I walked with my suitcase, following the pitch-pocked channels in the road where the tramlines had been. I was beginning to feel like a man made entirely of sawdust. I tried to get back to Ambrosia but none of it would click and I had nothing but hate for anybody. I fired off the repeater gun at all the people who knew my secrets, but none of the secrets really mattered, they were like dead wounds with the bandages falling off. I started to get clear, frightening thoughts. Nine pounds. Less the fare, call it seven. Seven pounds. If I can get a room for two pounds ten a week, that's two weeks and a quid a week for food. I can always get a job of some kind, maybe washing-up. I began to imagine myself in the tradition of American writers, driving lorries, sweeping up, South American revolution, soda jerk, newspaper boy. Then the No. 1 thinking switched off, this time at the mains. I knew that it would probably be a job as a clerk, in an office, but by myself, by myself. No Stamps, no Shadracks. I could be an eccentric. The surly one, the man with the past. I began to sing. ‘They called the bastard Stephen, they called the bastard Stephen, they called the bastard Stephen, cos that was the name of the ink.’
Saturday night was over and done with. Along Infirmary Street a low wind caught and held a sheet of brown paper and wrapped it round a lamp-post. I could hear cars whining up Houghtondale Hill two miles away. One or two rashly-hired taxis, piled high with people splitting the fare, ran past me on their way to the Strad Lee housing estate, and I caught the idiot murmur of their radios instructing the drivers as they passed. The late bus went by, looking as though it was the last bus that would ever run again anywhere, its occupants reading the Empire News under the blue glare. A dog padded across the road. A man stamped home in his raincoat and I knew that he was counting the lamp-posts to get there quicker. The pavement was dry and hollow, here and there etched with the trickle of long-stale urine. The streets were cold and the girls on the posters were grinning in their sleep.
I walked like a ghost down Moorgate, the suitcase making red ridges on my hand and turning into loot at every sight of a policeman. I turned into Bull Ring, dodging the slow-moving road-sweeper vans emerging like snails from the cleansing department and leaving their trickling smear along the gutters. I walked across Bull Ring into New Station.
The station was ablaze with cold, white light. The booking hall was deserted except for a fleet of electric trollies piled high with newspaper parcels. The last Harrogate diesel was just pulling sleekly away from platform two.
The inquiry office was closed. I walked up to the roller-indicator where the trains were listed: 1.05 Wakefield, Doncaster; 1.35 Leeds (City), Derby, Kettering, London (St Pancras); 1.50 Selby, Market Weighton, Bridlington, Filey, Scarborough. There were no other trains to London that night. All the windows but one at the ticket office were boarded up. I waited under A – G until a tired man in his shirt-sleeves appeared, and I bought a single second-class to St Pancras. It cost thirty-five shillings. I looked up at the big station clock. It was ten minutes to one.
Below the ticket office was the buffet and main waiting-room. The buffet end was closed, its counter still lined with thick cups and the floor littered with crusts of bread, but there were about a dozen people still in the waiting-room, most of them asleep with their feet up on the scratched tubular chairs or their heads down on the rockety tables, among the flattened straws and empty lemon-squash cartons. I went in and stood by the door, under one of the large, empty-looking pictures of fields and hills that lined the walls. A few people were awake: half a dozen soldiers, all in civies, going home on leave, three old prostitutes, a man in a large black coat. I was sleepy, recognizing everything about five seconds after it happened. I did not see Rita, or Stamp, until I had settled down on my suitcase and was lighting a cigarette.
They did not see me either. Stamp, savouring the dregs of his dull, drunken evening, was leaning against one of the gilded pillars that separated the waiting-room from the buffet, sweating and muttering to himself. Rita was pulling ineffectively at his arm, like a tired wife trying to get her husband out of the pub. ‘Come on, they're all looking at you,’ I heard her say impatiently. She stood indecisively and then let go of his arm and said, obviously not for the first time: ‘Oh, well I'm going, you can look after yourself.’ Stamp, lost in the biley swamps of his own suffering, gripped the pillar for support and comfort, retched, swallowed, and then, in his thin and watery way, was sick all over the floor. Rita tutted and phewed and looked rapidly from side to side to find sympathy for her own predicament. She walked a few steps away and turned her back, standing with a formal casualness, pretending not to be anything to do with Stamp. A few of the sleeping people stirred. One of them half-woke.
‘Christ sake, shift outside if you wanna spew!’
Some of those who were already awake began tittering. One of the soldiers imitated a man in the toils of sickness. ‘Wyyach!’ Stamp, clawing at the air, reeling and watery-eyed, caught some kind of hazy glimpse of me sitting in the corner, watching him. The image passed straight through into his subconscious and he peered at me without recognition, fixing his eyes on me only as an object while he strained and sweated and gasped for air.
The man in the big black coat, red-faced and beery in his own right, was enjoying it all. For the benefit of the soldiers he called: ‘Get that man in the guard-house! c.o.'s p'rade ‘morrow morning. Hat off, left right left right left right HALT!’ One or two of the soldiers grinned weakly; the one sitting next to me muttered: ‘He wants to get back in the effing army if he's so effing keen.’
Stamp, mopping grimly at his damp forehead, staggered to the wall and sat down on the floor under a picture of Lake Windermere, head down like a sleeping Mexican. Rita walked over and began plucking at him again, pleading: ‘Come on, then. You shouldn't drink and then you wouldn't be like this.’
In the middle of the room, the tableau changed. The three old prostitutes were haggling with a half-drunk, fair-haired lad who had just come in. ‘Well do you want her, then? You should have said. She doesn't care, one way or t' other.’ They were all about fifty years old, and they did not look like prostitutes, more like housewives who baked loaves. They talked like mothers anxious to please their grown-up sons with a good tea. ‘Well get a taxi and take her home then. She'll take fifteen shillings, she doesn't care, she doesn't want to skin you.’
The soldiers next to me were muttering. ‘He must be hard up for it, they look like three old grandmothers.’
‘Three old grandmothers, bet they'll be getting their pensions in the morning!’
‘Ha! Be funny if one of 'em pegged out on the job. Three dirty old grandmothers.’
It was wit to the taste of Stamp, but Stamp saw nothing of what was going on around him. He had got up and was leaning over his pillar again, slavering into the thin green mess which he had padded about the floor with his sick-speckled shoes.
‘Wyyach!’ went one of the soldiers.
‘That time me and Jacko got them German drinks. Wyyach!’
I got up and walked to the other side of the waiting-room, skirting round Stamp in a broad arc. As soon as Rita saw me I regretted that I had moved.
‘Look what's crawled out of the cheese!' she said, neither raising nor lowering her voice. She was wearing a blue swagger coat over her tight red dress. The silver cross was no longer round her neck.
‘I should think some people ought to crawl back into the cheese,’ I said, nodding towards Stamp.
‘Oo, where's yer rubber halo?’ jeered Rita. We looked at each other, or at least I looked at her. Rita had a habit of looking at nothing, her eyes glazing over with a sort of gormless preoccupation.
‘What happened to the Witch?’ I said.
She screwed her face up into an ugly scowl. ‘Who?’
‘Barbara. Her you were talking to in the Roxy.’
‘Don't know, don't care,’ said Rita.
‘Did she say anything?’
‘Ask no questions and you'll get no lies told,’ she said in the same level voi
ce.
‘I bet she got that cross out of you,’ I said recklessly. ‘Hope you didn't give her the ring back, did you?’
Rita's voice suddenly took on the same pitch and colour as the voices of the three old prostitutes still haggling away in the middle of the room:
‘You what? Do you think I'm daft, or what? It might be her cross, but you gave that ring to me!’
I looked around, but nobody was listening.
‘I know, only it's a bit of a mix-up,’ I said. ‘You see, I thought Barbara had broke the engagement off –’
‘Yer, well you've another think coming if you think I'm as daft as she is! You gave that ring to me, in front of a witness.’
‘How do you mean, what's witnesses got to do with it?’
Rita stared at me, thin-lipped like all the people I had known that day. She made as if to speak twice and then, spitting the words out with such force that her head shook, she said in the lowest range of her coarse voice:
‘You're just rotten, aren't you?’
I looked wildly across the room to my suitcase, and from my suitcase to the door, planning the shortest route out into the booking hall.
‘Y'are! You're rotten! All through! I've met some people in my time but of all the lying, scheming – Anyway, you gave that ring to me!’
I said quietly and urgently: ‘Look, nobody's asking for the ring. You can have it–’
‘Don't talk to me, you rotten get!’ Rita's voice was rising with each word, and even the prostitutes were beginning to stare. ‘Get back to 'er! You rotten get! You rotten, lying get! Gar, you think you're summat, don't you? But you're nowt! You miserable, lying, rotten, stinking get!’
White-faced, I turned my back on her and walked quickly towards my suitcase, skidding and almost losing my balance where Stamp had been sick on the floor. ‘You think you're it but you're shit! ’ shouted Rita. One of the soldiers caught my eye and jerked his head up, raising his eyes and going: ‘Cuh!’ I grabbed my suitcase blindly and made for the door. Two railway policemen walked into the waiting-room, looking ponderously about them, and Rita shut up. One of them walked over to where Stamp was leaning helplessly against the pillar and began talking to him in a low, dangerous voice.
The man in the black coat called: ‘Two men, buckets, mops. Floor cleaned. 'Port to me when you've finished. Double!’ I slid out of the waiting-room and stood irresolutely in the booking hall, still shaken.
It was just on one o'clock. I stood contemplating the gigantic advertisement for Ovaltine that filled one whole end of the booking hall. Running my eyes down the wall, I began to count the loaded parcel trolleys that stood around the station. I got up to nineteen, and then the waiting-room door opened again and one of the policemen came out, helping Stamp towards the lavatory. Stamp saw me with his boiled, steaming eyes and muttered through the spit on his face: ‘Know somethn bou’ you, Fisher. I saw you. Wai' Monday, you jus' wai'.’ The policeman led him off, as he muttered again: ‘Wai' Monday.’
I had lost my place among the parcel trolleys. I began counting the tiles on the dirty, unwashed floor of the station. I counted them in a line, screwing up my eyes, and numbering each tile only with great difficulty after I had passed twenty. Raising my head slightly I saw a pair of heels by the one window of the ticket office that was still open. I opened my eyes again and looked, and there was no mistaking the casual black skirt, the green suède jacket, and the unkempt hair. Liz was just turning away from the ticket office as I picked up my case and began to stumble towards her, walking drunkenly in the manner of Stamp being led off to the lavatory.
She saw me just as she was turning off to make for the platform where the Doncaster train was waiting. I waved, and she came towards me. I flapped my hand again, airily.
‘Goin' London,’ I mumbled, grabbing her arm and lurching about in front of her. ‘You goin' London? I'm goin' London. Go' catch a train. Goin' London.’
‘So you keep saying,’ said Liz, beaming comfortably.
‘You come London, me. Goin’ London. Pla'form three, S'Pancra’, ge's all London.’
‘Where did you get it?’ said Liz, still beaming as though she relished the whole thing.
‘Where ge' wha'?’
‘The booze. Or did you find some little dive to go to after you so mysteriously disappeared?’
‘Go’ go London,' I said. ‘Carn stay Stradanan. Go' go London.’
The station announcer, as inarticulate as myself, crackled out some message about the Doncaster train. Liz looked up at the station clock.
‘Well I'm not going to London. I've got to go to Doncaster –’
I took hold of her arm again, wagging my head heavily.
‘No, you come London. Need you London. Ge' nother ticket, come London.’
Liz gave me one of her long looks, and slowly took hold of me, inspecting me at arm's length.
‘Drop it,’ she said, stern behind the smile.
I said in my normal voice: ‘Drop what?’
‘That's better. You may be a brilliant script-writer, Billy, but you're a rotten actor.’
I put on an elaborate mock-sheepish act, standing on one foot, pulling out a grin and spreading my arms about.
‘All right,’ said Liz. ‘Now where did you get to tonight?’
‘Where did I get to? Where did you get to?’
Lovingly, in detail, we reconstructed the half-hour I had waited outside the Roxy, charting and justifying our movements, forgiving and understanding, and everything so simple. Liz had been having a long talk with the Witch, whom she had discovered weeping and slobbering and sick on the floor of the Ladies. Everything that could be told had been told.
‘Are you really going to London, or just pretending?’ said Liz.
I took the ticket out of my pocket and showed it to her.
She looked at me steadily and there was love in her dark eyes, the first time I had seen it, a liquid, far-reaching thing, too deep to touch.
‘I'm not coming, you know, Billy.’
‘Please.’
She shook her head. ‘I won't live with you, Billy.’
‘Come anyway,’ I said. ‘Live next door. Blimey, you've been everywhere else, you might as well come and live in -’ I broke off as a suspicion crossed my mind. ‘Why are you going to Doncaster?’
She grinned again, in the frank manner that gave nothing away.
‘Oh, just – Doncaster,’ she said, shrugging amiably.
I said bluffly, in the man of the world voice: ‘Well whatever you want in Doncaster, they've got it in London. Yes? Yes?
She was shaking her head, smiling.
‘One condition,’ she said.
I closed my eyes tightly and smote my forehead, teetering on the brink of a decision. All the details of it were there, in a compact parcel of No. 1 thinking, from the registry-office ceremony to the Chelsea attic. All it needed was the decision.
‘And I wouldn't want the communal ring,’ said Liz. But I did not answer, and she knew that there was no answer.
A porter was rattling the gate at the entrance to the Doncaster platform. Liz picked up her bag, a small, well-worn grip. She regarded me steadily for a few seconds and, standing a foot in front of me, blew me a kiss.
‘Postcards?’ she said, whispering it.
‘Postcards,’ I said.
I struck the farewell attitude, legs apart, arms akimbo, the sad figure fading into silhouette as the train steams away. But she did not look back. The porter banged the gate shut and I saw Liz clamber into the last carriage after two soldiers. I watched the train disappear. I knew that she would already be in bright conversation, grinning engagingly at some item of army news.
It was twelve minutes past one. I picked up my suitcase and walked back towards the waiting-room. Rita, the three old prostitutes, and most of the others had gone, and there was sawdust on the floor where Stamp had been. Two soldiers slept on, their feet extended across a couple of chairs apiece. The man in the black coat was still the
re, but dozing.
I stood by the wall and, raising one leg, balanced the suitcase on my knee. I took out the top layer of calendars and began rooting about among the shirts and socks for more. I stacked the calendars on the tubular table beside me until I had got them all out. Then I closed the suitcase and pushed it under the table. I scooped the calendars up into two heavy parcels, one under each arm, and barged the door open with my back. I looked up and down the booking hall but there was nobody watching. There was a deep wire litter bin, labelled ‘Keep Your Borough Clean’. I bent over and tipped the calendars into it. The basket toppled slightly. I gathered up some newspapers from a nearby seat and stuffed them in on top of the calendars.
I turned to go and then, struck by a second thought, I felt in my pocket for the wad of invoices that I should have posted for the old man. I dropped those in the basket too. I found the letters from the Witch, and ripped them in pieces, scattering the bits in the litter bin and on the floor around it. I began going methodically through my pockets, discarding practically everything: the fragment of script for Danny Boon, the letter I had started to write to him, a couple of Stamp's passion pills, a cigarette packet. When I had finished I had nothing left but the note from Danny Boon, Liz's postcards, and my railway ticket. I walked back into the waiting-room and got my suitcase. It needed fourteen minutes before the London train was due to go.
Ambrosia came softly into my head, the beginning of it all, with the march-past and the one-armed soldiers and the flags. I muttered to myself, almost aloud: ‘Seventy-eight, ninety-six, a hundred and four, the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters.’ The No. 1 thinking fused into a panic-panorama with the No. 2 daymares and the quick sharp shafts of ordinary, level thought. I imagined myself as a modern clergyman, pipe-smoking, twinkling, arranging a contemporary funeral with Shadrack; but nasally he was saying, ‘It's vair vair unsatisfactory, vair unsa'sfactory I could not summon up my No. 1 mother, only the real one, with her pressed, depressed mouth and her petty frown. Seven pounds, seven pounds ten actually, get a room for thirty bob a week, call it three weeks, three quid left, half a crown a day, egg and chips one and threepence, cup of tea threepence, bus fares a tanner. He restoreth my soul, he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. I saw Liz in the Chelsea attic, and Rita whoring it in the streets outside, and the Witch as the reactionary Dr Grover's mistress. I tried hard to shut it down and find myself, myself, but not knowing what to do for characteristics. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
Billy Liar Page 17