Sorting Out Billy

by Jo Brand

  Muff Diva was doing a few breathing exercises because she had been to drama college; had he done a warm-up, no doubt Dick Knob’s preferred method would have been a wank. Flower just sat with her head in her hands wishing herself back home and to the age of five when she was happy.

  Dan appeared in the dressing-room, said he would do about five minutes and left bravely for the stage having neglected to tell the intrepid trio that he hadn’t compèred before and he didn’t really know how to do it. What’s more, he was now very pissed.

  ‘Evening, fellow pissheads!’ was his opening salvo and then he vomited on the stage and staggered off.

  ‘Quick,’ said a technician, poking his head round the door to Muff Diva. ‘You’re on!’

  Muff Diva was in the toilet when all this happened, she went on stage like a lamb to the slaughter, slipped on the sick which she didn’t see because the stage was dark because the spotlight operator was pissed as well and had put it on too late, and went sailing into the audience who assumed it was part of her act and just threw her up and down as if she was up the front of the big stage at Glastonbury. Her queasiness rising to the surface at this treatment, Muff vomited onto someone’s head and a riot looked certain until Dick Knob, a seasoned campaigner at these sorts of events, got a hold on the proceedings by walking to the mike, dropping his trousers and revealing a small chicken strapped to his penis. He then did several minutes of execrable material on sexually abusing pets, turned to the side of the stage and said, ‘Please welcome a little Flower!’

  The mêlée of people seemed to explode as Flower walked on. The noise was huge, the lights blinding and the microphone seemed such a long way away. The stage had been cleared and as Flower reached the microphone, suddenly the mood changed, the audience quietened down and Flower realised that the friendly crowd were pleased to see her and waiting expectantly for her to begin. For the first time that day she relaxed.

  ‘Fuck me, it’s the bastard daughter of Barry Manilow and a fucking yeti,’ shouted a voice into the silence, followed by perhaps the purest ripple of laughter building to a crescendo of hysteria that Flower had ever heard. Inside she cried. Outside she did too. There was no option but to leave the way she came on and from that night onward the gig came to be known by (the mainly gentlemen of) the comedy circuit as The Hippylezzer Fiasco and went to prove that girls couldn’t handle the really rough gigs.

  Flower was downcast in the dressing-room after the gig and Dick Knob was probably not the best person to comfort her as he put everybody’s problems in a sexual context and, ‘I bet loads of them wanted to get in your knickers, love,’ was not really what Flower wanted to hear.

  She waited until Muff Diva had disappeared to the toilet again to have another puke and said to Dick, ‘I want to get that gun tonight.’

  ‘Now come on, love,’ said Dick.

  Flower took a gamble. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘You’re always pissing about. I’ll go somewhere else.’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ said Dick, who had actually spoken to a mate of a mate about it. ‘Look, I’ll make a call, we’ll drop Muff off home and then I’ll take you there, OK? Have you got any money on you?’

  ‘How much will I need?’ said Flower.

  ‘Two hundred quid or thereabouts,’ said Dick. . ‘I doubt I’ll get paid,’ said Flower. ‘That fucking heckler, it was the same one I always get.’

  ‘A stalker, you mean,’ said Dick.

  ‘Well, I’d never thought of it in that context so thanks for layering on an extra level of fear,’ said Flower.

  Dan the vomiter had been replaced by someone more studious-looking with glasses called Phil who came backstage with an envelope of money.

  ‘Don’t forget the promoter’s ten per cent,’ said Muff, as they divided it up.

  ‘Bollocks to that,’ said Dick and carried on counting. Flower’s mobile rang. ‘How did it go?’ said Charlie. ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Flower. She went outside and said: ‘Look, they’ve postponed it until two in the morning.

  Sorry, I’m going to be really late. I’ll call you when I’m on my way home.’

  Charlie for once didn’t have the energy to complain. He must be feeling really crap, thought Flower, and she resolved to get home quickly.

  They drove through West London, silent until they reached Muff’s house. Muff had been quiet and thoughtful all the way home and had been thinking about having children and how she was going to achieve it without having to ask any of her gay friends to bang her or masturbate into a jar.

  ‘Cheerio,’ she said absentmindedly.

  ‘She almost sounded like a heterosexual there,’ said Flower perceptively.

  ‘Well, I’d enter the dragon,’ said Dick.

  ‘You’d enter a Pot Noodle,’ said Flower, a sense of humour creeping back into her comedy, the life having all but been squeezed out of it at the college ball.

  Once free of Muff Diva, Dick turned the car towards East London and after about half an hour they were crawling along through Whitechapel looking for number 137. It turned up next to a funeral parlour.

  Very handy, thought Flower and, standing in a dirty pool of yellow light, Dick, who had called ahead on his mobile, pressed a grubby over-fingered bell and footsteps echoed down the stairs towards them. Flower, who had had a few steadying beers, was starting to ask herself what on earth she was doing here, but luckily for her, her PMT phase was virtually upon her and she could justify the purchase of a gun very easily in that mood.

  A good-looking scruff answered the door. ‘Hi Quent,’ he said to Dick.

  Flower was astounded, ‘Your name is never Quentin, is it?’ she said.

  ‘Well, of course it is, or he wouldn’t have called me it,’ said Dick, not his customary relaxed self for a few seconds.

  ‘Quentin What?’ said Flower. ‘Double-Barrelled, is it?’

  ‘No, and neither’s the gun,’ growled the good-looking scruff as he led them up the stairs, turning round to say to Dick, ‘Don’t she know then, Quent?’

  ‘No, she don’t,’ said Dick furiously.

  ‘Pratt,’ said the scruff.

  ‘Oh, he’s not,’ said Flower. ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘No, that’s his name,’ said the scruff.

  Had Flower not been close to incontinence, she would have laughed.

  By now they had reached a sitting room of sorts where two other men were watching telly and looked disinterestedly at Flower, because they were off their heads, rather than her assessment that she wasn’t attractive enough.

  ‘Right,’ said Scruff. ‘Got your money?’

  Flower produced her two hundred quid and expected her gun to be handed to her carefully wrapped in an oilskin. Instead Scruff took it out of his pocket, fished a bit more and produced three bullets.

  ‘There you go,’ he said.

  ‘Is that all the bullets I get?’ said Flower.

  ‘How many cunts do you want to shoot, love?’ said Scruff and the two men on the settee laughed.

  ‘Can you show me how it works?’ said Flower, convinced she sounded like a slightly demented Enid Blyton schoolgirl.

  The bloke dextrously opened the gun, shoved the bullets into the chamber, clicked it shut and said, ‘Look, that’s the safety catch. If that’s not on, you’ll have your fucking foot off.’

  And that was it. So simple, so banal and so untheatrical, thought Flower as they descended the stairs, but unfortunately there’s more than three cunts I do want to shoot. But never mind, I’ll make do for now’

  Billy and Sarah had fared badly as a couple since the night before Jesus was born. The black eye visible to everyone in the post-natal ward had been courtesy of Sarah’s six-year-old neighbour Keanu and his new baseball bat, but . she didn’t even bother to tell anyone any more.

  Sarah was still suspicious and angry about what she presumed was Billy’s infidelity with her best friend, but scared of rocking the boat, so she did what many women do in her situation: she directed the ang
er inwards and hey. presto! — became depressed.

  Billy, on the other hand, was angry with himself, contrite for what he had done, but unable to come clean and tell Sarah the truth, because he feared, wrongly, that this would finally finish them off and he had decided that he couldn’t manage without her. There were so many dark aspects to his seemingly normal facade that he wanted to come clean about, the legacy of having a rather nasty father with an unhealthy interest in porn and a mother who let it all slide past her without any kind of challenge. He wanted to tell Sarah all this and was surprised, as no other woman in his life had ever engendered that kind of trust and Billy just knew if he could get through this crisis, then their relationship could work happily and without violence.

  Of course, it never occurred to Billy to seek psychological help because he came from a background in which the conscious mind, let alone the unconscious one, got about as much respect as a busload of social workers, when compared to the achievements, wealth and array of material acquisitions that signified success. Billy’s parents would rather have been killed than found themselves saying to their son, ‘We don’t mind what you do, as long as you are happy, son.’

  Hence, any sign of emotional weakness was equated with lack of strength and so Sarah’s withdrawal into herself just got on Billy’s nerves. He found this harder to cope with than her anger which had simmered under the surface for ages but had been denied many times with the sweetest of smiles.

  Sarah, whose repertoire of emotional rescue plans consisted of shopping, health farms and more cigarettes than usual, had decided something drastic was called for if she was going to get back on an even keel and conduct herself sensibly enough to save the relationship between her and Billy. ‘Christ, why do I want to save it?’ she asked herself time and time again. ‘Hasn’t Martha done me a favour by sleeping with him?’ (Sarah had decided that this was the truth of the matter and however much she tried to deny it to herself, couldn’t see any other option than to believe her instincts.) Sarah’s attitude towards Martha oscillated between a kind of grateful resignation, an acceptance of the altruistic nature of their liaison and such extreme anger and hatred that she wanted to physically damage her and her child.

  ‘Having thought long and hard about how to feel normal again, she decided the only way was a makeover after which the new confident, sparkling Sarah would emerge strong and ready for anything because she’d had a bit of a haircut and a new eyeshadow colour. She managed to get a cancellation at the hairdresser she normally went to, called in sick to work and sat staring blankly at her reflection as the stylist, Bal, tried to tempt her into something which sounded utterly ridiculous and nothing like the kind of haircut she could tolerate.

  ‘Well, how about a bob then?’ said Bal distractedly in between chews of a piece of gum long overdue for ejection.

  ‘No, it’s not me, man,’ said Sarah. ‘I want something spiky — something, you know, gammon.’

  ‘You what?’ said Bal whose command of the English language wasn’t anything to write home about either, but did extend to knowing that bacon had never featured in the description of a style of hair.

  ‘Hang on love,’ he said and went off to ask Mia, the apprentice, who read books.

  ‘Oh, she probably means “gamine”,’ she said, and seeing Bal’s blank expression added, ‘you know, sort of Parisian street urchin look.’

  None the wiser, Bal headed back and decided to razor Sarah’s hair a bit more and bluff the rest of the way.

  When he had finished Sarah looked as if she had recently been tarred and feathered, but being unaware of this concept, as it had never happened in Maidstone where she came from, she quite liked the result.

  She then headed on to her favourite department store in the West End, which she knew could give her a new face, as she had called in advance to check. In a small booth with someone called Maria whose chat and nuclear perfume would have filled a cathedral, she struggled not to lose her temper, particularly when flashes of insight told her just how pointlessly pathetic what she was doing really was. Maria used a lot of melodramatic words to do with stripping away and starting again. She ‘rejuvenated’, ‘repaired’ and ‘exploded’, ‘electrified’, ‘evoked’ and ‘re-evaluated’ until Sarah convinced herself that this was real and it would work.

  Finally, after stepping out of the booth looking like an LSD casualty who has just been on a bender, she went up to the fashion department and bought herself a dress which would have looked good only on someone with anorexia nervosa and not on Sarah who was, although not fat, a sort of healthy chunky. She decided to wear the dress and headed home, being ignored for the most part by London’s populace who will pretty much accept any sort of behaviour without raising an eyebrow — from wanking to murder to badger-baiting — and so had no idea that she looked very bizarre.

  Shop windows and the mirror at home reinforced that message but somehow in her head Sarah had turned her look into a positive state of eccentric yet interesting beauty. She therefore almost forgot her transformation and so could not understand why Billy was standing in front of her, having come in from work, helpless with laughter.

  ‘My God, it’s Mata Hari on Es,’ he said through the laughter and Sarah lashed out at him.

  ‘Go fuck yourself, you bastard,’ she shouted and gave him a slap so hard across his face it hurt her hand.

  Billy’s emotional make-up was such that he shot first and asked questions later and without even thinking, he lashed out and caught Sarah below the eye, flooring her. It was the eye that had escaped Keanu’s baseball bat last week and so Sarah knew she would have a pair of Panda eyes to make excuses about.

  Billy immediately returned to his everyday self. ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I did it automatically. Sarah, believe me — I didn’t mean to.’

  Sarah couldn’t even speak. She got up, tore her new clothes off, kicked her shoes against the wall and flung herself into the bathroom where she locked the makeshift door and dunked her poor shaven head under the shower, while Billy stood nonplussed outside trying to think how he could retrieve this situation.

  Then Sarah stuck her head round the door and screamed, to his complete amazement, ‘Everything would be all right if I had a baby!’

  Meanwhile Charlie and Flower were discussing Martha’s situation and the Ted scenario.

  ‘Ted is a knobhead basically,’ said Flower. ‘He runs a dingy club for wankers in Soho and Martha should never have had anything to do with him.’

  ‘His heart’s in the right place though,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Charlie,’ said Flower, ‘the man is not much better than a pimp, and you’re trying to big him up.’

  ‘At least I’m not trying to speak a language that’s far too young for me and makes me sound ridiculous,’ said Charlie.

  Flower didn’t even hear what Charlie had said as she was wrestling with the huge question of whether she should tell him that she had bought ‘a shooter’ as Dick Knob rather pathetically kept calling it. She decided against it and thought that if Charlie came across it in a second make-up bag in her handbag she would say she was hiding it for Muff who was easily scary enough to be carrying one around.

  ‘Are you listening?’ said Charlie. ‘You seem preoccupied by something, have done all day. Was it such a bad gig last night?’

  ‘I’m just tired,’ said Flower, ‘and I want a baby.’

  Charlie nearly fell off his chair, which wasn’t difficult to do as it was one of those foam ones which tip over easily. In fact a young policeman who had visited them a couple of months ago to ask Charlie a few questions about his involvement with a group that caused a lot of trouble at demonstrations had found this out to his cost as he plunged sideways off the chair, ending up in a heap with his helmet on the side of his face and all he could see as he looked up was two giggling hippies.

  They weren’t giggling now though.

  ‘What on earth has brought this on?’ said Charli
e, whose paternal feelings were well and truly buried inside him, obscured by things he planned to do in his life which didn’t allow for the irritation of a baby — hitchhiking across Australia for example, and then living rough in the outback for a year. Unfortunately he hadn’t discussed these plans with Flower so he knew it was going to be difficult to convince her that he hadn’t just come up with them this minute.

  ‘Jesus has brought this on,’ said Flower, and for a moment Charlie thought that she was even more disturbed than he had imagined before he steered his mind back to Martha’s offspring bawling its head off in the local hospital.

  To be honest, he thought to himself, that puce little bastard doesn’t engender any fond feelings in me. ‘Look,’ he said to Flower, ‘it’s not like I don’t want to have kids with you, Flower, ‘cause I really do, but not yet. I mean, your comedy career is just starting to take off.’

  ‘That is bollocks and you know it,’ said Flower, ‘especially after last night’s fiasco. Look, I’m in my mid-thirties, right, and if we don’t start trying soon I won’t have the chance.’

  ‘We can’t afford it,’ said Charlie lamely.

  ‘We could if you stopped smoking so much dope,’ said Flower, ‘and if we stayed in a bit more.’

  Charlie’s sinking heart dived a couple more feet towards his boots. ‘Let’s go out and talk about it, shall we?’ he said. ‘I can’t think in this place, I need some space.’

  They headed out of London on the bus towards a scrubby bit of countryside they knew in Kent which was near enough to London to give the leaves on the trees dirty hems that were not visible to the naked eye, but made Flower and Charlie feel they were truly in a rural paradise, when in fact they were barely out of the suburbs. As usual they brought with them a big bottle of cider and their, books. Charlie was reading something incomparably dull on the ecosystem of Scandinavia and Flower was revisiting Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, a book she had read as a child and came back to every five years or so for emotional comfort.