Billy and Girl

by Deborah Levy

  For Jessica

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Billy

  Soon all the kids in England will be pushing up daisies.

  That’s what Girl says every night before I go to sleep. Girl is my sister and I’m scared of her. She’s seventeen years old and got ice in her veins. Tonight she reads me my rights.

  ‘Billy,’ she says in that voice like turps, ‘you have the right to complain about the weather. You have the right to promote Billy products when you’re famous. You have the right to help me find Mom and you have the right to tell me what happened to Dad. Which one is it to be?’

  Yesterday she bought me a present. A pair of stacked red trainers wrapped in folds of white tissue paper. She likes me to look like a baby gangster and I don’t mind, but now I have to pay for them. My sister pretends to be retarded sometimes so she doesn’t have to speak or react like other people do. Just as you think she is in Neverland, she suddenly springs on you with her white-trash fists.

  Girl was in love once. She was nice to me then and bought me a badminton set for us to play in the park. Love made her high enough to sing and jump and swipe the shuttlecock back to me with the toy racquet. Her sweetheart was called Prince. He bought me a water pistol and I shot myself in the ear, up the nostrils, in my heart, on the inside of my thigh, dying for the neighbourhood cats with their spacey eyes.

  ‘Which one are you going to choose, Billy?’ Girl’s black eyes always vacant, conveniently giving the impression she is braindamaged. I am in the womb of my mother who will later disappear without trace. ‘Don’t cry,’ Girl chides me, twisting her thin lips.

  I am in the womb of my mother. I hear car alarms go off and sometimes I hear my father. He says, ‘Hello, babykins. This is your daddy speaking. We are looking forward to meeting you, over and out.’ I hear cats purring and Girl shouting, ‘You’re late, brother. Come on out!’ I don’t want to be born. I’m never coming out. Dad tries again: ‘Hello, babykins, it’s your daddy here. Time to face the world like a man – look forward to meeting you, son. Over and out.’

  Mom used to stroke my head, babying me. I’d like to eat something with onions in ’em. Pizza or soup. Like Mom used to make before she disappeared. The night before she birthed me, she swam in shorty pyjamas and ate cinnamon buns. Life could have been amazing. We could have gone together to the video shop and bought ice cream, jelly beans and micro popping corn. We could have sat at home and watched a film, sprawled on the floor, stuffing ourselves.

  Girl says, ‘No, Billy, that is someone else’s memory. We never went to a video shop.’

  Yes, we did. When RoboCop says, ‘Stay out of trouble,’ I listen to him, but the trouble is in my head. It’s in my chest and the back of my neck. After I was born I howled the hospital down. I howled like the heart that had taken nine months to grow was going to splatter onto the silver stainless-steel tray the midwife was holding nearby just in case.

  I can see myself clearly as I was then. This is how I came to be Brother Billy in the English climate. I started life as a cell. The male and female chromosomes are fusing. I am two cells. Now I am a cluster of cells. Suddenly I am a tiny embryo embedded in Mom’s uterine wall. Four weeks old and I’m two millimetres long. I have the beginnings of a nervous system. No fingernails to chew yet. My hands and feet have ridges which will become fingers and toes. A spinal cord has begun to form. Ten weeks and my kidneys have started to produce urine. I weigh eight grams, like a little packet of mince. By the end of the third month I’ve grown a forehead, little snub nose and a chin. Watch out, family, cos my lips are beginning to move. I’m never coming out. Even to have a go at them. I’m not going to arrive. I wrinkle my forehead in preparation for sorrow and disgust. I’m learning how to swallow and breathe. Mom is being sick on Dad’s best Elvis-style shirt. Afterwards she guzzles salt and vinegar crisps helped by Girl who’s always got her sticky white fingers in the bag. Twelve weeks old and I can hear her sharp little teeth crunching crisps. I can hear Mom’s heartbeat. I can hear her blood whooshing. Mom is crying and Dad is crying. Girl just snivels. I can hear doors banging. Eighteen weeks old and I want to retire. That’s a long time to live in my book. I’ve had enough. No such bloody luck. Mom keeps on eating and I keep on growing. I’m sucking my fingers in fucking dread. Oh God. I can taste something. Dad does his rocker’s croon. ‘Hell-oo, Babykins – we’re going to call you Bill-ee!’ Mom tells Dad she wants him to leave the house and never come back. My eyes are tight shut. I am six months inside Mom and if I was born now I might survive out of her body. I want a good-looking woman lawyer who loves children to take my case to the European Courts. I’ve got toenails. Mom tells Dad I’m pressing against her bladder and she got caught short. Dad laughs and strokes her belly. That’s when I open my eyelids and start to kick. Eight months and my testicles began to descend into the scrotum. I got hiccups. Why? Because Mom’s producing adrenalin. It’s flooding into the bloodstream. She’s frightened. Her fear is leaking hormones into me: I am in biochemical harmony with Mom and I got fear in me too. Now my fingernails have reached the fingertips. I’m going down now, head first. I got a lot of fat laid down ready for the world. Girl is singing something horrible. Mom’s got sweet stuff in her breasts waiting for me. Yep, for me. Billeeeeee! Thing is, I won’t be coming out to taste it. Oh, no. The weather will be cool out there, I know it. I don’t want to arrive. No No No No. Oh God, no! The midwife pats Mom’s forehead with a towel. ‘He’ll give in, don’t worry, love. He’s got the whole family to meet, hasn’t he?’

  Leave out the formal introductions, won’t you. I’m sure the family will make themselves known to me in their own good time.

  All normal infants are supposed to smile, aren’t they? Laughter is genetically coded into the body. I’m slapping my little white thighs and chortling already.

  Dad pulled into a petrol station. He put the pump into his mouth and got five pounds’ worth. Then he took out his pack of cigarettes and lit up. It was the biggest barbeque south London had ever seen. My father had never smoked before. This was his first and last cigarette and his suicide was the most splendid thing he ever did in his life. Girl and I have talked about it over and over. We decided he must have bought the pack from the newsagent near the Odeon. Coins cold in his hand. Black secret in his heart. Streatham’s lone cowboy without horse or bourbon, just an imagination never expressed until now. All the people coming out of the Esso shop clutching sausage rolls and cans of Fanta fell about screaming. A reporter from a newspaper offered Mom the chance to ‘open her heart to the world’. Afterwards she bought Girl a Cindy doll with long blond hair, a blue bikini, a little pearl necklace and a plastic Ferrari with silver wheels. We set fire to Cindy one night and watched her melt in front of our eyes. Then I went off to watch Looney Tunes outside the TV shop in the mall.

  After I was born Mom took special painkillers beca
use they cut her up at the hospital to pull me out. Remember I didn’t want to come out. They cut her and then told her to cross her heels like a cat. ‘Cross your heels like a cat,’ the midwife said, and yanked out the placenta with both hands. I lay on Mom’s breast and they stitched her while Dad cried in the corridor, eventually putting his head round the door and whispering, ‘All right, pet?’

  Why don’t they all do something about my ‘welcome to the world’ breakfast? Like a smorgasbord of analgesics and a razor blade?

  When Mom took me home she examined my fingernails first. ‘Look, Girl,’ she said, ‘they’ve grown right to the edge and over.’ So I would scratch my face with my sharp nails. Make little fists and raise them to my cheeks and scratch because it upset Mom and made her kiss me more. She’d sit in a blue bucket under the shower, the smell of lavender she had added to the water filling the steamy corridor where Girl and I sat waiting for her. ‘The lavender fields of Provence, Billy, that’s what you can smell,’ she shouted through the steam, and Girl and I watched the rain splash against windows, shivering in our second-hand T-shirts.

  After she had bathed her birth wounds and done her hair – Mom wore a beehive that Dad said was a bit like Priscilla Presley – she limped downstairs to make Girl breakfast: banana fritters. Girl wanted banana everything. Banana milkshakes, banana blancmange, banana curry. Mom was a bit nervous of Girl and catered to her compulsions for fear her daughter would weep those catastrophic tears of hers and never stop. When Girl cries the world slows down. It’s like her thin white body is going to snap in two because her grief is so total and infinite. In the days we used to go for drives into the country, if she didn’t see a horse she’d scream and shout as if somehow this was a bad omen and the sky was going to fall on her head. Dad would get desperate and point to a cow grazing in a field. ‘There’s a horsie, Girl, see?’ The lie seemed to comfort her, as if just naming the beast completed the magic circle in her ash-white head, and she would calm down and fall asleep.

  Girl has always invented games for me and her to play together. Her favourite used to be the Bolt Game. When she found a jar full of two-inch wrought-iron bolts in the cupboard under the stairs where all the nails and screws were kept, she showed them to me as if she had found gold in a cave. All day she brooded on what to do with them, hiding behind her fringe of ash-white hair when anyone dared speak to her. ‘It’s a pain game, Billy,’ she whispered when Mom went out of the room and the next thing I knew she had dragged me outside and was drawing a chalk line on the pavement which I had to stand behind. Then she measured twenty footsteps away from my line and drew another line which she stood behind. The idea was I had to keep completely still while she aimed the little bolts at my head. When they missed and got me on my shins or on my fingertips I was not allowed to cry. It was a pain game, after all, and success was measured by how stoic the person being hit could be. What would it be like never to feel pain? The day Girl broke the skin on my forehead and blood dripped down my face and onto my T-shirt, she screamed, ‘Don’t blink, Billy!’ and then hugged me for being well hard. When I pretended not to feel pain, I know that Girl felt it on my behalf. ‘You’re a hero,’ she said in her acid-drop voice, and licked the warm blood with her tongue while I pretended to meow like a kitten. Girl’s pain game prepared me for being bashed by Dad. Girl was training me up to receive pain. It was her way of protecting me. My very own personal pain trainer. The first time Dad smashed his fist into my kidneys I was seven years old. Mom was out and Girl was in. I hollered and my sister went very quiet. She smoked her first menthol cigarette then. Coughing but no words.

  A few weeks after Dad set fire to himself at the petrol station, Mom took me on a coach trip somewhere near Newcastle to meet my grandfather. That’s my mother’s father. She packed tuna sandwiches and a flask of tea and sat me on her knee in the coach even though I was ten years old, so she wouldn’t have to pay for another ticket. I swear I could smell rubber on the tarmac of the motorway and the lacquer in Mom’s hair and when we arrived we heard a fat man in a pub sing, ‘England! Awake! Awake! Awake!’ I sat under the little tartan blanket and scratched my eyelids, all the time remembering my dad whispering, ‘Hell-oo, babykins, it’s your father here, over and out,’ scratch scratch, and Mom catching my fingers tight in her hands. Grand-Dad talked in whispers to Mom, sometimes leaning over me with his watery eyes and beery breath, checking me out and looking away again.

  I swear by the time he had cracked three bad jokes, I thought, Jeez, I really need a fag.

  ‘You are my balaclava angel,’ Girl whispers to me as I hold up the mirror for her while she trims her fringe. No, I’m not. I’m a broken-hearted bastard. I want to be the bloke in the Haägen Dasz ads, with good-looking girls in their underwear pouring ice cream all over my big beautiful body. Instead I’m poor, white and stupid. I take my knife into cinemas and stab the velvet seats in the dark. That is my silent broadcast to the British nation. Pain is like lager and Elastoplast. It has made me who I am. There is a history to my pain. It is an experience in search of an explanation but I can’t remember what the experience was. There ain’t no ointments, surgery or insurance form going to heal my nerves and neurotransmitters. The making and unmaking of pain. Grief is like pain. Sometimes it’s hard to experience them apart. I still feel it along the pulses. You can excite pain by touching the parts that hurt. That is what we are going to do.

  At night I hide in small gardens outside here and count the TV aerials. I click the heels of my new red trainers three times, take a deep breath, hold my nose, and wait for the wind to take me somewhere better than this.

  Chapter 2

  Girl

  Why did the chicken cross the road? Because its mom disappeared and its dad set fire to himself. What that skunk Billy doesn’t understand is that pain is not a riddle. It’s a mystery because we lack crucial information. Billy’s skin is blue. In all weathers. Indoors and outdoors. Blue like the soil on Jupiter probably is. If they ever put Billy into a spaceship and spin him up to the planets, I know he’ll feel at home so long as he can take the TV and a stash of popcorn with him. I bought him a cowboy shirt to keep him warm. It’s got pearl buttons and an extra one sewn inside the cuff in case. Billy always checks the emergency button is still there when he puts it on. It comforts him just about more than anything else. He wants an emergency button for everything: to get out of nightmares, to call for help when the lift gets stuck, to get out of boring conversations.

  Got a tattoo inked into his scrawny upper arm. An old-fashioned one like some virgin boy sailor who called men ‘sir’ and choked over his first Lucky Strike in a foreign bar full of hookers. I mean, I can’t believe he had that dopey tattoo done like all the other fat blokes in the world. It’s an anchor entwined with roses and doves. It says Mother, of course.

  I don’t know why my mother called me Girl.

  Sometimes I think she was just too lazy or too depressed to bother calling me by my proper name, Louise. So there are two of me: one is named, the other unnamed. Louise is a secret. No one knows about the Louise part of me. Girl stuck and that’s how it’s always been. Louise is England’s invisible citizen and when I read statistics about how many people live in this country, I always add one more: Louise.

  When I was seven, instead of learning the times tables off by heart I learnt the name of every single cleaning product. My mother didn’t want a daughter, she wanted a slave girl. Instead of running through parks in little black patent shiny shoes and green ribbons on the end of my plaits like girls do in storybooks, I ran about the house in my knickers with a dustpan and brush. My hands were always in bowls of dirty water washing plates or tying knots in black bin liners full of rubbish. The day I sat my art O level at school all the other kids brought in bowls of fruit and vases of flowers to sketch in charcoal for the still-life exam. I brought in a J Cloth and an aerosol of furniture cleaner and signed my drawing ‘Girl’.

  Billy never had to lift a finger. Not only was my brothe
r given a name, but my mother used to dab lavender behind his ears even though he looked like a cocky little evangelist from the day they tore him out of her body at the hospital. Listen, I am no slave girl. I want to be a love diva.

  Thing is, no one has ever taught me how to kiss.

  Louise is waiting for her prince. He will find her, and gallop towards her on a horse. Every single horse in England must be counted so that Louise will recognise the steed when it comes towards her; she will point and say, ‘Of course I knew it was going to be that one, the fine white stallion I saw in Kent from the car window.’ They spoke silently to each other through the glass of the window and Louise knew she had chosen him and he was destined to find her. Girl says, ‘You really make me puke lizards, Louise. I’m going to cut your long hair with nail scissors. I’m going to cut the horse into steaks and eat it raw. I’m going to carve DANGER into your arm with glass. Listen: the spirit of the Horse and Prince have got into the hollow tubes of your nervous system. It’s a conspiracy. It’s a bacillus like tuberculosis, wheeze and cough it out of your body now!’ But Louise doesn’t listen. She’s waiting for the big day. The prince is Dad.

  Dad topped himself. He was a lorry driver and used to show me the big teddy bear he’d hung up in the cabin for good luck. After he died we had to throw away his clothes. The sleeves of his favourite Elvis-style shirt spread out like Christ on the cross. A hero. A saviour. A king. I’ve forgotten how he died. Oh God. Bring my father back to me, safe and sound. Give him back his face. Give him a salary so he can do a weekly shop. Let him buy me a snooker table for Christmas. Give him spirit (hope) so I might catch some of it. Give him electricity (light) so I might see him. Give him words so he might speak to me in my hour of need. Give him another chance so that he can spread honey on my white-bread sandwiches. Give him back with a brand-new skin cleansed of pain, but mostly give him back with a wad of tenners in his back pocket, because that will make him happiest and he can drink a pint without fear in his heart. A poor man is wrapped in pain.