Sorting Out Billy

by Jo Brand

  However, Pat relented and fell asleep almost immediately. Martha marvelled at how she’d made it safely across the estate again and wondered whether maybe there was a God.

  As she walked back into the sitting room Flower said, ‘Fucking hell, Marth. Has your mum left the planet temporarily?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Martha. ‘I’ll find out tomorrow ‘Another knock at the door heralded Charlie, who had seen Pat wandering around outside the kebab place and dismissed her as a vagrant.

  ‘It’s fucking freaky out there tonight,’ he said. ‘That dope we got yesterday is strong, Flower, but I’m sure I just saw a bloke with a colander on his head and there’s some weird old lady wandering about outside.’

  ‘Yeh, that’s my mum,’ said Martha.

  ‘Oh ha, ha, you’re so funny,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I mean it,’ said Martha. ‘She’s in my bed asleep.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Tell him,’ said Martha to Flower.

  ‘No, honestly,’ said Flower, ‘it’s true.’

  ‘Oh, pull the other one you two drunken old tarts,’ said Charlie laughing.

  ‘Right,’ said Martha, pointing. ‘There’s my room, go and look.’

  ‘What is it, bucket of water on the door?’ said Charlie. ‘Blow up doll in the bed?’

  ‘No, it’s my bloody mother and don’t wake her,’ Martha told him.

  Charlie wandered into the room and could just make out a shape under the bedclothes which he assumed was made up of pillows. He sat down on the edge of the bed and gave the shape a good prod.

  ‘Hello Martha’s mum, you old slapper,’ he said.

  A hand appeared from under the duvet and grabbed his groin area and he nearly went through the ceiling. The look on his face as he arrived back in the room with Martha and Flower told them he’d found Pat and that she’d found him. Martha also had a colander on her head.

  ‘Come on, Flower,’ said Charlie, ‘time to go home.’ For once Flower didn’t argue.

  The following morning everyone had a hangover except Sarah who had gone to bed early and woke up feeling refreshed and healthy. She decided as Billy lay snoring, not something one expects handsome men to indulge in, that she would wander down to Martha’s, have a coffee and see how the Lump was coming along, and try to pump her for some more details of the Ted encounter.

  Martha looked bloody awful, a mop of greasy hair perched on top of a sallow face with two bloodshot eyes the only splash of colour. ‘What time is it?’ she said in a voice reminiscent of a frog.

  ‘About ten, mate,’ said Sarah. ‘Put the kettle on, I’m dying for a coffee.’

  Martha’s hideous appearance was further emphasised by the fact that Sarah looked like a Swiss milkmaid in the complexion department. Martha went to put the kettle on and shouted various bits of conversation through to where Sarah was sitting, not really noticing that she wasn’t answering but occasionally ‘umming’ or grunting. Martha made her coffee in a cup whose contents looked a couple of days old and did Sarah the honour of rinsing hers under a warm tap.

  ‘Flower had a terrible heckler last night,’ she said as she carried the coffees into the room and realised that Sarah had a very angry expression reminiscent of the Rev Brian on her face.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ she demanded, waving a pad at Martha.

  ‘It’s a pad, dear,’ said Martha.

  ‘And what is this list on it?’ said Sarah.

  Martha realised in a millionth of a second that it was her and Flower’s list for sorting out Billy. Did it have his name on it? Or had she torn it off? Was he identifiable from the different suggestions? She took a gamble.

  ‘Oh, I’m writing a book at work,’ she said.

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s about Bill, isn’t it?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I can just tell,’ said Sarah.

  Great, thought Martha. It hasn’t got his name on then. ‘Look,’ she said aloud. ‘I don’t really want to … that is, I’m a bit embarrassed — well, you’ll find out sooner or later. My mum’s here and my dad’s been knocking her about.’

  ‘No!’ Sarah was astounded. She thought the Rev Brian only had a bark.

  ‘Don’t say anything if she comes in,’ said Martha, ‘but Flower and I were pissed last night and we made a list of how we could help my mum.

  As if summoned to explain herself, Pat appeared at the door with Martha’s dressing-gown over her clothes looking drained of blood.

  ‘I’m sorry, dear. I think I might have been drunk last night,’ Pat said. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  While Sarah was round at Martha’s, Billy was at home watching a Saturday-morning football programme on television. A piece of his mind, however, and not the bit he always gave Sarah, was on something else. It wasn’t sex, although men apparently think about it every seven seconds. Who researched that particular statistic? Billy wondered. Who was their control group and wouldn’t men just say they were thinking about sex, rather than owning up to musings on scaffolding, say, or macramé?

  Billy had decided recently that he really, really liked Sarah, could tolerate her weird friends and could quite happily settle for this life he had with her. He had all but given up the adolescent hope of the leggy model/porn star/actress with exploding bosoms beckoning to him in a bar one night and thought at the age of thirty-two he should probably be sensible and squirt his semen into a permanent seedbed. However, like most men, a tiny bit of him clung onto the vain hope that even though he was happy in a relationship which made him want, for the first time, to sort out his violent temper, especially when drinking, he could still make room in his sexual calendar for a dirty woman. Why do my thoughts always sound like a bad porn film? he asked himself.

  Billy, unlike some violent men, was aware of just how bad his bad behaviour was, knew it needed to be curtailed and wondered if there was any help for people like him. His violence couldn’t be put to good use as a championship boxer or inner-city comprehensive deputy headmaster so he had better deal with it. Billy knew that when his temper started to mushroom, he became a thug; anyone, even someone he had decided he loved, could fan the flames and make him so full of rage that he questioned whether this deep-seated anger would ever go away. Maybe some poncy Guardian-reading arse from North London could guide him towards being a better person, but he doubted it. Billy couldn’t help it that his critical voice was directed outwards, towards others, whereas most women’s are directed inwards. He would always find weaknesses in others; it was just a question of how he dealt with them.

  As he lay on the settee thinking, Sarah opened the door and came in, calling out a greeting and dropping her bag on the hall table with a crash, which ever so slightly irritated Billy, who was still daydreaming. He thought about shouting something but checked himself. Sarah then clattered into the bathroom and he heard her running the shower and wondered whether she would leave the shower curtain outside the frame and get water on the floor, not to mention leaving the soap in a glutinous mess. He also wondered, briefly, why she was having a shower and within seconds had concocted a scenario in his head in which Sarah was being fucked up against a wall by a workmate of his called Craig, until he actually began to believe this scenario. He found himself dialling Craig’s mobile number to see whether he was at home in Hertfordshire and, after a brief chat in which he invented a spurious reason for calling, wondered how Craig could have got home from this liaison so quickly.

  Sarah, unaware of this ominous mind-ratcheting, was singing some dreadful song that was in the charts. This was one of the many things Billy didn’t understand about Sarah and other women; she didn’t have a favourite band, knew nothing about the people who performed the music she did like, had no inkling of back catalogues, who played saxophone on B sides and who managed bands through the difficult times. And she never put CDs away.

  Sarah, in the meantime, was in the shower preparing for her usual beauty routine. Some
girls do, some don’t. The ones who don’t can’t be arsed and are irritated by the ones who do because it underlines their neglect of what has become, over the years, a fundamental girlie obligation. Martha, for example, thought cleansing, toning and moisturising was a waste of time and believed that advice from various cosmetic companies to do so was a ploy to scare women into a phobia about wrinkles, thereby forcing them into a continuous frenzy of beauty product acquisition. She told people she didn’t buy beauty products on principle but, in fact, on a Saturday night would slap on the slap with the best of them. Flower didn’t use anything and didn’t need to, and her lack of beauty product use was based on the fact that she had been told by someone once that some beauty creams were made from the aborted foetuses of French nuns and try as she might to get this image out of her head, every attempt at moisturising evoked the unpleasant feeling that she was rubbing a baby into her cheek.

  Sarah, however, was meticulous and spent hours at the beauty counters of the biggest department stores, weighing up the pros and cons of various products and listening intently to the generalised bullshit of the immaculately plastered women with their flawless foundations, huge panda eyes and encyclopaedic celebrity knowledge.

  After rubbing in a sizeable amount of coconut oil when she left the shower, Sarah started from her feet and worked her way up using three different sprays to keep her fresh for feet, armpits and a spray that is euphemistically termed an ‘intimate’ deodorant because it masks the pungent smell of woman with an industrial-strength floweriness that can kill puppies at ten yards.

  Sarah then tackled the problem of removing hair from the bits of her body it shouldn’t be on, in her case legs, armpits and face. She was scrupulous about her face as she couldn’t help associating moustaches with comic-book lesbians. This was perhaps because your average teenage street heckler did too and she lived in fear of being on her own or worse, with Billy, when the, ‘Oi, like the ‘tache!’ heckle came, the consequences of which would be a hugely bruised ego or hugely bruised teenager. Sarah had tried hair removal creams but they smelled like they were burning a hole through her jaw and left a lingering taste in her mouth which made her think of crop spraying. She waxed her face then tackled what seemed like big sprawling bushes of hair on her legs but were in fact rather sparse clumps of light growth. Her armpits were also dealt with, and try as she might, she just couldn’t get the image of a plucked chicken’s arse out of her head when she raised her arm to inspect the work. Nails were pared and moisturised and cuticles driven back. Eyebrows were savaged. Hands were slathered in cream and ears were probed with cotton buds.

  It was at this point that Billy began his routine.

  ‘What the fuck’s taking you so long?’

  Sarah heard the bad temper in his voice and felt like childishly running through a list of her bathroom tasks until he either walked off and left her alone or exploded. Instead she managed a cheery if somewhat strained, ‘Out in a minute!’ Unfortunately this wound Billy up even more.

  ‘Why can’t you just be like the fat sow?’ He shouted, the ‘fat sow’ being what he considered his ironically fond name for Martha but which irritated Sarah.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she shouted back.

  ‘You know — never bothers with the routine shit, shaving, all that bollocks, got a badger under each arm.

  ‘Don’t be horrible!’

  ‘Or the hippy with her pissy little natural fibres and patchouli this and that, smells like a navvy underneath it all.’

  Billy was warming up into his weekly stand-up routine about what was wrong with Sarah’s friends.

  ‘Oh, leave it for once, will you,’ snapped Sarah, balancing on one leg as she checked the soles of her feet for unnatural growths, stains or fungal outbursts. She couldn’t hear Billy draw a big breath but she could imagine it.

  ‘Yeah, and Flower never washes…’ he began.

  Oh not this again, thought Sarah. ‘Just shut the fuck up,’ she said quietly.

  Billy must have had an ear-trumpet to the door because he seemed to hear. ‘Pardon?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Sarah, well aware that wasn’t an adequate answer.

  For some reason that Billy couldn’t fathom, this made him really angry. ‘What do you mean nothing!’ he screamed and Sarah jumped at the ferocity of it all.

  She appeared from behind the bathroom door with a shiny, ‘tache-free face, pink, shaved legs and those weird things you use to separate out your toes when you are painting them. Because she looked so silly, Billy at this point should have just laughed and forgotten his rising temper, but this was textbook Billy; his temper was on the way up and he couldn’t stop it until all his bile had leaked out.

  ‘Look at the state of you,’ he said very unkindly and Sarah, cowed by him most times, but emboldened by her visit to Martha’s den and the weird behaviour of Martha’s mum, slammed the door on him. This was quite enough to justify Billy really going mental and he began kicking the bathroom door. Sarah got quite scared and locked it. This escalated things and Billy began to kick harder, shouting, ‘Don’t lock me out of my own bathroom!’ which taken as an individual statement, sounded pathetic.

  Sarah began to laugh which made Billy feel foolish and humiliated and then there was no going back and he laid into the door with an extravagance he reserved only for his most violent moments. Sarah could not believe that the man she lived with was thrashing his way through solid wood to get at her. She wondered what he would do when he’d kicked the door open and so did he.

  They didn’t have to wait long because the bathroom door, rotting slightly as they do in rented places, flew off its hinges, hitting Sarah on the head. Sarah, along with many others, had often wondered if you really saw stars when you got a blow on the head.

  You didn’t.

  She did, however, feel sick and had acquired the quickest headache she’d ever known.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ she asked, already knowing that the answer was, ‘Because I am an out-of-control tosser. ‘Without thinking, she picked up a soap dish and chucked it. It sailed past Billy’s ear and smashed against a mirror in the hall. Oh dear, seven years’ bad luck, she thought. That’s a bugger.

  Billy stepped onto the incandescent rung of the temper ladder because of the hall mirror incident and swung a punch at Sarah who couldn’t believe he had done it and in her scramble to get away, tripped and fell, banging her head on the sink as she went down.

  At that point, as there always is in a farce, there was a knock on the door. Both Billy and Sarah felt their stomachs lurch. Billy didn’t want to be discovered in flagrante as it were and Sarah didn’t want him to look bad even at this stage of the escalation. They thought about keeping quiet and not answering but Billy felt it too risky.

  ‘Stay there,’ he said to Sarah and opened the front door.

  It was Charlie, who had never seen Billy’s eyes looking quite so wild before. He would have been happy to turn round and go, but he was on a mission from Flower and it had to be done.

  ‘Mate, hiya,’ said Charlie, trying to sound like he wasn’t about to be doubly incontinent with fear.

  ‘What do you want?’ replied a surly-eyed Billy.

  ‘Well,’ said Charlie, ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but do you want to come to a group for sorting out violent behaviour with me — you know, for a bit of a laugh like?’

  A gigantic fist connected with the side of Charlie’s face and his legs crumpled under him.

  Charlie limped home nursing a very sore jaw and wondering why he had been involved in violence yet again. It seemed unfair that he, who had spent his life trying to stop various wars, keep foxes alive, pay the workers a decent wage and curb the power of the police, always ended up getting smacked in the gob.

  Flower had got used to Charlie coming home with a bruise somewhere on him so she didn’t really take much notice when he skulked into the room holding his face and muttering darkly. Eventually irritated because she couldn’t hear
a relaxation tape she was listening to and therefore feeling very unrelaxed, she said, ‘What is the matter, Charlie?’

  ‘He hit me,’ said Charlie in a voice that demonstrated he was getting used to it.

  ‘Who?’ asked Flower, still not really listening.

  ‘Billy Bloody Arseface Taylor, that’s who,’ said Charlie.

  Finally Flower sat up and took notice. ‘Billy hit you?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Charlie. ‘Something weird was going on at that house of pain. I heard shouting and stuff being chucked, then I did my little speech and the bastard chinned me.’

  ‘Did you see Sarah?’

  ‘No, I can’t say I did.’

  ‘Well, did you hear her?’

  ‘No,’ Charlie admitted.

  ‘So you don’t know if she’s dead or alive?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a drama queen,’ said Charlie. ‘Of course she isn’t dead.’

  Flower reached for the phone and dialled Sarah’s number. Billy answered.

  ‘Hello, can I speak to Sarah?’ said Flower.

  ‘No,’ said Billy. ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘Well, where is she?’ Flower could hear the anxiety in her own voice.

  ‘Gone shopping,’ said Billy. ‘I’ll tell her you called.’ He hung up.

  ‘He’s killed her,’ said Flower. ‘I’m going to call the police.’

  ‘And what good are those fascist wankers going to do?’ said Charlie.

  Irritated, Flower said, ‘This is not the time or the place for a rant about the police.’

  ‘Nor is it time for a pre-menstrual fantasy about suburban murder either,’ said Charlie, who recognised the symptoms.

  ‘I do not have PMS!’ screamed Flower.

  ‘We call it good old PMT in England, I think you’ll find,’ said Charlie, from whom anti-Americanism tempered with unwarranted chauvinism occasionally escaped.

  ‘Call her mobile,’ he suggested, so Flower did and Sarah answered sounding rather muted but perfectly alive.