The Wrong Boy

by Willy Russell

  Sowerby Slim nodded and said, ‘Oh, he was happy all right. As long as he could keep his guitar with him he’d sing all night. We had some wonderful years, we did; some wonderful years with the Cowboy.’

  I looked at Cindy-Charlene and I said, ‘So why should anybody feel guilty?’

  And that’s when Cindy-Charlene said, ‘Because … because if we hadn’t brought him into the Desperadoes, he never would have met her, would he, never would have taken up with her.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  Cindy-Charlene’s petite pretty face suddenly transformed itself into a mask of repulsion and loathing as she said, ‘The Slut! Her. That spread-legged slut from Silkstone Common!’

  Deak the drummer shook his head and said, ‘He didn’t stand a chance. Not with her. The Cowboy, y’ see, he was as gentle a man as y’ could ever wish to meet. Throughout the whole of the Country circuit the Cowboy was renowned for the mildness of his manners. That man, he had the touch of a butterfly and the heart of a dove.’

  ‘And that’s why,’ Cindy-Charlene said, frowning darkly, ‘that’s why she was able to walk all over him. She led him like a lamb to the slaughter, the brazen bitch!’

  And all the Desperadoes told me then about the woman called Patsy, who the Cowboy met and married. The Country music groupie who couldn’t keep her hands off nowt.

  ‘Even on their wedding day,’ Cindy-Charlene said, ‘at the wedding breakfast she was at it. The ink not yet dry on the marriage certificate and she’s leg-spreading already. She said she was going into the function-room kitchen just to have a look in the oven and see how the sausage rolls were doing. But the sausage rolls ended up being burnt black, didn’t they! Because instead of checking sausage rolls like she should have been doing, she’d been at it in the walk-in pantry, her and that mean-lipped mandolin player from the back of Halifax. But what did he do, the Cowboy, when he was walking past that kitchen and he smelt the sausage rolls burning? And looking for some oven gloves to lift out the hot trays of burning sausage rolls, he opened the door to the walk-in pantry and saw that slut of a bride and that mandolin player tangled together, panting and whimpering and lost in lust – what did the Cowboy do? Did he walk out on that slut? Did he take that mandolin player by the scruff and stuff his miserable mandolin down his lusting throat?’

  I stared at Cindy-Charlene. ‘Well?’ I said. ‘Did he?’

  But Cindy-Charlene just shook her head. ‘No!’ she said. ‘The only thing that the Cowboy did was to send out for fresh sausage rolls.’

  ‘That’s how he was,’ Sowerby Slim said to me, his eyes filled with tears and admiration. ‘That was the Cowboy, you see.’

  And that set them all to reminiscing then about how, through many years of marriage, the constantly cuckolded Cowboy could always turn the other cheek.

  Cindy-Charlene shrugged and said, ‘I’ll never understand it. Not till the day I die, I’ll never understand it. But the sad fact is that, slut that she was, he still loved her.’

  Deak and Slim both nodded and added their own solemn testimony to the deep depth of hopeless love that the Cowboy harboured for the undeserving Silkstone Slut.

  ‘He put up with it all, y’ see,’ Sowerby Slim explained. ‘The Cowboy’s heart was a heart that was bigger than the heart of a humpety-backed whale. And he bore the burden of all that indignity and held all the humiliation there in his big big heart. He loved her! And to the Cowboy that was all that mattered. It’s like he was with that guitar of his. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t play it, couldn’t plug it in. As long as he could just have it there with him, that’s all that mattered. And it was the same with her; as long as she remained his, that was all he asked.’

  Cindy-Charlene shook her head in palpable disgust and said, ‘He turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to all her goings-on. He gave her enough leash to twirl two times around the world but still it wasn’t enough for her! What did she do in the end?’

  And apparently what she did do, the wife of the Kexborough Cowboy, was to tell him she was going to a Tupperware party in Todmorden. When she returned home three days later wearing a kiss-me-quick hat from Blackpool and a satiated smirk on her lips the Cowboy just smiled at her fondly and said, ‘Well, Patsy, did you get lots of nice new Tupperware then?’

  And Patsy told him then, told the Cowboy that she hadn’t been in Todmorden at all and that there’d never been no Tupperware party. The tungsten-hearted temptress recounted in delighted detail how she’d been in Blackpool for three days with the ponytailed pedal-steel guitarist from the Hebden Bridge Hoboes. And pausing only long enough to tell the Cowboy that if it hadn’t been for their dog she would have left him years ago, Patsy packed her case, put her arms around Duke, the mongrel, kissed it and was gone.

  In his hour of need, the Country music fraternity rallied round the forsaken Cowboy and bitter as the deed that had been done to him, everybody sought to reassure the singer, telling him as how his pretty Patsy had always been a voraciously insatiable slut and that therefore he should look on the bright side and see her departure as the blessing it truly was. And in response to such expressions of comfort and concern the Cowboy always nodded and smiled and murmured his thanks for such sympathies.

  ‘And we all thought he was getting over it, you see,’ Cindy-Charlene explained. ‘As the weeks turned into months the Cowboy gradually talked less and less about her.’

  ‘It was like he just accepted it in the end, wasn’t it?’ Sowerby Slim said. ‘He never talked about her no more and we all thought he’d come to terms with it. We never would have accepted that booking at the Allied Butchers’ and Architects’ if we’d known that beneath his stoic demeanour his heart was still rent asunder.’

  ‘We never should have accepted it anyway!’ Deak exclaimed. ‘We should have cancelled it the second we found out who we were sharing the bill with. If we’d done that then the Cowboy would still be with us today.’

  ‘Deak,’ Cindy-Charlene said, ‘he wanted to do it! The Cowboy said he could handle it. Time and time again he said it didn’t matter that we were sharing the bill with the Hebden Bridge Hoboes, he said he had no grudge against them, not even their pedal man. He said he could handle it. We had no alternative, we had to play that gig!’

  And the Dewsbury Desperadoes did play that gig. And, apparently, everybody agreed that that night the Kexborough Cowboy sang with such matchless and tender beauty that it was almost as if he was harbouring a premonition that the Plinxton Allied Butchers’ and Architects’ gig was to be his swansong.

  ‘It would have broke your heart to hear him that night,’ Cindy-Charlene recounted, her eyes all glistening as she recalled that particularly poignant performance. ‘By the time we were going on for our opening spot, the Hoboes hadn’t arrived and I was beginning to think that with a bit of luck and with them only doing the one spot after us we might avoid coming face to face with them.’

  Cindy-Charlene stared out the window for a moment. And then added, ‘But some things are just not meant to be. We were halfway through our set, the Cowboy had just gone into the first chorus of “Silver Dagger” when I looked down into the audience, and there at the back, just coming through the function-room doors and making their way along to the bar at the back of the hall was him, the ponytailed Pedal Man, and her, the Teflon-hearted trollop, with a skirt slit right up the side, displaying a flash of flesh and a dark blue suspender belt, testifying as ever to her disregard of decency; not to mention the risk of cystitis! We all looked at each other on stage, wondering if he’d seen them, the Cowboy. And in actuality there was no way he could have avoided seeing them; they were stood there propping up the bar, the pair of them laughing and indulging in all sorts of lascivious banter. But the Kexborough Cowboy, true professional that he’d become, he stood there on that stage in the Allied Butchers’ and Architects’ and he sang more beautiful that night than he’d ever sang before. He mesmerised that audience, the Cowboy, mesmerised them all. Apart from her, that slingbacked hoor,
and him, that pedal player, behaving for all the world as if they were out to taunt and torment that Cowboy; the pair of them up against the bar, in public, their hands full of each other’s flesh, chewing the mouths off each other, swapping tongues and saliva and bits of honey-roasted peanut.’

  Cindy-Charlene shuddered at her own flesh-creeping recollections and Sowerby Slim picked up the narrative then, telling me, ‘And even though we knew him to be as mild-mannered a man as Jesus of Nazareth, the public provocation as he had suffered was such that we considered it discretionary if a proper distance was maintained between ourselves and the Hebden Bridge Hoboes. When we came off stage after that first set we thought the wisest course of action was to keep the Cowboy away from the dressing-room area where the Hoboes and their pedal player would shortly be arriving to prepare for their own performance. So in an effort to distract him I said, “Come on, Cowboy, why don’t me an’ you go and admire the exhibits in the Trophy Room.” ’

  And the Kexborough Cowboy, who was apparently in something of a trance-like and pliable state, allowed himself to be meekly led away from the dressing-room area and into the quiet harbour of the Trophy Room where his loyal bass guitarist kept him distracted by pointing out various artifacts and trophies and memorabilia which sat there a-glistening and a-gleaming in their display cases. Keeping half an ear cocked for the opening bars which would testify that the Hoboes and their pedal man were safely on the stage, Sowerby Slim promenaded the Cowboy from one display case to another, all the while providing what pertinent comment he could muster on the quills of architects whose artistic endeavours still stood proudly in Plinxton and thereabouts, long after their begetters had gone; and the gleaming cleavers and keen-edged chop knives which in the nimble fingers of bull-necked butchers had carved and cut out countless hearts, slicing flesh from bone with the kind of flourish and finesse that is so often found wanting in what passes for butchery these days. And just as Slim was running out of things to say about the Great Gold Fillet Knife which the butchers of Plinxton had won from the butchers of Burnley for the third and final time in the bitterly fought pork-filleting competition of 1963, Sowerby Slim heard the opening bars of ‘Orange Blossom Special’ and knew then that the Hebden Bridge Hoboes were safely on the stage. Leading the way to the big oak doors of the Trophy Room, Sowerby Slim told the Cowboy, ‘We can go back to the dressing room now, Cowboy.’

  But when he got to the doors of the Trophy Room, the Kexborough Cowboy said, ‘I don’t want to go to the dressing room thank you very much, Slim. I’ve the intention of going out front to the bar and having myself a pot of beer.’

  And that’s when Sowerby Slim stood in front of the Cowboy, frowned and cocked his head and said, ‘Come on, Cowboy; you know who’s out there. Come on, don’t cause yourself no more pain than is necessary.’

  But with his customary good grace the Cowboy just thanked the big bass player for his concern and told him, ‘Slim, you can’t break a heart that’s already in pieces.’

  And pondering both the wisdom of this and the possibility that it could be quite a good title for a new Country song, Sowerby Slim just stepped aside and the Kexborough Cowboy headed out to the bar and asked for a pint of ale. And while it was being pulled he turned and looked along the bar and saw his own wife leaning there, her back against the bar rail, a stilettoed foot tapping out time and her nail-varnished fingers wrapped around a long thin glass containing a cocktail called Do-It-Till-Dawn.

  Taking a sip of his beer, the Cowboy dallied with his pint for a moment, and eyes fixed on the creamy whirl of froth he said, ‘I miss you, Patsy. Me and the dog, we both miss you.’

  And that’s when the leg-spreading lady turned her head for a moment and just looked at him as she chewed on her chewy. And when the Cowboy raised his eyes from his pint pot and looked at her, the tungsten-hearted tart just opened up her mouth and laughed and laughed before turning her attentions back towards the stage where her new and thrilling lover, who sported the proudest ponytail in the whole of the British Country circuit, was playing the opening bars to ‘One More Tequila Sheila And We’ll Make The Border Tonight’.

  The Cowboy edged along the bar a bit towards his wife and told her, ‘My heart’s in two pieces, Patsy. And there’s not a glue on this earth that could bind it back together. My heart’s in lumps, Patsy. But so is the dog’s. Me and Duke, we’re both broken-hearted without you, Patsy.’

  But the pitiless Patsy ignored his words and kept her lustful gaze on the stage and the pedal-guitar player who was pedalling and playing and starting to stare back at the goings-on at the bar.

  ‘I know that you’d never come back for me,’ the Cowboy insisted to his wanton wife. ‘But, Patsy, what about the dog? The dog never done you no harm, Patsy. Wouldn’t you come back for the sake of the dog?’

  On stage the pedal player glared and stared. And fluffed the opening notes to his instrumental break.

  ‘Not for me, Patsy,’ the Cowboy was telling his wife, ‘just for the dog. Y’ see, the dog won’t eat a thing since you’ve been gone and it’s all I can do to look at him these days. And if you don’t come back, Patsy, I’m going to have to take our Duke to a veterinary surgeon and have him put down in a humane manner.’

  And that’s when Patsy turned her head slowly, her nostrils beginning to flare and her gaudy red lips pressed tight together in disgust as she slammed down her neo-exotic cocktail on the bar and declared, ‘You heartless bastard!’

  And that’s when the pedal player put down his plectrum and stood up, leaving all the other Hoboes grinding to a clumsy shuddering halt in the middle of ‘One More Tequila Sheila And We’ll Make The Border Tonight’.

  A sudden and eerie silence descended upon the Allied Butchers’ and Architects’ Club, a silence observed by everyone in that hall, apart from the Cowboy, whose pleading words to his wife echoed all through the function room as he told her, ‘Patsy, the fate of our Duke is in your hands.’

  But the Cowboy’s appeal for such canine consideration only served to harden the pitiless Patsy’s tungsten heart. Reaching for her drink, she told him, ‘Fuck it then! Have the dog put down if y’ like. What do I need with a dog these days? I don’t need a dog to stroke no more.’ And inclining her head to the stage and to the ponytailed Pedal Man who was stood there staring and glaring she said, ‘Look, just look at the ponytail on that!’ And turning back to the Cowboy, triumph on her lips and insolence in her eyes, she told him, ‘Up there’s a head of hair that gives me all the stroking I’ll ever need.’

  ‘Please,’ the Cowboy said then, ‘please, Patsy, please,’ as he reached out his hand to touch her arm.

  And that’s when a deep growling voice from the stage said, ‘Hey! Cowboy!’

  And the Cowboy turned and saw, on the stage, the pedal-steel guitar player pointing at him.

  ‘What d’ y’ think you’re up to?’ the pedal player demanded.

  The Cowboy looked up at the stage and said, ‘I’m not up to nowt that need concern you, Pedal Man.’

  The Pedal Man stared and narrowed his eyes then and said, ‘But, Cowboy, it does concern me.’

  ‘Well, it needn’t do,’ the Cowboy said. ‘If a chap wants to have a word with his wife about their dog then I think he’s got the right to.’

  Everybody turned and looked at the Pedal Man then. And the Hoboes’ bass player shrugged and said well that was reasonable enough, wasn’t it, a feller talking to his wife about their dog? And assuming the matter to have been settled, he counted in four bars and tried to lead the other Hoboes back into ‘One More Tequila Sheila’. But the Pedal Man just kept standing and ‘One More Tequila Sheila’ bit the dust again.

  The Pedal Man pointed his finger then. ‘Cowboy!’ he said. ‘You listen to me; Patsy’s not your woman no more. Pretty Patsy’s my woman now!’

  And the Pedal Man glanced at Pretty Patsy, the leg-spreading slut who was loving every minute of it and whose cleavage was heaving with pride for the pugnacious Pedal Man.

/>   ‘And I don’t want you talking to her,’ the Pedal Man told the Cowboy. ‘I don’t want you talking to her about nothing, not dogs, not nowt, understand?’

  All eyes were on the Cowboy again then, waiting to see what the Cowboy would do. But the Cowboy did nowt except look. And the Pedal Man pointed his finger and said, ‘Now you move away from Pretty Patsy, go on, move.’

  There were some in the crowd as shouted out then and told the Cowboy that he should stand his ground and others who said as how he should take that pedal-steel guitarist outside and give him a good thrashing. There were even some as shouted and said he was a shitawful pedal-steel player anyway and the only reason he was in the band was on account of his ponytail. And everyone agreed that he was right out of order and therefore deserved a thrashing from the Cowboy.

  But those who offered such advice were unaware of the mildness of the Cowboy’s manners and the Gandhian goodness of his heart. And instead of taking such advice the Cowboy merely nodded at the Pedal Man and said, ‘Yes, I do understand. Patsy’s your woman now.’

  There were those in the crowd then who started yelling at the Cowboy, telling him he couldn’t just ignore it and shrieking, ‘Don’t be a bollocks, get up there, Cowboy, and give that ponytailed prat what he deserves.’

  But disregarding the vehemence and passion of such exhortations, the Kexborough Cowboy just put his pint pot down on the bar, turned and walked slowly out of the hall and the frustrated and disgruntled cries of the audience were drowned out as the Hebden Bridge Hoboes went back to telling Sheila that after one more tequila they’d all make the border tonight. And Pretty Patsy, almost limp with lust, ran her tongue in a slow circular motion over her bottom lip as she stared at the stage and wantonly contemplated her ponytailed hero.

  The Cowboy just walked. He didn’t know where he was going and he didn’t care. He just walked and walked until eventually he came to a church. And though not a man of any particularly devout religiosity, the Kexborough Cowboy, in need of solace, found himself pulling back the latch on the churchyard gate and sitting himself down to rest on a bench beneath a gnarled and twisted yew tree of some considerable antiquity. And it happened that the Cowboy’s eyes were drawn to a floodlit display board that had been erected in that churchyard and on whose bright yellow hardboard surface, in dark red lettering, were written the words, The meek shall inherit the earth. And intended though it was to bring comfort to those who would never have nowt and to bolster and make bearable the grief of the perpetually put down and trampled upon, this bald beatitude had exactly the opposite effect upon the Cowboy, who reflected upon the meekness and mildness of his own demeanour and concluded that far from gaining him the earth, such consistent gentility had gained him nowt but a cold lonely house in Kexborough, a fretting dog and a broken heart. And rising from that bench, the Cowboy’s formerly gentle hands seized the stanchion that held aloft the hardboard lie and in an anger born of years of restraint and humiliation he ripped that post clean out of the hard earth and battered and buckled the hardboard beatitude until its words could be read no more. And knowing now, knowing in his pounding and excited heart that it was not the meek who inherited nowt, that it was all the bad bastards who inherited the earth and who always would, the bad bastards, the dubious, the barbarous, the brutish and the biggest, the hardest and the toughest and the determinedly unscrupulous, they were the ones who inherited everything. And walking once more, only this time striding purposefully back towards the Allied Butchers’ and Architects’, the Cowboy laughed out loud, laughed and laughed at his own craziness, at how he’d been such a dove for his Patsy, such a meek and mild-mannered man, believing that such consistent consideration and gentility would be rewarded with her love. All along he’d been a dove and she’d upped and left him for a prick of a ponytailed Pedal Man with dubious left-hand technique. And the Kexborough Cowboy, laughing hysterically as he marched past the houses and cottages, had already concluded that to win back the heart of the woman he loved, the dove must fly and the brute must out!