by Jo Brand
Martha had been at her mum and dad’s a few weeks before to impart the news of her soon-to-be-visible illegitimate child, so her cushion-shaped tummy wasn’t a surprise to her mother, but Pat Harris chose to tackle difficult situations by pretending they didn’t exist, so she hadn’t even mentioned it yet. Martha wasn’t too bothered about this huge abyss in mother-daughter communication, because the sort of upbringing she’d had precluded mentioning periods without someone fainting. So, the two of them sat there for the evening talking politely like ladies at a church coffee morning, until Martha made up a bed for her mother with the cleanest-looking sheets she could find and heaved a sigh of relief as her mother disappeared for the night into the room she used as an office. It was only nine thirty. Martha still hadn’t got over that teenage wonderment of people who can go to bed before midnight and consider it normal.
Sarah phoned at about ten, having got rid of Billy either in the bath or down the off-licence. It was a couple of weeks since the incident of the slap. Given the current crisis, it was of course impossible for Sarah to phone while he was in earshot in case she had to relate, second by nail-biting second, some recent incident between the two of them. Martha found her calmer and more back to her old self and under-exaggerating like a holiday rep.
‘Yep,’ said Sarah, ‘I think I overreacted the other day. I mean, it wasn’t really even a slap. It was a tap. Don’t hold it against him, will you, Mart?’
‘I’m not sure I could help it,’ said Martha.
‘Oh, please. For me?’ There was a desperate girliness in Sarah’s voice.
‘I’ll try,’ said Martha, unconvincingly.
Martha wished she’d talked Sarah into ditching Billy and his flying fists, but instead she dialled Flower’s number to compare notes.
‘What do you reckon?’ she asked Flower.
‘Dunno, really,’ said Flower, who was tired, irritable and not a little unsympathetic and temporarily floating outside her stereotype of a nice friendly hippy. There was the minutest of throat-clearings during a pause.
‘Charlie!’ said Flower. ‘Get off the fucking extension.’
Charlie was Flower’s bloke, a library assistant at the LSE who spent his spare time protesting about what an incredible mess the planet is in and how horrible most people are. Unfortunately, more by chance than design, because he was always in the thick of some sweaty, angry protest, he tended to meet quite a lot of horrible people, namely policemen who wanted to take their frustrations out on his unwashed head and assorted anarchists who saw every protest as an opportunity to rearrange a policeman’s face into the shape of a piece of steak … unusual for vegetarians. Charlie, despite his laidback nature, was insanely jealous of Flower’s every contact with the world and he attempted to monitor calls … as if Flower would phone her lover while Charlie was at home wandering about. Flower wanted to ask him who on earth would be interested in a six-foot-tall, vulture-nosed, failed stand-up comic and part-time social worker, but was aware that if he cottoned onto her sense of low self-esteem, he might bugger off too. One thing Flower had learned was that if you pretended you thought you were great and normal, nine times out of ten, people believed it. So that was what she tried to do. She often thought of Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe and marvelled at how these women could hate themselves, although she knew intellectually that it was possible, despite the fact that Sarah maintained steadfastly that all the reports about low self-esteem were a mistake and someone who could shop like Diana couldn’t possibly be unhappy in any way.
Another knock on the door startled Martha just as she was telling Flower about her day at work, and Flower agreed, as a safety measure, to stay on the phone while Martha went to the door, and then call the police if she didn’t come back or heard blood-curdling screams. Martha herself knew that as the walls in the estate were fag-paper thin, any noises of violence would be heard, but ignored. In order to attract someone’s attention, you had to put on a record really loud, as that would bring the neighbours down on you like big, badly-dressed locusts.
Just before Martha put the receiver down on the table, Flower said she didn’t think she could stand to hear her being murdered, as if it was almost certain to happen, and then Charlie chipped in and said he’d listen for her, and Flower screeched at him and an argument started. So as the knocking got louder and more insistent, Martha left them at it, thinking they wouldn’t even notice if a twenty-minute excavation of her innards took place. She put the chain across the door and opened it.
The two-inch crack revealed a snarling Rev Brian with what looked like some dog poo on his face. Still, it made a change from the snuff that dribbled out of his nose and went unnoticed only by him.
‘Is your mother here?’ he shouted.
‘No,’ Martha experimented. This didn’t wash, of course.
‘Don’t lie, Martha,’ he said. ‘I’ve been to Mary’s, she wasn’t there, and let’s be honest, the silly cow hasn’t got the gumption to go anywhere else.’
Martha wondered, as she had on numerous occasions, if men of the cloth were allowed to behave like this, and resolved to grass her father up with an impassioned speech at the General Synod. Something she’d read recently in the Sunday paper came back to her, a simplistic analysis of Freudian theory in one sentence, which proposed that men spend their lives trying to escape from their mother and women spend their lives trying to attract their father’s attention.
Christ, how wrong can they be, she thought. She sensed someone behind her. It was her mum in her favourite dressing-gown.
‘Pat,’ said the Rev Brian, through the crack in the door.
‘Come home with me at once..
‘I will not,’ retorted Pat, quite defiantly Martha thought.
But just as she turned to congratulate her mother on her stand, the words, ‘Oh all right then,’ sailed past her towards her father.
‘Mum,’ she said, as imploringly as she could without the Rev Brian cracking on that she was trying to take her mother’s side.
‘No, dear, I’ve made up my mind,’ said her mother.
And five minutes later, she was dressed, with her travelling case packed. The Reverend Brian looked smug. Martha felt depressed.
Then Pat Harris walked out of the flat door, banged the Rev on the nose with a spoon, and went straight back in. It was a dessert spoon, Martha noticed. Perhaps the only piece of information she had retained from domestic science lessons.
The Rev Brian yelped, backed off and disappeared into the gloom. He walked towards his car with a thunderous expression which should have told the Big Issue seller on his way home to give him a wide berth, but no. A man with a dog collar was too hard to resist; at which point the seller felt and smelled a huge, slightly cheesy hand being pushed into his face and found himself sitting down in the gutter. So much for the Good Samaritan, he thought.
Arriving at his fifteen-year-old Rover, the Rev Brian found it daubed with words which, when witnessed the next morning in the village, gave some of the residents quite a turn. The Rev Brian had presided over the parish for some thirty years now, although ‘scared the shit out of it’ might have been more accurate, and no one was surprised to see those sort of feelings expressed towards him.
Martha congratulated her mum and wondered whether she had found the little bottle of vodka she kept in her desk. Being a mother, Pat had naturally honed her ability to dig up drugs, sexual paraphernalia and booze. When she sobered up, things might be very different.
‘We won’t talk any more tonight,’ said Martha. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Her mother padded off again. Martha cursorily flicked through the TV channels and, finding only the suicide-inducing crap that passed for late-night telly, flicked it off and sat thinking in the semi-darkness. She always left the big light off in her sitting room, as she only had lace curtains which became see-through at night and fuelled her fantasies about being watched by an army of self-abusing, frustrated old sex-offenders.
Graduall
y, she became aware of a tiny, yet angry noise, like a mosquito, and realised it was coming from the phone receiver. It was Flower, nearly hoarse with screaming. It was difficult to make out what she was trying to say, and Martha didn’t need to bother because that very second, an over-ambitious, slightly hyped-up and very irritable rookie policeman kicked her door in.
Flower had always wanted to express herself artistically in some way, and being a grungy old hippy had originally intended to do juggling or stilt-walking, until it began to dawn on her how brain-fragmentingly dull it was and she had a vision of the future in which an audience tried to gnaw off its own toes while sitting through her routine.
In the end, she had plumped for stand-up comedy, her reckoning being that it involved the least amount of work for the most amount of money. She also thought it was crap that people considered stand-ups brave in some way. All right, so verbal humiliation from a sadistic member of the audience was always a possibility, but Flower thought there were far worse things. Her approach was pragmatic. She knew, given her height and general oddness, that she would be heckled by people in the audience and so she had attempted to anticipate every type of heckle she could possibly receive and have an answer ready for it. Unfortunately, this was not as easy as she had first thought. So, in her book of anticipatory put-downs, there ranged such possible replies as, ‘Please don’t be horrible to me, I’ve got a medical condition,’ or, ‘Why don’t you fuck off,’ both of which she knew she needed to improve on. The problem with humanity in all its glorious unpredictability, was that it kept coming up with heckles that she couldn’t anticipate and which crumbled her comic resolve.
Flower was at the stage where she had maybe ten unpaid five-minute slots under her belt and was trying to persuade a number of equally frustrated male comics, who had decided the only way they could make it in comedy was to run their own clubs, to give her a paid gig. Many of the problems she had were associated with Charlie sitting at the back of every gig and threatening to assault the heckler before Flower even had a chance to try out her put-down.
Flower had tried to redirect Charlie’s energies in a more fruitful way by asking him to help her write put-downs, and there hadn’t been an incident for some weeks now. An additional string to Flower’s comedy bow was that she was a social worker. Social workers are desperately unpopular, because the decisions they make can never be tested, unlike doctors who, if someone dies, just get all their mates to say it wasn’t their fault. Flower worked in a residential home for people with learning difficulties, although the children who lived in the street in which the home was situated still preferred to address them as ‘mongs’, assuming that this word shouted very loudly at the group when they walked down the street was extremely funny.
Flower had begun to hone her put-down technique on these little bastards without even realising it, and her latest sharp-tongued assault, she believed proudly, had left a twelve year old in tears. This was less to do with would you like it if someone in your family had learning difficulties, tosser?’ and more to do with Charlie’s surreptitious clip round the ear as he walked past him.
Flower had received an irate phone call from Martha after the police raid débâcle and had had to apologise several times in five minutes for calling in the Old Bill. She couldn’t help herself, she explained, as the Rev Brian’s voice sounded very frightening relayed down a phone line and when she heard his reaction to being hit on the nose by his wife, she decided to call the police, who were constantly on the alert as far as Martha’s estate was concerned because there was often trouble there.
According to Martha, a group of hyped-up young policemen had destroyed her door and been pretty pissed off when they discovered there was only Martha and her mum inside. Martha had offered them a cup of tea, but taking in the state of her flat and Pat in a dressing-gown with the Ten Commandments printed on it, they withdrew swiftly, making a mental note that any trouble there in the future was likely to be a false alarm.
Coincidentally, earlier in the week, Flower had taken the liberty of contacting the police anonymously to find out what would happen if she called upon them in the future to sort out the Billy and Sarah situation.
Police operator: ‘Yes?’
Flower: ‘Um.’
Police operator (more impatiently and more unpleasantly than the first time, which had been quite unpleasant to start with): ‘Yes?’
Flower: ‘I’m phoning for some advice.’
Police operator: ‘About what?’
Flower: ‘I’d like to speak to someone about domestic violence.’
Police operator (with a sigh): ‘Hold on please, caller.’
There is silence on the line — thankfully, thinks Flower. At least we’ve not got ‘The Four Seasons’ or something grim out of the charts. Just good old wholesome silence for a change. In fact, come to think of it, the police could show themselves to be the possessors of a good bit of irony if they played something along the lines of ‘Fuck the Police’. Eventually, a gruff male voice containing as much empathy as that of Travis Bickle came on the line and immediately wound up Flower by saying, ‘Ye h?’
Flower: ‘I’ve got a friend who’s been hit by her boyfriend. Is there anything I can do?’
Gruff male voice: ‘Does she want to press charges?’
Flower: ‘No.’
Gruff male voice: ‘No?’
Flower: ‘Yes.’
Gruff male voice: ‘Eh?’
Flower: ‘Yes.’
Gruff male voice: ‘Yes what?’
Flower: ‘I can’t remember.’
Gruff male voice: ‘Call me when you can, love.’
Flower: ‘Oh right. Thank you for your help.’
This last sentence was spoken into dead air, although of course Charlie was on the extension, but he couldn’t say anything to Flower because he wasn’t meant to be there. He wondered whether Flower was talking about herself. He tried to approach the topic several times after the call, but Flower’s mind was elsewhere as she had a booking coming up. She was doing another five minutes at a small comedy club in East London which offered a try-out night for all new acts and was known by the other more experienced comics on the circuit as Death Valley, because you couldn’t make that audience laugh if you paid them. And so a succession of unsuspecting baby comics flayed themselves, totally unaware that they were pissing in the wind in front of an audience who wouldn’t have been out of place at a gangland funeral.
That night, Martha, Sarah and Billy had come down to give Flower ‘some support’, although what support a girlfriend-beater who had a closer relationship with his computer than his girlfriend could give Flower it was difficult to say.
That night on the bill there were the normal no-hopers and budding comic geniuses who hadn’t yet descended into the pondlife where they would naturally settle in five years ‘time.
On the bill was ‘Muff Diva’, a cheerful lesbian who mixed great opera arias with rants about castrating men:
‘Evening, women and complete fucking arseholes …’
Then there was ‘Edie Azzard’, a female version of a certain very successful stand-up:
‘Hi, hi! What would it be like if a horse could open a bank account …?‘
And finally ‘Dick Knob’, whose comedy heroes included various sex-offenders and murderers. Dick Knob was quite a scary character whose friends had evaporated, given his propensity for trying out his act on them, since it involved a lot of spitting and occasional physical violence:
‘I was holding this girl down on the floor earlier tonight …’
Five years later, an interested observer would have found Muff Diva in a steady relationship with a male schoolteacher in Sussex and working as a sports mistress; Edie Azzard married with three kids to the timpanist in an orchestra and going slightly insane at home while her husband toured the world; and Dick Knob presenting his own TV show in Australia and being fêted by his peers.
Flower was on third, and the audience was thin. Her
supporters included a couple of girls from her netball team who never went out in the week and therefore were quite excited. There was a group of blokes who looked much worse than they were, as groups of blokes invariably do, a couple of friends who had wandered in looking for a drink, Muff Diva’s mum and Edie Azzard’s boyfriend, who was the only person in the world who had any faith in Edie’s comedy.
Charlie was stalking round the back of the room waiting for someone to start on Flower as she stepped onto the stage. The smattering of applause she received wasn’t encouraging and although the group of lads weren’t child-killers, they had had a few bevvies and felt it was their duty to start on her.
‘What’s the weather like up there?’ ventured the group wag, as Charlie pulled him backwards off his chair.
‘Charlie, for Christ’s sake!’ shouted Flower. ‘Leave him alone, will you.’ She took advantage of the moment to launch into her longest speech ever.
‘Lookatyouyoulooklikeabloodyrescuedogwhothehelldoyouthinkyouaretryingtoprotectmelikesomewankymedievalknightwithaweirdsenseofloyaltyletmestandonmyowntwofeetorwe’refinishedandstoplisteningtomycallsyouarseholeand …‘
This was a bit of a departure from Flower’s normal material which was about recycling and the ozone layer, and the audience loved it because it seemed so ‘real’. Charlie was taken aback by the applause and cheering which accompanied Flower’s rant and, rather than taking in what she said, started to plan her new act.
In the dressing-room afterwards — well, not so much a dressing-room, more a small kitchen which smelled of rotting vegetables and dirty tights — Charlie went through a brief list with Flower. Then he went off to the toilet and as Flower, all alone for a moment, turned to walk out and rejoin her group of friends, she found her face about two inches away from Billy’s, which had transformed itself from its normal resting expression of bad temper into snarling aggression with a side dish of spittle.
