Billy Liar

by Keith Waterhouse

  ‘Don't take any wooden bodies,’ Arthur called from the door.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ said Stamp.

  3

  STRADHOUGHTON was littered with objects for our derision. We would make Fascist speeches from the steps of the rates office, and we had been in trouble more than once for doing our Tommy Atkins routine under the war memorial in Town Square. Sometimes we would walk down Market Street shouting ‘Apples a pound pears’ to confuse the costermongers with their leather jackets and their Max Miller patter.

  The memorial vase to Josiah Olroyd in Shadrack's window always triggered off the trouble at t' mill routine, a kind of serial with Arthur taking the part of Olroyd and I the wayward son.

  As we begun to walk down St Botolph's Passage, Arthur struck up: ‘Ther's allus been an Olroyd at Olroyd's mill, and ther allus will be. Now you come ‘ere with your college ways and you want none of it!’

  ‘But father! We must all live our lives according to our lights –’ I began in the high-pitched university voice.

  ‘Don't gi’ me any o' yon fancy talk!’ said Arthur, reflecting with suspicious accuracy the tone of the old man at breakfast. ‘You broke your mother's heart, lad. Do you know that?’

  ‘Father! The men! They're coming up the drive!’

  We turned into Market Street swinging our arms from side to side like men on a lynching spree. Arthur held up an imaginary lantern.

  ‘Oh, so it's thee, Ned Leather! Ye'd turn against me, would ye?’

  In the university voice: ‘Now, Leather, what's afoot?’ – and before Arthur could seize the part for himself, I switched accents and got into the character of Ned Leather. ‘Oh, so it's the young lord and master up from Oxford and Cambridge, is it? We'll see about thee in a minute, impudent young pup!’

  Arthur, piqued as always because I had got the Ned Leather dialogue for myself, dropped the routine. We walked in silence past the pork butchers and the dry-cleaning shops stuffed with yellow peg-board notices, and turned into Moorgate. I was in a fairly schizophrenic state of mind. I was looking into the distance to catch a glimpse of Liz in her green suède jacket, but at the same time tensing myself ready to meet Rita, who worked in the café where we had our morning break. Digging my hands into my pockets I could feel Stamp's little box of passion pills, and this reminded me of the Witch. I was thinking confusedly about all three of them when Arthur began clearing his throat to adjust his voice into ordinary speech. I had noticed before that when he had something unpalatable to say he would preface it with a bit of clowning from either the trouble at t'mill or Duxbury routines.

  ‘My mother's been saying how nice it would be if our families could get together,’ he said at length.

  ‘God forbid,’ I said.

  A star feature of my No. 2 thinking was a morbid dread of Arthur's mother meeting my mother. I had once told Arthur's mother, in a loose moment, that I had a sister called Sheila.

  ‘And she wants to send some old toys to the kids as well,’ said Arthur.

  ‘All contributions gratefully received,’ I said, still flippant.

  I wondered to myself why I had ever started it. In the odd bored moments, waiting for Arthur to tie his tie in the quiet ticking house where he lived, I had got Sheila married to a grocer's assistant in the market called Eric. Eric, prospering, now had three shops of his own, two in Leeds and one in Bradford. As conversation lagged between me and Arthur's mother, I had given Eric and Sheila two children; Norma, now aged three, and Michael, aged one and a half. Michael had unfortunately been born with a twisted foot, but medical skill on the part of one Dr Ubu, an Indian attached to Leeds University, had left him with a hardly noticeable limp. Arthur had often asked me to kill my sister off and put the kids in a home, but the long-drawn-out mourning and a Shadrack and Duxbury funeral were beyond me. I felt indignant that his mother should take so much interest in a family of what, after all, were total strangers to her.

  ‘Anyway, don't let your mother come near our house,’ I said. ‘I've told 'em she's in hospital with a broken leg.’ This was the truth, not the truth that Arthur's mother was in hospital, but the truth that I, to tide me over some awkward moment, had said she was.

  ‘The trouble with you, cocker, is you're a pathological bloody liar,’ said Arthur.

  ‘Well, I've seen the psychiatrist and –’

  ‘Kindly leave the couch.’

  We resumed our silence, this one more uncomfortable than the last. I saw that we had a hundred yards to go before the café, and I switched into the No. 1 thinking for a brief morning bulletin. My No. 1 mother was on: ‘Billy, is this another of your ghastly practical jokes?’ The idea of switching in brought a radio into my mind, a little white portable singing among the rubber-plants on the low-slung shelves as I mixed the drinks before dinner. My No. 1 mother said: ‘Do for God's sake turn off that bloody box!’ but this brought me back to the Vim-scoured face of my actual mother and her letter to ‘Housewives' Choice’. Cornered between the Guilt Chest and the spectre of Arthur's mother it was with some relief that I saw that we were outside the glassy, glacial doors of the Kit-Kat café and its monstrous, wobbling plaster sundae.

  The Kit-Kat was another example of Stradhoughton moving with the times, or rather dragging its wooden leg about five paces behind the times. The plaster sundae was all that was supposed to be left of a former tradition of throbbing urns, slophouse cooking, and the thin tide of biscuit crumbs and tomato pips that was symbolic of Stradhoughton public catering. The Kit-Kat was now a coffee bar, or thought it was. It had a cackling espresso machine, a few empty plant-pots, and about half a dozen glass plates with brown sugar stuck all over them. The stippled walls, although redecorated, remained straight milkbar: a kind of Theatre Royal backcloth showing Dick Whittington and his cat hiking it across some of the more rolling dales. Where the coffee-bar element really fell down, however, was in the personality of Rita, on whom I was now training the sights of my anxiety. With her shiny white overall, her mottled blonde hair, and her thick red lips, she could have transmogrified the Great Northern Hotel itself into a steamy milkbar with one wipe of her tea-cloth.

  ‘You know, dark satanic mills I can put up with,’ I said as we climbed on the wobbling stools. ‘But when it comes to dark satanic power stations, dark satanic housing estates, and dark satanic coffee bars –’

  ‘Put on another record, kid, we've heard that one before,’ said Arthur in a surprisingly coarse voice.

  The Kit-Kat was full of people of the Stamp variety, all making hideous puns and leaning heavily on the I've-stopped-smoking-I-do-it-every-day kind of conversation. Rita was serving chocolate Penguins to a mob of cyclists at the other end of the bar. She waved, tinkling her fingers as though playing the piano, and I waved back.

  ‘Watch your pockets, fellers! See if they measure you up!’ This was the standard greeting from the Stamp crowd for any of us from Shadrack and Duxbury's, and the reply was: ‘Drop dead.’ - ‘Will you bury me if I do?’ – ‘Free of charge, mate,’ and that was the end of the responses.

  ‘No, look, seriously though, you haven't said our old woman's broken her leg, have you?’ said Arthur.

  ‘Course I have.’

  ‘She'll go bloody bald, man! What if I'd called at your house and your old woman had asked after her?’

  ‘You would have risen to the occasion,’ I said mock-heroically.

  ‘The liefulness is terrific,’ said Arthur, entering reluctantly into the mood of banter.

  I toyed with the Perspex-covered menu, advertising onion soup that did not exist. ‘Think Stamp really did see Liz this morning?’ ‘I said.

  ‘I don't bloody know, man,’ Arthur said, adding irrelevantly: ‘I've lost track of your sex-life.’

  ‘No, I was just wondering,’ I said.

  Arthur nodded furtively up the bar towards Rita, who was still engaged in primitive verbal by-play with the cyclists. ‘Listen,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Which one of 'em are you supposed to be engaged to – her o
r the Witch?’

  ‘That's an academic question.’

  ‘Well you can't be engaged to them both at once, for Christ sake,’ said Arthur.

  I turned a wryly-haunted face to him. ‘How much have you got says I can't?’

  ‘Jesus wept!’ said Arthur.

  The position with Rita was that I had had my eye on her ever since she moved into the Kit-Kat from a transport café in the Huddersfield Road, her natural habitat. A life of mechanical badinage with lorry drivers had left her somewhat low on the conversational level, but she was a good, or at least a stolid, listener. The previous night, in an eloquent mood, I had proposed marriage and Rita, probably thinking it bad manners to refuse, had accepted. The only complicated thing was that I was already engaged to the Witch, so that Rita's status was roughly that of first reserve in the matrimonial team.

  ‘Well which one of them's got the naffing engagement ring?’ whispered Arthur.

  I said: ‘Well, the Witch had it, only I've got it back. I'm supposed to be getting it adjusted at the jeweller's.’ The Witch's engagement ring in its little blue box, I now remembered, was among the items of loot in my jacket pockets. I wondered in a fleeting panic what they would make of it all if I was knocked down by a bus and my possessions were sent home to Hillcrest.

  ‘Who's next on the list – Woodbine Lizzie?’ said Arthur.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We can accept no further engagements.’

  ‘Write that down,’ said Arthur.

  At the other end of the counter, Rita's conversation with the cyclists ended abruptly as one of them stumbled over the tight boundaries of propriety. She pitched her mill-tinged, masculine voice at its most raucous to call back ‘Gerron home, yer mother wants yer boots for loaf as she turned away and sauntered down the bar, running the gauntlet of standard raillery as she came to greet us. There was no doubt at all that the Stamp crowd had something to whistle about. Rita was a natural for every beauty contest where personality was not a factor. She had already been Miss Stradhoughton, and she had been voted The Girl We Would Most Like To Crash The Sound Barrier With by some American airmen.

  Arthur slumped himself ape-fashion across the bar. ‘Gimme two cawfees, ham on rye, slice blueberry pie,’ he drawled, a snatch from the two Yanks in a drugstore routine which we were still perfecting.

  ‘Oo, look what's crawled out of the cheese,’ said Rita. ‘Marlon Brando.’

  ‘If I fire this rod it'll be curtains for you, sister,’ said Arthur out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘Yer, cos it's a curtain rod. Tell us summat we don't know.’

  ‘Well come on, love, pour us a coffee,’ I said, speaking for the first time.

  ‘Gerrof yer knees,’ said Rita without rancour, strolling over to the espresso machine. So far there had been no sign from anybody, her, me, or anybody else, that we were engaged to be married.

  Someone out of the Stamp crowd, preparing to leave, called out: ‘Coming to the Odeon tonight, Rita, back row, eh?’ Without turning round she called back: ‘They wun't let you in, it's an “A” picture.’

  Everybody I knew spoke in clichés, but Rita spoke as though she got her words out of a slot machine, whole sentences ready-packed in a disposable tinfoil wrapper. There was little meaning left in anything she actually said; her few rough phrases had been so worn through constant use that she now relied not on words but on the voice itself, and the modulation of the animal sounds it produced, to express the few thick slabs of meaning of which she was capable. In moments of tenderness a certain gruffness, like Woodbine smoke, would curl into her throat, but she had long ago forgotten, and probably never knew, the vocabulary of human kindness.

  She slopped the coffee in front of us, Joe's Café style, and rested her elbows on the counter, her bosom – itself a cliché, like a plaster relief given away by the women's magazines – protruding over the bar. She now thought it necessary to make some delicate reference to the fact that we had had a momentous time of it the night before.

  ‘What time did you get in last night?’ she said.

  ‘'Bout one o'clock,’ I said. ‘Our old man went crackers this morning. Should've heard him.’

  ‘Me mam did as well. I've got to stop in on Monday. Why, did you miss your bus or summat?’

  ‘Yer – 'ad to walk,’ I said, falling chameleon-like into her own tongue.

  ‘Why didn't you take a taxi, old man, old man?’ said Arthur in his Western Brothers voice.

  ‘Oo, hark at Lord Muck,’ said Rita. ‘You should have gone to Town Square, got an all-night bus.’

  This was the sequence and rhythm of daylight love-play as she knew it, a kind of oral footy-footy that was the nearest she could get to intimate conversation.

  ‘No, I like walking,’ I said.

  Rita said, ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching,’ in the derisory tone she used to apologize for putting her tongue to a quotation. ‘Anyway, you're lucky, you can always get your shoes mended free.’

  I was puzzled by the remark until I remembered, dredging among the fallen platitudes of the night before, an invitation I had made to Rita to come to Sunday tea. The invitation had been make-weight, a kind of free coupon along with the proposal, but in the course of it I had told her that the old man was a cobbler with a shop down Clogiron Lane.

  ‘Oh, yer,’ I said. ‘Are you still going to the Roxy tonight?’

  ‘Yer.’

  ‘Have I to see you inside, or outside?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘Just thought I'd get away without paying,’ I said. It was standard, ready-to-use repartee, expected and indeed sought after. ‘See you outside then, 'bout nine o'clock. Are you still coming for your tea tomorrow?’

  ‘Yer, if you like. Anyway, we'll fix that up tonight,’ she said.

  Rita did not know it, but the matter was already fixed. The old man would be called away to inspect a load of Government surplus rubber heels in Harrogate, my mother would take the opportunity of a lift to visit my Aunt Polly in Otley or somewhere, and the tea would be postponed. I had not yet tackled the problem of the Roxy, to which I was also supposed to be going with the Witch. Arthur, by my side, was covering his face with his hands and making quiet cawing noises in a pantomime of amazement. I gave him a quick kick on the foot and felt in my pocket for the little blue box with the Witch's engagement ring in it.

  ‘Try this on for size,’ I said, sliding it casually across the counter.

  ‘What, is it for me?’ said Rita in her gormless way.

  ‘Who do you think it's for, your mother?’

  She opened the box and put the cheap, shiny engagement ring on her finger, as though expecting a practical joke. ‘Just fits,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Why, you haven't bought it, have yer?’

  ‘No, he knocked it off out of Woolworth's window,’ said Arthur, who had started whistling tunelessly and looking up at the ceiling.

  ‘Oo, it can speak!’ jeered Rita. She changed her voice to find the unfamiliar tone of gratitude. ‘Anyway, ta. I won't wear it now, cos you know what they're like in here.’ I could see the picture of marriage forming in her mind, the white wedding, the drawers crammed full of blankets, the terrace house with the linoleum squares, the seagrass stools, and the novel horseshoe companion-set in satin-brass. I felt pleased to have brought her this temporary pleasure, but there was no time to lose, and already I was racing ahead with the No. 1 thinking, breaking the engagement with the big speech about incompatibility.

  The glass doors of the Kit-Kat rocked open, and one of the burly lorry drivers with whom Rita had had barren and wintry affairs in the past shambled in. ‘Look what the cat's brought in,’ said Rita loudly. She slipped the engagement ring into her overall pocket and re-set her face into gum-chewing nonchalance.

  I was smiling as we walked back to the office. ‘What have you got to grin about?’ said Arthur.

  ‘Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves,’ I said.

 
‘You what?’

  ‘A quotation from Messieurs Shadrack and Duxbury's calendars,’ I said. The calendars were still warm and sharp under my pullover, but they had become a part of my clothing, like an armoured vest.

  ‘You're going to be up for bloody bigamy, mate, that's what you're going to be up for,’ said Arthur.

  I tried to look as though I knew more than he did about my affairs, and we walked on along Moorgate.

  ‘Have I told you I'm leaving?’ I said, putting it as casually as I could.

  ‘Yes, we've heard that one before as well,’ said Arthur.

  I wondered whether to tell him at all, or whether just to vanish, turning up self-consciously in a camel-hair coat years later like somebody coming home in uniform.

  ‘I'm going to London,’ I said.

  ‘What as – road-sweeper?’

  ‘Ay road sweepah on the road – to fame!’ I cried in the grandiloquent voice. When it came to the point, I was embarrassed about telling him. I added, in a shuffling kind of way: ‘I've got that job with Danny Boon.’

  ‘You haven't!’

  ‘Yup. Scriptwriter, start next week.’

  ‘Jammy bugger! Have you though, honest?’

  ‘Course I have. Don't tell anybody, though, will you?’

  ‘Course I won't. When did you fix that up, then?’ Arthur was finding it hard to keep the traces of envy out of his voice.

  ‘He sent me a letter.’

  Arthur stopped abruptly in the middle of the street and gave me what my mother would have described as an old-fashioned look.

  ‘Let's see it,’ he said, holding his hand out resignedly.

  ‘What?’ I remembered where I had left the letter, in the pocket of the raincoat I used for a dressing-gown, and I wondered if my mother was snooping round reading it.

  ‘Come on – letter,’ said Arthur, clicking his fingers.

  ‘I haven't got it with me.’

  ‘No, thought not. I'll believe it when I see it.’

  ‘All right, you wait till next week,’ I said, trying hard to get into the spirit of jocular injured innocence, but succeeding only in the injured innocence.