Billy Liar

by Keith Waterhouse

  I was humming as I went into the bathroom to fetch my toothbrush.

  The old man shouted up the stairs: ‘Do you hear? T'taxi's come!’

  I shouted: ‘All right! Just coming,’ and put out the light.

  13

  THE old man did not see the suitcase, and so there was no trouble in getting out of the house. The taxi-driver was one we knew slightly, a man who sometimes came round to Hillcrest to help on jobs. I leaned back against the spent and slithery leather-work, pretending he was a stranger. I clicked without real interest into the piece of No. 1 thinking I always reserved for taxis; my chauffeur-driven Bentley running through the home counties and stopping at the prosperous, half-timbered pub. ‘Have you eaten, Benson? Better put the car round the back and join me, hadn't you?’

  ‘What's up, then?’ said the real taxi-driver as we turned into Clogiron Lane. ‘Is somebody poorly?’

  ‘Yer, me grandma,’ I said. ‘She's had one o' them turns again.’

  ‘Well, you can expect it, can't yer? She's not getting any younger.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She's a grand old lass, though, i'n't she?’

  ‘Yer.’

  Stradhoughton Infirmary was a white Portland-stone building, rusting round the window-sills and mottled with the bleaching it had had from the so-called brackish air. In the light of the concrete lamps it looked even more like a madhouse than ever. We pulled up outside the scratched swing doors and I told the taxi to wait. I took the suitcase in with me. I was met by the dead smell of lavender polish; it was like breathing through a furry yellow duster. The portraits of aldermen and benefactors looked down over the deserted central hall. I went through the white door into the casualty department.

  It was busy in its late-night, sleep-walking way. On the high-backed benches a knot of women were joined in a litany of bad doctors, inadequate pensions, and leaky houses. They whiled away the time indignantly while their husbands had emergency operations or their children suffered. They were the same women, or seemed to be the same women, I had seen earlier in the New House, the ones who knew about life and death and all the rest of it. I no longer envied them. A man with his arm in a sling sat alone and perplexed, wondering why he had come. He was the one I warmed to. Over by the ambulance bay the porters looked as though they did not care about anything, sitting in their little glass office smoking Woodbines crooked in the hollow of their hands. They distended their necks and frowned and altered their mouths into an oblong shape to expel the smoke. A young char in spectacles swilled at the parquet floor. Nurses in white and purple held huddled conferences that were not to do with the dying. The women talked: ‘He put me on port wine.’

  I found my mother sitting alone in the corridor on a padded bench that had been ripped and sawed at with a knife until the grey stuffing spilled out like brains. I put down the suitcase and went over and stood in front of her. She looked up.

  ‘We looked all over,’ she said weakly, and cleared her throat.

  ‘Wher's me grandma?’

  She nodded towards the flapping doors where the corridor came to an end. ‘They've got that black doctor to her. She can't talk. We're just waiting.’ She spoke hoarsely, in a resigned way, yet at the same time excitedly. These were the headlines. I knew, for I had seen her lips moving, that she was already rehearsing the text of this eventful day, plucking at the details of it like pomegranate seeds and stringing them together in a long rosary that would be fingered on and off long after anyone had ceased to care. ‘We've been trying to get you since half past nine,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to come down with me.’

  ‘I know, my dad was saying,’ I said, trying to sound like his son. ‘He says she's badly this time.’

  My mother sucked in her cheeks and moistened her tongue ready for the first run of her long narrative.

  ‘She was all right again at four o'clock, just after you went out,’ she began. ‘She had a cup of tea at half past, when we had ours, but she wouldn't have any brown bread. Then she had a sleep. And she was all right at nine o'clock, when your father got back from the pub, because she woke up and asked him if he were putting t' television on. Then we were all just sitting watching television –’ (later she would add the name of the programme and of the singer and possibly of the song) – ‘when she just slumped forward in her chair. We thought she were having a fit, but no, she just gave a little jerk with her head, uh, like that there’ – she imitated the jerk, and searched with her magpie memory to see if there was some pin she had left unaccounted for in the first five minutes of my grandmother's dying. ‘Then she started to slaver. She were just like a baby. It was pitiful. Just like a baby, slavering and gasping for breath.

  ‘Anyway, your father said, if it isn't a fit, we'd better ring for Dr Morgan. So we waited five more minutes and she was still slavering, she wet four handkerchiefs through, them big handkerchiefs of your dad's, so I said “You'd better ring up and get t' doctor”.’

  The account droned on until we had covered every paving-stone on the way to the Infirmary. I was not listening but I knew all that she was saying; I responded, Mm, Mm, Mm, at every pause. I did not want the details of it, not every detail, and I began concentrating on objects in the corridor and thinking the wall, the wall, the ceiling, the ceiling, so that the things my mother was saying could ricochet off them and lose what force they had.

  ‘The last thing she said before they got her on t' stretcher was “Where's my Jack”. I had to think who she was talking about, then I remembered she must have meant your grandad. Only she always used to call him John. She never called him Jack, never. Then she said, “I love you Jack”’ – my mother had difficulty in pronouncing this word love. I had never heard her say it before, and it sounded strange on her lips. I tried to imagine it on the lips of the yellow woman on the other side of the swing doors, but it was impossible. I – love – you. My mother said it as though the word had just been invented, like Terylene.

  ‘Oh, before that she said, “What are you thinking about?” I think she must ha' been talking to your grandad.’ My mother stopped and took a long breath, the breath coming out in a staircase of sighing. ‘But you had to listen close to, to hear what she was saying. She could hardly speak, and by the time we got here she couldn't speak at all. She was just slavering.’

  She seemed to have finished. I had been trying on various expressions and by now I was searching feverishly for one that really belonged to me. I found it difficult to feel anything beyond indignation that my grandmother should be seen off with this gossiping commentary. Even as my mother was speaking, the phrases with which Arthur and I dissected the conversations around us kept slotting into my head like price tabs ringing up on a cash register. ‘Never use a preposition to end a sentence with.’ ‘I must ask you to not split infinitives.’ I felt disgust at myself but, when I shopped around for some deeper emotion, there was none. I had a nervous urge to laugh, and I found myself concentrating entirely on keeping my face adult and sad.

  My mother said: ‘They're a long time.’ I had no idea how long she had been here, in spite of the time-table she had given me. She stirred on the creaking couch and seemed to shake herself free of her drama. She turned to me, seeing me probably for the first time as her son and not only as a listener.

  ‘Well, you've got yourself into a fine mess, lad, haven't you?’ she said.

  I got up and stretched, elaborately, turning away from her.

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘I'm only grateful she knows nowt about it,’ my mother said. She was silent for a minute or so. It seemed to me that she did not want to discuss the subject but was pushing herself into it.

  ‘Why didn't you post that letter of mine?’

  ‘I did post it. I was telling me dad. I just wrote it out again, that's all.’ I had been working on the story since leaving the old man and got it into convincible shape, but I was tired and it no longer seemed to matter.

  ‘What did you want to write it out again
for?’

  ‘There were some mistakes in it. I just thought it would stand a better chance if it was better written, that's all.’ I was beginning to feel annoyed with her for picking at trivialities at a time like this.

  ‘Yes, well we can't all be Shakespeares, can we,’ she said, in a way that was supposed to shame me. She glanced down the corridor at my suitcase against the wall. She showed no surprise, and I knew that she must have noticed it already and decided to say nothing.

  ‘And what have you been saying to Arthur's mother about having a sister?’ she said in sharper tones.

  ‘Why, it was only a joke,’ I said, not even bothering to try and sound convincing. I did not know how she knew about Arthur's mother, and I did not care.

  ‘A joke, it sounds like a joke. And I thought you told me she'd broken her leg?’

  ‘I didn't know you knew Arthur's mother,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you don't know who I know and who I don't know, do you? If you want to know, she rang me up. And what did you do with the cardigan she gave you?’

  I remembered this. Arthur's mother had once given me a red cardigan for my imaginary sister. I had carted it around town all day and then left it on a bus.

  ‘Gave it to Barbara, thought I told you about it,’ I said.

  ‘You tell me nothing. You didn't tell me about giving her cheek outside t' cemetery this afternoon, did you? When you were with Barbara. Anyway, she's coming round tomorrow, when Barbara comes for her tea. So you've got a new cardigan to find.’

  I decided to speak. She had seen the suitcase, so she knew, but I decided to tell her.

  ‘I won't be here tomorrow,’ I said.

  My mother sat bolt upright and pursed her lips, pulling in any expression she might have had on her face. She could not disguise a look of restrained shock, as though I had suddenly struck her and she was trying not to show it.

  ‘I'd have gone already if it hadn't have been for me grandma,’ I said, as gently as I could.

  She looked at me, a long, sorrowing look. ‘If you're in trouble, Billy, it's not something you can leave behind you, you know,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘You put it in your suitcase and take it with you.’

  My mother was so little given to this kind of imagery that I wondered if she had got rush reports on the calendars in my suitcase.

  ‘Well, I'm still going,’ I said doggedly. ‘I told you I'm going and I'm going.’

  The swing doors opened softly. A nurse came padding along the corridor, walking like an actress. She stopped by my mother and said: ‘Mrs Fisher?’ in the tones of somebody trying to wake somebody else up from sleep. ‘Would you come this way?’ Infected by the mood of feigned solicitude, I stood up as my mother, the light of fear in her eyes, rose and walked slowly with the nurse through the swing doors. I sat down, suddenly tense and frightened. I said to myself, clenching my fists, Don't let's have any scenes, don't let's have any scenes, don't let's have any scenes. I wondered rapidly whether to go now, but I knew I would not. I began pawing the floor with embarrassment. I picked up an old newspaper that had been shoved down the back of the bench, and began to read aimlessly. ‘Three passengers on a Belfast plane recently were Mr GOOSE, Mr GANDER, and the Rev. Mr GOSLING. They did not know each other.’ Beneath this news item was a cartoon, of a little boy saying: ‘Can I see this gab that daddy says you have the gift of, Mrs Jones?’ I chucked the paper down and began walking from one side of the corridor to the other, heel to toe as though measuring out a cricket pitch. Don't let's have any scenes.

  It was only a few minutes before my mother came back, holding her handbag between her hands, her face marked with grief and dignity as she imagined it to be. She was helped as far as the doors by a grave-faced doctor, and it looked to me like some corny act on television. I could not help these thoughts. I prayed: Please, God, let me feel something. Let me feel something, only don't let's have any scenes.

  ‘Your grandma died at fourteen minutes past twelve,’ my mother said, as though making a formal announcement. I wanted to say: ‘I'm sorry’ or something, but anything I said would have sounded ridiculous. ‘I shall have to sit down,’ my mother said. I sat by her, legs apart, head bowed, staring down at my feet and counting the stains on my suède shoes. I examined what I was feeling and it was nothing, nothing.

  My mother was already in the luxury of reminiscing. ‘She would have wanted it this way,’ she said, a platitude so inept that I could only marvel at the clichés that she used like crutches to take her limping from one crisis to another. And at the same time I was relieved to hear her talk like this; I thought, They're as bad as I am, they don't feel it, they only say it. But I did not believe what I was telling myself.

  ‘Do you want to go in and see her?’ my mother said. I mumbled ‘No’, mingling shock and shame.

  She sighed, drawing on her gloves. ‘Well, we'll have to carry on as best we can,’ she said. She stared at the wall, moving her lips again. ‘Her last words were just “Jack, Jack, what are you thinking about”.’

  And she died with a slavered smile and not a genuine thought from anybody. No one had been capable of a genuine thought. All those women, who were supposed to know it all, all about life and death, they didn't know any more than I did.

  ‘Can we get a cup of tea, I've had nothing to eat since half past four,’ my mother said.

  ‘Yer, there's a canteen out in the waiting-room,’ I mumbled. I hovered about, pretending to help her up, and we walked down the corridor.

  ‘We shall have to ring up Mr Shadrack,’ my mother said. I had been fearing this, ever since I had heard that Gran was ill, and often in the past I had worked out how to get out of it if they ever wanted a Shadrack and Duxbury funeral for her.

  ‘You don't want to get them, you want to get the Co-op,’ I said.

  My mother, speaking as though she was ashamed, said: ‘Why, do they pay a divi?’ and it was as though her voice was being pulled back on a lead, like a dog.

  I said: ‘No, but they're better than blinking Shadrack and Duxbury's.’

  We were back in the hall of the casualty department. The canteen was still open. I went over to the steamy aluminium-ridged counter with the pale milky rings on it, and ordered sloppy tea in a thick mug marked SGI, Stradhoughton General Infirmary. I took the cup over to my mother and then went back and fetched my suitcase. I stood it almost in front of her and sat down. All the women had gone. There was only an old tramp in a dirty raincoat, his foot bandaged, sitting like a lost man in the corner.

  My mother put her cup on the floor, shaking her head. ‘I can't drink it.' She twisted her wedding ring.

  ‘What train are you supposed to be catching?’ she said.

  ‘I don't know, when there is one.’ And then, in the gentle voice: ‘I've got to go tonight, because I want to see Danny Boon on Monday morning.’

  My mother opened her handbag. ‘Well you haven't got any money, have you?’

  I said, flushing for the first time: ‘I've got a few pounds. I've been saving up.’ I was beginning to get embarrassed. I wanted to be away and finished with it all. I said: ‘You'd better be getting back. I've got a taxi waiting for you outside.’

  ‘I've got some papers to sign first,’ my mother said. She stared down at the cup of tea on the floor. ‘We don't say much,’ she said – a straight lie, for a start – ‘but we need you at home, lad.’

  The sudden editorial ‘we’ made me feel uncomfortable. ‘Well, I'll be coming home,’ I said. With a rush of generosity I added: ‘I'll just get fixed up with Danny Boon and then I'll come home next week-end.’

  She shook her head slightly from side to side, saying nothing.

  ‘Well, I'll have to go, because I don't know what time the train is,’ I said. ‘T’ taxi's just outside, when you're ready.’ I shuffled about in front of her, trying to say some words that I had practised for this moment, but I could not say them. I walked away slowly, trying to look as though I were reluctant to go. By the time I reached the whi
te door I was already thinking of Gran as an article in the Reader's Digest. ‘Ma Boothroyd said what she thought. Everyone feared her blunt tongue. Came the day when Ma Boothroyd had to go into hospital….’ Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

  I did not have the courage to turn round and look at my mother, but I knew that her face would be flawed and crumpled like an old balloon, and that for the first time she would be looking as though these things had really happened.

  14

  THE strange, poppy-like flowers seen nowhere else in the world were in full bloom in Ambrosia, or what was left of it. We had won the elections, and I was pressing forward with my visionary plan to build an entire city over the dunes on a gigantic wooden platform. The reactionary Dr Grover had got a commission set up to investigate me, but I knew for a fact that he had been bribed to put forward a rival plan for another city to the west, over the marshes. In the inner layers of No. 1 thinking, Grover got his way and the houses began to sink, seventy-one dead and fourteen unaccounted for. ‘We will rebuild,’ I announced in the Ambrosia Poppy. ‘We will build on the dunes.’ Now I was home on a visit to my parents, my full-dress uniform unbuttoned at the throat. The telephone rang, and I spoke rapidly in Ambrosian to one of my lieutenants. ‘Monay. D'cra d'njin, intomr nay nay Grover. D'cra Grover, n'jnin repost. Finis.’ My mother was impressed, but no, she was not impressed. How could she be, that one? I tried to fit in my No. 1 mother, but she was a piece from another jigsaw. I began to slide off into some hate thinking about my real mother and her clichés and her knitting, about my dead grandmother snickering ‘Good night’ at the television set and the old man, stolid and daft, pulling his faces and banging nails all over the garage. ‘Dad, I shall want the van. Don't ask questions. There may be people here. You don't know where I've gone or when I'm coming back. O.K.?’ I was sick and tired of it all, of it all.