Dinner at Billy's

 *

 

  

 

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.

 

 

* 

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

 

*

 

The big things don't matter.

 

 *

 

 

 Bar

 

 

 

As I get older, I see  that the big things don´t matter, only the details. If the details are sure, everything else follows through, geometrically amplified- right?

* 

I'm sitting in my little office overlooking the wharf, analysing marketing strategies. I'm working on a strategy for selling sweet alchoholic drinks to teenagers. If it's successful  there will be many more achoholic teenagers, and teenagers having accidents and fights and the shareholders will be happy.

The phone rings.

"It's Billy."

 

"Yes Billy."

 

"I'm downstairs."

 

"I'm working."

 

"Fuck off."

 

"Come on."

 

"Fuck off. I want a drink."

 

"Fuck off Billy."

 

"Come for a drink."

 

"Christ Billy, I'm working."

I think he smelt a weakness there in my tone. Like many base characters, he has an instinct for a weakness.

"Come on, I'm downstairs. I've got a fiver."

 

"Jesus Billy."

 

"Come on man, don't be a cunt."

 

Give me two minutes.

Billy looks a complete disgrace. His is hair matted, his jeans are filthy and there is an odd black smear on his cheek which is long and bulbous at one end and doubly bulbous at the other. Yes, you can guess what it resembled.

 

  "Jesus Billy, I say. Did you sleep under a truck?" You know, I almost feel sorry for him sometimes.

 

 Billy just looks down to his feet: two broken trainers.

Anyway, soon we are at the Prince of Wales, a cavernous pub from way back. We are the only ones there apart from the old guy who is always there and the ashen faced barman who lives there too.

 

 "God Bless the Queen!" the old guy cries across the room, raising his glass.

At the bar:

 "Mine's a pint of bitter."

"So's mine," says Billy

The drinks appear; "thanks Billy."

 

Billy looks coyly at the floor.

 

"You fucker Billy," I say, as I hand the barman the money.

*

Ardbeg- the fourth of the Billy stories

*

"Weeping, death, a lonely and desperate place. Goblins everywhere"

Ardbeg

Here’s a memory, true of course...

  I was walking down Wentworth Street when I saw Billy. It was one of those overcast days, when you just wander about expecting it to rain. I’d been to the train station just for somewhere to stand. I looked at the huge sign with all the destinations which I had never been to and maybe never would.

 I wore my light buff raincoat and felt like a detective. My shoelace had become untied so I bent down to tie it and as I was bending down I saw him, blue t shirt and jeans, that pink English face skin so pink it always seemed weird to me (I am quite dark, you see). He was standing outside the station talking to some fellow and, I saw his face in profile, the sharp nose and too small mouth. From my crouching tie position I yelled “Billy” loudly, and then the pink face that was Billy turned. I wondered if he saw me: he turned and started to run, so I went after him. I caught him at the corner, grabbed his arm.

 But it wasn’t Billy. It was some other guy. Indeed, he didn’t really look like Billy at all, except for that English pinkness. “Fuck off,” the stranger said.

In those days I’d avoid going home. "Home" meant a two room garret, a place seemingingly perfect for solitude, with a neat kitchen and living area, ample bookshelves and a sweet bedroom, all cosied by the sloping roof.

 

 But the place had been taken over by goblins. They’d sit on my bed and mock me with cackling sounds, or messed with my stuff, taking the CDs out of their cases and putting them in the wrong ones so I couldn’t find the stuff I wanted to listen to. Or they reversed the books on the shelves so you took ages to find the thing you wanted. And the fruit smeared on the kitchen cabinet handles. Why? 

They had black skin and screeching voices and wore almost nothing except woolen caps and their hair was crazily unkempt. They stank of coal and urine and I didn’t like them much. So I was always looking for someone to hang out with or else working late in the little office near the harbour, with a desk, a phone and a computer and where I would sit trying to figure out a way to make some money. 

I reckoned that if I didn’t show up at home they’d just move on to bug someone else. They' been there for two months already. I got to the office and stood there looking out at the forlorn sky and how the boats weren’t moving and everything was too grey even for someone who likes overcast days. And even the gulls flew slowly.

 I had some whiskey on the table, a good bottle still half full with the solemn words ARDBEG proud on the front and I poured a good slug into my dirty cup and it softened it all.

*

 

Read to Alburquerque Cyberscribes 26 April, 2021 

*

11.30am, The Prince of Wales, Billy (the third of the Billy stories)

 *

 

 *

 

"Hello, Schweppes Corporation -Hello, May I speak to John Fisher?"

 "John Fisher is in a meeting. Can I ask him to call you back?"

 It was 10.45, then 11.00, then 11.15. No call. 

 Enough: I put on my coat and started for the Prince of Wales.

 But as soon as I got outside it started to rain. Insane weather, so suddenly switching on like that, and so heavily wet. I ran to hide in my car.

 I sat in the Rover, smoking. An old friend: the seats of worn green leather creaked reassuringly in the same way every time I sat ; the instruments solid, designed to reassure. It had been inherited from an uncle who died when he was driving across the South Downs when he stopped and went under a tree to relieve himself and got struck by lightening along the stream of his urine. 

I drove the hundred yards to the Prince of Wales, pressing my face close to the windscreen to see, the rain so heavy, it was like sitting inside a drum. Thankfully, there was a space right outside the pub. The pub is cavernous, Victorian, and designed for the needs of hundreds of thirsty dockers. But the mechanisation of the port, and use of containers means that it rarely serves more than 20 people at any one. That’s fine by me.

 It has a giant, circular bar, so grand it dwarves the barman, a silent, pale, northern fellow . I guess he moved down here and just swallowed up by the giant sad bar, losing all colour.

 I entered: as always there below enormous plate windows seated on the maroon vinyl banquette, the elderly solitary drinker. I look across to him and nod: he raises his glass in his thin white arm. “Here’s to your lordship’s health!”

 There is a billiard table there. I like to play in the silence of the pub with the guys who hang about there. I am an excellent player and that secures me a place in The Prince of Wales socially. In any case, the players don’t talk. They just stand about sipping pints of beer and all you hear the resonant clink of the balls and the murmur of people at the bar, and occasionally the scrape of chalk on a board if they decide to keep a score, which isn’t often. It’s very satisfying and makes a gorgeous contrast to the brittle world of celphones and emails at the desk in my office.

Anyway, that’s where I met Billy.

 Billy was a scrawny dilapidated sort of guy who appeared here and there except when you might want him to. I never quite figured out what he did or why though. I never imagined for a second that it might be legal.

*

Illustration: a sly fellow, April 2021

 

*

Billy again

 *

 

The phone rang. I could see from the screen that it was Billy. Probably he wanted money. It was sure that he wanted something. 

 I opened the phone. "Billy, "what do you want?"

 It was necessary to sound harsh when answering the phone to Billy because it was sure he wanted something. Usually I felt guilty about that right afterwards. It was like shouting at a dog that has been sick on your carpet. 

 "I'm stuck", said Billy.

 "Stuck where?"

 "In a shed."

 Back then, I worked for myself in a room near the harbour on the 6th floor of an old warehouse a street back from the dock. From the window, across some corrogated concrete roofs you could just about see the cranes unloading giant containers which then were shunted into warehouse.But today it was quiet and there was no movement in the cranes I could see. Anyway, I went to this room which had a phone and a desk and an old computer and I 'phoned people and then wrote bits and pieces analysing marketing strategies.

 I affected scorn, but secretly, I was happy about Billy's interruption. No-one was returning my calls, and the article I was writing had an aimlessness to it that I didn't know how to overcome. 

The reason for being harsh to Billy which was that he never felt the least shame for bothering you. Or just maybe he detected that I secretly liked being distracted as I could then blame him for my low productivity: though more likely he didn't give a damn.

The shed was in a field. "You can't miss it," Billy had told me- which always means the contrary in my experience. The shed was somewhere on the north approach road. I knew that quite well, but there was a turn off at a farm, said Billy, which because a minor road. My old Rover chunted along happily and sure enough there was the turn off, and beyond it a copse, then some uneven fields Cattle grazed in one, in another some doleful crows pecked. It looked as if it might rain. 

 Then, said Billy, there were some giant hay barns, painted dark pink, and the shed was in an adjacent field. I stopped the car by the wooden gate. There was no one in sight. There was the shed, a wooden thing, the size the size of a car garage some hundred yards insode the field. What on earth was Billy doing there?

 I started across the field which was muddy with the hoofprints of cattle. The mud stuck and my feet got wet through my city shoes and I started to dislike Billy. He hadn't mentioned the mud.

 I reached the shed and shouted, "Billy, I'm here." 

"I'm stuck" replied Billy, "open the fucking door".

 There was the door, heavy and wooden. The door had a huge metal closer and the doorframe had a corresponding hoop so it could be locked with a padlock. There wasn't a padlock there, but someone had inserted a screwdriver in it. Billy had pushed against the door, but hadn't managed even to bend the screwdriver or buckle the latch. 

 "There's a screwdriver stuck in the padlock", I said.

 "Fuck," said Billy. 

"How long have you been in here, Billy?" 

"Open the fucking door"

 "Come on Billy, you've got to be polite if you want favours?"

 "Two hours" said Billy quietly. "open the door."

Billy didn't say anything as we drove back. There was a piece of straw in Billy's hair and his sweater was had some brown smears down the shoulder. He sulked as we made our way back through drizzle to the city. He wouldn't tell me why he was in the shed- probably he was looking for something to steal and the farmer saw him entering the barn.

He asked to be dropped at the bus station. I pulled into the concourse outside the bus station. 

"Can you lend me ten quid?" asked Billy, the straw trembling.

 I laughed.

 

 *

 Illustration: doodle, pen, paper, April 2021

*