Billy Liar

  I looked back sharply at the Witch, but she was occupied, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief. I slipped the little silver cross quickly into my pocket, picked up her handbag, and strolled back to where she was sitting.

  ‘Sorry, dalling,’ I said again. She reached up and squeezed my hand, sniffing deeply to prove that she had finished crying.

  ‘Let's go,’ she said.

  ‘All right.’

  We walked back along the crumbling church path, through the lych-gate, and into St Botolph's Passage. I was beginning to say, ‘You know, darling, I think you have feelings, too, deep down,’ but the Witch had already re- the formal attitude she assumed for public appearances. I let the matter drop.

  ‘Are we going looking at the shops this afternoon?’ she said as we paused at the corner of Market Street.

  My heart sank. On Saturdays, as well as taking her to the Roxy at night, I was expected to meet her two or three times during the day – at lunch-time, during the afternoon, and possibly before I went to the pub for my club turn in the evening. She always said it made her feel wanted, although she had little idea what I wanted her for.

  Today I was hoping to get out of the afternoon session.

  ‘I'd love to, only I've got to go and see Shadrack this afternoon, and I don't know what time I'll get through.’

  ‘Please?’ She would have said ‘Pretty please’ if she had had the nerve.

  ‘All right, dalling. About four o'clock. Only wait for me if I'm late.’

  ‘All right, pet.’

  Fingering her little silver cross in my raincoat pocket, I watched her down Market Street until her swinging skirt was out of sight.

  5

  IN the cold sun, on a Saturday afternoon, St Botolph's Passage was just about bearable. It was alive with fat men in dark suits, puffing and blowing over folded racing papers and chucking clean, empty packets of twenty down on the uneven paving stones. Men in raincoats came and went in the vicinity of the shady chemist's, and a swaying, red-faced group continued an argument outside the pub, one of them saying the same sentence over and over again like a blocked gramophone. It seemed to be the same group every Saturday, having the same argument. ‘Have you ever realized,’ I said to Man o' the Dales – puff, puff – ‘that your blunt Yorkshire individuals are in fact interchangeable, like spare wheels on a mass-produced car?’ At the end of the passage, by Market Street, there was even a violinist with his hat on the floor, playing ‘Pennies from Heaven’. Shadrack and Duxbury's was the only shop with the blinds down, but the door was open and the bell rang quietly when I went in.

  The office was cold and dusty now, and looking more like a funeral parlour than usual with the roller blind filtering a green, dead light over the empty desks. I stood hesitating, gaping dozily at the washed-looking photograph of Councillor Duxbury doffing his bowler in front of a horse-driven hearse. It was very quiet. I had a quick, happy notion that they had abandoned the office for ever, or dropped dead in their own coffins or something, but then I saw the thin red glow of the convector heater shining under Shadrack's door. I went over relutantly and knocked. He was not there. It was probable that he was out in Market Street, selling a Morris Thousand to some fruiterer or other. Shadrack had never quite abandoned his previous trade.

  I sauntered over to my desk and sat down heavily, feeling happier because Shadrack was not there. It was, after all, not beyond the range of possibility that he had been run over by a bus. I lit one of my cigarettes and aimlessly opened the drawer of my desk. I stared vacantly into it for a moment, and then made a decision. My desk drawer was a sort of town branch of the Guilt Chest; there were few documents in it that did not cause even a passing spasm of anxiety. I began, briskly, to sort through them, tearing up the unposted funeral accounts first, then the obscene verses about Councillor Duxbury, and the rough notes for a long love letter I had once written to the Witch, daringly mentioning her breasts by name. There were about eight first pages of The Two Schools at Gripminster. I stacked them together, tore them through the middle, and dropped them in the wastepaper basket. There seemed to be whole sheafs of quarto with nothing written on them but my name in a variety of handwriting styles. I threw those away too. There was a fragment of dialogue entitled Burglar Scene, that I had once thought just right for Danny Boon:

  BOON: If I fire this rod it'll be curtains for you.

  FEED: W-why?

  BOON: It's a curtain rod. Of course, I'm a very respectable man, you know, a very respectable man. My wife and I are in the iron and steel business.

  FEED:

  BOON: She does the ironing while I do the stealing.

  I put this in my pocket together with the beginnings of the letter I had tried to write to Danny Boon. At the back of the drawer there was an old, yellowing piece of foolscap on which I had tried to list all the things that were worrying me at the time. The idea was that I should tick off each item as it ceased to be an anxiety, and when I had finished there would be nothing left to worry me any more.

  I looked at the list again, apprehensively. ‘Cal. Witch (Capt). Ldn. Hswvs Choice. Namepl. A's ma (sister).’ There was nothing on the long list that I could honestly cross off and forget about. I made a decision, and ripped the piece of paper into four, dropping the pieces in the wastepaper basket. There was nothing left in the desk except the long ink stain, the stubs of pencil, and the word ‘LIZ’ which I had blocked in in careful crayon. I got up and tried to open Stamp's desk, but it was locked. I paced round the office, whistling through my teeth.

  One of the habits I was going to get out of was a sort of vocal equivalent of the nervous grimace, an ever-expanding repertoire of odd noises and sound effects that I would run through in time of tension. Alone in my bedroom, seeking refuge in a telephone box, or walking purposefully, purposelessly home along Clogiron Lane late at night, I would begin to talk to myself, the words degenerating first into senseless, ape-like sounds and then into barnyard imitations, increasing in absurdity until I was completely incoherent, thereupon I would switch back into human speech with a kind of thought-stream monologue on whatever problem was uppermost in my mind at the time.

  I did this now, dropping my cigarette end into Stamp's inkwell.

  ‘London is a big place, Mr Shadrack,’ I began, mumbling to myself. ‘A man can lose himself in London. You know that? Lose himself. Loo-hoo-hoose himself. Looooooose himself. Himself Him, himmmmnnn, himnnn, himself. Ah-him-ah-self!’ Wandering about the office, I started on the odd sounds and the imitations of animals. ‘Hyi! Hyi! Yi-yi-yi-yi-yi. Grrruff! Grrruff! Maaa-aaa. Maa-aaa! Maaaaaa! And now –’ – taking in a fragment of one of the routines I went through with Arthur from time to time – ‘and now as Sir Winston Churchill might have said it. Nevah! In the field! Of human conflict! And this is the voiceofemall, Wee Willy Fisher, saying maa-aaa! Maaaa! Maaaaa! Grmp. Grmp. What a beautiful little pig. Hay say, whhat ay beautiful little pig.’ I began to repeat this sentence in a variety of tones, stresses and dialects, ranging from a rapid Mickey Mouse squeak to a bass drawl, and going through all the Joycean variations. ‘What a batiful lattle pahg. Ah, whet eh behtefell lettle peg.’

  I was standing at the open door of Shadrack's office. The room was beginning to echo with my voice. I stopped for a moment and toyed with the idea of going in and having a quick run through Shadrack's desk, but my ankles tingled at the thought. I had a short flash of No. 2 thinking, trapped in Shadrack's swivel chair with the drawer of his desk jammed open. For relief, I turned back to my verbal dooling and began to call his name.

  ‘Mr Shadrack? Mr Shadrack? Ha-meester Shadrack! Mee-hee-heester Shadrack! Shadrack! Shadrack!’ Each time I called, the ‘rack’ sound bounced back off his streamlined convector stove. ‘Shadrack! Shar-har-har-har-hadrack! Shaddy-shaddy-shaddy-shaddy-shadrack! Hoy! Shadders!’

  I was just drawing breath for the second run when Shadrack, who had undoubtedly been listening for the past ten minutes, came into the office through the door that led down to
the lavatory. I stuck a finger in my throat and began going ‘Ar! Ar! Arrgh! Sharrgh!’ trying to falsify his memory of what he had heard. My first real thought was one of relief that I had not been going through his desk; my second was to turn on him the Ambrosian repeater gun, rather like a machine-gun, which I kept permanently manned for such occasions as this.

  ‘Oh, it's you, is it?’ said Shadrack, but without any indication that these words explained, or excused, the din I had been making. Had he heard everything, or had he just come up from downstairs? Even downstairs he could not have failed to hear. Four moves flashed through my mind like a drowning man's life story. One, pretend was singing. Two, pretend not seen him and continue, making it sound like singing. Three, pretend rehearsing play. ‘And yet, Lady Alice, even pigs have feelings.’ Four, on the No. 1 level, ‘I'm glad you heard that, Shadrack. I've been wanting you to hear my views for a long time.’

  ‘Hope my singing didn't put you off,’ I said.

  ‘Curious din you were making,’ said Shadrack. ‘You'd better come into the office.’

  I followed him into his private sanctum, humming in an embarrassed way.

  Shadrack's office was furnished in what he imagined to be American executive style, in so far as he could afford it. He had a metal desk completely free of everything except a black ebony ruler, an unacceptable object to me ever since he had discovered me, or I think discovered me, conducting with it from a record of ‘Abide With Me’ which he kept on the record-player, another item of luxury. I turned the Ambrosian repeater gun on him again for good measure. On a low, coffee-bar sort of table there were the plans and drawings of the glass-fibre coffin he was working on, and a yellow pad on which he was doodling his ideas for a streamlined hearse. Beyond this, a couple of grey contemporary chairs, the first ever seen in Stradhoughton, and on the wall a boxed print of one of those Chinese horses.

  ‘Come in, siddown, make 'self at home,’ said Shadrack. He smiled with his bad teeth, and produced from his blazer pocket a matchbox-sized model, made out of Perspex, of his wedge-shaped coffin. ‘Y'know, by the time we're burying you, you'll be going off in one o'these. You know that?’

  ‘Really?’ I said, trying to sound interested. I was not fooled by his manner, the well-known friendly word, the boss relaxing on his Saturday afternoon off. I perched on one of the grey chairs and cleared my throat. ‘Arrgh! Sharrgh!’

  ‘Y'see, people don't realize. It's all clean lines nowadays. All these frills and fancies are going out. It's all old.’

  ‘Hm,’ I said.

  ‘Same as I tell Councillor Duxbury. You've got to move with the times. It's no use living in one style and dying in another. It's an anarchism.’

  ‘Anachronism,’ I said, before I could stop myself.

  ‘Yes, well.’ Shadrack turned abruptly to the olive-green filing cabinet and took out a manilla file. He held it up and tapped it. ‘Anyway, that's my worry. S'pose you want to talk to me about this letter of yours, do you?’ I had an absurd feeling of importance that I should have written a letter and that he should have put it in a file. He put the file, open, on the desk, and I saw that there were several other papers underneath my letter of resignation. I fell to wondering if this was some kind of personal dossier, filled with reports from Stamp and the Witch, and secret spidery mumblings from Councillor Duxbury.

  Shadrack perched on the desk, adjusting his tapered slacks and shooting his cuffs. ‘So y're thinking of leaving us, hey, is that it?’

  ‘Yes, well, I was thinking, now this opportunity's come up….’ I trotted out a wretched, shambling imitation of the speech I had prepared.

  Shadrack picked up my letter and examined it. I tried to see what the next paper on the file was. It was one of his yellow memo-sheets with a lot of his writing on it. He frowned over the letter as though he could not read.

  ‘“…now succeeded in obtaining a post with Mr Danny Boon….”’ he quoted, and I had an idea that he was going to go through the letter, point by point, getting me to expand. ‘Now that's the chap who was on telly the other night, isn't it?’

  ‘That's right,’ I said in the encouraging voice.

  ‘Yes, vair vair clever fellow. And you say you're going to work for him?’

  ‘Yes, well, he liked some of the material I sent him and –’

  ‘That's your ambition is it, script-writing?’ He was the eager questioner, off-duty, Saturday afternoon.

  ‘Oh, yes, always has been,’ I said, beginning to relax and sit back in my chair. ‘And of course, there's quite a lot of money in it if you go about it the right way.’

  ‘You get paid by the joke, then, or what? Or do you get a salary coming in each week?’

  ‘Well, it's vair vair difficult to say,’ I said. I had noticed before that I often tended to start imitating the person I was talking to. But Shadrack had lost interest. While I was scrabbling away trying to think of something to tell him, he began murmuring ‘Ye-es, ye-es’ absent-mindedly and shuffling the papers in the file. His expression changed to a business one. He got up off the desk and stood behind his chair, putting his full weight on it and swivelling it from side to side.

  ‘Ye-es. Well this letter,’ Shadrack began, and it was obvious that we were getting down to the serious business. I looked up intelligently.

  ‘Now you don't need me to tell you that it's vair vair unsatisfactory, a letter like this. Now do you? ’

  I mumbled, trying to get some action into my voice: ‘Oh, I'm sorry to hear that?’

  ‘Vair unsatisfactory. Fact I'd go so far as to say it's unprofessional, Fisher. Vair vair unprofessional.’

  Shadrack had a thing about the undertaking business being a profession. I cleared my throat and said: ‘Well, I suppose I've got to leave some time –’

  ‘Yes, we realize that. We all realize that. Don't doubt it. Nobody wants to stand in your way, don't think that, and I wish you the vair vair best of luck. But it's felt that you might have gone about it in a more sa'sfactory manner.’

  ‘Oh, in what way?’ It sounded like something out of amateur dramatics, the way I said it.

  ‘Well we were hoping, we were hoping, that you'd try and get one or two things cleared up before you took a step like this.’

  An icy chill, a familiar enough visitor by now, seized me somewhere under the heart. I cleared my throat again and said faintly: ‘What –?’

  ‘Y'see, I don't mind telling you that we're vair vair disappointed you've not been to see us before this. I mean before you wrote this letter. I mean don't think I want to make things awkward for you, far from it, but it has been felt you owe us one or two little explanations.’

  It was difficult not to look as though I understood what he was talking about. I said, trying to keep up the equal partners voice of a few moments before, ‘Well, I know my work probably hasn't been as good as it might have been. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I think I ought to leave.’

  ‘It's not a question of work,’ said Shadrack. ‘It's not a question of work at all. It's just a question of what you pr'pose to do about one or two things.’

  He looked at me levelly, trying to gauge how much of the message was coming across. Then he said, almost gently: ‘Y'see, there's those calendars to be explained, for one thing. I mean, we've never had any sa'sfactory explanation about that, now have we?’

  I stared back at him, licking my lips. It was no surprise to me that Shadrack actually knew about the calendars. He was bound to suspect, if not to know. I had just been hoping that natural delicacy or some kind of feeling of hopelessness would have prevented him from bringing the subject up. There were many things, in fact, on which I leaned heavily on the reluctant, brooding tact that was Shadrack's speciality. I decided that my best policy was to say nothing, and indeed I had nothing to say.

  ‘I mean, they cost a lot of money to produce, a lot of money. We can't understand what you did with them.’

  I felt bound to make some sort of an effort. ‘Well, there was a bit of a mis
understanding –’ I began, a story about a fire at the post-office beginning to cobble itself together in my mind.

  ‘It wasn't a misunderstanding, it's just that two or three hundred calendars didn't get posted. To my knowledge. I mean, I know you want to leave, I think it's the best thing you could do. I think you're taking a very wise step. We all realize that. But y'see, we've got to get this cleared up and implemented.’

  I didn't know, and neither did he, what he meant by ‘implemented’. Shadrack had a habit of hoarding words and dropping them into a sentence when they got too heavy for him. It was obvious now that he was going to go on and on about the calendars, probably for half the afternoon, simply because he had never studied the art of changing the subject. I decided that I was supposed to make some constructive suggestion.

  ‘Well, of course, if it's a question of paying for them –’

  ‘Ah. Aha! Wait a minute. Wait just one little minute. It's not as easy as that. It's not – as – easy – as – that. Y'see, there's the goodwill to consider. What about the goodwill? Those calendars were for goodwill, we can't understand why you didn't send them out. I mean that's what they're there for. I mean, we don't buy calendars so that you can just go out and chuck them on the fire, y'know. That's not what we're in business for.’

  He was getting warmed up now. He had stopped fiddling about with his chair and was sitting down, leaning forward over the desk, messing about with the ebony ruler. His eyes glistened.

  ‘No, that won't do at all. I'm afraid you don't seem to apprec'ate it's a vair vair serious business. And then of course there's this other matter.’

  ‘What other matter?’ I said dully.

  ‘I think you know vair well what matter. It's no good sitting there saying what matter. There's this matter of the nameplates, isn't there?’