by Jo Brand
‘Keep your very big nose out of mine and Sarah’s business, you overgrown piece of hippy scum,’ he snarled, ‘or you’ll regret it.’
Typically, the one time that Flower was really threatened, Charlie wasn’t there.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Flower, sounding like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.
Billy sneered like a bad actor, but with some real menace thrown in. ‘I know you’ve been thinking, you and that pregnant cow, of getting involved in what doesn’t concern you, but just forget it, or there’ll be a lot more violence.’
Suddenly his face broke into a warm smile. ‘Hiya, Charlie mate,’ he said, as Charlie came back into the room. ‘Better find Sarah, get her home. She’s got a long day tomorrow.’
He led Sarah away from the table as if she was five years old and Martha thought of suggesting he might like to get her some reins for those difficult times when his hands were full, but didn’t.
Flower hadn’t told Charlie about Sarah and Billy’s bit of domestic so she didn’t know how she could bring it up, considering it had moved onto a more serious level. And Charlie shouldn’t have been listening in to her conversation, so he couldn’t mention it to her. Flower grabbed Martha and took her aside.
‘Billy just threatened me,’ she said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Martha. ‘Threatened you about what?’
‘Well, I’m not really sure,’ said Flower, whose reporting skills weren’t terribly sharp. ‘He said that we shouldn’t poke our noses into his and Sarah’s business, but how could he know? I haven’t even told you yet!’
‘Told me what?’ said Martha.
‘Well,’ said Flower, ‘I phoned the police recently, because I just wanted to know where Sarah stood if Billy decided to cut up even rougher than he has done already.’
‘And?’ said Martha.
‘Well, they were totally unhelpful. I don’t know what I expected, but since they’ve got rape suites and all that sort of thing I somehow hoped that I might get some nice, floaty woman who sounded like a therapist and would listen patiently to my problems then give me a considered and useful answer.’
‘And you got the usual.’
‘Exactly. But how could Billy have known I was doing that?’
‘Lucky guess?’ said Martha.
Sarah and Billy had walked about half a mile towards the river before a cab went past and they managed to stop it. As they crossed Tower Bridge heading for Sarah’s flat, the argument, which had flared up like a small fire in a wastepaper bin, had become a raging house-destroying inferno by the time they got home.
‘Give us a fag,’ said Billy.
‘I haven’t got any,’ said Sarah. ‘We’d better stop at the garage.’
‘Why didn’t you get any earlier?’ said Billy. ‘It’s not like they’re something we don’t get very often.’
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry,’ she said, but thought, Well, why didn’t you get any, arsehole?
‘Sorry’s no good, is it? Can’t you just remember in future?’ Sarah giggled nervously and her thoughts started to escape from her head. ‘Perhaps you should remember,’ she said.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Billy. ‘I didn’t realise that I had to do all the fucking shopping as well as working all day.’
‘I work all day too.’
‘Oh, that’s a proper job, sitting at a desk saying “Hello, can I help you?” like some stupid parrot all day long, is it?’
Sarah calculated that Billy had had eight pints, so it probably wasn’t safe to push him any further. But she’d had six vodkas.
‘Yeh, but you could make a bit more effort to do … stuff.’ Her voice trailed off as she felt the almost palpable change in Billy’s mood and knew she should have just kept quiet. Billy looked tight-lipped out of the window and Sarah wished:
She was anywhere else except in a cab with him.
She didn’t love Billy.
She had done a karate course.
She still lived at home with her mum.
She had a gun.
Alcohol had never been invented.
She could be more like Martha.
She’d had her nails done today.
Billy could be more like Charlie and hit other people instead.
They stopped at the late-night garage to get cigarettes. Outside London, many garages stay open in the normal way all night, but Londoners are too criminal to be trusted with an actual open door; they have to use grilles like they do in New York. Tonight, every kind of person was queuing at the grille. Dope heads after Rizlas; young single mothers bored out of their skulls craving chocolate, having left their babies alone; a great big fat person who only ventured out at night and got enough of a hard time then from the group of clubbers buying water, and two boys on their way to burgle a house. Sarah joined the queue, while Billy sat like a thin, sulking Buddha in the cab. Normally, Sarah would have been too frightened to join this queue to hell, but given the mood Billy was in, she thought it might be safer.
The harassed Asian guy behind the counter was struggling under the weight of the single mother’s chocolate demands, going backwards and forwards with each new request rather than taking the whole order. Consequently, the mob outside became restive like a post-office queue on pension day, and started to shuffle and grumble. One of the burglar boys happened to have a personality that was constantly at boiling point. Londoners are familiar with these characters and give them a wide berth. The queue parted for him as he sauntered up to the counter to purchase his bits and pieces. Sarah, two vodkas short of a challenge, kept her mouth shut, but desperately wanted to kick him up the arse. She was soon back in the cab.
‘Did you get any chocolate?’ said Billy.
‘You didn’t ask,’ said Sarah.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. Do I have to actually bloody say everything I fucking want?’ shouted Billy, as though nonverbal communication was perfectly natural between them.
The cab driver, who had been listening to all this thought, Poor cow. Why doesn’t she find herself a decent fella? but didn’t say anything. It was something he regretted, along with the many other missed interventions into lives whose inevitable progress he had left untouched, because that’s what’s expected. The most he could do when the cab pulled up was try and communicate his fatherly concern in a look, which unfortunately came across to Sarah as a slightly pervy leer and made her recoil.
Once inside the flat, what passed for Billy’s public social niceties evaporated into thin air and his true face, the one only his mum had ever seen and which Sarah was getting to know rather too well these days, was revealed. Billy and Sarah had been together for two years now, and the protective veneer of romance which keeps bad behaviour at bay had long been scoured away. Normally this just causes the odd row or ongoing irritability, but sadly, in Billy’s case, it had opened a Pandora’s box of flying demons.
Much of Billy’s bad behaviour could be laid at the feet of his mother, who had brought him up to be a right little bastard. He was the only child of a couple in their thirties who had tried for many years to conceive and had eventually, to their disbelief, produced Billy. His mother wasn’t a bad person, but she was a big softie who found it impossible to deny her son anything because she couldn’t bear to see him upset. Billy’s father tried to assert some authority but he had failed. By Billy’s third birthday, a tantrum got him anything he wanted. Attempts by his father to intervene were rebuffed with such screaming that psychologists were consulted but their advice was rejected on the grounds that they were all weirdos who made perfectly normal children into miniature weirdos.
Billy didn’t like women. Even his mother got on his nerves. A quarter of the children in this country have fathers who are not actually their real fathers, but unfortunately, Billy’s dad could not even claim this privilege. Billy’s mum had hardly ever had sex with him, let alone anyone else.
Billy’s violence was unpredictable. Sarah had assumed that it would happen
tonight but it didn’t. He shouted at her a lot, called her a stupid cunt, and said her friends were a nightmare and she should find some decent people, although he wouldn’t mind giving Martha one if she wasn’t quite so bloated. Sarah listened to all this in a resigned fashion, knowing her response could either soothe or agitate Billy’s troubled waters.
One of the problems that occurs when boy meets girl is that we are not called upon to give a truthful relationship CV to each other. Although our real personalities eventually will out, it can be some time before we have a sense of what our partner is holding back. The problems surrounding the history of a new partner are tackled in magazines for teenage girls and women under the heading ‘previous partners’. Leaving aside a certain section of gay men who seem to have an inexhaustible appetite for sexual encounters, men don’t want to hear they are not taking on a virgin, and women don’t want to hear that they are. Apart from that, we explore very little of our partners’ previous. Computer dating is a very good example of how utterly shallow we are in terms of matching people up and it is luck rather than judgement that puts the occasional fortuitous pair together. It doesn’t actually matter a stuff that one person likes Country and Western and the other likes Easy Listening. Those sorts of differences can be ignored. But it does matter if one person is a bully and the other a winder-upper. If Winder-Upper is constantly niggling at Bully, Bully will explode and a pattern is set. The CV Billy never revealed to Sarah went something like this:
I never liked the opposite sex much, thinking they were a bit silly and stupid, but I liked having sex. I first hit a girl at school who was screeching and getting on my nerves. Her dad battered me to a pulp, which just made me more angry. My first serious girlfriend went off with another bloke, my second finished it when I pushed her and my third put up with me hitting her for three years before she left. I like Sarah, but she’s stupid like a lot of them, and if she steps out of line, I try to behave, but I can’t help myself.
I was fairly bright at school; my parents sent me to a private one where I always felt like the poor relation and never invited anyone back to my inadequate home. I got friendly with a group of boys whose trademark was defiance and I didn’t want to seem like a creep. So I failed most of my exams and ended up working in computers because it was not very demanding and I could sit back and do the minimum amount required. Also there weren’t too many women around to get on my tits and I could have a laugh with the blokes there. If Sarah ever kept a diary, she might have seen a pattern revealed of Billy’s true nature, and could probably have worked out, with the use of a computer programme, when the optimum time to get out would have been.
24 January
Meets Billy in a pub when out with Flower and Martha. Chatting to him. Flower and Martha making ‘He’s a wanker’ signs behind his head.
23 February
Bumps into Billy in same pub a month later. He’d been in there once in that time. Sarah had dragged either Martha or Flower in there a total of eleven times. Billy asks for Sarah’s phone number.
2 March
Billy phones Sarah and arranges to meet her. Sarah proudly points out to Flower and Martha that she hasn’t sat by the phone all this time like a wimp but has led a ‘normal’ life. She doesn’t tell them that when she is out she has diverted all calls from her land line to her mobile.
8 March
Billy and Sarah go out to the pub. He puts extra vodkas in her drink when he goes to the bar. She pours her drinks into a plant when he’s at the bar because she knows if she gets pissed, she’ll end up having sex with him.
She ends up having sex with him.
9 March to 10 September
Billy and Sarah conduct the initial stage of their relationship in a blur of happy feelings, laughing at daft things, playing games they will never play again, washing much more often and spraying themselves with a selection of chemicals, having uninhibited alcohol-fuelled sex a lot smattered with many orgasms and both Sarah’s anxieties and Billy’s grumpiness are kept at bay for many months.
10 September
Billy, irritable because he’s had a bad day, is tired and has had a row with someone on the Tube, pushes Sarah out of the way when she tries to show him a picture in a magazine of a sofa they might buy. Sarah bursts into tears and Billy walks out of the flat.
14 December
Billy has been at the firm’s Christmas party and comes home very drunk. He breaks two cups in the kitchen and kicks Sarah’s cat by accident. When she remonstrates with him, he slaps her round the face with a wet tea towel. She cries because it hurts and he laughs because he is so drunk and it’s a wet tea towel.
15 December
Billy cannot apologise enough; hung-over as hell he drags himself out to get flowers. Sarah is touched and forgives him. But when she tells him she has buggered up the video and taped Morse instead of a programme about the Jam, he tells her to shut the fuck up and leave him alone.
One spring day two years after they first met
Billy slaps Sarah harder than last time and she phones Martha and- Flower. He isn’t drunk.
Sarah crept round Billy for the night and things calmed down a bit. She was aware that in a breathy way, she was being a geisha, running round making him drinks and food, moving stuff nearer for him, finding the telly pages and keeping the peace. She could almost visualise herself in a basque, boop-boop-pe-doo-ing in and out of the room with a selection of tempting snacks and drinks. She kept quiet because she was in love with him in the psychotic sort of way that means you’ll put up with almost anything, and as she lay in bed that night, she tried to work out what being in love with him actually meant in her case. Did it mean she couldn’t envisage being with anyone else ever? No, it meant that he was nice most of the time, so that would have to bloody do. Martha had been sarcastic about her previous failed relationships — but were she and Flower laughing at her?
She woke up and realised Billy wasn’t there. She put on an old T-shirt and went out into the hall. She could see him silhouetted against the window.
‘What’s the matter, Billy?’
Martha to Flower 11.30 a.m.:
Martha: Have you spoken to Sarah today?
Flower: Yes, she sounded weird.
Martha: In what way?
Flower: Sort of stilted … a bit low.
Martha: It’s probably that dungeon she works in … they even have to write down when they go for a piss. They’ll be measuring the volume next and setting a minimum level.
Flower: It’s like when Charlie got arrested in Newbury. He had to piss in a pot in the cell.
Martha: Still, at least he had a pot to piss in. Sorry. Flower: Call her tonight when she gets home. She’s got a half-hour window before Bolshie Bollocks gets in.
Martha: Why can’t you call her?
Flower: Netball practice.
Martha: Speak to you later. Hello, Charlie.
Flower: No, he’s out … something in Suffolk coming up. They’re meeting in the park. How’s Lump?
Martha: Fine, moving about a lot.
Flower: Give Lump a kiss for me.
Martha: If I was that agile I’d get a job at the club blowing ping pong balls out of my … Bye.
Charlie to Flower 12.03 p.m.:
Charlie: Hello! Can you hear me? I’m on Dumbo’s mobile. Are you all right? Some fucking bastard farmer’s kicked me in the bollocks.
Flower: I can’t hear you … love you … talk to you later.
Martha to Sarah:
Martha: It’s me, are you all right?
Sarah: I don’t know really, yes I’m fine.
Martha: Is Billy being all right?
Sarah: Martha, he’s being absolutely fine, please don’t worry. Please, let’s just leave it … we’re all right now.
Martha: Are you sure?
Sarah: Yes, really. I’d tell you if there was a problem.
Martha: All right. Are you OK for Thursday night down the King’s Head?
Sarah: I don’t k
now … I’ll call you tomorrow, OK?
Martha: OK. Look after yourself, don’t let him—
Sarah: Yeh, all right, bye.
Flower to Coin Club 5.54 p.m.:
Flower: Hello, is that Martin?
Martin: Yeh.
Flower: I did your club recently and I just wondered whether you’re going to give me a booking.
Martin: Which one were you?
Flower: Tall, hippy-ish I suppose … Oh hang on, I’ve got a call waiting.
Charlie: Who are you talking to?
Flower: Get off the phone, Charlie, I’m talking to someone about work. Hello? Martin? That was Tim from Jesters in Croydon offering me a twenty-minute spot.
Martin: Oh well, all right then. Twenty-sixth of April.
Flower: Thank you.
Flower to Jesters in Croydon:
Ansaphone: Hello, this is the ansaphone for Jesters’, Croydon. There’s no one here right now. Please leave your name, phone number and the number of tickets you require. This weekend’s bill includes Dick Knob and Terry Hunter.
Flower: Hello, it’s Flower Gardener here. I did your new act night, three weeks ago. Please, please can I have a gig, it’s really important.
Billy to Ambulance Service 7.31 p.m.:
Billy: Can I have an ambulance, quick.
Operator: What’s the problem?
Billy: My girlfriend’s unconscious. She fell over, tripped … hit her head. Quick!
Operator: Address?
Billy: 17, Denbigh Mansions, Denbigh Road, SE 17.
Operator: On its way.
Charge Nurse, A & E to Martha, 10.23 p.m.:
Charge Nurse: Hello, can I speak to Martha Harris please.
