Billy Liar Read online

  I put the ballpoint away and shoved the envelope back in my pocket, and on the cue of cry number seven, by far my favourite (‘Your boiled egg's stone cold and I'm not cooking another’) I went downstairs.

  Hillcrest, as the house was called (although not by me) was the kind of dwelling where all the windows are leaded in a fussy criss-cross, except one, which is a porthole. Our porthole was at the turn of the stairs and here I paused to rub the heel of my slipper against the stair-rod, another habit I would be getting out of henceforth. Shuffling there, I could see out across the gravel to the pitch-painted garage with its wordy, gold-painted sign: ‘Geo. Fisher & Son, Haulage Contractors, Distance No Object. “The Moving Firm.” Tel: 2573. Stamp, Signs.’ The sign was inaccurate. I was the son referred to, but in fact the old man had gone to great trouble to keep me out of the family business, distance no object. What really got on my nerves, however, was the legend ‘Stamp, Signs’ which was almost as big as the advertisement itself. Eric Stamp had been the white-haired boy of the art class when we were at Stradhoughton Technical together, and was now my colleague at Shadrack and Duxbury's. It was his ambition to set up in the sign-writing business full-time, and I for one was not stopping him.

  Anyway, the fact that the garage doors were not open yet meant that the old man was still at home and there were going to be words exchanged about last night's outing. I slopped down into the hall, took the Stradhoughton Echo out of the letter-box, where it would have remained all day if the rest of the family had anything to do with it, and went into the lounge. It was a day for big decisions.

  The breakfast ceremony at Hillcrest had never been my idea of fun. I had made one disastrous attempt to break the monotony of it, entering the room one day with my eyes shut and my arms outstretched like a sleep-walker, announcing in a shaky, echo-chamber voice: ‘Ay York-shire breakfast scene. Ay polished table, one leaf out, covahed diagonally by ay white tablecloth, damask, with grrreen stripe bordah. Sauce-stain to the right, blackberry stain to the centre. Kellogg's corn flakes, Pyrex dishes, plate of fried bread. Around the table, the following personnel: fathah, mothah, grandmothah, one vacant place.’ None of this had gone down well. I entered discreetly now, almost shiftily, taking in with a dull eye the old man's pint mug disfigured by a crack that was no longer mistaken for a hair, and the radio warming up for ‘Yesterday in Parliament’. It was a choice example of the hygienic family circle, but to me it had taken on the glazed familiarity of some old print such as When Did You Last See Your Father? I was greeted by the usual breathing noises.

  ‘You decided to get up, then,’ my mother said, slipping easily into the second series of conversations of the day. My stock replies were ‘Yes’, ‘No, I'm still in bed’, and a snarled ‘What does it look like?’ according to mood. Today I chose ‘Yes’ and sat down to my boiled egg, stone cold as threatened. This made it a quarter to nine.

  The old man looked up from some invoices and said: ‘And you can start getting bloody well dressed before you come down in a morning.’ So far the dialogue was taking a fairly conventional route and I was tempted to throw in one of the old stand-bys, ‘Why do you always begin your sentences with an “And”?’ Gran, another dress fanatic who always seemed to be fully and even elaborately attired even at two in the morning when she slunk downstairs after the soda-water, chipped in: ‘He wants to burn that raincoat, then he'll have to get dressed of a morning.’ One of Gran's peculiarities, and she had many, was that she would never address anyone directly but always went through an intermediary, if necessary some static object such as a cupboard. Doing the usual decoding I gathered that she was addressing my mother and that he who should burn the raincoat was the old man, and he who would have to get dressed of a morning was me. ‘I gather,’ I began, ‘that he who should burn the raincoat –’ but the old man interrupted:

  ‘And what bloody time did you get in last night? If you can call it last night. This bloody morning, more like.’

  I sliced the top off my boiled egg, which in a centre favouring tapping the top with a spoon and peeling the bits off was always calculated to annoy, and said lightly: ‘I don't know. 'Bout half past eleven, quarter to twelve.’

  The old man said: ‘More like one o'clock, with your half past bloody eleven! Well you can bloody well and start coming in of a night-time. I'm not having you gallivanting round at all hours, not at your bloody age.’

  ‘Who are you having gallivanting round, then?’ I asked, the wit rising for the day like a pale and watery sun.

  My mother took over, assuming the clipped, metallic voice of the morning interrogation. ‘What were you doing down Foley Bottoms at nine o'clock last night?’

  I said belligerently: ‘Who says I was down at Foley Bottoms?’

  ‘Never mind who says, or who doesn't say. You were there, and it wasn't that Barbara you were with, neither.’

  ‘He wants to make up his mind who he is going with,’ Gran said.

  There was a rich field of speculation for me here. Since my mother had never even met the Witch – the one to whom she referred by her given name of Barbara – or Rita either – the one involved in the Foley Bottoms episode, that is – I wondered how she managed to get her hands on so many facts without actually hiring detectives.

  I said: ‘Well you want to tell whoever saw me to mind their own fizzing business.’

  ‘It is our business,’ my mother said. ‘And don't you be so cheeky!’ I pondered over the absent friend who had supplied the Foley Bottoms bulletin. Mrs Olmonroyd? Ma Walker? Stamp? The Witch herself? I had a sudden, hideous notion that the Witch was in league with my mother and that they were to spring some dreadful coup upon me the following day when, with a baptism of lettuce and pineapple chunks, the Witch was due to be introduced to the family at Sunday tea.

  Gran said: ‘If she's coming for her tea tomorrow she wants to tell her. If she doesn't, I will.’ My mother interpreted this fairly intelligently and said: ‘I'm going to tell her, don't you fret yourself.’ She slid off down a chuntering landslide of recrimination until the old man, reverting to the main theme, came back with the heavy artillery.

  ‘He's not bloody well old enough to stay out half the night, I've told him before. He can start coming in of a night, or else go and live somewhere else.’

  This brought me beautifully to what I intended to be the text for the day, but now that the moment had come I felt curiously shy and even a little sick at the idea of my big decisions. I allowed my mother to pour me a grudging cup of tea. I picked up the sugar with the tongs so as to fall in with house rules. I fingered the used envelope in my raincoat pocket, see S. re job. I cleared my throat and felt again the urge to yawn that had been with me like a disease for as long as I could remember, and that for all I knew was a disease and a deadly one at that. The need to yawn took over from all the other considerations and I began to make the familiar Channel-swimmer mouthings, fishing for the ball of air at the back of my throat. The family returned to rummage among their breakfast plates and, aware that the moment had gone by, I said:

  ‘I've been offered that job in London.’

  The replies were predictable, so predictable that I had already written them down, although not on a used envelope, and had meant to present the family with this wryly-humorous summing-up of their little ways as some kind of tolerant benediction on them after they spoke, which according to my notes was as follows:

  Old man: ‘What bloody job?’

  Mother: ‘How do you mean, you've been offered it?’

  Gran: ‘What's he talking about, I thought he was going to be a cartooner, last I heard.’

  Another of Gran's whimsicalities was that she could not, or more likely would not, remember the noun for the person who draws cartoons. She threw me a baleful glare and I decided not to bring out the predictions but to carry on as I had planned the night before or, as the old man would have it, the early hours of the morning, tossing and turning under the pale gold eiderdown.

  ‘That jo
b with Danny Boon. When I wrote to him,’ I said.

  I had often likened the conversation at Hillcrest to the route of the old No. 14 tram. Even when completely new subjects were being discussed, the talk rattled on along the familiar track, stopping to load on festering arguments from the past, and culminating at the terminus of the old man's wrath.

  ‘What job with Danny Boon?’ This line – together with a rhubarb-rhubarb chorus of ‘What's he talking about, Danny Boon’ – was optional for the whole family, but was in fact spoken by my mother.

  ‘The job I was telling you about.’

  ‘What job, you've never told me about no job.’

  It was obviously going to be one of the uphill treks. The whole family knew well enough about my ambition, or one of my ambitions, to write scripts for comedy. They knew how Danny Boon, who was not so famous then as he is now, had played a week at the Stradhoughton Empire. They knew, because I had told them four times, that I had taken him some material – including my ‘thick as lead’ catchline which Boon now uses all the time – and how he had liked it. (‘Well how do you know he'll pay you anything?’ my mother had said.) They knew I had asked him for a job. Thank God, I thought, as I pushed my boiled egg aside with the yolk gone and the white untouched, that they don't ask me who Danny Boon is when he's at home.

  ‘Why does he always leave the white of his egg?’ asked Gran. ‘It's all goodness, just thrown down the sink.’

  The remark was so completely irrelevant that even my mother, always a willing explorer down the back-doubles on the conversational map, ignored it. Shouts of ‘What about your job at Shradrack and Duxbury's?’ and ‘Who do you think's going to keep you?’ began to trickle through but I maintained my hysterical calm, wearing my sensitivity like armour. Above everything I could hear the querulous tones of Gran, going over and over again: ‘What's he on about? What's he on about? What's he on about? What's he on about?’

  I took a deep breath and made it obvious that I was taking a deep breath, and said: ‘Look, there is a comedian. The comedian's name is Danny Boon. B-double O-N. He does not write his own scripts. He gets other people to do it for him. He likes my material. He thinks he can give me regular work.’

  My mother said: ‘How do you mean, he likes your material?’

  I brought out the heavy sigh and the clenched teeth. ‘Look. This pepper-pot is Danny Boon. This salt-cellar is my material. Danny Boon is looking for material -’ I turned the blue plastic pepper-pot on them like a ray-gun. ‘He sees my flaming material. So he flaming well asks for it.’

  ‘'Ere, rear, rear, watch your bloody language! With your flaming this and flaming that! At meal-times! You're not in bloody London yet, you know!’

  ‘He's gone too far,’ said Gran, complacently.

  I went ‘Ssssssss!’ through my teeth. ‘For crying out loud!’ I slipped back a couple of notches into the family dialect and said: ‘Look, do you wanna know or don't you? Cos if you do ah'll tell you, and if you don't ah won't.’

  They sat with pursed lips, my mother heaving at the bosom and the old man scowling over his bills and the Woodbine ash filling up his eggshell. The radio took over the silence and filled it for a moment with some droning voice.

  ‘Try again,’ I said. I took another deep breath, which developed into a yawning fit.

  ‘You just eat your breakfast, and don't have so much off,’ my mother said. ‘Else get your mucky self washed. And stop always yawning at meal-times. You don't get enough sleep, that's all that's wrong with you.’

  ‘And get to bloody work,’ the old man said.

  I pushed back the polished chair, about whose machine-turned legs I had once had so much to say, and went into the kitchen. It was five minutes past nine. I leaned against the sink in an angry torpor, bombing and blasting each of them to hell. I lit a stealthy Player's Weight, and thought of the steel-bright autumn day in front of me, and began to feel better. I breathed heavily again, this time slowly and luxuriously, and began to grope through the coils of fuse-wire in the kitchen drawer for the old man's electric razor. I switched on, waited for a tense second for the bellowed order from the lounge to put the thing away and buy one of my own, and then began my thinking.

  I was spending a good part of my time, more of it as each day passed, on this thinking business. Sometimes I could squander the whole morning on it, and very often the whole evening and a fair slice of the night hours too. I had two kinds of thinking (three, if ordinary thoughts were counted) and I had names for them, applied first jocularly and then mechanically. I called them No. 1 thinking and No. 2 thinking. No. 1 thinking was voluntary, but No. 2 thinking was not; it concerned itself with obsessional speculations about the scope and nature of disease (such as a persistent yawn that was probably symptomatic of sarcoma of the jaw), the probable consequences of actual misdemeanours, and the solutions to desperate problems, such as what would one do, what would one actually do, in the case of having a firework jammed in one's ear by mischievous boys. The way out of all this was to lull myself into a No. 1 thinking bout, taking the fast excursion to Ambrosia, indulging in hypothetical conversations with Bertrand Russell, fusing and magnifying the ordinary thoughts of the day so that I was a famous comedian at the Ambrosia State Opera, the only stage personality ever to reach the rank of president.

  Propped up against the gas-stove, buzzing with the old man's razor, I began to do some No. 1 thinking on the subject of the family. This usually took a reasonably noble form: riding home to Hillcrest loaded with money, putting the old man on his feet, forgiving and being forgiven. My mother would be put into furs, would feel uneasy in them at first, but would be touched and never lose her homely ways. Grandma married Councillor Duxbury and the pair of them, apple-cheeked, lived in a thatched cottage high up in the dales, out of sight. That was the usual thing. But this morning, in harder mood, I began to plan entirely new parents for myself. They were of the modern, London, kind. They had allowed, in fact encouraged me to smoke from the age of thirteen (Markovitch) and when I came home drunk my No. 1 mother would look up from her solitaire and groan: ‘Oh God, how dreary! Billy's pissed again!’ I announced at breakfast that I was going to start out on my own. My No. 1 father – the old man disguised as a company director – clapped me on the back and said: ‘And about time, you old loafer. Simone and I were thinking of kicking you out of the old nest any day now. Better come into the library and talk about the money end.’ As for Gran, she didn't exist.

  The thinking and the shaving finished concurrently. I switched off and began brooding over the matter of the black bristles under my chin which, shave as I might, would never come smooth. I dropped back into my torpor, a kind of vacuum annexe to the No. 2 thinking, and began scraping the back of my hand against the bristles, listening to the noise of it and wondering whether there was something wrong with me. The old man came through into the kitchen, putting on his jacket on his way to the garage.

  ‘And you can buy your own bloody razor and stop using mine,’ he said without stopping. I called: ‘Eighty-four!’ supposedly the number of times he had used the word ‘bloody’ that morning, a standing joke (at least, with me), but he had gone out. The business of going to London was shelved, forgotten or, as I suspected, completely uncomprehended.

  I went through the lounge and upstairs. My mother, as I passed her, chanted automatically: ‘You'll-set-off-one-of-these-days-and-meet-yourself-coming-back,’ one of a series of remarks tailored, I liked to fancy, to fit the exact time taken by me from kitchen door to hall door. There had been a time when I had tried to get the family to call these stock sayings of hers ‘Motherisms’. Nobody ever knew what I was talking about.

  Swilling myself in the bathroom, I found the business of the bristles on my chin leading, as I had known it would, into a definite spasm of No. 2 thinking. I wondered first if I were developing ingrowing hair, like those people whose throats tickle every six weeks and who have to go into hospital to get it removed, and then I ran through the usual reperto
ire, polio, cancer, T.B., and a new disease, unique in medical history, called Fisher's Yawn. Nowadays these attacks, occurring more or less whenever I had a spare minute, usually culminated at the point where I began to wonder what would happen if I were taken to hospital, died even, and they found out about the calendars.

  My mother shouted up the stairs: ‘You'll never get into town at this rate, never mind London! It's after half past nine!’ but by now the calendar theme had me in its grip, and I staggered into my bedroom, gasping and clawing for breath, doing some deep-level No. 2 thinking on the subject.

  It was now September. The calendars had been given to me to post about two weeks before Christmas of the previous year. This meant that this particular problem had been on the agenda for over nine months or, as I sometimes worked it out, six thousand five hundred and twenty-eight hours. The calendars were stiff cardboard efforts measuring ten inches by eight, each bearing a picture of a cat looking at a dog, the legend ‘Rivals’ and, overprinted in smudgy olive type, ‘Shadrack and Duxbury, Funeral Furnishers. Taste’ – then a little star – ‘Tact’ – and another little star – ‘Economy’. They were prestige jobs for Shadrack's contacts, people like the directors of the crematorium and parsons who might ring up with a few tip-offs, and for good customers like the Alderman Burrows Old People's Home, with whom Shadrack and Duxbury's had a standing account. I had omitted to post them in order to get at the postage money, which I had kept for myself. I had hidden the calendars in the stockroom in the office basement for a while and then, tired of the hideous reel of No. 2 thinking where Shadrack lifted the coffin lid and found them, had gradually transferred them home. A few I had already destroyed, taking them out of the house one by one at night and tearing them to shreds, dropping them in a paper-chase over Stradhoughton Moor and sweating over an image of the police picking them up and piecing them together. I had got rid of fourteen in this way. The rest were in a tin trunk under my bed. There were two hundred and eleven of them.