by Jo Brand
Flower could not contain her delight and began to jump up and down shouting, ‘Fuck, you’re joking!’ at the top of her voice.
Steve laughed and said, ‘See you soon, then.’ The Reverend Brian looked as if he had been hit with an axe. ‘Language please,’ he said. ‘And now I really must be getting home.’
‘Aren’t you going to see Martha?’ said Flower.
‘Not if she persists in using that sacrilegious name, no, ‘said the Rev.
‘She’s thought better of that,’ Flower told him, having no idea whether she actually had or not. ‘Please go and see her, she really loves you, you know,’ and wondered why she had an image at that moment of Martha punching her in her head.
‘Was that Martha’s dad?’ said Sarah, as Flower sat back down.
‘Yeh,’ said Flower. ‘Fancy him or what?’ And then decided, given the solemnity of the proceedings, that was inappropriate and added, ‘Sorry.’
‘Come on,’ said Sarah. ‘Let’s go before Billy comes in here looking for me.’
Billy was at home crying with his head in his hands wondering why it had all turned out so badly and why he was such a bastard to women. He knew he was pathologically unable to show vulnerability and was coming to the realisation that if he did not change, he would never be able to make a relationship last. A little voice in his head said to him that he could not change without help and it was the first time that it had occurred to him to think about that. But with any problem that he needed to sort out, there was always a period of stubbornness and reluctance before he took any action and therefore Billy told himself that he would leave it a few days, let the fog in his head clear and then patch things up with Sarah and sort himself out. He knew Sarah loved him and although he knew, also, that he had weakened their bond, he felt fairly confident he could strengthen it again.
The problem with going to stay with a friend when you are emotionally turned upside down is that you should ideally be in your own environment in order to be able to make sensible decisions about your future. Sarah, having been in Flower and Charlie’s flat for approximately seven minutes, had already made the decision to go back to Billy if he asked. She realised, looking in her make-up bag, that she had forgotten to bring her eyelash-curlers, a piece of equipment so essential to her equilibrium that she decided to go back to the flat and get them.
‘You are joking, aren’t you,’ said Flower.
‘No, I really need them,’ said Sarah. ‘Really really really, Flower.’
‘Well, if you really need them, Charlie will go,’ said Flower.
Charlie gave Flower his, ‘In the kitchen, now!’ look beloved of couples who have guests but need to slag each other off.
‘Just going to the loo,’ said Flower, leaving the room and two minutes later Charlie got up. ‘Just putting the kettle on,’ he said. ‘Raspberry leaf tea?’
Sarah, who unlike Martha knew everything there was to know about pregnancy and its effects, said, ‘No thanks, Charlie, I’m not trying to elasticate my vagina to give birth. I’ll have a coffee, please.’ She knew this was just an excuse for Charlie and Flower to reconvene in the kitchen and sobbed silently to herself, thinking of the times she and Billy would do the very same.
In the kitchen Charlie said, ‘No fucking way am I turning up on that tosser’s doorstep and asking for pissing eyelash-benders.’
‘Curlers,’ said Flower. ‘Oh please, Charlie.’
‘No,’ said Charlie. ‘You’ll have to go.’ He waited for Flower’s next protest but it didn’t come.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go,’ thinking she could give Billy a fright and warn him off Sarah.
Of course, the nearer she got to Billy and Sarah’s flat the more ridiculous it all seemed to her, and she couldn’t quite believe that she and Dick Knob had actually gone to that place and got that gun quite so easily. Charlie’s stories of Albanian gangsters looking for contracts to kill people for as little as three hundred quid must be true then. She phoned Martha for moral support, not a great idea given Flower was riding her bike and Martha was difficult to hear.
Flower said, ‘Hi Martha, I’m going to collect something from Sarah’s for her and I’m going to threaten Billy with this gun I’ve got.’
‘Ted, hold his head, not his bleeding leg, he’ll drown —sorry, what was that?’ said Martha.
‘I’m going to wave the gun at Billy,’ shouted Flower. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Martha. ‘No, not you, Ted. That’s fine.’
‘Can you come and help?’ Flower bawled.
‘No, of course not,’ said Martha, ‘but phone me as soon as you’ve seen him. You wanker, I told you not to do that!’
‘Pardon?’ said Flower, then she hit the kerb and fell off. Flower wasn’t injured, yet when she thought of the enormity of what she was about to do, she found herself wishing she had been badly hurt and taken to hospital so she didn’t have to go through with it. Somehow she ended up at the entrance to Denbigh Mansions and with a trembling hand rang the bell. Her mobile rang at the same moment, which made her jump, and when Billy’s voice sounded through the intercom all he heard was a high-pitched, strangled noise.
It was Charlie on the mobile. ‘Are you all right?’ he said, realising he had been cowardly sending Flower.
‘Go away!’ she hissed. ‘I haven’t been in yet,’ and into the intercom, ‘Hello Billy, it’s Flower. Can I talk to you?’
Billy told himself to keep calm and accede to whatever demands Flower might make or Sarah might make through her. He buzzed the door open and Flower climbed slowly up the stairs where Billy stood at the top looking absolutely huge.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘She wants her eyelash-curlers.’ Flower was astounded that Billy had a feminine side and kept telling herself that he had been very nice to Martha.
‘Hang on,’ said Billy, ‘I know where they are,’ and he disappeared into the bedroom, reappearing within seconds with a smile on his face, saying, ‘Here we are. Send her my love, won’t you?’ as though Sarah was just going on a long weekend with the girls rather than having been thrown round her own flat by him, causing her to run away.
Flower stood still for a very long time, trying desperately to decide on a course of action.
‘Anything else?’ said Billy, who had decided at all costs not to ask Flower to beg Sarah to come back to him, and had vowed not to threaten any of Sarah’s friends. He was so charming that Flower, to her complete shame, found herself fleetingly wondering if Sarah was exaggerating it.
Billy coughed. ‘Is Martha well?’ he enquired, as if pushed to make polite conversation.
‘Fine,’ said Flower and thought, I can hardly wave a fucking gun around and tell him to watch it now.
‘Right then,’ she said. ‘I’d better be going. Shall I give Sarah a message?’
‘You can say I know we both let it get a bit heated,’ said Billy, ‘and I for one am very sorry.’
‘OK,’ said Flower hesitantly. ‘See you then.’
Suddenly she was on her bike and on the way home, the video of the incident in her head having been completely erased by the reality. She called Charlie. ‘Yeh fine,’ she said into her mobile. ‘See you in ten minutes.’
Then she called Martha. ‘Couldn’t fucking do it.’
‘Thank Christ,’ said Martha. ‘Hoped you’d come to your senses.’
‘Oh thanks,’ said Flower. ‘Cheers. Oh, by the way,’ she added, ‘saw your dad in the pub and did a terrible thing. Told him you weren’t calling Jesus, Jesus. I think he might come round.’
‘He’s already here,’ said Martha.
‘Oh, right you are. I’ll be off. What are you going to call him then?’ she added, almost as an afterthought.
‘Got to go,’ said Martha annoyingly. ‘Talk to you later.’
‘I’ve got a gig at the—’ started Flower then realised she was talking to air.
Martha’s dad was indeed sitting there looking marginally less grumpy than usual. He had called
Pat from a phone box to tell her the good news and Pat had been so relieved, having felt awful about just trotting after him at the hospital.
‘So, what are you going to call him?’ said the Rev.
They had all reached this point because the Rev had arrived in the middle of a screaming row about the name. Flower had really landed them in it, having to come up with a name on the spot. Ted wanted to call the baby Melvin after his father but Martha told him that no way was any child of hers going to have a sex-offender’s name. She herself wanted to call him Jude — at which Ted remarked that his son wasn’t going to have a girl’s name. A furious, noisy stalemate had been reached, coinciding with the Reverend’s arrival. The Rev Brian stood grinning on the doorstep, thinking to himself what a relief it was to finally hear someone giving Martha as good as they got.
‘So what are you going to call him?’ repeated the Rev, as Ted and Martha stared with pure hatred at one another.
‘Melvin,’ said Martha.
‘Jude,’ said Ted, and they fell towards each other and laughing, kissed slurpily.
‘Thank you. That was all I wanted to know,’ said Rev Brian, getting up and heading towards the door.
Sarah couldn’t see herself holding out much longer at Flower and Charlie’s flat. There was an alien feel to their lifestyle that made her realise what she was missing about home: the familiarity, the comfort, the ordinariness which, balanced against the odd black eye now and again, surely won out. She knew she was underplaying the whole situation in her mind, and that things must have been bad to drive her from her home, but even so the memories faded and were replaced by longing.
Charlie and Flower did their best, bought breakfast cereal that they wouldn’t feed to their worst enemy, a tabloid newspaper that made Flower feel physically nauseous to have in the house, and Charlie even kept his mouth shut about Sarah’s incredibly daft ideas on politics. However, the pair of them were beginning to feel the strain and after a miserable few days in which Sarah had gone zombie-like to work in the mornings and returned looking even less animated at night if that were possible, they decided to cheer her up by taking her on a demonstration on the Saturday, followed by a gig in the evening, and then to Flower’s big important gig at the Comedy Store on the Sunday.
Sarah did her best to look enthusiastic, but couldn’t help drooping. She so desperately wanted to go and hide in her room but her only respite in the small flat was to go and sit on the toilet; she had gone out to walk aimlessly round the local park, but several approaches by professionally disturbed people and comments on her appearance had put her off. As time passed, she did begin to feel a glimmer of excitement about the demonstration. This was something she had never done in her life, because every time something with a tenuous political connection came on TV, her mind ceased to function. She had, however, seen fighting in the streets between Charlie look-alikes and the police so she wondered if it might give her the chance to sublimate some of her anger and have a bloody good scream because dragging herself round the shops after work every night didn’t seem to be doing the trick.
Flower felt sorry for Sarah and increasingly aggressive towards Billy and the rather empty sad person he had created. Worst of all, she felt angry because she knew how fiercely Sarah wanted him back.
Flower was nervous about the big gig coming up on the Sunday. but was pleased she had a small gig to practise at in Kent before it happened. Coincidentally it was in Maidstone, Sarah’s home town and they were going to meet her mum, Connie, at the pub where the show was on. According to Sarah, Maidstone was the equivalent of the Deep South of America and Flower would have more than enough of a challenge from the local toothless pig-stickers, who liked nothing better than frying London comics.
At last, it was the end of the week and Sarah sat with Flower and Charlie in the tiny sitting room and prayed they would turn on the rather battered telly and let her slump in front of it. No such luck. In an attempt to entertain her and keep her mind off her pain, they had invited a male friend of theirs called Sim to come round. Slim was a storyteller and had been travelling abroad for six months. He had called Flower and Charlie to tell them he had picked up lots of new stories and promised to come over for an evening of chat and food.
In the toilet for some brief respite from what Charlie told her was called ‘world music’ Sarah started to ask herself what the fuck a grown-up bloke was doing telling stories. She wanted to call Billy on his mobile and have a laugh about it, because that was one of the things they did well together. She wished he would phone her, but had no idea that Billy was playing the long game and steadfastly resisting any kind of contact to reel her back in.
Someone knocked on the door of the toilet and Sarah jumped. ‘Yeh?’ she shouted.
‘Sim’s here,’ said Flower. ‘Are you coming out?’
‘In a minute,’ said Sarah, steeling herself for the weirdness that Charlie and Flower had lined up for her.
Flower had phoned Martha and asked her if she, Ted and the baby wanted to come round and meet Slim.
‘I’d rather make a hole in my stomach, pull my entrails out with laundry tongs and fry them while they’re still attached,’ was Martha’s answer, with poor Ted holding the baby and saying in a conciliatory fashion in the background, ‘There’s no need to be quite so direct.’
When Flower grumpily reported Martha’s answer because she didn’t have a huge sense of humour about their friends, Sarah had to bite her lip to stop herself laughing and wished herself round at Martha’s flat living in cheery squalor, but she knew that would have palled by now too. So she sighed a big sigh, put something approaching a smile on her face and entered the land of storytelling.
It was much as expected. In Sarah’s later description to Billy: ‘He talked a load of bollocks about pixies and that for fucking hours,’ whereas Flower had enthused to someone at work about Sim’s ‘amazing grasp of the world Zeitgeist and his cherishing of the human race’. Sarah medicated herself with wine throughout the evening and therefore sailed close to damming poor Sim’s flow on a number of occasions with stifled giggles and the occasional, ‘for fuck’s sake!’ Because she was sleeping in the main room, she couldn’t go to bed until they did and Charlie roiled joint after interminable joint. Sarah had tried it once many years ago and it had made her giggly and slightly hungry but she thought she might as well have a go, as anything that made her slightly less connected to reality was a blessing.
‘And now a couple of tales from Tasmania with a sting in the tail,’ said Sim.
Sarah braced herself as Sim began. ‘In the land of Tasmania, good and evil had fought a constant battle over thousands of years. The good people of Tasmania lived together in harmony on the mountain while the low, hairy, vile people of the plains lurked at the forest edge, carrying off the occasional good person’s daughter to ravish and take into slavery.
‘One day the good people realised they only had one beautiful daughter left, the daughter of the chief, and they resolved, much as they hated fighting, to defend her to the last life. Sure enough the low hairy people (‘Was Charlie one of them?’ Sarah wanted to ask) crept to the village in the middle of the night and snatched the chiefs beautiful daughter. The good people sprang from their beds and a great battle commenced until sure enough all the good people lay dead or dying and the chief of the low people carried away the sobbing daughter of the good chief. A tear fell on his neck as they ran and he changed in an instant into a snake and slithered away and that is how the Tasmanian Devil was born.’
Sim sat back with a smug look on his face.
‘Hang on a sec,’ said Charlie. ‘The Tasmanian Devil’s not a snake.’
‘Whatever,’ said Sim.
‘Yeh, whatever,’ said Charlie and handed Sarah a freshly rolled joint.
Sarah took a massive pull on it and nearly catapulted back through the wall.
‘Christ Almighty, Flower,’ she said hoarsely. ‘that is some fucking blow, man.’
Flower, wh
o was inured to its power and quite stoned, nodded absentmindedly and didn’t think to try and contain this novice’s intake. Sarah went remarkably quiet for about half an hour and when Flower asked her if she wanted herb tea, Sarah looked at her with an expression of pure malice and said, ‘I am evil.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Flower, ‘the double zero’s got her.’
‘Right,’ said Sim, ‘here’s another really cool-tale from Tasmania called “Why the Trees Don’t Talk Any More”.’
‘I’m not Sarah any more,’ said Sarah.
‘Hey, chill babe,’ said Sim. ‘There might be something in this story for you.’
‘Only my death would be any relief,’ said Sarah.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Sim, looking worriedly at Flower and Charlie. “Fraid I can’t oblige you there, little princess.’
Then Sim, never one to be too concerned by the mental state of his audience — for if he had, he wouldn’t have had an audience — ploughed on regardless.
‘In Tasmania,’ he said, ‘the trees used to talk to each other, man.’
Sarah began to cry.
‘Yeh, I know it’s beautiful, babe,’ he said.
Sarah snarled like a wolf and this sent an alarm signal to Flower who was pretty stoned so it was as if the cry for help came down a very long cottonwool tunnel. Then Sarah began to howl.
‘Yeh, carry on, delightful lady,’ said Slim, ‘there was wolves on this island. Glad you’re joining in. Anyway, to continue the story,’ he said, ‘the trees would make love with words and their green branches would swoosh with anticipation …’
‘You want a story?’ said Sarah. ‘Here’s one for you, you boring hippy twat. It’s the story of a little girl born into the shitty world of an ex-prostitute who was knocked up by a client and got her dates wrong, so missed out on having a legal abortion by two weeks. The illegal one failed so the baby arrived into a nasty little flat in an evil town and the order of the day for that little girl was to shut the fuck up while. Mum’s at work so the neighbours don’t ring the social. A selection of boyfriends passed through: some of them hit the girl, some of them touched her up and some of them, she had to suck off.’