Authors: Alexei Sayle
‘Hi,’ I
said.
‘Hi,’
she said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to seeing you this much.’ And she spread
her arms apart to indicate a huge amount.
‘Me
too.’
She
took me by the hand and said, ‘Before we go on trip, I want you to come and say
hello to the rest of everybody.’
‘Yeah
okay, sure,’ I replied reluctantly. ‘Even Valery?’ She began to lead me towards
the cirKuss tent. ‘Especially Valery. You must understand Valery is my special
friend. My buddy. He is from the next village to me back home, so he knows me
like nobody. But I cannot stand it if you are not friends with Valery. Unlucky
though he cannot speak nearly any English so he cannot tell you all the great
things about me.’
‘I hope
I find them out for myself,’ I simpered.
She
took me across the tarmac showground into the big mouth and we entered the hot
interior of the tent. Everybody I recalled from my previous visit seemed to be
in there though quite why I couldn’t discern; there seemed no reason for them
to be inside the tent since they were all sprawled about on the benched seating
or on the floor of the ring doing absolutely nothing at all. I felt like a fat
family driving their shitbox saloon car tentatively into the lion enclosure of
a safari park. All around me sinuous feline forms stared with cold eyes and
slowly unwound themselves, sniffing the air and wondering whether I was edible
or not.
Still,
Florence’s happiness was contagious; it made me grin idiotically just to look
at her as she dragged me from one bizarrely named person to another. ‘Glinka
this is Kelvin, Pnnnngg and Bvvvvxxx say hello to Kelvin, Kelvin this is my
good friend Toast Arrangement…’ It dawned on me that I was being shown off,
that for some reason this stunning woman was proud of me as she introduced me
one after another to her fellow cast members. I shook hands with various
Asians, Africans, assorted shades of Levantine and Slav, none of whom seemed to
display the enthusiasm for me that Florence felt.
I also
got the impression that unlike
Florence
not many of the other performers had made much effort to learn English,
that they lived in their own enclosed world and rarely ventured outside it.
Finally
we came to Valery.
Florence
ordered me, ‘Kelvin, say again how you are sorry to Valery.’
Eager
to please her I said, ‘Valery, I’m sorry I threw your ball away that time.’
At
first the clown just mumbled something under his breath in a foreign language
but
Florence
snapped a string
of clacking words at him and surprisingly the big man rose and took me in a
tight embrace. I hugged him back but then unseen and unheard by anyone else
Valery whispered in my ear, ‘You stay away her.’
Oh,
fucking brilliant, I thought as I unwrapped myself from the clown. He fancies
her and he’s fucking jealous. Then, surprising myself, I realised I felt really
sort of pleased that someone was jealous of me.
Unaware
that things weren’t now perfect,
Florence
took my hand and announced to the cirKuss folk, ‘We’re going to
Liverpool
!’
Outside
I said, ‘Shall we get the train?’
‘No
train!’ she said, pointing to one of the grey-painted vehicles ranged alongside
the tent. ‘We go in my truck.’ The vehicle she indicated was one of the smaller
four-wheel drives but still it rode high on huge all-terrain tyres, there was a
split windscreen driver’s cab complete with machine-gun cupola in the roof
hunkering behind a long tapering bonnet. Mounted on the back of the heavy steel
ladder chassis was a separate box body, its roof adorned with powerful
auxiliary spotlights; wooden steps led up to a padlocked metal door set in its
side.
‘You
want to see where I live first?’ she asked. ‘Sure,’ I said.
She
scampered ahead of me up the steps, unlocked the door and stepped inside. I
followed her, subconsciously expecting something like the interior of the
caravan my parents had rented for years on a site just outside Llandudno —
frilly cushions, cupboards up the walls, narrow foam banquettes and the smell
of powerful toilet chemicals so that I was unprepared to see … a room. Simply
that, a room with an old-fashioned couch and matching moquettecovered
armchair, standard lamp with fringed shade in one corner, paintings of mountain
villages, lakes and forests on the walls, rag rugs over the floor, telly in the
other corner.
Florence
giggled at my amazement. ‘Is proper living room. I don’t want to
live in caravan, I’m not fucking gypsy or Dutch tourist. I don’t cook so no
cooker and for toilet there is always fields, so no toilet. I don’t want to
sleep with a bucket of shit, you know.’
‘Who
would,’ I said.
‘Exactly,
so now we go to
Liverpool
.’
We
climbed back out of the body of the truck,
Florence
locked the door and folded the stairs away underneath. Then she
skipped round to the left-hand driver’s side of the cab, opened the door and
jumped straight up, twisted in mid-air and dropped into the driver’s seat. On
the other side I climbed like a drugged monkey swinging off various grab
handles, projecting bolts, obscure protuberances and metal steps, my shoes
slipping on the wheel rim until I clumsily managed to haul myself gasping into
the passenger seat of the high cab.
Florence
started up the big diesel by pressing a red button on the metal dash, stomped
on the enormous clutch pedal, wrestled the truck into first gear with both
hands and, hauling on the enormous thin-rimmed wheel, steered the truck out of
the cirKuss ground. The sight of this beautiful young woman, her whole body
bending to the machine, sent a shiver of desire corkscrewing up my legs through
my trunk and out the top of my head.
Noticing
this spasm she asked, ‘Are cold? The heater is slow to …’
‘No,
not cold, no,’ I said. ‘I, erm … haven’t been in a vehicle since the …
you know, the …’
‘You
scared?’
‘In
this thing? No, just memories kicking me around.’ Indeed as we rolled slowly
down the slip road to join the M57 (we had to go slow at first because one lane
was entirely taken up by a long ragged trench, overflowing with rainwater and
garbage but no workmen — I actually don’t think it was one of mine), then
picked up speed with the engine note building to a stentorian cackle, the cab
and body began pitching and creaking to such an extent that conversation became
too much of an effort and I found myself relaxing in the bouncing seat and
watching her drive, so that after a while a benign calm settled over me and I
felt more at peace than I had done for a long time.
She
left the truck taking up two parking spaces at the top of
London Road
and from there we walked into
Liverpool
town centre.
I said,
‘So you know this place is the north-west’s largest independent retailer of
disabled and elderly products; you don’t think it’s a juggling shop or
anything?’
‘That’s
right. I know what it is.’
‘So
what are you going there to buy, stuff for people back home who’ve been like
wounded in the civil war?’
‘No,
why would I do that?’ she asked. ‘I’m buying stuff for me.’
‘For
you? But you’re not disabled and elderly.’
‘Not
now I’m not,’ she said, then after a pause went on, ‘Look, you read car
magazines right, man with car like that reads car magazines?’
‘Sometimes
… not now, I used to.’
‘Well,
in car magazines they always say that when you want to buy speciality car best
time to do it is out of season when they are not so in demand. So if you’ve got
your heart set on Mercedes convertible much better you do a deal in winter when
nobody else is thinking about convertible car. Same if you want four-wheel
drive you go down to the Land-Rover showroom in the height of summer when nobody
thinking about driving in the mud. So now I think that one show at the cirKuss
I will have bad fall in the ring or if not I will certainly be old one day then
will need walking-stick or wheelchair or what you call that frame thing?’
‘Zimmer
frame.’
‘Zimmer
frame, yes. Now in those shops, where they sell disabled stuff they used to
having people in who are all sick and weak, they not going to do a deal with
those people but I go in there and I say, “Hey, look at me. I don’t need your
stuff, do me a good bargain!” and they will: it’s guaranteed.’
I
wasn’t so sure that was how things worked, but considered her way of thinking
about the sweetest thing anybody had ever said; it gave me a mild hard on. I
said, ‘I’m not certain you can haggle in a medical goods showroom.’
‘Oh,
everybody haggle,’ she stated emphatically as we turned through the double
doors of the north-west’s largest independent retailer of disabled and elderly
products. For a while we were left unattended to browse and
Florence
scuttled about with adorable
enthusiasm poking at walkingsticks and vibrating seats and wheelchairs and
adult incontinence pants (organic or non-organic) with squeals of delight. She
was particularly taken by one of those giant big-foot heated slippers that a
whole person can sit in. ‘Oh, dis would be great for my truck,’ she said. ‘I
would be so snug in there.’ And I wanted to fuck her right there and then,
pulling her tights down and bending her over a display of commodes or perhaps I
thought we could do it inside the big slipper. Eventually a middle-aged man in
a greasy suit wandered over to us just as
Florence
was trying out the brakes on a wheeled Zimmer frame. ‘Good
afternoon, can I help you?’ he asked dubiously.
‘Sure,’
replied
Florence
. ‘I am
interested in buying many things for myself, okay? But before we talk about
that I would like you to watch this.’ And so saying she performed a series of
five somersaults down the central aisle of the shop, ending the last one with a
handstand; she balanced upside down for a few seconds before shooting herself
upwards, turning over in mid-air and landing in the splits. Finally she sprang
back up and took a deep bow by bending right over, her head sweeping the floor.
‘And look,’ she said as she came back up, indicating the spot on the floor
where her legs had been spread, ‘I didn’t pee myself.’
‘I
thought everybody haggle,’
Florence
said angrily as she stomped down the street with me behind her
struggling to keep up.
‘Apparently
not.’
‘Stupid
motherfuckers.’
‘You
know, thinking about it, you might have had a narrow escape.’
‘In
what way?’
‘You
might have bought all that stuff then it might be your bad luck to live to be a
hundred and twenty years old with no injuries or infirmities.’
She
stopped and said with vehemence, ‘No I can’t think like that.’
‘Why
not?’ I asked.
She
considered for a moment. ‘Okay. Do you know why most old people are so grumpy?
I tell you. Because old age come as a big shock to them, dey not expecting it
at all. One day to them dey running about climbing trees then the next day dey
got crumbly bones syndrome. My plan is that if you think about being old all
the time and you expect the worst all the time then it won’t be such a big
shock to you when it happen.’ Then she said thoughtfully, ‘You know you’re lucky,
you already got a head start in knowing what it’s like to be old person.’
‘How’s
that?’ I asked.
‘Well,’
she said, ‘all your friends are already dead.’ She took my arm. ‘Is your
home-town?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So
show me important places for you, show where little Kelvin used to go.’
So we
walked around town and I pointed out to her where the superclub Cream had been
and I talked about the beginning of places like Cream and Ministry and the
anarchy of clandestine rave culture. I showed her where Liverpool’s first branch
of Next had opened, where I’d bought my first Nintendo, the pub where I’d seen
my first alcopop, the chip shop I’d been in when I’d heard about Thatcher’s
resignation and how people had danced in the streets, the time Ant and Dec had
come to open the new branch of HMV records and a madman had shouted obscenities
at them. Then she told me she had to get back to our town for her evening show.
An hour
and a half later as she dropped me at the end of my road she said, ‘Sunday
night is last show we’re doing here, there is always party afterwards, you want
to come?’
‘Yeah,
sure, that’d be great.’
‘Thank
you for my lovely day,’ she said, then she kissed me on the cheek before I
clambered backwards out of the cab, burning my hand on a hot exhaust pipe that
I tried to hold on to.
Two
days later I went to meet Sidney Maxton-Brown. As the taxi took me across the
flat black cabbage-stinking farmland the driver was saying, ‘… so I never
knew me real parents but me foster dad wasn’t too bad I suppose, at first, until
he got back from the
Falklands
that is, that’s when the delusions started. I had to go to school wrapped in
Bacofoil and fuse wire which meant that the bullying which hadn’t been too bad
started to get …’