Whatever Happened to Billy Parks

4

Billy Parks’s mum, smells of bubble-gum, Billy Parks’s mum, smells of bubble-gum.

The three bastards had been keeping their chant up all the way home. Bastards: Eddie Haydon, grinning and gurning like a melon; Pete Langton, shouting at the top of his newly developed, but still squeaky voice; and Larry McNeil, the biggest bastard of the lot, defying me to turn around and confront them so that they could give me a right good pasting.

I’d been in secondary school for a week: St Agnes School for ruffians, rogues and arseholes. Each day, for some reason, these three had decided to follow me home goading me with their chant. I knew that their words had nothing to do with bubble-gum; this was their assertion that my mother had cavorted with a Yank during the war: it was a suggestion that I was the illegitimate child of an American soldier. A suggestion made solely on the basis that I didn’t have a dad. The morons – I mean I wasn’t even a war baby, I was born in 1948, three years after the Yanks had either gone home or been blown to high heaven in Normandy. Historical detail, though, meant nothing to Larry McNeil and his cronies. I was small, with no dad and that made me an easy target.

‘Hey, Parksy,’ one of them shouted, ‘was your dad Frank Sinatra?’ They laughed as though this is the funniest thing any of them have ever heard. ‘Or was he John Wayne?’ said another joining in a thread of mindless abuse that could have gone on for some time had they actually known the names of any more Americans. ‘Perhaps he was a nigger,’ said one of them. I turned to confront them, my teeth clasped together and my fists tight like rocks by my side. Straight away their laughing stopped and they hardened their own stance. ‘Come on then, Billy,’ said McNeil. ‘Come on if you’re going to fight us.’

I was outnumbered. I was not a fighter. I wanted to protect the honour of my unhappy mother and poor bastard father who went to Burma to mend tanks for these little arseholes and who ended up in the canal – but I couldn’t. I turned away from them and they jeered and howled and made chicken noises and continued with their chant about my mother smelling like bloody bubble-gum.

I got home and closed the door behind me; the still silence of our house put its arm around me like an old mate, I was safe. I put my foot on the stairs with the intention of going up to my bedroom, but my mother’s voice stopped me: ‘Billy, is that you?’

‘Yes, Mum,’ I said. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to see her. I knew that she’d be sitting in the front room, perched on the edge of the armchair. Fidgeting. Nervous. I knew that. What I didn’t know though is how she would be with me. I didn’t know if I was going to be the waste of space and accident that she wished had never happened, or her lovely son, her little sunshine, the light of her otherwise dark bloody life.

‘Billy,’ she said again. ‘Yes, Mum,’ I answered and wandered into the front room.

There was no trace of her drinking, not a clue, there never was then. She’d stopped going to Mrs Ingle’s years earlier. I didn’t link her mood swings with drink. It would be a debate I would avoid having all my life.

‘Come and sit down,’ she said, ‘have a chat with your old mum.’ She looked pathetic, holding one shaking hand in the other; did I nearly lose my temper for this? Did I nearly get my arse kicked in a fight to protect this? Nearly.

‘How’s school going?’ she asked.

And I shrugged. ‘Alright,’ I said unhelpfully and she looked at me as though she was trying to gauge if I was telling her the truth.

‘Good,’ she said and I looked down, knowing that she was staring at me, hoping that I’d say something that would make everything somehow better, even for a second, but I couldn’t. I bloody couldn’t.

After an age, she continued. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I tell you what, why don’t we go to the pictures on Friday, The Alamo is showing down the Roxy, my treat.’ She smiled doubtfully at me, and I hated her weakness but I hated myself even more, because deep down I knew it wasn’t her fault.

‘It’s got John Wayne in it,’ she continued, ‘you like him’, and I grimaced at the ironic mention of John Wayne. ‘Well?’ she said, and I nodded and her face broke out into a smile. ‘Good, that’s a date then.’

I knew that by Friday, she’d have forgotten.

‘Come and give your old mum a hug.’

I tentatively got up and slowly walked towards her, my body hardening against the thought of hugging her. And she knew it, and it just made everything bloody worse.

I went outside to the back yard and kicked my football against the target I had drawn on the gate. I kicked it alternately with my right then left foot, 200 times, it had to be 200 times and if I missed the target just once, I had to go back and start again. I kept missing because I was angry.

The next day Larry McNeil and his mates were waiting for me again. This time we were in the changing room before PE. It was my first PE lesson at St Agnes. Pete Langton spotted me: ‘Hey look fellas, here he is, the Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ McNeil joined him and scowled at me as the changing room went quiet. ‘Billy Parks’s mum had it off with a nigger,’ he declared and I had no choice, I rose up and went for him – immediately the whole year of boys closed around us chanting, ‘fight, fight, fight,’ as they did. I put my head down and swung a few hopeful punches in McNeil’s direction, but, as I said, I was no fighter.

Mercifully, the fight was broken up by the muscular grasp of the teacher, Taffy Watkins. He pulled us apart and stared at us. ‘Right,’ he bellowed, ‘what on earth is all this about, I’ve never seen such a woeful fight in all my life: like two squirrels squabbling in a hessian sack.’

It was the first time I’d heard a Welsh accent. ‘Well?’ he repeated, but neither of us responded. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘you two shall come to me after the lesson and I will cane your rotten backsides.’

Then he turned to the rest of the class. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘on to the pitch so that I can laugh at your desperate attempts to play Association Football. The only thing of any worth invented by the English.’

At the mention of football, I felt my insides warm.

Outside on the school pitch, we were put into two teams. To my delight, Larry McNeil and his two mates, Langton and Haydon, were put on the opposing side to me. I knew what was about to happen. The gods of football had meant for this.

I got the ball pretty much from the kick off and set off down the pitch. I knew what I was going to do without even thinking. I could see the space on the pitch, I could feel the desperate lunges by the opposing team as they tried to take the ball from me. I was in complete control, my body responded instinctively – one boy, two boys, three boys, they couldn’t get near the ball as I feinted and shimmied and burst past them. Eventually there was only one player left between me and the penalty area, Larry McNeil. His face contorted with pathetic rage as he rushed towards me; silly arse, never play the man, always play the ball. He tried to kick me and I prodded the ball with my left foot past him and skipped over his trailing leg. Then, as Little Jimmy Cleary, a lad with callipers, who’d been put in goal, stood rooted to the spot, I put the ball in the back of the net.

On the touchline Taffy Watkins watched with his hands on his hips and the flicker of a smile across his chops.

I repeated the exercise seven more times and each time I made a total cunt out of Larry McNeil: this was for my unhappy mother and my unhappy tragic father and for me, Billy Parks, growing a little bit happier with every goal.

At the end, I traipsed off with the rest of the boys. I knew that in the oh-so-important pecking order of eleven-year-old lads, I had risen like a meteor – I knew it, and so did Larry McNeil.

Taffy Watkins held us back. We sat outside the room off the gym reserved for PE teachers; Watkins’s own personal fiefdom where he would reward and nurture the few boys he felt possessed sporting talent, and brutalise the rest. Larry didn’t look at me. He was called into Watkins’s room first and I heard the thwack of the cane as he delivered six of his Welsh best on to Larry McNeil’s arse. McNeil ignored me as he emerged, red faced and gritting his teeth against the tears he knew he couldn’t show.

I braced myself.

‘Right,’ said Watkins and I followed his beckoning finger into the tiny room. It smelled of liniment, dubbin, old leather, dry mud and scared boys. He looked at me: ‘The other lad started it did he?’ I said nothing. ‘I thought so,’ said Watkins, ‘now I’m going to give you one chance – you’re to train with the under-fifteens this Thursday, and if your performance out there was a fluke and you’re rubbish, you shall have ten of what McNeil had – you hear me?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Good.’

‘Right, off you go.’

‘Thank you, Sir.’

He nodded as I got up to leave.

‘Oh, and what is your name again?’

‘I am Billy Parks, Sir.’

Details: Match 2, September 1960

Venue: St Agnes Third XI football pitch (knocked down and redeveloped into a Sainsbury’s in 1991)

Class 1e 10 v. Class 1f 1

Parks (8) Eccles (2)

Gillway

Line Ups (formations a bit fluid)

Class 1e: Charlie Hugheson, Tommy Rigby, Alan Hattersley, Brian Collins, Peter Hirst, Johnny Smith, Paul ‘Donkey’ Edwards, Ed ‘Clarkey’ Clarke, Billy Hindles, George Gillway, Billy Parks

Class 1f: Little Jimmy ‘Four Legs’ Cleary, Unknown boy, described as having a cleft palate, Larry McNeil, Sam Smith, Paul Carrington, Pete Langton, Eddie Haydon, Maurice ‘Spud’ Eccles, Keith Ringer, Richard ‘Paddy’ Murphy, Dave ‘Shorty’ Hopkinson

Attendance: 1 (Taffy Watkins)

5

I know it’s there. I know it is sitting on the table in my kitchen, at least half-full. It has been growing in my mind over the last few days as I have waited for my release from hospital and is now the size of one of those giant bottles that you see on advertising hoardings: a giant bottle of vodka.

‘No more drinking now,’ Dr Aranthraman says, ‘remember, just one more drink could kill you,’ and he smiles, because he’s a nice fella, and I smile, because I am the twinkling, dazzling Billy Parks. And then Maureen, who has come to pick me up and take me home, bless her, smiles, but she does so with thin lips, because she knows the weakness in me.

‘You look after him now,’ says Dr Aranthraman, ‘he is a famous footballer.’

‘Oh I’ll do my best,’ she says, looking at me like I am a naughty boy. I smile up at them both, but in my mind, I am being chased by a six-foot bottle of fucking Smirnoff vodka. I know that it is there, on my kitchen table. It is there and it has grown and now fills all the space in my brain with its wondrous evil presence.

We get into Maureen’s car. As ever she is immaculately turned out; all teeth and hairdo and posh knickers, that’s Maureen. I catch a glimpse of stockinged thigh as she changes gear. I know that underneath her clothes there will be a complicated and exotic system of underwear that is designed to deflect attention from the signs of wear and tear on her fifty-five-year-old body. It works too. Usually. But not today. After two weeks in hospital, even I, Billy Parks, can’t think about getting me leg over. All I can think about is the vodka bottle on the kitchen table.

‘So,’ she says, ‘how are you feeling?’

‘I feel fantastic,’ I say, ‘like I’ve got a new zest for life.’ The words float easily from my mouth, they’re not weighed down by truth.

‘That’s great. I kept a couple of clippings from the newspapers for you.’

She’s good like that, Maureen, she’s been doing it for the entire time we’ve known each other; she’s already told me that there was a paragraph in the Sunday People, saying ‘Former West Ham favourite, Billy Parks collapsed while out watching a park game’, which is a load of cobblers, I was on my way to the pub; while the Mirror ran a story about ‘Billy’s Booze Battle’. I don’t mind. They’ve got their job to do. They’ve got to sell their newspapers. And, for me, I can’t lie: it’s nice to be talked about.

We drive down round the Elephant and Castle and I look out of the window at the light of the day. After ten days in the hospital, the world seems huge, a bloody frightening, fast moving chaos; the cars are giant metal beasts, careering around corners and across junctions, carrying life and normal, ordinary people. And as I watch them the vodka bottle grows bigger and more powerful.

I try to take my mind off it. I’ve got to. Dr Aranthraman told me: booze, no new liver, bad end; no booze, new liver, life. It sounds easy.

I try to chase the vodka bottle away by changing the subject.

‘Funny thing happened,’ I say, ‘in hospital, a very funny thing; this old geezer, Gerry Higgs his name is, he used to be like a coach and groundsman at the Orient when I was a kid.’

She pouts and her eyes narrow a bit as she’s taking in what I’m telling her. ‘He was there when I fell over in Southwark Park and he comes to visit me.’ I stop, because it still doesn’t make any sense to me. ‘He must be well into his eighties, because he was old back in the day.’ I pause and the image of Gerry Higgs back in 1965 shouting and bawling at the apprentices drifts into my mind. ‘Well anyway, he tells me that I’ve been selected to appear before some kind of committee of footballing legends.’

‘Footballing legends?’ she says. ‘What’s that?’

I shrug, then sigh, ‘I dunno.’ Because I don’t know, I have no clue what Gerry Higgs meant. ‘Perhaps it’s some programme on ESPN or Sky Sports or summat, anyway, it was nice of him to visit me.’

Maureen turns to me now. ‘Visit you?’ she says. ‘Those nurses told me that the only person to visit was me.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Gerry Higgs was definitely there.’

She drives on. She’s not interested in the Council of Football Immortals. Instead she tells me that in the back of the car she’s got something for me: a jigsaw. A jigsaw. I’m confused. A jigsaw? Me, Billy bloody Parks. I once scored a hat-trick inside twenty minutes at Maine Road, pulled Mickey Doyle all over the place I did – God love him.

What do I want a jigsaw for?

‘It’s a competition I’m running at the pub,’ she tells me. ‘There’s a prize for the person who can complete the jigsaw in the quickest time. You text me when you’re about to start and then text me when you’ve finished, and I put the times up in the bar. Little Brian Staplehurst, you know that bloke who works at Lloyds Bank, he’s already posted a time of seventeen hours. And anyway – it’ll keep your mind off drinking and going to the pub – you heard what the doctor said.’

The vodka bottle grows a little bit more and casts me in its magnificent, vicious shadow.

‘Seventeen hours,’ I say. ‘Is he blind or something?’

‘No.’

She laughs.

She has a nice laugh does Maureen, that’s what I first liked about her; she has a light laugh, flirty, but not quite accessible, yes, that is Maureen. It’s why we’re not an item, never have been, not properly – she’s a landlady with a nice laugh and great underwear who has been let down by better blokes than me and knows how to enjoy a bottle of wine and listen to all the bullshit and be seductive without allowing you to get too close. I’ve known her for years. I like her. If we’d met when we were younger, before the bad blokes, before everything, then, who knows?

We park up. And make our way up the stone piss-smelling staircase to my second floor flat.

It’s not there.

It’s not bloody there. The vodka bottle is missing from the kitchen table. It’s not bloody there. It’s not there and its absence has blasted a hole through my very being. How can it not be there? I don’t want to drink it, of course not, one more drink might kill me, but I want it to be there, more than anything. I want the chance to drink it.

I turn to Maureen. ‘The vodka bottle,’ I say, ‘the bottle that was on the table – where is it? Where the fuck is it, it was sitting on the table, half finished?’

She looks at me, her face crumbling with incredulity at what I am saying, and I know that’s the right reaction, but I just want the fucking massive bottle of vodka, the fucking beautiful massive bottle of vodka which has been chasing me and has caught me and dragged me closer to its open mouth.

‘Billy,’ she says. ‘Billy, are you mad? You can’t drink vodka, I chucked it down the sink when I came to get your clothes for you.’

‘You silly cow. You silly fucking bitch.’ The words just shoot out of my mouth. I’m not thinking; I’m like a cobra, a thirsty horrible black cobra crawling on my belly; I just want it to be there. Is it too much to ask? What has it got to do with her, what does she care if I have a quick vodka now I’ve been released from hospital? I mean, she’s just a friend; we haven’t fucked each other for months.

‘You silly, stupid bitch,’ I say, and I’ve gritted my teeth and I’m so, so wrong. And I’ve clenched my fists and for a second I am so angry that I want to punch her, but instead I slam my hand against the empty kitchen table.

Maureen puts her hand up, she’s dealt with much worse than me. ‘Billy,’ she says, ice cold, colder than the North Pole, colder than the surface of Neptune, she sighs, and shakes her head. ‘Just fuck off and kill yourself.’ And with that she’s gone, out the door.

I’m left alone. For about an hour I frantically go through the bins and the cupboards and drawers, looking for a drink. I throw things on the floor and rip out stuff from the back of my wardrobe. I search through boxes crammed with my life history, yellow newspaper clippings, old programmes, photos of me, young and beautiful with my arms around the shoulders of missing friends. I ignore them, I discard them in my search for drink. But there isn’t any. I know there isn’t any. I know that there is no drink in my home. But looking for it has at least made me feel alive.

Alive.

Then tired.

I sit down on my own. I sit down on my bed in my one-bedroom Housing Association flat, panting, and put my head in my hands. Me, Billy Parks, crying like a right twat. I could go out to get more drink. Replace the vodka. I could. I want to. But I can’t do it. Instead I lie on my bed and try to think about something meaningful. I try to picture my daughter and her son. I want to make plans to see them, take the boy somewhere, perhaps I could take him down West Ham, get in the Directors box, see the players, but I can’t make those plans, I can’t form the images in my head, images of happy me and happy daughter and happy boy. It’s too difficult. I can’t even work out how I’ll find her.

I get up and pace around. The dark clouds of self-loathing gather. Then I notice the jigsaw that Maureen’s left on the table, thousands of fucking pieces depicting a detail from the start of the London Marathon – thousands of heads and bodies in running vests with little numbers on them. I sigh. Seventeen hours she said. I sigh again but before I know it I’ve taken the pieces out and I’m turning them over the right way.

I have an idea.

I text Maureen telling her that I’m sorry and that I’m a complete twat, and that I’m starting the jigsaw. Then I telephone Tony Singh, a bookie I know from the pub. ‘Tony,’ I say, ‘Billy Parks here. I’m fine mate, never felt better. Listen, you heard about this jigsaw competition Maureen’s running at the pub? That bloke who works at Lloyds has posted seventeen hours. Yeah. Yeah. What odds you going to give me?’

Fucking four to one: the tight-fisted bastard.

Still – I have two hundred and fifty quid on Billy Parks.

6

Two days later I find Gerry Higgs waiting by the lift at the bottom of my building. He’s got a rather odd, pleased expression across his face. I’m wary, but, I have to admit, intrigued by the old duffer.

‘Hello, Billy,’ he says.

‘Mr Higgs,’ I say, ‘what brings you to these salubrious parts?’

His face breaks out into his most sinister smile. ‘You, of course, Billy,’ he says.

Of course.

‘It’s good news,’ he adds, ‘the Council of Football Immortals have said that you can watch one of their plenary sessions.’