Gareth Roberts - Whatever Happened to Billy Parks

He leans in towards me, his face close to mine. I can see the hairs that explode from his veined nostrils and the blood pumping to the pupils in his eyes.

‘The Council of Football Immortals, Billy,’ he whispers, giving each of the words the heavy weighty air of importance.

‘Who?’

‘The Council of Football Immortals,’ he repeats putting his face even closer to mine. ‘The greatest footballing minds that ever lived.’

His lips wobbled as he spoke and spit flew out indiscriminately. He is definitely mad, and if it is his intention to scare me, then he has succeeded, because I’m shitting myself. I consider pushing the red ‘help’ button by the side of the bed.

‘That’s why I asked you the question I did, Billy,’ he says, and he asks it again, though this time in a rather sinister rasping whisper. ‘What would you give to have the chance to turn the clock back and put a few things right?’

No words come to me, instead I move myself as far away from him as I can. Our eyes meet and we stare at each other. Then he breaks off and turns his face away from me.

‘That’s why I asked about your daughter, Billy. You see I know that you and her have,’ he paused now, searching for the right words, ‘got a few issues to settle.’

My daughter. He’s right. My little girl. As soon as he says it, the image of her and her boy, my grandson, Liam, forms in my mind. He’s right. But I don’t want him to be right. I want to tell him that he’s talking bollocks and that everything between us is tickety-fucking-boo, but before I can say a word in response, he’s waving his craggy finger at me: ‘Don’t worry about it, Billy, I understand, old son, it’s not just your fault. But we can help you to sort it all out.’

‘We?’

‘The Service.’

Oh, Christ, there it is again, that word ‘Service’. Just the mention of it makes me swoon and slip down my pillows. He watches me, and I wonder what he’s going to do next. To my surprise, he taps me gently on the hand.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he says, still tapping, ‘I’ll leave you now to get some rest; the Council haven’t formally called you up yet, so we’ve got a few days, but I’ll be in touch when I know a bit more. Who knows, they might let you sit in on one of their sessions before you go before them.’

With that he stood up and was gone.

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.