Trevor could always trump what you were saying.
‘Serious accident on the Mumbles Road,’ a fellow said. ‘They sent an ambulance.’
‘Two,’ said Trevor. ‘The second came straight after. Multiple injuries, see.’
‘There was a police car there as well,’ the fellow said.
‘And a helicopter,’ Trevor added. ‘Carnage, deaths, blood.’
Another time a woman said she’d seen a naval boat in the bay. The Royal Navy in Swansea Bay? What were they doing: shopping at Sainsburys in the Marina? Then Trevor announced:
‘Escorted by a submarine. Top secret, apparently. Came to the surface for a moment. Spotted it at once, I did.’
Whether Trevor was using unvarnished truth or decoration, the dwellers on the estate agreed on one thing: he had a remarkable facility for being an on-the-spot witness to another fellow’s anecdote, and his confirmation of the anecdote always involved turning a simple account into elaborate pomp.
The beauty of his tales wasn’t matched by looks. He was small and squat like a boar, and he stunk like the hippo house at London Zoo. His backside, overproportioned in relation to the rest of him, was about the size of a small nuclear reactor and probably as lethal. He stumbled along the street, trousers at half-mast, so that the top of the join between two enormous pink buttocks was displayed. Occasionally he would gob into the gutter, a mini-lagoon of yellow pestilence splattering it.
He could trump your illness too. When a veteran said he’d got diabetes, type two, Trevor responded: ‘I had TB, me, as a kid. And there’s only one type of that: the lethal type.’ A neighbour swore Trevor’s childhood illness was polio, her neighbour said it was beriberi, and the local greengrocer asserted leukaemia, definitely leukaemia.
When he died suddenly, his demise was much discussed. The TB had never left him, said one. He’d got gangrenous after cutting himself shaving, said another. There was a mysterious virus, a blood disorder, ‘something in the family’, said a third.
There was similar confusion around his funeral cortege. One hearse, black, pleased with itself, stood outside his house, the neighbours said. But somebody had seen a stationary limo at the top of his road, which became two, three, and then a fleet. A motionless yacht in the bay was spotted as his hearse came down the hill. Some insisted they’d espied a flotilla of such yachts, that in fact ‘half the marina had turned out to see him off’, because ‘he knew a lot of influential and monied people, the boating fraternity and that sort of thing, you know’.
That’s how it was with Trevor. They’d put him in the ground but his spirit lingered about the estate, encouraging ever more colourful memories of his character and hyperbolic tales of his comings and goings. His corpse was now virtually canonised by the community. Only Trevor could have achieved it: become an even bigger presence after death than he had been in life.
