Sorting Out Billy

by Jo Brand

  Martha ran over what she could remember of the night before with Billy and found herself blushing at some of the things they had said to each other. Was it still ‘they’? she wondered, eyes tightly closed as if to ward off the inevitable repercussions of last night. Or was it, as usual, just herself, the regretful lover having sneaked out under cover of the sort of unconsciousness only extreme amounts of alcohol can guarantee. She hardly dared look and reluctantly opened one eye.

  Christ, he’s still there, she thought.

  She tried to open the other eye and discovered it was gummed shut with Mother Nature’s post-binge glue. A wave of guilt flowed over Martha at the knowledge of what she had done to one of her best friends, and she berated herself further because this hadn’t stopped her feeling that she’d quite like to do it again now.

  Billy had half a pizza stuck to his face which just made him look even more delicious. Martha noticed it was a Margarita, her favourite. Lump kicked inside her and hormones surged as she rolled towards Billy and he responded.

  Pat came out of the bathroom to see an early-morning repeat of what she had witnessed the night before, and assumed it was one of these sex marathons people under fifty could still manage. Little did Pat realise the degree of exhaustion with which her daughter was conducting this tryst, but at the same time the passion was intense and enabled Martha to put every effort in rather than snoring, which is what she really wanted to do. Besides, she reasoned, this might be her last opportunity for a very long time.

  Billy, who, somewhere in the middle of the night, had assumed he would be repulsed when sober, found himself handled more expertly and delightfully than he could ever have imagined, and his plans to brusquely exit Stage Left pursued, he imagined, by a desperate Martha, melted away. Like all good things it was over pretty quickly, and as they lay staring at the ceiling the enormity of the cover-up required began to roll over them.

  Martha went to the kitchen to make tea on the sticky surface that passed for a worktop and listened to the answerphone. There were three messages on it.

  ‘Hi Martha, it’s me. Is Bill there still? It’s two-thirty and he’s not home. Perhaps he said he was going on somewhere. Call me, can you? Bye.’

  ‘Martha, call me, will you. It’s Sarah.’

  ‘Martha, it’s Flower. Will you at least call Sarah and tell her what you know’

  Martha, who had always fancied being a Catholic as they seemed so much less banally psychologically disturbed than their C of E counterparts, for the first time understood what true guilt was as a wave of it engulfed her, almost causing her to sit down on the floor.

  Billy had also heard the messages and came shamefacedly out into the hall with all his clothes on.

  ‘I’d better go,’ he said.

  Pat, listening at the door, thought, Yes, you better had, my lad.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t stay and have some tea?’ said Martha, aware that even this light-hearted question sounded rather desperate and hoping that Billy couldn’t see the image that burned into her brain which portrayed Martha, Billy and the Lump, now a beautiful baby, as a little family group in Battersea Park in the children’s zoo, smiling and strolling. She wondered to herself why an alternative image of him drunkenly beating her hadn’t surfaced ahead of the family group.

  ‘No, better go,’ he said.

  Shall I ask him whether there’ll be a repeat performance? thought Martha, briefly forgetting he was one of her best friend’s boyfriends.

  I hope she doesn’t ask me if we’re going to see each other again, thought Billy.

  Just as Martha was about to humiliate herself by asking that very question, Pat quickly emerged from her room and holding out her hand said, ‘How charming to meet you, and you are?’

  ‘… Just going,’ Billy managed to say and slid with an enormous sense of relief outside the front door.

  ‘Seemed like a nice young man,’ said Pat, as the door shut.

  The phone rang. Unfortunately, Martha hadn’t decided on her strategy yet so she coughed very loudly as her tearful friend left another message asking her to call.

  Pat, whose hearing was very acute, had made out the gist of the message and looked sternly at her daughter.

  ‘Oh dear, have you made love to a friend’s fiancé?’ she said.

  Martha couldn’t help herself, she laughed- out loud at her mother’s choice of words.

  ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘I am in my late thirties and what I do is none of your business. I don’t want to upset you, but you just have to accept that I am an adult and wrong as they may seem, I make my own choices.’

  This would have been a perfectly acceptable plea for independence had not a huge tear rolled down Martha’s face, as she finished her little speech. Pat’s stomach lurched as it always did when one of her little girls was upset and the two stood there with Martha crying as hard as she ever had and Pat trying to fold herself round her daughter’s mountainous bump but not succeeding very well.

  Sarah and Flower were in a café quite close to Martha’s when they saw Billy walk past.

  Sarah had phoned Flower in a panic when Billy didn’t come home because it was the first time it had ever happened and Flower had gone over to keep her company until Charlie’s phone calls got very frequent and she left about 2 a.m.

  Sarah hadn’t slept all night and Billy, who had started the night as someone who was beginning to irritate her slightly and with whom she might finish, not least because of the increasing violence, became by the morning a saintly and generous man whom she loved madly and who very occasionally was violent, probably because she goaded him into it.

  Flower was not happy when she heard Sarah eulogising Billy as if he were St Francis of Assisi. It had crossed Flower’s mind that Billy and Martha had spent the night together, but she didn’t dare suggest it to Sarah, who was thinking it too, but wondered if it would be betraying her friend to even consider it. Flower had borne the brunt of Martha’s hormonal outbursts during this pregnancy and therefore believed that any behaviour was possible.

  ‘Billy!’ screamed Sarah and ran out of the café.

  Billy’s heart missed a beat and his brain began to work overtime.

  Sarah ran towards him as though he was a soldier come back from the war, but halfway across she remembered he had been out all night and skidded to a halt several inches from him.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ was the unlyrical enquiry that escaped her lips.

  Billy had decided to play it indignant and the plot his brain had delivered to him began to spray out.

  ‘Look, Sarah, I’m sorry — I was round at Martha’s and she felt really rough, thought the baby might be coming so we ended up going to Casualty and they took her in to see the doctor and I fell asleep in the waiting room and then Martha thought I’d gone home because she looked in the wrong place and they woke me up about seven this morning and I went and had some breakfast and now I’ve just been round to Martha’s to see if it’s all right. Christ, she’s your friend —you should have been looking after her.’

  ‘Sorry,’ was Sarah’s automatic response. Then she thought, Why am I saying sorry? He’s the one who didn’t contact me, and so she said this.

  ‘I did. I bloody called you on your mobile,’ bluffed Billy. ‘Did you have it on all night?’

  ‘Er …’ Sarah began to falter. ‘Why didn’t you leave a message?’

  ‘Well, I would have, but Martha was having a really bad spasm and I … well, I just got distracted. Most of the time I had it switched off in the hospital.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you call me later?’

  “Cause I fucking fell asleep, for Christ’s sake,’ said Billy, managing to talk himself up to the moral high ground.

  Flower, who was lurking in a gawky fashion in the background, didn’t believe a word of it.

  ‘Flower!’ Suddenly Billy’s voice burned her brain.

  ‘Yes?’ she answered.

  ‘You believe me, don’t you?’
<
br />   ‘Yes,’ said Flower and hated herself.

  Sarah turned to her with an expression of semi-disbelief and appeal.

  ‘I think he’s telling the truth,’ said Flower wanly.

  ‘So, let’s all go back to Martha’s and see how she is,’ said Sarah, looking for a flicker of guilt, panic or whatever.

  ‘If you like,’ Billy said casually, feeling relieved she couldn’t see an EEG which would demonstrate the level of electrical activity in his brain: he could have run a power station on it. The three of them turned in a formation and headed down the road towards Martha’s estate.

  Martha nearly fainted when she opened the door to see the three of them. In the split second that followed, she assumed that Sarah hadn’t pronounced her guilty of the worst betrayal of friendship because she hadn’t hit her yet. But she had absolutely no idea what Billy had told the girls and therefore she waited for his lead. He, on the other hand, didn’t want to make it too obvious by saying something like, ‘Hi, how are you feeling after our trip to Casualty after you felt bad and I couldn’t phone Sarah because of the emergency nature of the visit and then her mobile was turned off but anyway we thought that we’d pop round and see how you are.’

  Instead he said, ‘Feeling OK now?’

  Sarah was watching them like a madwoman for signs of betrayal.

  ‘Yes, much,’ said Martha.

  ‘Poor you,’ said Flower, ‘having to go there.’

  Where does she mean? wondered Martha and took a lucky guess given her condition but just to be safe didn’t mention the word.

  ‘Yes, it was awful — noisy, dirty.’

  ‘That’s the NHS for you,’ said Flower, confirming it for her.

  Sarah was still glowering, trying to decide whether Martha looked like she’d been banged senseless all night or not.

  Then. Pat appeared out of the spare room. ‘Hello everyone,’ she said brightly.

  Please, prayed Martha, don’t let her give the game away. She turned towards her mother and made a panic-stricken face which Pat correctly interpreted as a clue that some sort of subterfuge was going on. Rather than put her foot in it she withdrew, making an excuse about having to wash her girdle.

  Martha now had the floor and decided to trowel on the drama. ‘I’m so grateful to Billy for taking me to Casualty and bearing with me,’ she said. ‘I felt bloody awful, like my insides were gradually being squeezed through my intestines to be shat out.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Martha,’ said Flower, who was weedy about this sort of thing.

  ‘Why didn’t you call us?’ said Sarah.

  “Cause I was worried it had all gone wrong and I was going to lose the Lump and I just didn’t know how I would react,’ said Martha, and then felt incredibly guilty that she had used her unborn baby ‘as an alibi for her unfaithfulness.

  ‘Oh Martha, I’m really sorry,’ said Sarah and Martha felt even worse because she realised that the corner had been turned and Sarah now believed that she and Billy had not done anything. She felt her eyes welling up with tears and realised that Billy was looking at her with contempt.

  She just wished that everyone would piss off and leave her to get her head in gear and her story straight.

  At that point Junior from next door popped his head round the balcony and said, ‘Fucking hell, Martha, were you banging a bloody football team last night or what?’

  A portentous silence followed.

  Pat, without so much as a backward thought, stepped into the breach.

  ‘It wasn’t Martha, Junior,’ she said. ‘After all, she is nine months’ pregnant. No, it was me. Embarrassed as I am to admit it, the Rev Brian was visiting and we got carried away.’

  Junior felt physically sick at the thought of these two people of advancing years copulating noisily. not to mention wrinkly bits of skin flapping with wild abandon, forgetting that he possessed similar younger but equally wrinkly bits too and looked a bit silly himself when they were undulating furiously.

  Flower also found herself disgusted at the thought of Pat and the Rev, and then shovelled in some political correctness from somewhere to get her conscience back on an even keel. After all, she reasoned to herself, why shouldn’t old people couple in any way they want? If they could cope with it, surely their younger relatives could turn a blind eye to the fact that they were being horribly carnal for their age.

  Junior was seeing Martha’s mum through new eyes. ‘Oh, right you are then, Mrs Harris,’ he said and slunk back to his balcony area to text all his friends and tell them what stomach-churning sexual practices were going on right under his nose.

  Everybody shifted uncomfortably once Pat had made her revelations about her midnight shenanigans with the Rev Brian. Flower noticed that Billy had a little smirk on his face. Martha’s expression was one- Flower had never seen before nor was it intelligible as representing any recognisable emotion. Her nearest stab at it would have been an animal previously in great pain having been freed from a trap.

  ‘Well, now we know Martha’s all right perhaps we’d better go,’ suggested Billy tentatively and everyone started to move towards the door. He and Sarah wished Martha and her mother an awkward goodbye and headed through the rubbish littering the walkway to play Lift Lottery, the game that is so popular on London’s council estates.

  Flower, who didn’t want to catch them up, thereby giving them a chance to talk about the schism in their relationship thrown up by last night’s absence, hung back. ‘Can I just use your loo?’ she said and headed off towards it wondering why she had asked and whether there is ever an occasion when access is denied by anybody. Surely it would be more sensible just to inform Martha she was off to use her toilet, but English manners forbade this as a faux pas more serious than urinating openly in a pot plant and Flower preferred to forget that particular birthday.

  In the toilet Flower pondered the convincingness of Pat’s statement and decided that it wasn’t true and that she was covering up for Martha. But why would Martha do something as stupid as fucking Billy, especially when she knew what had been going on between him and Sarah? Before she had a chance to stop herself, Flower realised she was not just having a pee; something bigger, fashioned by obsessive consumption of bran was heading out, another huge catastrophe of etiquette and frowned upon by all but the most libertarian of toilet-owners. ‘One should always shit in one’s own toilet,’ she mused to herself, pleased with her homespun homily but not really sure what it actually meant apart from what it literally meant.

  Left alone for a couple of minutes, Martha said to Pat, ‘Thanks a million for getting me out of trouble there, Mum.’

  ‘I don’t approve, Martha,’ said Pat, ‘but you’re in enough trouble as it is,’ throwing a glance at the Lump. ‘Also,’ she went on, ‘I’ve decided to go back to your dad.’

  ‘Mum, you can’t,’ said Martha. It was a pain having her there, but apart from her bedroom, which was out of bounds, the place was looking almost normal.

  ‘It’s my duty as a wife to be by your father’s side, to love him, cherish him and do my best in the kitchen, at social events and between the sheets,’ said Pat.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mother — that will do.’ Martha was trying to banish a vision of the Rev Brian rhythmically rocking aboard the good ship Pat. ‘Look, Mum, Lump’s due in a couple of weeks, and Dad’s a pig.’

  ‘Don’t call him that. He is my husband.’

  ‘Oh, rub it in, why don’t you?’ said Martha, although she wasn’t convinced that having the Rev Brian as a husband was better than having no husband at all.

  ‘Who is the father, dear? Please tell me and then Brian could have a word with him,’ said Pat.

  ‘What, crowbar in a quick shotgun wedding at St Faith’s?’ Martha snorted.

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear.’ Pat had the ability to fly Martha back through time and make her feel about six years old.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Martha. ‘Look, do you want me to come on the bus with you to the station?’ She
was 99 per cent convinced that her mother would reject the offer.

  ‘Yes, that would be lovely,’ said Pat, much to Martha’s horror, and went into her bedroom to pack her bag.

  Flower came shamefacedly out of the loo. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Just sort of happened.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Martha. ‘You eat so much greenery your shit smells like horse manure.’

  ‘Fancy a lunchtime drink?’ said Flower, who thought if she just twisted Martha’s arm a bit she could find out the truth. She knew her friend of old. Martha’s inability to keep a secret was famous and she would obviously be dying to tell someone.

  ‘Sure,’ said Martha, ‘but I’ve got to go to the station with Mum first, then we could go somewhere up town. What about Charlie?’

  ‘Oh, he’s taken the day off work to go on some demo somewhere,’ said Flower absentmindedly, little realising that at that very point in time the size eleven of a policeman was booting a pavement-bound Charlie extremely hard up the arse.

  Flower, Pat and Martha set off, finding Lift Roulette in their favour for a change. As it spewed them out at the ground floor, a little gaggle of twelve-year-old girls who looked forty-five set up the sort of cackling that one only expects from bona fide witches, as they looked the bedraggled trio up and down.

  ‘Do they do eye of newt at Sainsbury’s?’ enquired Martha as they passed, causing a blank look to pass over their faces, which was immediately replaced by their habitual maniacal giggling.

  Pat, although she didn’t like to admit it, was terrified and was glad she had her daughter and Flower there, although had she really thought about it she might still be terrified, because a heavily pregnant woman and a tall willowy pacifist are about as much use in a fight as Kylie and Danii Minogue. Pat decided she must toughen up.