(2003) Overtaken Read Online Free

and
my friends, apart from Sage Pasquale, had all been born in the city of
Liverpool, but one by one in our twenties we’d migrated to a small Lancashire
market town about fourteen miles away. We all had lovely homes that, bought
during the low prices of the mid nineties, were completely paid for, giving us
plenty of disposable income. With the area’s excellent motorway links to the
north, south and east we could travel to see all kinds of cultural events that
were on in Manchester , Liverpool , Southport , Lancaster , Preston , Bolton . That year alone we’d already been in the audience for the Eels,
Eminem, Paul Weller playing an acoustic set at the Empire Theatre, Liverpool;
we’d stood in front of new works by Chris Ofili and Tracey Emin at the Lowry,
Salford; we’d gone to a poetry slam at the Lancaster Literary Festival;
witnessed touring productions of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, The Nutcracker,
Pina Bausch and her Dance Theatre of Wuppertal; seen comedians and operas; got
our cookbooks signed by two TV chefs at Waterstones in Manchester; not to
mention that at the age of thirty-three we were still clubbing it in Liverpool
and Manchester to top DJs most weekends.
    In the
municipal car park on the front at Southport Loyd had slid the side door of the
Ford back and the other three were sitting around the fold-out table in the
dark interior drinking champagne and eating a plate of mini sashimi. ‘Hey
Kelvin, hey Siggi,’ they said and passed two glasses out.
    Me and
Loyd were best mates from way back; he was a kid that came to live in our
street when we were five, the only black family for miles. We’d met when he
called my dad a ‘reactionary class traitor’.
    Colin
and Loyd became mates at the comprehensive they went to. Siggi had been Loyd’s
girlfriend at school for a while; the other women came a bit later, after we’d
all left school.
    For
Colin, school was still very real even though he’d left it fifteen years
before: he’d often talk about things that had happened to them there; he’d say
to Loyd, ‘You remember that time when we was all in the library and …’
    One
time when we were staying in a villa on the island of Lanzarote he was going on
like this and I drifted off and started thinking about a thing on the telly I’d
seen the previous night on the satellite TV about ‘Tomb Raider’. They’d shown a
sequence out of Tomb Raider 2, the game not the movie. It was some bit where
Lara was swinging from rope to rope above a canyon then she dived into a cave
and inside the cave was a series of wood-panelled rooms that she had to run
through. Steadily through and through those rooms she ran. And the thing was
that to me those rooms were so, so familiar, more familiar and real than the room
I was in while I was thinking these thoughts, because when I’d been playing
that game I’d spent hours and hours, day after day, getting Lara through those
rooms and yet they were dreamlike and insubstantial, they were not real and
because they were not real I’d forgotten them utterly until I saw them again on
the TV and then they seemed realer than anything else. Well, to me school felt
like those suddenly remembered rooms on the one occasion when I’d gone back for
an adult visit. Come to think of it I recall Lara was being chased through
those rooms by giant slobbering dogs with the multiple heads of demons, and
school felt a bit like that too.
    In the
summer darkness Loyd closed up the van and we walked in a group across the car
park and through the floral gardens to where on a large gravelled patch of land
was pitched a rather small grey tent. Much smaller than I had imagined it would
be, much smaller than you could really believe a circus could be performed in.
It didn’t look like it had been manufactured as a circus tent at all, it looked
more like something an army might take on manoeuvres for the generals to have
their dinners in.
    Behind
the tent a strange collection of trucks were ranged in