by Jo Brand
‘Ooh look,’ said Rene, one of the other care assistants. ‘Flower’s going driving.’ Everyone turned to look at Flower, who felt her face flush with embarrassment. She had her foot on the accelerator.
‘Well, move, you silly moo!’ boomed Ernie Bolland.
Flower accelerated and, forgetting the small issue of steering, headed straight over the roundabout in the middle of the drive, which contained a number of primroses, surprisingly enough. The residents of Primrose House were hugely impressed as she ploughed across, bumped off the other side and disappeared out of the drive without slowing down. A huge cheer went up as Flower roared off round the corner, with Ernie Bolland looking amazed, an expression he would wear once again that week when the young boy he picked up in the public toilets showed some interest in his life.
Flower found that her mind emptied every time she went for a driving lesson, which was not the best time for it to do that. She shaved an old woman’s shopping basket on a zebra crossing, and even Ernie Bolland’s penetrating baritone couldn’t completely break through into the world of her thoughts. She was fretting about her next gig and the possible reappearance of the heckler and what his note actually meant. It sounded as though he wanted to have sex with her but maybe that was just the slant she was putting on it. Whichever way it went, she’d have to keep Charlie away from it all as she didn’t want yet more trouble.
Meanwhile, Martha had been ‘Mary-ed’ as she called it, in other words trapped on her sofa while her miserable sister regaled her with all the elements of her miserable life. Normally, at the end, when Martha tried to say something, Mary tended to get up and go home. This time, for a change, they were actually having something approaching a conversation about their parents; as usual Martha had taken her mother’s side and Mary, her father’s. Mary couldn’t bear anyone to show any kind of weakness, the legacy of many years as the oldest child being battered into submission by the Rev Brian, whilst being hauled up mountains, swimming in leg-mottlingly cold English seas and standing outside in all weathers preaching the word, which was really an excuse for her dad to get out of the house and away from the pathetic beseeching eyes of her mother who wanted a proper happy family.
‘When’s that thing due?’ asked Mary unkindly, looking at Martha’s Lump as though it was a lump of snot in her embroidered hanky. ‘And have you told Dad who the father is yet?’
‘What — so he can give me another fucking lecture?’
Mar visibly cringed at the F word as many people do who long to be able to use it. Mar thought her husband was a fucking wanker, her neighbours were fucking cretins and the kids were fuckwits. Hurrah for a Christian upbringing.
‘It’s due in about three weeks,’ said Martha. ‘Coming over for the big event?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Mary. ‘Anyway, I’ve come to talk about Mother and Father, not the bloody ball of skin and bone you’ll be ejecting out of your naughty.’ (Mary hadn’t really moved on from a childhood approach to sex.’).
Martha had never heard Mary put it so charmingly and decided that as well as having all the best tunes, the devil had all the best descriptive phrases as well.
‘So what about Mum and Dad?’ said Martha, who was torn between hoping her parents would split up so her mum could come and help her with the baby, even if it meant having to clean up her act … and wishing she’d keep well away.
‘Well, since her foolish little foray here, I think things have slightly improved,’ said Mary, ‘but we need to keep an eye on them because Dad is just as likely to chuck her out as her go again, you know. He’s nearly had enough.’
‘Oh the poor bastard,’ said Martha. ‘It must be really hard for him having someone cook his meals, keep the house clean and shag him whenever he wants.’
Mary nearly vomited at this suggestion. ‘That is b— disgusting,’ she said, not even having reached the stage of the ‘bloody’ word yet.
‘Oh come on,’ said Martha, ‘surely you must know the man is an animal? He twirls her on the end of it at least three times a week.’
Mary let out a strangulated scream. ‘Shut up!’ she shouted at Martha who was enjoying herself, but also being truthful.
‘Oh grow up,’ she said impatiently. ‘Do you think they did it twice for us and a couple of times trying for Lazarus? He’s over-sexed, is Brian. He’s a fucking randy vicar, you silly cow, except he doesn’t do it with anyone else except poor Mum.’
‘I will not listen to this!’ screeched Mary, and headed for the door. As she reached it, she turned and put her hand in her bag, pulling out a tin of ham. ‘For you and the baby!’ she shouted, lobbing it. Having thrown the javelin at school she didn’t realise her own strength and the tin sailed past Martha’s ear, out of the balcony window and landed on the car roof of some drug dealers measuring out some crack below.
A stream of expletives floated out of the car and it was a good job Mary didn’t hear the myriad options available to her of meeting her death as they determined to pull limb from limb the person who had damaged their pride and their car.
Oh what a shame, thought Martha. The baby would have loved a ham sarnie just after it squeezed out of my naughty.
It was a pity it didn’t sail in through the window of Sarah and Billy’s flat because just at that moment Sarah was longing for a heavy object with which to defend herself. Billy was advancing menacingly towards her, having criticised everything all day and now looking like he might thump her again.
‘Bloody useless, thick, pathetic, vain, ridiculous …‘ One adjective after another spewed so easily out of his mouth when it had been lubricated with alcohol.
And now for the physical part of The Krypton Factor challenge, thought Sarah grimly. And all this because Martha had phoned and asked her out for a drink on a Thursday night.
Flower, Martha and Sarah arranged to meet on Friday night because Sarah had phoned sounding very breezy, in the way that over-optimistic hostages do, and told them she couldn’t make the Thursday — but of course Flower and Martha detected beneath this unnatural cheefulness that a bit of domestic was going on and assumed rightly that Billy had been at it again. Martha, in the throes of a hormone surge, kicked the wall and cried, and Flower building up to a PMT session kicked Charlie and he cried.
Sarah was desperate to try and halt the descent into relationship hell for which Billy was lining her up. A nasty situation had been developing, averted only by a ring on the doorbell from a concerned neighbour asking if they were all right— something that shocked Billy, who made an excuse about the telly being too loud and letting his composure slip by finishing the encounter with, ‘And mind your own business, you nosy cow!’
The nosy cow in question was Maxine who lived in the flat next door and had a husband called Sean, a kind sensitive bloke who didn’t like the look of Billy and had avoided conversations with him in the communal hallway. Billy didn’t care because he thought Sean looked under the thumb.
But before Friday and the great revelations by Martha Spinster of this Parish, Flower had another gig to get through, this time at a club on the outskirts of South London, one of these rather manicured well-off areas that is filled with a very high quotient of middle-class yobs, who obviously wouldn’t be seen dead in a comedy club, but appeared to have sent their older brothers and sisters along. Flower was Charlie-less again as he had a bad headache sustained during Flower’s two-day PMT window.
Flower was beginning to feel under siege with all the problems in her life: the driving lessons weren’t going well, work was hard work, Charlie was being too suspicious, Billy was a nightmare and she dreaded her next encounter with the heckler, having had plenty of time to imagine a Hollywood woman-slasher blockbuster in which she was finally tracked to a disused comedy club and disembowelled.
This time Flower was working with Chas Lawrence, a very pleasant man in his forties whose friends had told him he was brilliant at telling jokes; emboldened by alcohol one night he had got up at a comedy club in Hasting
s and done five minutes of jokes which had gone down a storm. He’d then tried his luck in London and since then his career had taken off, but he had been ignored by telly people because being funny isn’t enough.
Also on with Flower and Chas were Billson Tillson, a young man with a history of mental illness who tended to recount his thoughts to the audience and that seemed to be enough, and Lulu West, a solicitor, whose act consisted of describing famous murders and doing songs about them with a ukulele. Had her bosoms been two cup sizes larger, she would already have had her own series on telly.
Billson always started his act by staring mournfully at the audience for about a minute, which was a hell of a long time.
Tonight, he began by saying, ‘My medication’s not working so well this week,’ and because he looked like a badly dressed owl, this worked well and the audience laughed and some clapped. Bilson continued, encouraged, ‘When me and my twin sister Electra were eight my mother killed my father because he wouldn’t mow the lawn and after she’d cut him up, we had to eat seventy fish fingers each for tea that night to make room for him in the freezer.’
Fewer people laughed this time.
‘Next day I didn’t have anything to take into school for cookery class so I took a bit of my dad’s leg.’
The audience sensed something on cannibalism coming up and wondered if they had the stomach for it.
‘Trouble was, my dad’s leg got so badly burned in the oven, I wasn’t allowed to eat it.’
Shuffling and coughing began and some people suspected that this odd character wasn’t making it up. A mental-health worker at the back more out of concern for what might develop than sadism began to shout, ‘Off! Off!’
Bilson didn’t need telling twice and he left the stage somewhat miffed that the terribly convoluted punchline he had prepared about being given a dead leg at school would never be aired at this particular venue.
Chas then came on and told a lot of old jokes that he had collected since he was a child and the audience breathed a sigh of relief that they didn’t have to do anything except sit back and relax. Personally Flower thought there were too many sexist jokes in Chas’s set but kept her mouth shut because this- was the way things seemed to be these days. Also, when he got to the one about the lion-tamer putting his knob in the lion’s mouth and hitting it on the head with a hammer with no reaction from the lion, she had to admit it was a funny joke and started to laugh, as the lion-tamer asked the circus crowd if anyone wanted to try it and an old lady answered, ‘Yes, I’ll have a go but you won’t hit me too hard on the head with the hammer, will you?’
Chas stormed it and after ten minutes the audience were whooping and cheering. This made Flower nervous because she knew the content of her set would not be the material of choice for this particular audience.
However, that’s what it’s all about, she said to herself, appealing to the widest possible audience — so with as much of the trench spirit as she could muster, she walked onto the stage.
‘Bit of a shithole round here, isn’t it?’ she started, which got a very respectable laugh, possibly a six on the Richter Scale. Flower loosened up a bit. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘I live in Nunhead and the gardens round us aren’t nearly as well kept as yours. Look!’ She pulled a bunch of flowers from behind her back and smelled them luxuriantly …—and the audience laughed and applauded.
Flower foolishly allowed herself the thought that for once it had started well.
‘I hope you got those from my garden,’ shouted a voice, “cause I piss on them to water them, you know’
The audience laughed very loudly, giving Flower eleven and a half seconds to come up with a funny reply.
‘Fuck off Titchmarsh,’ she ventured.
A big laugh.
‘Hadn’t you better have a sit-down, beautiful?’ continued the voice. ‘The scent of them flowers will knock you out, taken in through that conk.’
A bigger laugh, Flower’s confidence sliding down into her boots and sweat springing up all over.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ came out of her mouth and she knew she was already defeated.
‘I might have to if you’re all that’s on offer,’ came the reply.
Flower struggled on for a bit longer but gave up and left as soon as she could. Dec, the club manager, was sympathetic but Flower could tell he wanted people who could handle the audiences and for some reason the self-confidence of most women comics is set at a different level from that of men; crumpling into a girlie heap comes so much easier to the female of the species. At least there was no note from the heckler this time. It was not long though before, in Flower’s head, the heckler would be spelled with a capital H.
As Flower left the building she heard the mildly irritating tones of Lulu West’s ukulele drifting out of the window and caught a snatch of, ‘The Yorkshire Ripper stalked the streets of Leeds nightly, / Why couldn‘t he have helped us out and cut up Richard Whiteley?’
Big laughs.
On her bike on the way home, Flower’s mobile rang. It was Charlie.
‘How did it go?’
‘Shit,’ said Flower. ‘I guess Bromley’s not my heartland.’
‘Never mind,’ said Charlie. ‘Hurry home and we’ll do it.
Flower began to pedal faster, fearing Charlie might do it on his own if she didn’t get there soon. Flower’s phone made a beeping noise that signalled the arrival of a text message and like 90 per cent of the population when driving, she assumed that she could access a message and read it quite safely whilst continuing to pedal home through the cheerless South London night. Of course, Flower pressed a wrong button, tried to peer more closely at her phone and careered off the road and up onto the kerb which flipped her off and she landed on her bum on the pavement. More embarrassed than hurt, and cursing Charlie who had obviously decided to encourage her home for their tryst textually, she found the message.
Two nil it said, followed by a capital H, and it was enough to let the Grim Reaper clutch her heart and give it a good squeeze as she realised it was from the heckler. How did he have her phone number? This was getting spooky and she didn’t like it. Perhaps she’d better tell Charlie. Well, at least she could tell the girls and see what they said although their advice, from the heavily pregnant, hormonally flooded Martha to the emotional knife-edge that was Sarah, might not be worth having at the moment.
‘All right, love?’ shouted a voice. ‘That’s not a chair, you know!’
She looked over to see a leering greasy sort of face poking out of an estate car. Fucking hell, she thought. I’m still being heckled. ‘More’s the pity, or I could ram a leg up your arse,’ she replied and shuddered at her own creative limits.
The driver looked mortally wounded, as a lot of street hecklers do if you actually come back at them … well, either that or they stab you and it was Flower’s lucky night.
Back at home, Charlie’s erection had faded, been reactivated by a quick five minutes of his Mary Poppins video and then died again when Flower phoned him to say she’d come off her bike. They had an early sleep-filled night.
On Friday night the King’s Head received Martha, Flower and Sarah into its dankness like little sperms into a big womb. The air was foetid and smoke hung in the air but they all loved it like a mangy old dog that refused to die.
Flower and Sarah were shivery with anticipation as they were about to find out who the father of the Lump was, a most unexpected development and one which they had assumed wouldn’t happen until the Lump was about five and someone made a drunken slip of the tongue at a party.
Martha had steeled herself with a few drinks, knowing she shouldn’t but this was a four-fag emergency and at least she hadn’t given in and smoked, but as the Bloody Marys slipped down, she mused that at least she was introducing some Vitamin C along with the foetal alcohol syndrome. She regretted having to tell Sarah and Flower the truth, as she had rather enjoyed being a woman of mystery for eight months while they and her relatives pondered the gr
itty question of who could have impregnated her, and it had to be said that the Rev Brian had mooted the idea with Pat that someone had perhaps forced himself onto their daughter.
The etiquette for revealing to your two best friends the identity of the father of your soon-to-be-born child is not described anywhere in a manual so none of them really knew what to do.
Should I just come straight out with it? thought Martha. Put an appropriate record on the jukebox? Do a drumroll on the table? Mime it and make them guess?
‘Come on then,’ said Sarah, ‘don’t keep us waiting. It’s Ted, isn’t it?’
‘Ooh, how could you?’ said Martha. ‘Me knocked up by that self-propelled dog turd! You are joking, I hope?’
‘But he’s got a nice sense of humour,’ said Flower, ‘and he’s not that ugly.’
‘Oh thanks,’ said Martha, ‘so that’s my ideal partner rating, is it? Not that ugly. I can just see myself on a dating show with a couple of other mangled old bloodhounds competing for the attention of Mr Not That Ugly!’
‘Don’t be sensitive,’ said Flower. ‘I’m only pissing about. Spit it out. Is it Alan the Planet?’
‘Not unless he’s mailed me some Next Day Deliver sperm in a DIY postal experiment,’ said Martha. ‘I haven’t seen him for ages.’
‘Well, it must have been that bloke we met in that club in East London — what was his name?’
‘Mohammed,’ said Martha. ‘Oh Gawd, I hope not. Besides, I didn’t even sleep with him.’
‘You said you did,’ said Flower.
‘Well, that’s ‘cause I don’t like to appear too boring,’ said Martha.
‘Well, who is it then?’ said Flower and Sarah who were now getting slightly irritated.
‘It’s … oh, I’ve just got to go to the loo,’ said Martha. She saw their faces. ‘No, I’m not arsing about. I thought you knew I had to go at least fourteen times an hour because the Lump has made my bladder shrink to the size of a weasel’s bollock.’