I dressed, making another mental note to look up Every Man's Own Lawyer and find out the penalties for this particular crime. ‘Pay attention to me, Fisher. I have thought very carefully about sending you to prison. Only your youth and the fact that your employers have spoken so highly of your abilities…’ Tying my tie, I began to imagine myself in Armley Jail, impressing the governor with my intelligence, making friends with the padre; and for a short while I was back on the No. 1 thinking, a luxury I could ill afford at half past nine on a working morning.
‘Billy! If you're not out of this house in five minutes I shall push you out!’
I put on my jacket and pulled the old japanned trunk from under the bed. The piece of stamp edging was still in position across the lid. A long while ago, when it had contained no more than the scribbled postcards from Liz and a few saccharine notes from the Witch, I had started to call this trunk my Guilt Chest. Any grain of facetiousness there had been in this description had long since disappeared.
I lifted the lid gingerly, jolted and disturbed as usual by the vast number of calendars there seemed to be, stacked dozens deep in their thick brown envelopes, addressed in my own broad handwriting to Dr H. Rich, P. W. Horniman, Esq., J.P., Rev. D. L. P. Tack, the Warden, Stradhoughton Workpeople's Hostel. Besides the calendars, nestling in their own dark hollow of the Guilt Chest, were the love-letters, the bills the old man had given me to post, the aphrodisiac tablets that Stamp had got for me, the cellophaned, leggy copy of Ritzy Stories, and the letter my mother had once written to ‘Housewives' Choice’. I could picture her sitting down with the Stephens' ink bottle and the Basildon Bond, and I could never explain to myself why I had not posted the letter or why I had opened it under cover of the Guilt Chest lid. ‘Dear Sir, Just a few lines to let you know how much I enjoy Housewife's “Choice” every day, I always listen no matter what I am doing, could you play (Just a Song at Twilight) for me though I don't suppose you get time to play everyone that writes to you, but this is my “favourite song”. You see my husband often used to sing it when we a bit younger than we are now, I will quite understand if you cannot play. Yours respectfully (Mrs) N. Fisher. PS. My son also write songs, but I suppose there is not much chance for him as he has not had the training. We are just ordinary folk.’ The debates I had had with my mother on the ordinary-folk motif, in long and eloquent streams of No. I thinking, would have filled ‘Housewives' Choice’ ten times over.
Snapped together by a rubber band, like the used envelopes I had fancied for myself, was the thin pack of postcards that Liz had written to me on her last expedition but one. They were matter-of-fact little notes, full of tediously interesting details about the things she had seen in Leicester, Welwyn Garden City, and the other places where whatever urge possessing her had taken her; but at least they were literate. I felt mildly peculiar to be treasuring love-letters for their grammar, but there was nothing else I could treasure them for. Sometimes I could think about Liz, think properly on the ordinary plane, for a full minute, before we were both whisked off into Ambrosia, myself facing trial for sedition and she a kind of white-faced Eva Peron in the crowd.
I took one of the calendars out of the Guilt Chest and stuffed it under my pullover. If I was going to London in a week it meant that I had one hundred and sixty-eight hours to dispose of two hundred and eleven calendars. Say, for safety, two calendars an hour between now and next Saturday. I took out another three and crammed them half under my pullover and half under the top of my trousers. Rummaging in the Guilt Chest, I spotted the flat white packet of supposed aphrodisiacs, the ‘passion pills’ as Stamp, shoving them grubbily into my hand in a fit of remorse, fear, and generosity, had called them. I put Liz out of my mind and began thinking about Rita and then, making a definite decision, about the Witch. I put the passion pills in my side pocket and bent to close the Guilt Chest, the calendars stiff under my ribs and the sharp corners showing through the cable-weave of my pullover. I replaced the stamp edging, four inches from the handle on the right-hand side, pushed the trunk carefully under the bed and went downstairs, feeling like a walking Guilt Chest myself. In the hall I put on my outdoor raincoat and buttoned it to the waist before going into the lounge.
‘He'll be buried in a raincoat,’ said Gran, almost, in fact completely, automatically. She was rubbing viciously at the sideboard with a check duster, a daily gruelling which she imagined paid for her keep. It was to the sideboard that she addressed herself, because my mother was in the kitchen.
It was long past any time at all for a working morning. The last late typists, their bucket bags stuffed with deodorants and paper handkerchiefs, had clacked past on their way to the bus shelter. A morning hush had settled over the house. There were specks of dust in the sunlight and the stiff smell of Mansion Polish. The radio emphasized the lateness with an unfamiliar voice, talking about some place where they had strange customs; it was like going long past one's station on the last train.
I called: ‘I'm off, mother!’
‘WWell don't hurry yourself, will you?’ she called back, following her voice into the lounge. I paused with my hand running up and down the brown bakelite finger-plate on the door.
‘Might as well give my notice in today, if I'm going to London,’ I said. My mother pressed her lips together in a thin purple line and began bundling up the tablecloth, taking it by the corners to keep the crumbs in.
‘You want to make up your mind what you do want to do!’ she said primly.
‘I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to work for Danny Boon.’
‘Well how do you know, you've never done that sort of thing before. You can't switch and change and swop about just when you feel like it. You've got your living to earn now, you know!’
She was trying to talk kindly, making a real effort at it but drawing the effort back, like someone whispering across a bridge. I was touched, fleetingly. I said, trying hard myself: ‘Any road, we'll talk about it later,’ a gruff and oblique statement of affection that, I could see, was received and understood.
I left the house, ignoring the old man who was messing about with the lorry in the road outside. If I can walk all the way down Cherry Row without blinking my eyelids, I told myself, it will be all all right. I kept my eyes wide and burning long past Greenman's sweet-shop, past the clay cavities where the semis were not built yet; then Mrs Olmonroyd came past, spying. I clapped my eyes shut and wished her a civil good morning. I felt the calendars under my jacket and wondered why I had brought them out and what I was going to do with them, and what I was going to do about everything.
2
‘THE very name of Stradhoughton,’ Man o' the Dales had written in the Stradhoughton Echo one morning when there was nothing much doing, ‘conjures up sturdy buildings of honest native stone, gleaming cobbled streets, and that brackish air which gives this corner of Yorkshire its own especial piquancy.’ Man o' the Dales put piquancy in italics, not me.
My No. 1 thinking often featured long sessions with Man o' the Dales in whatever pub the boys on the Echo used, and there I would put him right on his facts. The cobbled streets, gleaming or otherwise, had long ago been ripped up with the tramlines and relined with concrete slabs or tarmacadam – gleaming tarmacadam I would grant him, stabbing him in the chest with the stocky briar which in this particular role I affected. The brackish air I was no authority on, except to say that when the wind was in a certain direction it smelled of burning paint. As for the honest native stone, our main street, Moorgate, was – despite the lying reminiscences of old men like Councillor Duxbury who remembered sheep-troughs where the X-L Disc Bar now stands – exactly like any other High Street in Great Britain. Woolworth's looked like Woolworth's, the Odeon looked like the Odeon, and the Stradhoughton Echo's own office, which Man o' the Dales must have seen, looked like a public lavatory in honest native white tile. I had a fairly passionate set-piece all worked out on the subject of rugged Yorkshire towns, with their rugged neon signs and their rugged plate-glass
and plastic shop-fronts, but so far nobody had given me the opportunity to start up on the theme.
‘Dark satanic mills I can put up with,’ I would say, pushing my tobacco pouch along the bar counter. ‘They're part of the picture. But’ – puff, puff – ‘when it comes to dark satanic power stations, dark satanic housing estates, and dark satanic teashops –’
‘That's the trouble with you youngsters,’ said Man o' the Dales, propping his leather-patched elbows on the seasoned bar. ‘You want progress, but you want all the Yorkshire tradition as well. You can't have both.’
‘I want progress,’ I retorted, making with the briar. ‘But I want a Yorkshire tradition of progress.’
‘That's good. Can I use that?’ said Man o' the Dales.
Anyway, satanic or not, it was the usual Saturday morning down in town, the fat women rolling along on their bad feet like toy clowns in pudding basins, the grey-faced men reviewing the sporting pinks. Along Market Street, where the new glass-fronted shops spilled out their sagging lengths of plywood and linoleum, there were still the old-fashioned stalls, lining the gutter with small rotten apples and purple tissue paper. The men shouted: ‘Do I ask fifteen bob, do I ask twelve and a tanner, I do not. I do not ask you for ten bob. I do not ask you for three half crowns. Gimme five bob, five bob, five bob, five bob, five bob.’ Frowning women, their black, scratched handbags crammed with half-digested grievances, pushed through the vegetable stalls to the steps of the rates office.
Off Market Street there was a little alley called St Botolph's Passage, the centre of most of Stradhoughton's ready-money betting. Besides the bookies' shops, the stinking urinal, the sly chemist's with red rubber gloves and big sex books in the window, and the obscure one-man businesses mooning behind the dark doorways, there was a pub, a dyer's and cleaner's, and Shadrack and Duxbury's tasteful funerals. Many were the jokes about St Botolph and his passage, but even more were those about the dyers and the undertakers.
The exterior of Shadrack's, where I now paused to take my traditional deep breath before entering, showed a conflict of personalities between young Shadrack and old Duxbury, the two partners. Young Shadrack, taking advantage of Duxbury's only trip abroad, a reciprocal visit by the town council to Lyons (described by Man o' the Dales as the Stradhoughton of France), had pulled out the Dickensian windows, bottle-glass and all, and substituted modern plate-glass and a shop sign of raised stainless-steel lettering. Thus another piece of old Stradhoughton bit the dust and the new effect was of a chip shop on a suburban housing estate. Councillor Duxbury had returned only just in time to salve the old window-dressing from the wreckage, and this remained: a smudgy sign by Stamp reading ‘Tasteful Funerals, “Night or Day Service”’ (which, as my other colleague Arthur had said, needed only an exclamation mark in brackets to complete it) and a piece of purple cloth on which there was deposited a white vase, the shape of a lead weight, inscribed to the memory of a certain Josiah Olroyd. The reason Josiah Olroyd's vase was in Shadrack's window and not in the corporation cemetery was that his name had been misspelled, and the family had not unreasonably refused to accept the goods ordered. The Olroyd vase always served to remind me of a ghastly error with some coffin nameplates in which I had been involved, a business that was far from finished yet, and it was with this thought uppermost in a fairly crowded mind that, ninety minutes late, I entered Shadrack and Duxbury's.
The shop-bell rang and, behaving exactly like a Pavlov dog, Stamp got up and began, elaborately, to put on his coat.
‘Must be going-home time, Fisher's come,’ he said.
I ignored him and addressed Arthur.
‘Is buggerlugs in?’ I jerked my head towards Shadrack's door.
‘Just come in this minute,’ said Arthur. ‘You can say you were in the bog.’
I hissed with relief and flopped down at my desk, between Stamp and Arthur. Every day, sitting tensed at the front of the bus, pushing it with my hands to make it faster, I had this race to the office with Shadrack. Dux-bury didn't matter; he never came rolling in until eleven and in any case he was so old that he could never remember who worked for him. It was Shadrack, with his little notebooks, and the propelling pencil rattling against his teeth, who gave all the trouble. ‘It's been noticed that you were half an hour late again this morning.’ He always said ‘It's been noticed’. ‘It's been noticed that you haven't sent those accounts off yet.’
‘I'm off to tell him what time you came in,’ sniggered Stamp, and I was obliged to murmur ‘You do’, the passing acknowledgement of his feeble jest. Stamp called himself a ‘clurk’ and did not go very much beyond jokes of the Mary-Rose-sat-on-a-pin-Mary-Rose variety. He now started on his morning performance.
‘Hey, that tart on telly last night! Where she bent forward over that piano! Coarrrr!’
It was the first duty of Arthur and myself to nip this quietly in the bud.
‘What make?’ said Arthur innocently.
‘What make what?’
‘What make was the piano?’
Stamp sneered: ‘Oh, har har. Some say good old Arthur.
We got down to our work, what there was of it. Shadrack and Duxbury's was dull and comfortable as offices go. It was done throughout in sleepy chocolate woodwork, which Shadrack, dreaming of pinewood desks and Finnish wall papers, had not yet got his hands on. Our task was to do the letters, make up the funeral accounts, run the errands, and greet prospective customers with a suitably gloomy expression before shuffling them off on to Shadrack. September was a quiet month and Saturday was a quiet morning; we all had our own pursuits to work on. Stamp, head on one side, tongue cocked out of the corner of his mouth, spent most of his time making inky posters for the youth club. ‘Have you paid your “subs”? If not, “why not”!!!’ Arthur and I would sit around trying to write songs together, or sometimes I would tinker with The Two Schools at Gripminster.
‘You couldn't see what make it was, she was bending too far over it,’ Stamp said at last. I did not look at him, but I knew that he was describing a bosom with his hands.
‘Penny's dropped,’ Arthur said.
‘Penny-farthing more like,’ I said. ‘It's been earning interest while he thought that one up.’
‘Write that one down,’ Arthur said.
‘Joke over,’ said Stamp.
There was nothing in the in-tray. I got The Two Schools at Gripminster out of my desk drawer and stared vacantly at what I had written of my thirty-four thousand words. ‘“I say, weed! Aren't you a new bug?” Sammy Brown turned to greet the tall, freckle-faced boy who walked across the quad towards him. Sammy's second name was appropriate – for the face of this sturdy young fellow was as brown as a berry. W. Fisher. William Fisher. The Two Schools at Gripminster, by William Fisher. William L. Fisher. W. L. Fisher. Two-School Sammy, by W. L. P. Fisher. Two Schools at Gripminster A Sammy Brown Story by W. L. P. Fisher. The Sammy Brown Omnibus. W. Lashwood Fisher. W. de L Fisher.’ I looked at it for some time, thought ‘William Fisher: His Life and Times’ but did not write it down, then put the paper back in the drawer. The four chunky calendars under my pullover hurt my chest when I leaned forward over the desk. I began thinking of Danny Boon and the letter I had better write to him, and about Shadrack and the letter I had better write to him.
‘I've got something unpleasant to say to our Mr Shadrack this morning,’ I said to Arthur.
‘You've got something unpleasant to say to our Mr Shadrack this morning?’ repeated Arthur, dropping into the Mr Bones and Mr Jones routine in which we conducted most of our exchanges. I decided not to tell Arthur just yet about the London business but to while half an hour away in the usual manner. ‘Anything I say to Mr Shadrack would be unpleasant,’ I said.
‘Kindly leave the undertaker's,’ Arthur said.
‘Tell me, Mr Crabtree, what are the Poles doing in Russia?’
‘I don't know, Mr Fisher, what are the Poles doing in Russia?’
‘Holding up the telegraph wires, same as everywhere else.’<
br />
‘That's not what these ladies and gentlemen have come to hear.’
I jumped to my feet, clutching the ruler from my desk. ‘Have a care, Mr Crabtree! If I fire this rod it'll be curtains for you!’
‘Why so, Mr Fisher?’
‘It's a curtain rod.’
‘I don't wish to know that.’
Stamp plodded in: ‘Same here, it's got whiskers on it, that one.’ We had explained to him fifty times over that that was the whole bloody point, but the idea would not sink in. It always led Stamp to his own jokes.
‘If a barber shaves a barber, who talks?’
Arthur and I, deadpan, said: ‘Who?’
‘Joke over,’ Stamp said, weakly. He went back to the poster he was doing for a pea-and-pie supper out Treadmill way. Arthur started typing out the new song we had written. I got going on the letter.
Dear Mr Boon,
Many thanks for your letter of September 2 –
Dear Mr Boon,
Yes! I should be delighted to come to London –
Dear Mr Boon,
I will be in London next Saturday –
The idea of being in London next Saturday, put down on paper and staring me in the face, filled my bowels with quick-flushing terror. For as long as I could remember, I had been enjoying rich slabs of No. 1 thinking about London, coughing my way through the fog to the Odd Man Out Club, Chelsea, with its chess tables and friendly, intelligent girls. I was joint editor, with the smiling ‘Jock’ Osonolu, a Nigerian student, of the club's sensational wall-sheet, modelled somewhat on the lines of the Ambrosia Times-Advocate. I would live in a studio high over the Embankment, sometimes with a girl called Ann, a Londoner herself and as vivacious as they come, but more often with Liz, not Liz as she actually existed but touched up with a No. 1 ponytail to become my collaborator on a play for theatre in the round. Sometimes I could see myself starving on the Embankment, the tramp-poet; and now, sitting at my desk, the idea of actually starving on the Embankment suddenly presented itself to me. I switched over into the No. 2 thinking with a grinding of the points inside my stomach and there I was, feeling for the actual pangs of hunger and counting the hot pennies in my pocket. Five shillings left, one egg and chips leaves three and nine, doss down at Rowton House, two and nine. Evening paper two-pence-halfpenny, breakfast a tanner, call it two bob, two bob, two bob. I do not ask for ten bob, ladies, I do not ask you for three half crowns. Gimme two bob, two bob, two bob, two bob, and back I was on the No. 1, the poet stallholder of Petticoat Lane.
Billy Liar Page 3