Billy Liar 2 - or 'Here Lies William Fisher'

“Ding dong, the Witch is dead.” I wondered whether she might recognise the tune I was humming under my breath and decided that it wouldn’t matter anyway. The Witch remained in blissful ignorance of her epithet. To be fair, the Witch remained in blissful ignorance of just about everything. The Witch was far from dead. The Witch was alive and well and walking alongside me.

As though sensing the direction my train of thought had taken, she turned and looked at me with the New Face, an expression she’d been trying on for the past few weeks, as if breaking it in. The New Face occupied an uncertain territory somewhere between concern and suspicion and was presumably intended to serve as a warning shot whilst also reminding me that she worried constantly about my mental welfare.

“Are we going anywhere special, pet?” she asked from behind the safety of the New Face. “I thought you were taking me for a coffee.” She stopped and I wandered on for a few paces, attempting to convey the impression of a man gazing vacantly out across the landscape as though seeing there a reflection of his own inner turmoil. With the Witch’s help, this was an impression I’d been working on since the Events of a certain Saturday a few weeks ago.

I tried not to think too much about the collapse of my previous existence several weeks ago, but the involuntary part of my thoughts that I’d come to categorise as Number Two Thinking wouldn’t let me. Number Two Thinking set the facts before me in stark detail, like the counsel for the prosecution:
Exhibit A: The contents of one chest, discovered beneath the bed of the accused and comprising sundry letters of a personal nature and various misappropriated artefacts the property of Messrs. Shadrack and Duxbury, Funeral Furnishers of St. Botolph’s Passage, Stradhoughton.
Exhibit B: One engagement ring, zircon set in gold plate, the ownership of which was the subject of an alleged dispute between the accused and his two fiancées.
Exhibit C: The disinterred remains of several hundred calendars, the property of Messrs. Shadrack and Duxbury &c.
Exhibit D: Postage book removed from premises of Messrs. Shadrack and Duxbury with entries made by the accused in an attempt to cover up the wilful embezzlement of petty cash from said employers.
Exhibit E: One handwritten letter addressed to Godfrey Winn, c/o Housewives’ Choice, BBC Broadcasting House, London, the letter in the hand of the accused’s mother...

And so it went on. It seemed that there was no part of my former life that had not been dug up and subjected to the forensic scrutiny of the various injured parties involved; my parents, Shadrack and his partner Councillor Duxbury, the Witch and Rita (my putative fiancées) and even my colleague at work, Arthur Crabtree. There were only two people who had failed to offer an opinion of the sort of person I was. One was my Grandmother, whose opinions were known only to the Almighty; and the other was Liz.

Even from the perspective of a few weeks, the Events of that Saturday already seemed to belong to a former life. They might just as well have happened to someone else. They certainly hadn’t happened in the part of my thoughts I set aside for the enjoyable business of Number One Thinking. My Number One Self was living in sin in London, sending cheerful letters home asking after my Grandmother, who had recently returned from a spell in hospital and was reported to be walking out with Councillor Duxbury. I had comfortably established myself in a Mayfair apartment and was already on first name terms with London’s literary and artistic establishment. Noel Coward had asked me to contribute some one-liners to a new play he was working on and J.B. Priestley was a regular visitor, calling in to exchange memories of Northern life and surprising me with the revelation that he too had worked for Councillor Duxbury in his youth. In my few spare moments I would take telephone calls from Emmanuel Shadrack (whom I now addressed as ‘Manny’) and advise him on the modernisation of the funeral business, promising to pop a copy of my last novel in the post and offering a sneak preview of the galley proofs of the next. At home, my parents gave interviews to journalists who were already at work on the definitive biography of William Fisher, playwright, novelist, stand-up comedian and the darling of Mayfair society.
All things considered, a surprising amount had happened in a few weeks.

The reality was somewhat different. My Grandmother had not returned from hospital and Mr. Shadrack was still making threatening noises involving criminal proceedings. Shadrack was the sort of person who will threaten you with the police but never has the nerve to call them in. He would aim them at you like an automatic weapon but flinched at the thought of having to pull the trigger. Arthur reckoned that Shadrack had once been caught speeding on the Houghtondale Road and had been left with an irrational fear of the police. The thought of Shadrack speeding had led inevitably to the conclusion that he had been driving a hearse at the time.

There was little in the way of fun to be had at Shadrack’s expense at the moment. Old misdemeanours that I thought I’d managed to conceal were being discovered on an almost daily basis. The contents of my desk had been removed, inspected and placed on file ‘pending further invest’gation’ as Shadrack informed me. Arthur tried to offer a crumb of comfort by telling me he’d caught Shadrack reading some of my half-finished comedy scripts and laughing, asthmatically, under his breath. It turned out he was looking at some of my fictitious invoices.
The fictitious invoices were part of an emergency strategy I’d developed to try to account for the missing postage money, for which there was no adequate explanation. “To the supply of coffin handles, brass, three dozen, Messrs. Laidlaw and Sons, Doncaster,” made frequent appearances. No one at Messrs. Laidlaw and Sons was likely to remember the exact details of consignments dating back some two and a half years, or so my reasoning went. Shadrack, however, had already cast himself in the role of private detective and had no doubt obtained letters from Messr Laidlaw himself and his five sons, furiously denying all knoweldge of said coffin handles.

When all was said and done and denied and covered up, there was no way on earth that I could pull the wool over Shadrack’s eyes, at least not where money was concerned. Not even my unique double-entry book keeping method could convince him that postage money had been somehow diverted towards settling invoices for non-existent coffin handles.
For the time being I remained at Shadrack and Duxbury’s whilst the matter was ‘taken in hand’, as Shadrack would have it. My suggestion that I might be suspended or simply dismissed was glossed over. “Quite frankl’ Fishah, we find such an idea untenable, most unten’ble,” had been Shadrack’s response. No doubt nothing would come of it. My father would agree a settlement with Councillor Duxbury in the warm convivial fug of a lodge meeting and my future career would be assured. In the meantime, my status at the company remained a sort of armed truce with Shadrack. How long this phoney war could be maintained was anyone’s guess.

If there could have been at least one successful outcome to the Events of that Saturday, then it would have been the long overdue departure of the Witch. But the Witch was not dead. The Witch, in fact, refused to die. Anyone else suffering the same indignities would have exited swiftly in a blaze of bitterness and recriminations. The Witch, however, was different.
The Witch sulked.

She sulked for a week, sometimes via letter, sometimes at point blank range when she would contrive to bump into me in the street during our respective lunch hours. Professional sulkers like the Witch no doubt have access to a sulking manual giving the precise duration of sulk required to achieve various desired effects; four hours to persuade a parent into giving you a puppy against their better judgement; two days for a missed date at The Roxy; and six days for discovering your fiancée is engaged to someone else.

In six days her world was made better. And on the seventh she rested. And the Witch said: “Let there be light once more in the life of Billy Fisher.” And the Witch saw that the light was good. It would have to be.

Difficult though it was to believe, the Witch actually came round to apologise. Somehow during her six day interlude, she had managed to reverse the polarity of the situation in her mind. When I should by rights have been showering her with the usual fruits of profuse apology - flowers, chocolates, cinema tickets and bags of her bloody oranges - it was the Witch who was apologising to me. She even apologised to my parents while she was about it. She’d probably apologised to everyone on top of the bus on her way over, as a trial run.

This was how the Witch viewed the situation; she’d been wrong to get upset about a silly misunderstanding over ownership of an engagement ring when I had so many other things to worry about. If anyone was to blame in the Witch’s book, then it was Rita, her rival in the fiancée stakes. Rita, so the Witch believed, had simply taken advantage of my temporary confusion and led me astray. On several occasions, I might have added. I was unhappy at work, the Witch told me, and my Gran had died; though how the latter had led to my becoming engaged to two girls at once she didn’t explain. I rather wished she was going to. I could have done with a scapegoat and Gran wasn’t about to argue the point.

It was my Grandmother, rather than the Witch who I found myself thinking about as I surveyed the dreary prospect of Foley Bottoms. Far off in a damp and unsuitable quarter, a plot of new houses was being built. Already I was constructing an elaborate Ambrosian version of the scene in which I, in full military regalia, was inspecting the site, the first new housing to be built in the wake of the Great Ambrosian Conflict. I paused to exchange cheery confidences with some rough-hewn artesan with skin the colour of red salmon, and had my photograph taken weilding a pickaxe, before mounting a podium to deliver a rousing address to the assembled workforce.
At last we came to the great dedication ceremony as Liz, the Ambrosian Foreign Secretary and First Lady, cut a symbolic length of barbed wire and declared the first of the new Worker’s Cottages open. And waiting to cross the threshold was a beaming Councillor Duxbury with my Grandmother on his arm. In life she was no more, yet in Ambrosia she lived on, a national heroine. We had buried her once and still she came back to offer succour to an elderly man in his declining years.

“Well, are we going somewhere special or are we just going to wander around here all afternoon?” The Witch struck a petulant pose. “I’ve shopping to get in for my mother and all sorts of other things to think about.”
I put Ambrosia back in its box and turned to her, wearing the Troubled Face. “Dahling, I’m so sorry. I was miles away.”
“Poor pet. Is everything all right?” The Witch came alongside, in much the same manner as a pocket battleship, but refrained from offering any comforting gesture such as taking my arm.
I shrugged and stared at the floor. “I was just thinking about my Gran.”
Her face brightened at this. “Oh it was a lovely funeral wasn’t it? All those mountains of flowers. Have you decided on a headstone yet?”
“Not quite. We were thinking of having something a bit special. An angel perhaps, or a sort of obelisk.”
“Obelisk?” From the Witch’s expression I guessed she imagined this was somewhere in Siberia.
“A bit like Nelson’s column,” I added, embroidering the scene in my mind as I went along, “with lions around the base. In actual fact, my father’s been discussing the possibilities of a Fisher Vault. Councillor Duxbury is having the plans drawn up.”
“Posh,” said the Witch with a glow of appreciation, presumably at the thought of marrying into the sort of family that buries its dead in Vaults.

We walked on in silence. I seldom came out here with the Witch. Foley Bottoms belonged to the era of Rita and more particularly to the era of Liz, which was definitely over. There had been no letters since she went to London, but this in itself was unexceptional. Liz might send an occasional postcard with a few lines, usually a joke, scrawled on the back, but letters were a rarity. Nevertheless, I felt that her departure on that day of all days somehow marked the end of an era. Coming out here with the Witch was probably an unconscious acknowledgement of the fact.

The Witch looked uncomfortable in the overgrown wilderness of Foley Bottoms. She was the sort of person who was made to be seen against a backdrop of soft furnishings rather than stinging nettles and coils of bramble. “Are we going much further, pet? There isn’t anything down here, is there?”
“I just felt like a wander, Dahling,” I replied. “I think I need fresh air.”
“There must be nicer places we can go for some fresh air,” said the Witch, eyeing the brambles and passing a hand involuntarily over her skirt as though in anticipation of being molested by the vegetation.
I sat down on a mossy bank and plucked a stem from the long grass. The stem became a pipe and I sucked on it in meditative mood as I listened to Man O’ The Dales expounding on the virtues of solid, honest-to-goodness redbrick housing as opposed to the flimsy jerrybuilt apologies for dwellings that were going up at the edge of Foley Bottoms. Man O’ The Dales was The Stradhoughton Echo’s fictitious source of Northern wisdom and popular opinion and a frequent visitor to my bouts of Number One Thinking.
“Y’see, trouble wi’ them houses they’re erecting yonder,” said Man O’ The Dales, “is they may well be pretty as a picture when they’re finished. But will they still be here fifty year from now?”
“Will we still be here fifty year from now?” I replied, rhetorically.
“Thou hast a point theer, lad,” replied Man O’ The Dales. “Will any of this still be here fifty year from now? I think mesen lucky I’ll not be around to see th'outcome o' what’s being wrought in this day and age.”
“We’re too ready wi’ a bulldozer to smash down t’walls of our industrial heritage,” I told him, then realised that I’d voiced this opinion out loud and the Witch was staring at me as though I’d just come out with something from Wittgenstein.
“Whatever do you mean pet?”
“Just thinking, Dahling. Thinking aloud.” I patted the grass next to me without really knowing why. “Sit down, why don’t you?”
“No thanks pet. You oughtn’t to be sitting there. It’s all wet.”

Man O’ The Dales had sent me into a thoughtful mood and as I gazed out at the sweep of Strad Lee and Houghtondale Hill rising blue and smoky in the near distance, I felt a sudden inexplicable sense of nostalgia, as though I were viewing this scene from somewhere in the distant future. Man O’ The Dales had vanished. I watched a trail of smoke rising slowly from the Infirmary chimney.

The Witch had wandered off and was gazing at something in a clump of leafless bushes. “What’s this?” She prodded the grass tentatively with her foot.
“Probably only my virginity,” I wanted to reply. Well, half of my virginity, if you can have such a thing. Just slipped out of my pocket one night when I was here with Liz. You’ll probably find a pile of cigarette ends nearby.
“It’s a kiddie’s tricycle,” said the Witch. “All rusted away and forlorn. What a shame. I expect someone’s stolen it and just thrown it away down here.”
“Dahling,” I said. “If you could live anywhere in the world, anywhere at all, where would it be?”
The Witch turned. “Why, our little cottage in Devon, Billy, of course.”
Ten out of ten, I thought. Exactly the answer I’d expected. “You do realise, Dahling, that things are different now?”
“How do you mean, pet?”
“Well, I mean, in the light of recent events...”
She tried on the New Face again. “Why, that’s all been taken care of, hasn’t it?”
I gave her a look of resignation. “If only I could believe it was true, Dahling. I’m afraid there are all sorts of recriminations still to be faced. And there’s the legal implications to consider.” This, in recent weeks, had become a stock Shadrack-ism, as in: “We’ve the legal impl’cations to be consider’d, Fishah. Serious legal impl’cations.”
“I thought you’d told me your father had sorted everything out with Mr. Duxbury?”
“It’s Councillor Duxbury,” I replied in a pompous echo of the Councillor’s own voice. “I only said he was going to sort things out. There’s money to be paid back. What I’m trying to say, Dahling, is that, in the light of everything, I’m not sure if we should really talk about our cottage in Devon for the time being.”
The Witch nodded. “I understand, pet. It must be very painful for you.” She opened her handbag and, on cue, produced an orange. “But remember Billy, in your hour of need, there’s always someone you can turn to.”
For a horrible moment I imagined she might be about to turn evangelical.
“Who’s that, Dahling?” I asked.
She coloured and stared intently at the orange she was undresssing in her hands. “Well, me, pet, of course. I’ll always be here, you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I replied, in a hollow monotone. “You’ll always be here.”
“And I am coming for tea with your family tomorrow, aren’t I, pet?”
I launched involuntarily into my stock opt-out clause of: “well, that’s just it,” but checked myself. “Yes, Dahling, of course you are.”
“Well then, there’s nothing to worry about, is there?”
“No, Dahling.” Nothing at all.

"It's neither mucklin' nor micklin'..."

A few years ago, purely for my own amusement, I decided to try and write a 'sequel' to Keith Waterhouse's classic novel Billy Liar. Clearly, it would have been an act of supreme hubris to have taken such a project seriously, but as a diversion it proved an interesting exercise.

Obviously, Waterhouse did, in time, provide us with a sequel in the form of Billy Liar on the Moon. The latter book, being set some years after the events of the original, and featuring none of the characters aside from Billy himself, did not answer the questions of exactly what happened to Billy Fisher following the events of the single Saturday in which the original novel takes place.

This was, of course, never intended for publication, and I don't personally condone fan fiction that appropriates characters from the likes of Star Wars or The X-Files. Almost all of it is trash, and mostly mildly pornographic. I was simply interested in whether I could satisfactorily unravel the unresolved plot threads of the novel in a way that would lead seamlessly into a second narrative. It ran to around seven pages before one of my own ideas demanded my attention, and in, true William Fisher style, it remained unfinished. I recently rediscovered the text and it's presented here as a curiosity. Obviously, if anyone objects, it will disappear again in short order.


All characters are copyright Keith Waterhouse
My text is © 2008 Martin Cater