like dickheads, the ones I’ve met anyway.

So
anyway I’m doing this lawyer’s voice for Siggi and I say, ‘“It’s just, you
know, the final thing, Kelvin mate,” he says. “We love the house, don’t get me
wrong, mate, you and your guys, your builder guys, mate, did a fantastic job, mate,
it’s just that that switch, white plastic switch is like the final detail. That
white plastic switch is really like, you know, screaming at us, it’s spoiling
the rest of the basement, well the whole house really, the entire neighbourhood
in fact. It’s like we’ve got X-ray vision: even if we’re in the attic we feel
like we can see it, down there at the back of the house. Honestly Michaela’s
getting quite down about it; she’s spent the last couple of nights in an Executive
Double at the Campanile Hotel by the Albert Dock.”‘

‘Oh,
get over yourself, tosspot,’ Siggi said.

I
asked, ‘Are you talking to me or the tosser in the
Toyota
van?’

‘I’m
talking through you to this lawyer guy.’

‘Right.
So I says, “Of course, Mr Harris, a thing like that, while it’s small it can be
an enormous irritant,” I says. “Look, give me twenty minutes to shoot round to
the wholesalers and pick up the right switch, another fifteen to get to your
place and then I’ll swap it over quick as you like.” The lawyer, he breathes
out with this sort of tremble in his voice, “Whoo, thanks, that’d be great,
Kelvin,” he says. “No problem, Mr Harris,” I replies. “I’ll be right there.”‘

‘Then
what did you do?’ asked Siggi.

‘Then I
put me coat on, I walked outside, I got in me car and I set off for the
circus.’

Siggi
said, ‘It’s not a circus it’s a circus.’

‘Eh?’

‘It’s
spelled cee, eye, arh, capital kay, you, ess, ess. CirKuss, not a circus. Completely
different kind of thing. Loyd read about it in a magazine he got free on a
train. Not like we used to go to when we was kids: mentally ill lions, sexually
suspect birds in high-cut spangly outfits showing their twats, a ringmaster in
a top hat with a whip. I mean if that isn’t a symbol of patriarchal hegemony I
don’t know what isn’t.’

‘No,
neither don’t
I.
’ There was a
sudden bleeping in my car. ‘Hang on, I’ve got call waiting…’

It was
our friend Loyd. ‘Where are ya?’ he asked.

‘I’m on
the M57 ‘bout half an hour away from the circus,’ I said. ‘Where are yous?’

‘We’re
there,’ he said. ‘We’re in the council car park, on the seafront, you know, by
where the miniature railway runs. They always make me think of the trains that
used to run to
Dachau
those
trains, but you know … sort of smaller.’

‘It’d
make a great ride at Legoland.’

‘Is
Siggi wit ya?’ asked Loyd.

‘No,
she’s in her own car, about five minutes behind me.’

‘Cool,
we’ll see ya in thirty then.’

I
switched back to Siggi.

‘It was
Loydy, him and the others, they’re there. So what did it say in this article about
the circus?’

‘Did
you say “circus” or “cirKuss”?’

‘I said
“circus” but from now I’m going to say “cirKuss”.’

‘Mind
that you do. So the article said that the cirKuss was a modern reinterpretation
of the old thing in a ring and that they were a collective and that all the
performers were drawn entirely from countries where there had been civil war or
genocide or regicide or some other extreme kind of “cide”.’

‘Have
you noticed the blue stuff they put the big razor in in the barber’s is called
“Barbicide”? Is that a mass murder of Barbers? Or possibly Barbies?’ I’d been
storing this up to tell her for a while. ‘Or the mass murder of Barbie dolls?’

‘No,’
Siggi said firmly, ‘they’re very hard to kill are Barbie dolls. Every little
girl knows that if you’re not nice to them it’s your Barbies that wake up at
night, pick the lock of the toy cupboard and murder you while you sleep.’ I
found it cute when she talked about when she was a kid.

‘Especially
that Nazi Barbie doll —Klaus Barbie the Butcher of
Lyon
,’ I said.

‘It’s a
collector’s item,’ she replied. ‘No, they meant that they were from, you know,
Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Zaire, Chechnya. Places where it was a
bit difficult to put on a circus right now what with the mass killings and
whatnot. Some of them, it said in the magazine, were trained acrobats, jugglers
and so on from traditional circus families while others had no acquaintance of
performing at all until they had joined the cirKuss. The show they put on is
drawn from their collective experiences and one of the few features it has in
common with the old, shitty, discredited kind of circus is that they are both
in a tent.’

‘It
makes no sense.’

‘What
doesn’t?’

‘The
pies, the pies.’

‘What
the fuck you talking about now, Kelvin?’

‘You’ll
pass it when you hit the slip road,’ I said. ‘There’s this green railway bridge
that goes over the slip road on to the A59 and somebody’s written on it, like
years ago, “The pies, the pies”.’

‘So
what?’ she asked.

‘So
what, it bothers me. I don’t know when I first noticed it, it was just suddenly
there, “The pies, the pies”. It was certainly before I got the TVR, perhaps
before I had the Porsche or the Range Rover or the XK8 or the Maserati 3200 GT,
which would make it at least five years ago. Thing is that not only do the
words make no kind of sense but that there’s also no single other piece of
writing on the bridge, even though kids have written on everything else: walls,
phone boxes, lamp poles, the odd squirrel that’s stood still for too long, yet
apart from “The pies, the pies” the bridge remains unsullied.’

‘I
think you just like saying, “The pies, the pies” all the time.’

‘True.
So one theory I have is that either the bridge is incredibly dangerous to be
on, so perilous that even the thickos who scrawl their tag everywhichwhere
think better of it, or the guy that wrote it died and nobody’s been brave
enough to go up there since, even to get his body: But here’s another thing:
the maintenance schedule on that bridge must mean it’s repainted something like
every four years yet “The pies, the pies” is always there. Now either the
painters carefully paint round it or as soon as it’s covered over somebody
reinstalls it.’

‘I’ve
just seen it!’ she shouted, laughing. ‘I’ve just seen it and I’ve never noticed
it before. Fuck you, Kelvin, I’ll never be able to pass it now without seeing
it, you fucker.’

‘Fucking
hell,’ I said, ‘you’re motoring ain’t ya?’

Still
laughing she said, ‘If your clock goes up to 160 mph I always reck that’s what
the car’s manufacturers want you to do.’

‘Try
telling the cops that.’

There
was a pause then she said, ‘I’ve got a theory for you. There’s this guy, right?
Whose nickname in the drinking dens he inhabits is “The pies, the pies” and
he’s so fucking hard this guy, I mean he’d have to be to climb on to that
crocodile-infested railway bridge with the 150,000 volts running through it and
the land-mines that litter the gravel; he’s so hard that once he wrote his name
up there nobody else has ever dared to cover it up or add to it.’

 I
said, ‘Could be. I sometimes think that I’d get up there and add to it myself,
write my name “Kelvin” or something cryptic, maybe like “Make my meringue Mr
Attlee”. Something like that. I’d almost certainly do it except for the fact
that I always forget absolutely and totally about “The pies, the pies” once
I’ve driven past it.’

‘Driven
past what?’ she said.