Billy and Girl (9 page)

Wait
while she buys a bottle of tequila, a bottle of Triple Sec and a pack of menthols. When she climbs back into the car, cursing Billy out loud for not thinking to get lemons and limes instead of goddamn pizza, the driver is surprised to find himself checking that his radio phone is still working. Sometimes it just blanks out and he can’t get directions when he’s lost. Yesterday he spent two hours trying to find Trafalgar Square. Eventually a Japanese tourist gave him detailed instructions and even then it was a long haul. No wonder the ashtray is overflowing with butts and foul squibs of spat-out chewing gum with teethmarks in it.

Girl throws a FreezerWorld tenner into his lap. When she slams the cab door, the window falls out, completely intact, and drops six foot into the hole where the road is being dug up.
Girl checks for one terrible second that she hasn’t left her FreezerWorld carrier in Oddbins, though she knows she hasn’t because she’s just parted with some of her precious bleep loot. She just stands there in a daze, watching the driver roll his trousers up and climb deeper and deeper into the hole. Look at that fucking car. Someone should show it the way to the cab cemetery. Her pulse has gone crazy. She’s going to be sick and then she’s going to make a margarita.

The driver grips the glass under his arm and clambers out of the hole. When he finally manages to open the boot, a complicated task achieved with a screwdriver and a two-pence piece, he wedges the glass between a vital part of the engine that fell off yesterday and an exhaust pipe swapped that very morning for a windscreen wiper.

A tenner! That sobbing psycho didn’t even ask how much the ride was. What’s wrong with girls these days? Even his seven-year-old daughter has started to get stroppy about him practising his three-point turns when he takes her to school in the mornings.

Whining, but never looking up from her book on quarks.

Weirdness in Billy’s face. Slow freaked paces across the kitchen lino. Billy is home. Ho-me! Bandage wrapped tight round his hand from casualty, clutching a bouquet of flowers, compliments of FreezerWorld, in his good hand.

‘Five stitches. Blood everywhere.’

‘God, Billy! What you want to cut yourself like that for?’

Girl sits him down, lights him a menthol cigarette and gives him a glass. ‘Best margarita you’ll ever taste, Billy boy.’

Billy takes a gulp, punches his head, sends the whites of his eyes up to the ceiling, pokes out his tongue, rises on tiptoe, spreads out his arms and throws himself against the wall.

Mom and Dad are masked dancing figures on stilts. The sun is shining well into the night, damaging concrete and skin structures. Birds stalk their prey on suburban lawns. Billy has his ear to the ground. He is a catastrophe theorist who will export his mind like grapefruits and potatoes to every corner of the globe. But for now it’s gone quiet. Panic quiet. Girl inhaling exhaling menthol. Billy hallucinating scenes of macabre margarita beauty. Mom in a tiara made from ice. Dad waistdeep in snow caught in a storm of bees. Images for his first book on pain. Pain is as mysterious as love. A world of feeling and silence. Mood changes and sobbing. Both enter the body, love and pain often the same thing. Both cause profound change and even death. Biographies, symptoms, histories.

‘Could have done with a few days in the hospital.’ Billy eventually staggers up from the floor. ‘A lovely nurse bringing me my cup of tea in the morning. Time for the doctor’s round. Morning, Billy England. And how are we feeling today?’

‘Start packing, Billy. We’re off.’

Her brother walks to the oven and turns the gas down to four. ‘Pizza’s burning. Gas too high. Always read the instructions on the box.’

‘There’s a cab coming in one hour’.

Billy doesn’t want to hear departure words. He is somewhere else already. Can’t be in two places at the same time. Pain is a place. Too heavy-hearted to be a tourist.

‘There was some commotion on Till Five. All the baskets fighting it out with the trolleys. Tens is chief of the FreezerWorld tribe. But he just can’t work out what’s happening. He can’t control his own people. Doesn’t understand what makes ’em tick. There was one man who only had a loaf of sliced bread in his basket. He went mad. Totally cracked up in Trolleyland.’ Billy’s whining morose voice.

‘I mean, there is Tens being mobbed by the Basket tribe. Does he reach for a couple of bottles of FreezerWorld champagne? Give them a complimentary drink? No. He offers to give the basket people an IOU for any special offers sold out while they were on the long march to Trolleyland!’

Girl opens the oven and takes out the sizzling four cheeses pizza just like Mama used to make.

‘I said, there’s a cab coming.’

Not just a bit rainy. It’s bucketing down, if you know what I mean.

‘I did a Mom check in FreezerWorld.’

Girl has gone quiet. Sinister, Billy thinks while he shovels the pizza into his mouth. Not quiet, downright sinister.

‘She was holding a little pink baby shoe.’

Billy waves his bandaged hand to stop her talking, but Girl’s voice is hardly there. Her eyes are shutting down. Over and out. Mom is like the phantom limb of an amputee. It tingles in the stump where she once was. Pain is not just in the body. It is in the mind and soul. Call Himmler. Call Dr Ruth and Oprah. Call Oscar Wilde and Descartes. Most importantly, call FreezerWorld Louise. Anyone who knows a bit about hurting.

‘Naaaaaa.’ Billy is fading too. Screwing up his eyes like he’s gone snow blind. ‘Those shoes were a free gift. A FreezerWorld promotion. They all had one. Every single Frozen customer had one. They got bubble bath in ’em.’

Billy knows his sister is about to cry her girl tears. Got to keep talking. Talk all the way through grief and out the other side. Thing is, all words have stopped. He wants to go to bed. He hasn’t got any summer clothes to pack. On account of the weather. Got winter clothes. Clothes for the cold. Trying to talk sunshine and shades but all words have stopped. Ice in his mouth. Shivering. Wants animal skins and furs. Girl has taken out the cash and is counting it at the table, tears pelting onto the fifty-pound notes.

‘Louise said she was going to see me later.’

‘Yeah.’ That’s the only word Billy wants to ever say again. Not too much effort. Yeah.

‘She’s dangerous.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Know what she does in her tea break?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Does it in the car park with Danny. D-a-n-n-y.’ Girl puts as much disgust into her voice as she can.

‘Louise helped us, Billy. She doesn’t know she wanted to, but she helped us all the same.’

Her brother puts his arms around her thin shoulders. ‘You’re a heroine, Girl. You were brilliant.’

‘Louise wants us to save her. From Mr Tens. From Danny. From the Frozen World.’

Billy takes notes in his head. Girl is his patient and Girl is his sister. When he is famous and the TV cameras travel across his pain features and make them a public spectacle, he will say, ‘Take your time. Stare at me without embarrassment. Don’t feel you have to look away. The great pain tundra of Billy England. I will wait if you have to inhale from your asthma machines. I will wait if you have to telephone your families to say you will be late. I will wait while you order coffees and Danish pastries from your subsidised cafeteria. I will even wait while you snort cocaine in the toilets.’

‘It’s a respectable cash haul, Billy.’ Girl is whispering now. Big smile. Big enough to cross the Thames and not fall in. ‘It’s enough. Run me a bath. The last bath I will ever have in England.’

Billy and Girl thought they were were heading for California. Knew all about America from the brochures and TV. Imagined themselves drinking daiquiris under the palm trees and blue movie skies. ’Cept it wasn’t the big buck agents, the surf and Disney pets that wanted them. No Mickey and his lovely first lady Minnie in her lickle white gloves to welcome Billy and Girl to the land of plentiful. No TexMex was to pass their lips. No tax-free shopping in Tijuana. No healthy walks through miles of mall to stretch the legs and get blood circulating pronto to the remaining shards of Billy and Girl heart-hacked with English weather problems. No Florida crocs and beauty-queen mermaids to tickle their pain history and stretch lips into knowing kitsch smiles. Girl was never to become a Nevada cowgirl sprayed into denim and photographed for gentlemen’s leisure mags. She thought she would be wearing high-cut orange bathers and shooshing her peroxide fluffy hair when she spoke to male lifeguards all muscle and morality and megahormone narratives. Poor Girl. I mean, can you see her scrawny white-bread English thighs lazing with the Californian beach girls? English Girl with her introspection and minicab rage and no cosmetic surgery to armour her and no sweet talk inside her to simper its way out and get involved with local boyfriend and beach-life issues? Girl buying donuts in bulk to bait every obese woman she meets into giving her an interview? Hi, Mom. Have a donut. Have three. No. That’s all over.

Billy was not to be discovered by Hollywood highballs on Malibu beach in his Speedo minitrunks. Not that kind of boy icon. For a start, even with a tan, even with a personal trainer in a de luxe Malibu gym, Billy is not reliable or predictable. He can’t be trusted to learn his lines. Writer delivers script. Director reckons this is the one to swipe all the Oscars on the big night and he is already getting his wife to write his speech. She’s faxing a draft to him right now. How he discovered William English singing ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ whilst strumming a toy plastic banjo, and how he just knew, with Great Director’s Instinct, that the boy was a screen God for the contemporary world. Billy is wined and dined, groomed and flattered. Billy eats with gusto. Bloody steaks flap off the sides of his plate. Fistfuls of Californian french fries are shovelled into his boy mouth. Billy never has to eat another chicken winglet again. He gets a little plumper but won’t do arm curls, not even with the starter weights that even a poodle can lift effortlessly with one manicured pawkin. He reads the script. Agrees to be a star. He’ll play a sulky James Dean reincarnation called Jonnie. His co-star is an apple-pie babe with attitude and her character is called Candy. They go over the script together and then the big day arrives. Billy has to be dragged kicking and screaming out of his trailer and pushed onto the set. The scene is set in a moody bar.

JONNIE
: See you’re drinking beer.
CANDY
: Yeah. So what?
JONNIE
: That’s a good brand.
CANDY
: I know.
JONNIE
: Mind if i sit here?
Candy shrugs. Jonnie sits
.
JONNIE
: I feel really good sitting next to you.
CANDY
: (
Secretly flattered
) Well, thank you.

Not too demanding, is it, Billy? Lights. Sound. Action.

BILLY
: See you’re drinking beer?
CANDY
: Yeah, so what?
BILLY
: That’s a good brand.
CANDY
: I know.
BILLY
: Mind if i sit here?
Candy shrugs. Billy sits
.
BILLY
: You remind me of my sister.
CANDY
:
(Improvising for camera)
Oh.
BILLY
: She won’t let me fall in love with other girls.
CANDY
: Is that right?
BILLY
: I don’t mind. Cos I’m frigid.
CANDY
:
(Catching director’s eye. He’s saying busk it.)
Uh-huh.
BILLY
: Completely totally fucking frigid.
CANDY
:
(Cracking up now)
We’ll soon do something about that, Jonnie.
BILLY
: Frigid.
DIRECTOR
:
Cut cut cut cut!

Okay. The English boy has a kind of anti-charisma that’s interesting. Inneresting. Let him ad lib. Look at him. He’s taking out a little pen knife and cleaning his fingernails. That’s not in the script either. Okay.
Okay
. But hang on. Frigid?
Frigid???
Can’t have boy icon say he’s fuckin’ frigid. Not good for box office. Not good for the plot. Not good for the next scene when he has to take Candy home and make love to her in the shower. Cos the only power Jonnie’s got in this movie is his bad-boy sex appeal. So why not give Billy England a chance and try shooting that shower scene? See how that goes and then come back to the bar. Okay.