Dinner at Billy's

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Vomiting man, pen on paper, 2021

 

Dinner at Billy's

 

 In which our hero goes to Billy's for dinner and is extremely sick...

 

This is another story about Billy.

I met him at the Prince of Wales and after we'd had a few we went round the corner to his flat for dinner. It sits to the back of some unprepossessing harled buildings, and you enter by passing between great grey wheelie bins. He served me Spaghetti Bolognese.  At least, that's what he called it.

There were two teenage children there. There were no conversations with them. They were fifteen and seventeen. I'd never met them before but I'd suspected they might be disagreeable and had hoped they wouldn't show.

 Both slouched menacingly in the kitchen while I ate, watching me, when they weren't obsessively prodding their smartphones. I remembered that one of them had recently been prosecuted for sticking a knife into another boy on the Edgware Road and occasionally would receive the attentions of a social worker. I wasn't sure which one it was and I thought it might be impolite to ask. Perhaps it was the one leaning against the wall, scratching his groin? Or it might have been the one with the peirced nostril and tatoos of an iron cross in a heart on one shoulder and the ying-yang sign on the other. 

There was also a dog of indeterminate breed. It took an immediate dislike to me, watching me and barking continually while I ate, the racket a matter of indifference to the household.

Even while eating, I began to feel quite sick. Not sick in the normal way that you might resonably expect to feel after eating dinner at Billy`s. I mean very sick indeed in the way you would feel tossed in a dinghy on mid-Atlantic in a tempest.  Ergo, projectile vomit and a deep sense of unease.

So Billy took  me to a hospital and I was laid up there for  four days. I fell in love with a nurse with unusually large feet, which were encased in gigantic white rubber clogs.  Never before had a nurse or someone with huge rubber encased feet captured my heart. Indeed, I think normally, the big feet would have put me right off: it's just not my thing: I don't write that to make others who have such preferences feel bad.

But in unusual circumstances things can be seen from fresh perpsectives. Registered Nurse Wendy had a brisk yet caring manner.  I lay watching with admiration and not a little jealousy how she busied herself in the ward, tucking the bedclothes round other patients, enquiring of their well-being, offering soothing and encouraging words and sympathetic smiles. I was enamoured.

But my feelings weren't reciprocated. For Nurse Wendy, I was just another vomit covered loser passing through the gastroenterology wards, meriting professional kindness but nothing more. And if I had romantic feelings then that made me no more than a cliche.

So I left hospital loveless, and quite angry about Billy`s cooking, even for a time wondering if he or his brats might have intended to poison me.

As soon as I was out on the street I called him.

"Billy, you bastard."

"Sorry mate," replied Billy.

 I stood about just near the hospital collecting myself, considering how to get home. I glanced down at the ground. Down there, a horde of tiny ants had discovered a dead dragonfly. One team triumphantly carried off the head, while another worked on detaching the thorax. A third group busied themelves around the abdomen. Would they leave the magnificent coloured wings behind?

 I didn't wait to find out: there was a twenty pound note curled up just there nearby. I went straight to the pub and had a few.

 

 

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Read to The Brentwood Writers' Critique Group, 1st May, 2021

 

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