Sorting Out Billy

by Jo Brand

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Flower, ‘but you’ll end up gradually breaking every bone in your body. Why not sort it out?’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s well under control.’

  Flower then moved on to Billy. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Well, that man needs his anger controlled,’ said Charlie. ‘Look,’ said Flower, ‘I’m sure there are these groups you can go to where you discuss stuff like that and sort out your temper. How-about going to one for me and finding out if it would- be any good for Billy? We’ve got to do something.’

  ‘Oh bloody hell,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Oh please,’ said Flower. ‘He’s hit me now, and Sarah; that only leaves Martha who’s not really in a fit state to be hit at the moment — well, not in the stomach anyway.’

  ‘The size her bump is, that kid’s going to be a human bouncy castle anyway,’ said Charlie. He realised Flower’s eyes were continuing to plead. ‘Oh all right,’ he said.

  The next day, despite her bandaged wrist, Flower decided she could and would ride her bike round to Martha’s as it was a bit too far to walk and the bus route went past a young offenders’ institution, which meant the bus always contained some spotty mini-psychopath who had just had his fags confiscated and was on his way, in a fit of pique, to piss up a bus shelter or rob a pensioner, after having given Flower a mouthful of abuse.

  This particular day Flower escaped relatively unscathed on her bike until she was turning into Martha’s road, when two blokes in a van drew alongside.

  ‘Fancy a jump, Conky?’ said the greasy-haired occupant of the passenger seat whose breath could have been used to kill off garden pests.

  Flower kept her head down and continued cycling determinedly along.

  ‘Oi, nozzer!’ added his mate, a worthy contender for the Unhealthy Pallor with Fetid Cardigan Oscar. ‘Don’t ignore us!’

  Flower turned off at this point and could feel another layer of her equanimity being peeled away by the London Experience.

  I must learn to drive, she thought. At least I can wind the window up then.

  She arrived at Martha’s in a bad mood and didn’t mention the encounter because she was slightly ashamed of the number of times her nose was alluded to by the citizens of London, little realising that Martha minimised her quota of fat abuse for the very same reason.

  Martha let Flower into her very untidy smelly flat with an apology. ‘I’m so tired, you know, because of Lump. I can’t even be bothered to clean.’

  Flower knew Lump had nothing to do with it and that Martha’s laziness and general lack of hygiene were her oldest friends.

  ‘When’s Lump due?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘Do you want me to help clean the place and try to create some sort of environment for a baby out of this landfill site?’

  ‘Yeh, that’d be great.’

  ‘Well, let’s do it and while we’re at it we can make a list of the options for sorting Billy out.’

  Martha grabbed an old envelope and put her hand under the settee where several pens lay and headed the page Billy.

  ‘Contract out on him?’ she said. ‘Or shall we just nail his bollocks to a convent wall ourselves?’

  Flower laughed in a slightly restrained way. ‘I think we should talk to him,’ she shouted over the hoover as it rattled and spat out some dangerous-looking smoke, indignant at being asked to suck up the debris of a good month’s worth of crap.

  ‘What, tell him to stop it and see if he does so like a good little boy?’ shouted back Martha, who was down on her hands and knees with the Lump pressed rather uncomfortably against the carpet scooping up newspapers, cups with varying degrees of penicillin-like growth in them and a couple of pairs of very unattractive knickers that would get her stoned to death in a lap-dancing club.

  ‘No need to be sarky,’ said Flower. ‘I’m sure we could get somewhere if we talked to him — correction, I could get somewhere. You’d probably make him go out and spray some puppies with automatic fire you wind him up so much.’

  ‘All right then,’ said Martha, ‘you have a nice little chat with him, put him bang to rights and if it cures him of his violent tendencies, I’ll clean the bath.’

  Flower’s resolve to sort Billy out strengthened.

  ‘What do you think Sarah will think of us interfering?’ she asked.

  ‘We won’t tell her,’ said Martha, whose inclination was always towards the cloak and dagger.

  ‘Really?’ said Flower, who nearly had a mental breakdown if she had to tell a lie.

  ‘Look, she won’t thank us. He won’t tell her we’ve talked to him because he’ll be too embarrassed. It’s better all round to keep it quiet.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Flower.

  ‘What?’ said Martha and turned to see Flower gagging on account of an elderly plate of half-eaten dinner she’d discovered under a pile of mother and baby magazines.

  ‘Look, shall we go down the caff and call it a day here?’ Martha suggested, surveying the barely touched flat.

  ‘Please,’ said Flower.

  They sat in Martha’s local caff which surprisingly for the area was run by two very healthy people who served very healthy food — which meant that no one went in there very much.

  The Sorting Out Billy list grew and moved from Flower and then Martha chatting to Billy to some slightly more duplicitous and then downright mad suggestions.

  ‘How about trying to split them up?’ offered Martha.

  ‘But they love each other,’ said Flower.

  ‘What, in a Henry the Eighth-Anne Boleyn sort of a way, do you mean? Look, he’s popped her one twice now and it’s not going to stop, so if the gentle approach doesn’t work we need some stand-by ideas.’

  ‘Well, how could we split them up? I don’t see,’ said Flower.

  ‘Easy peasy,’ said Martha. ‘You or I could sleep with him.’

  ‘But Sarah would never talk to us again,’ Flower objected. ‘Yeh, but at least she would be able to talk … because she’d be alive.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so melodramatic,’ said Flower. ‘He won’t kill her, this is real life.’

  ‘Yes, and ordinary. people do things like this to each other,’ said Martha grimly.

  ‘What about just finding Sarah a new bloke?’ said Flower. ‘Sarah doesn’t want a new bloke, she wants Billy.’ ‘OK, how about getting someone to threaten him?’ This was an unusual and somewhat daring suggestion from a natural peacekeeper like Flower.

  ‘Mmm, not a bad idea,’ said Martha, ‘but we’d have to get someone decent to really scare the shit out of him.’

  ‘As opposed to …?‘

  ‘Well, Charlie, or my dad,’ said Martha. ‘How about if we just go and buy a gun, get him in a room, point it at him and say, “Leave our friend alone or you lose your fucking crown jewels”.’

  They looked at each other and laughed uproariously.

  In the end it was decided that both Flower and Martha would start the process of sorting things out for Sarah by talking to Billy and it fell to Flower as the natural conciliator to have the first attempt. She decided she would phone Billy at work so Sarah didn’t find out what they were up to and then realised she had no idea where Billy worked.

  She got straight on the phone to Martha.

  ‘Oh, it’s some firm up in Whitechapel,’ said Martha. ‘Where all the killers come from.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Flower.

  ‘Oh, a spurious reference to Jack the Ripper,’ said Martha.

  ‘No, he killed in Whitechapel, he didn’t come from there.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, first of all, no one knows who he is so how would they know where he came from, and secondly—’

  ‘Don’t bother with secondly,’ said Martha. ‘I’m not that entertained by stories of prostitute murderers.’

  ‘Ooh, you big fat feminist rebel,’ said Flower.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve got Billy’s number,’ said Martha. �
�Got a pen?’

  Flower gritted her teeth and dialled. She was hoping to get Billy’s voicemail, but he picked it up.

  ‘Hello, Bill Taylor speaking.’

  ‘Bill, it’s Flower,’ said Flower.

  There was a small pause during which Billy took in the information that one of his girlfriend’s friends had called him at work. Within a split second he had speculated that she either wanted to sleep with him or shop him.

  ‘And what can I do for you?’ said Billy.

  Flower hated that phrase. In her head she said, ‘You can’t do anything, you bad fucker, it’s what I can do for you in terms of transforming you into a decent member of society.’ She actually said, ‘I want to have a chat with you about something. Can you meet me?’

  ‘Very mysterious,’ said Billy.

  ‘I’m doing a gig on Wednesday at Frogs Wine Bar,’ said Flower. ‘Can you meet me there before it starts, about seven?’

  ‘Give us a clue,’ said Billy.

  ‘No, I’ll tell you when I see you,’ said Flower and hung up.

  ‘Who was that?’ said Charlie, his radar bringing him prematurely from the bathroom.

  ‘Oh, no one,’ said Flower. ‘Wrong number.’

  Charlie wondered why Flower was even bothering with that lie because nobody ever believes that ‘wrong number’ line, but for once he let it go and sauntered into the kitchen to make some evil-looking, evil-smelling and evil-tasting tea.

  Flower was slightly put out that he didn’t give her the third degree. Perhaps he’s saving it for the anger management group, she thought, which was where he was going the night she was meeting Billy.

  Flower’s heart thumped at the thought of it all going wrong with Billy, the gig falling apart and Charlie going mad when he found out that she had met Billy and talked to him on her own.

  Why was life always such a worry? Why couldn’t it be relaxing, fun and unchallenging? It was so much easier to do nothing than get involved in other people’s problems. Flower thought of a saying her father was constantly trumpeting at her as a child, as she was dragged on yet another demonstration heading towards Hyde Park. He used to say, ‘For evil to triumph it is necessary only for good men to do nothing.’ Well, what a pain that was! Why couldn’t it be, ‘For goodness to triumph it is necessary only for good men to sit on their arses and get pissed’? Why was poking your nose into other people’s problems always at such a high emotional cost?

  Wednesday arrived with the unsettling speed of a teenage mugger, as do all days which engender apprehension of some sort, and Flower found herself walking towards Frogs Wine Bar going through her lines for her guest spot.

  The man behind the Frogs empire of one sad lonely club had decided to jump on the comedy bandwagon with very little idea of where he was going; the facilities, as usual, were not at their best. There was no changing room and Flower couldn’t believe it when the choice put to her was the women’s toilet — one smelly cubicle — or standing on the pavement outside.

  Flower clocked Marty Mavers in the women’s toilet, a highly ambitious Australian comic who kept a record of hers and everyone else’s earnings and had her nose so far up the arses of the relevant TV people that, had her nose been the size of Flower’s, their livers and kidneys would have been shredded. So Flower decided she’d stand out on the pavement with Dunk, a Cambridge university graduate who believed there was far more danger and excitement to be had amongst the comedy clubs of London than on some adventure trail in South America, much to his parents’ disappointment as they had very little else to do with their money, their imaginations being inversely proportional to their wealth.

  Billy found Dunk and Flower chatting just as it started to rain so he and Flower escaped inside to the relative warmth of the bar although she was to discover later that the audience was several degrees below freezing.

  ‘So,’ said Billy, ‘come to ask me out?’

  ‘In your dreams,’ said Flower, whose boldness increased the nearer she got to a stage.

  ‘Well, what then?’

  ‘I want to talk to you about Sarah,’ said Flower.

  ‘Me and Sarah is none of your fucking business,’ said Billy.

  Aware of the fact she was already sounding- like some really irritating unreconstructed seventies feminist, Flower said, ‘Look, Sarah is a really good friend of mine and I wouldn’t like to see any harm come to her.’

  She waited for the eruption.

  Instead, Billy just laughed.

  ‘What are you on about?’ he said. ‘You ridiculous woman! How would any harm come to her?’

  ‘Well,’ said Flower, ‘there was that night …‘ She trailed off not wanting to actually say the words.

  ‘When I caught her accidentally with my hand, when I was trying to …‘ Billy trailed off too, searching for the right words.

  Come on, thought Flower. This’ll be good.

  ‘… smack the cat?’

  Oh, the cat that flies through the air at head height, thought Flower, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Look,’ said Billy, ‘I’ve apologised about your wrist. I wasn’t doing anything to Sarah that night, I was just having a laugh and you got it all wrong.’

  Flower, as she had many hundreds of times, began to doubt herself. She felt silly — and felt silly that she felt so silly. Her chummy speech about whether Billy needed help working through his anger stuck two fingers up at her and flew out the window.

  ‘Is that all?’ said Billy. “Cause I’ve got to get home.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Flower, now feeling pissed off and deflated and not in the mood for comedy. She hoped that the hideous Marty Mavers had vacated the Ladies and headed inside the club. Flower was on in the middle of the show. She didn’t like to watch the show because it put her off and made her feel she wasn’t funny.

  Marty Mavers opened with a treatise on the size of her vagina and what particular makes of truck could be backed up into it. The repressed and depressed British crowd loved her and failed to notice her eagerly scanning the audience for anyone more influential than the compère with whom she had slept a couple of years ago.

  While Marty was on, the final act of the night Des Plumpton turned up. He was a trouper from the old days who’d decided he had to get in with the kids and had swapped his racist, sexist act for one which included lots of swearing and jokes about adverts, although in the last few years he’d found his old set increasingly acceptable in the ever-shifting field of comedy. Flower and Dunk were the guest spots and had Flower not liked Dunk so much she would have been quite pleased that he struggled as this usually meant that the next act on would have an easier time.

  Dunk was a nice unassuming aristocrat who was rather embarrassed about his family’s wealth and had made a half-hearted attempt to separate himself from the bosom of his family, live in a squat and be an anti-hunt protester. He met his parents at a few fox-hunts and had pulled his dad off his horse once before he realised who it was.

  The audience wasn’t going for Dunk’s gentle public-school brand of humour.

  ‘Why don’t you fuck off, you posh twat?’ was a question Dunk had been asked rather too many times by audience members and he retired hurt, having been unable to come up with the killer put-down.

  Flower always timed her pre-performance piss very badly and heard her name called as she was reaching for the toilet paper. There then ensued a wild scramble while she tried to sort herself out, check everything was pulled up and secrete her set list in her pocket as she made her way to the stage. Flower vowed she would sort this problem out but always had to pee right at the last minute. It was preferable to incontinence on stage, which she felt was only one false move away. The memory of the time she went on with some toilet paper tucked in her waistband and a vast expanse of gruesome Christmas present knicker on show burned into her making her, even now, blush with shame. Too new in the game. to turn it to her advantage or pretend she’d done it on purpose, she allowed the crowd to satiate t
heir laughter lust and then quietly left the stage.

  ‘Hello everyone,’ said Flower, as she stepped onto the makeshift stage. ‘I really do—’

  ‘Cor, I’d like to sit on your face,’ came a heckle. The crowd laughed.

  Flower floundered. ‘Er…’ she said.

  ‘But I’d get my bollocks slashed to bits by that nose,’ continued the voice.

  The crowd laughed again.

  Shit, I should have said that, thought Flower, not realising the simple act of repeating that out loud would have got her some sympathy and a round of applause in a parallel universe.

  ‘Nice tits too,’ said the heckler.

  The crowd laughed again.

  Where’s Germaine Greer when you need her? thought Flower, yet again failing to capitalise on her thoughts. I hope Charlie’s having a better time at anger management.

  Charlie wasn’t.

  The anger management group seemed to Charlie to be an excuse to gather as many cartoon psychopaths into one room as possible and he was shaking with fear. His only ally, he felt, from the world of relatively stable non-homicidal people was a comic, Matt Vicious, who had broken the nose of an over-enthusiastic heckler, thus prompting his agent to send him here as he fast saw his percentage drying up if Matt began laying waste to audience members. Apart from Matt, the rest of the room consisted of convicted felons, wife-beaters and a bloke who always thumped bus drivers if, as they normally did, they arrived at his bus stop accompanied by two other buses of the same number. Unfortunately, this guy had been seen by many as the Robin Hood of South Norwood and many passengers often cheered as he took a swing at a series of unfortunate men whose only crime was to linger too long outside the local café stop.

  The anger management group leader was a tiny psychologist called Sian who looked like she couldn’t have held her own against an angry squirrel let alone these bruisers.

  Therefore she had to rely on their ability to control- themselves, the support of the other group members should an incident occur or, at the very least, the ability to run out of the room as fast as her tiny little legs would carry her. Group membership was fluid as some came and went, while others had a spell in prison or just couldn’t be arsed to return because they considered their problem to be an advantage rather than a treatable symptom of a personality disorder.