Sorting Out Billy

by Jo Brand

  Charlie was the only new member of the group that week and the other men had to look twice when they saw this rather bedraggled scruff slouch into the room.

  ‘I could take that nonce out with my little finger,’ mused Dave, a career criminal from Balham who knocked his wife about as a sideline and had no idea that she was a regular visitor to Michael Randall’s self-defence classes just waiting to pick up enough knowledge to give her husband the biggest shock of his life. Dave’s neighbour, at whom the remark was aimed, nodded and snarled a bit which tended to be his only form of communication. He didn’t like hippies and this one had better not be a wanker into the bargain.

  ‘Right,’ said Sian brightly in a high-pitched voice which matched her appearance, ‘I see we have a new member this week. If everyone would like to introduce themselves to Charlie, then he can tell us a bit about why he’s here.’

  One by one, this gene pool of lack of impulse control mumbled their names and within seconds they were back at Charlie who had been dreading this moment.

  ‘Hi.’ He raised a hand, realised he looked like a social worker and put it down immediately.

  ‘I’m Charlie,’ he said, and much to his surprise began to talk about himself, how he was a jealous character who found it hard to let Flower live her life, how he didn’t use violence on her but couldn’t wait until he was at some sort of march and could get his hands on a policeman. To his even greater surprise, this roomful of assorted terrifying blokes began nodding sagely at his words and a discussion ensued about jealousy, insecurity and their long-term effects, and whether they’d inherited it from their families.

  Charlie was amazed. He’d assumed there would just be a short interlude before he was battered to a pulp and then taken to hospital, but he could see how these guys were really trying to tackle their problems. He was sitting there with a slightly soppy grin on his face when a chair hit him on the head.

  The chair that hit Charlie on the head had been lobbed from some distance by Dave’s wife, Dawn, who had left a friend looking after the kids and made her way up on the bus determined to make an impact and a statement, given that Dave had been attending this wretched group for weeks and yet his behaviour had shown very little improvement. It wasn’t so much Dave’s violence, which to be honest was like their sex-life — infrequent, and swift — it was more the incessant carping about her appearance/cooking/household-management skills/talent as a mother and human being that wore Dawn down. Once Dave had failed to come home for his dinner and in a fit of rage Dawn had gone to the pub with it on a tray, walked up to a table containing a very surprised Dave and three amused mates and dumped it in front of him and walked out. The reaction was not what she’d hoped. Dave got some salt and pepper from the bar and happily tucked in while the conversation about sport continued.

  Unfortunately, it’s not easy to aim a chair with any accuracy and therefore the chances of it hitting Dave were minimal, as soon as it left Dawn’s hands.

  Dave didn’t help the situation by laughing out loud when he realised that the chair intended for him had hit the dopey hippy, and this incensed Dawn and interestingly Dave’s neighbour Phil, who was quite happy to beat the crap out of blokes, but had sat there for weeks with his blood pressure slowly rising as he listened to tales of Dave’s wife being battered in different rooms of the house and thought of his mum. Phil didn’t realise Dave had exaggerated his violence for theatrical effect. Therefore he and Dawn between them leaped onto Dave and began battering him as best they could.

  Sian had not encountered a brawl before, and finding her voice could not be heard above the din of Dawn‘s screaming and Phil’s snarling, she thumped someone on the head with a hardback copy of Psychiatry in Dissent to try and break it up. Unfortunately this was Charlie, who was beginning to feel picked on and he turned and lashed out, catching Sian on the side of the cheek. At this point Phil, seeing this tiny childlike woman being assaulted, went mental and threw Charlie to the ground, banging his head on the floorboards as poor Charlie tried desperately to apologise to Sian and explain to Phil.

  This was when the other members of the group — most of whom, to be honest, had missed the squirty adrenaline sensation of a bloody good ruck — got stuck in, and the anger management class became a seething Loony Toon mass of arms and legs and noise.

  The fight was only stopped when a security guard, aged ninety if he was a day and almost transparent in his frailty, stuck his head round the door and hobbled towards the group to see what he could do, cherishing memories of bare-knuckle fighting for money as a teenager in the East End.

  Even I could knock this one out, thought Sian as she saw him approaching, and if she was honest with herself, she decided to have a crack as she had never hit anyone in her life and wanted to see how it felt. When it came to it though, she just could not bring herself to stick one on that veiny nose planted in the middle of that pinched face and so the fight stopped even more abruptly than it had started.

  Everybody got up and brushed themselves off in a matter-of-fact fashion, apart from Charlie who had been at the bottom of the pile of fighters and was winded and worried that he’d broken another one of his fingers.

  Meanwhile, Flower’s heart had been broken as she’d been forced off the stage by the heckler and there was nowhere to run except the ladies’ toilets where Marty Mavers stood, combining the incongruity of a smug grin and a tragic voice full of empathy about Flower’s demise.

  ‘It all takes time,’ she said, sounding like some teacher Flower had hated at school and Flower felt a rising inclination to thump her silly face. Instead she said, ‘Thanks, Marty,’ flatly and turned to leave.

  As she did so, an audience member appeared in the doorway and said, ‘I thought you were great!’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Marty, extending a hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the punter, ‘I didn’t mean you, I meant her.’

  Flower was so grateful she could have cried and with her head held high she left the toilet, somewhat repaired, leaving a foolish-looking Marty Mavers wondering why the only punter in the Whole room who could possibly prefer Flower’s act to hers, had walked into their toilet.

  On her way out, the club-owner Tom stopped Flower and for one joyful moment Flower thought he would offer her a booking. It wasn’t to be. He handed her a note.

  ‘Someone likes you,’ he said.

  Flower opened the note. It was from the heckler, she deduced cleverly as it was signed The Heckler, and it said:

  This time the victory is mine but if you are very, very, very nice to me, I’ll leave you alone. More instructions to follow.

  Flower shivered. Oh great, she thought. This is just what I need. She chucked the note away thinking that if Charlie saw it, it might set back all the good work done by anger management.

  If only.

  All the good work done by anger management consisted of a bloody nose, bruised spine and torn trousers for Charlie. As he and Flower limped home from opposite points of the compass, each damaged in different ways, both feeling utterly defeated, Martha’s voice was flying over their heads along a wire to Sarah who, revelling in the luxury of a night in on her own with no fear of saying the wrong thing or being clumsy or burning the dinner, was chatting happily on the phone with her, about the mess that was their romantic lives.

  ‘Look, Marth, I love him so I’m hardly going to walk away, am I?’ said Sarah, sounding like a girl band.

  ‘But Sar, you’ve got to think of yourself in this,’ said Martha. ‘I know you underplay it ‘cause you’re embarrassed, but be honest, are you scared of him?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Sarah said, underplaying ‘almost all the time’ to something more palatable.

  ‘Well, is that a good basis for a relationship?’ said Martha. ‘It’s better than not having one at all,’ said Sarah, touching on one of life’s great questions for many women who feel like a spare part-cum-leper if they are not accompanied by a penis-owner at all times.

  ‘Oh th
anks,’ said Martha. ‘Thanks for reminding me.’

  ‘You’ve got the Lump,’ said Sarah, who truly believed that it was possible for a baby to fill a relationship-sized gap.

  ‘I can’t fuck the baby,’ said Martha crossly and then thought how lucky it was that her father couldn’t listen in to her conversations any more.

  ‘Marth, what a terrible thing to say,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Martha grudgingly. She had got so used to winding up her dad, it leaked into other parts of her life too.

  Tentatively, Sarah said, ‘Look, Marth, you haven’t told anyone who the father of Lump is yet. We want to help, you know. Why won’t you tell us?’

  Martha had been caught at a rather hormonal time by Sarah and her resolve, like some tuberculosis-ridden Victorian heroine, to keep schtumm about the origins of the Lump, caved in and she started to weep great big hiccuppy sobs down the phone.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Sarah. ‘I didn’t mean to set you off.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ wailed Martha through a wall of snot. ‘Don’t know what?’ said Sarah. ‘Don’t know what to do?’ ‘No, don’t know who the father is,’ lied Martha. ‘Well, how many possibles are there?’ said Sarah. ‘Three,’ said Martha.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said Sarah. ‘I never realised.’

  ‘I’m so embarrassed,’ said Martha as she sobbed on. ‘Can’t you do one of them tests?’ said Sarah. ‘Who are they, anyway?’

  ‘Look, I can’t talk now,’ said Martha. ‘I’m dying for a piss. I’ll meet you and Flower in the pub and tell you all about it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Sarah. ‘It’ll be all right,’ although she had no more idea whether it would be than whether Flower would make it on the comedy circuit, something she had assured her of many times.

  ‘I’d better go,’ said Martha. ‘See you tomorrow night?’

  Sarah didn’t want to say, ‘If it’s all right with Billy,’ but Martha sensed that this was an issue and said, ‘If not then, Friday eh?’ knowing Billy went out with workmates on Friday nights.

  Sarah went to bed that night with a list of names in her head about who the most likely candidates could be and found herself, strangely, to be somewhat envious of Martha’s predicament.

  As she dropped off, she narrowed the list down to four and was eager to see if any of them were right. There was Martha’s ex-boyfriend Alan the Planet, so named because his head contained many more facts than most people’s. He’d moved away and the relationship had lost impetus as his visits got less frequent. Or could it be Martha’s next-door neighbour, fourteen-year-old Junior, with whom she flirted outrageously whenever she got the chance? Perhaps it was Ted, her boss from work, whose unattractiveness was negated by a large wallet and a wicked sense of humour, or maybe that bloke whose name she couldn’t remember whom they’d met in a club in East London.

  Her money was on Ted.

  Charlie and Flower sat miserably at home like a pair of pensioners who’d just discovered rationing was back. They were hunched over a small electric fire because the central heating had broken down and the weatherman had been excitable to the point of idiocy as he described the coming cold snap. Charlie, as is common in enough men for women to comment on, was hypochondriacal to the point of having cheated death many times in his head and was swathed in hot towels with a Lemsip and Marijuana Sprinkle, as he called it, to dull the physical pain brought on by the anger management group. Flower, on the other hand, was suffering a higher form of pain, the emotional humiliation of the heckled-off comic which makes one feel like one’s insides have been taken out and auctioned off outside the local newsagent for enemies to use as table decorations.

  At that moment, Hitler (‘so we never forget the evil bastard existed’ … Charlie Knapp 1992), their black and white cat, entered the room, limping, with one of his back legs in plaster completing the sad trio of damaged creatures in the house. Had Charlie and Flower been a little less depressed the cat would have offered the possibility of a good laugh at themselves, a route untravelled by too many politicians and celebrities.

  Charlie had related his tale of woe from anger management and was trying to explain to Flower that with such a volatile group he didn’t think it was the best idea to send Billy along quite yet. Flower then related the tragic tale of her evening, leaving out the Billy and heckler elements because they would have upset Charlie, which meant he found it difficult to understand why it had been such a bad evening.

  ‘Oh, let’s do it,’ said Charlie, which was his answer to pretty much any traumatic situation and Flower thought fondly of the times she had been pinned to the ground by him in the midst of some chaos — a demo that went wrong at Stonehenge, under a police van, round at her parents’ just after an emotional dinner and their most unusual perhaps, a quick one in Sainsburys at two in the morning over the organic frozen section. It was quite difficult to make it look like they were taking a long time to decide whether to go for veggie sausage rolls or a turkey that had had a damn good run round a bit of mud in Essex before it was pulverised. Normally in a relationship the sexual urge cools unevenly, but in Flower and Charlie’s case even after many years together there was an equal appetite not only for the long slow encounter but also the race against Big Ben’s bongs for the midday news.

  This time it was on the floor in their scruffy living room, and if either of them had been interested they would have spotted the flash of binoculars as their neighbour opposite, a long-time silent participator in their sex-life, thanked his lucky stars for a grandstand view and put the phone down rather abruptly on the local radio station before his voice rose too highly. Another skill Flower and Charlie possessed was the ability to discuss any aspect of their life, however trivial, during fucking — so the conversation about Billy’s suitability for the anger management group continued accompanied by a few squeaks and low-pitched grunts, making it sound to someone on the other side of the wall as though the news and a porn film were being played simultaneously. And there was someone on the other side of the wall listening — their next-door neighbour, a dried-up old misery of a woman who had made it her life’s dedication to get Flower and Charlie out of the place by logging every sound above a whisper and plaguing the Environmental Health Office with a catalogue of the bangs, squawks, thumps, boings and sighs of Charlie and Flower’s life. The fact that she had to use an old-fashioned ear trumpet to do it was not something she revealed to the authorities, however.

  Charlie and Flower were aware she was trying to get them out and in their hippy Christian sort of way had tried to be nice. This elicited completely the opposite reaction and the woman, Mrs Edith Challoner, was so unpleasant to them that they had no option but to hate her in as uncharitable a way as possible. They called her ‘Grandma PMT’ because of her thoroughly ill-tempered behaviour, which was matched once a month by Flower, who possessed the genuine article: she had offered several times to pop in and stuff a pillow over Mrs Challoner’s face, prompting Charlie to ladle an extra helping of Evening Primrose into her mug of tea at breakfast.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Charlie, ejaculating and seamlessly segueing into, ‘We’ll leave the anger management suggestion to Billy for a while, shall we?’

  ‘OK,’ said Flower squeakily as she dropped off, the one of the pair who always went out like a light.

  Billy, meanwhile, was totally unaware of all this mental activity being directed towards his life as he sat with his feet up on a chair in a pub mulling over the conversation he had had with Flower earlier in the evening and wondering how much these bloody girls would interfere in his life. He supposed another approach would be forthcoming from Martha and quite looked forward to what the pregnant old sow would have to say to him. He also wondered whether Sarah was in on this and had sanctioned the approaches, but he presumed, rightly, that she would be absolutely devastated if she knew, because he recognised in Sarah the self-esteem level of a minnow and knew that she would plug any emotional outburst that might elicit
a show of concern from friends or family. Family of course wasn’t very likely as Sarah hadn’t seen her mum for five or so years and had never even known her dad, so it was down to her friends to offer her the support a family would have provided.

  Flower was having an affair with a car. She had booked driving lessons. She hadn’t told Charlie about it, because he hated cars and thought that they both managed perfectly well on their bikes and with the odd lift in some hideous smelly van. But Flower was fed up with being on a bike. It felt like being on a conveyor belt that ran through a country of hecklers, and the anticipation of abuse made her anxious every time she mounted the bloody thing. This made her make silly mistakes, and so far she had ridden into a lamppost in front of some teenage boys who had predictably pissed themselves, broadsided an old lady on a zebra crossing (regrettably not Mrs Challoner) and run over their own cat, thus necessitating its leg in plaster.

  Flower’s driving instructor had the Sergeant Major air of someone who had been responsible for the suicide of several squaddies. He was possessed of a voice so gratingly loud that being stuck in a car with him was torturous. Flower would have changed to another instructor but hated to offend anyone, although to offend a creature with skin this thick would have required placing an explosive device in his Y-fronts. You could not have slipped even a fag paper in between Ernie Bolland’s arse and the plastic seat in the tiny car. He parped out orders, which made Flower nervous, and she kept making a mess of things each time they had a lesson.

  Mr Bolland always picked Flower up from work so Charlie wouldn’t see them and there he was this particular morning, his jellylike bulk firmly sat in the passenger seat. This was Flower’s third lesson and the residents of Primrose House were all out in the garden as she stepped into the car.