Deborah Levy - Billy and Girl

Mr Tens looks a bit anxious. What’s wrong, Mr Tens? Will your children inherit a better FreezerWorld than this one?

Girl slips off the chair and moves over to pick up the pizza. She puts it in her FreezerWorld bag with the cash, walks out of the store into the car park and takes off her overalls.

Time to smoke a gold band menthol. Smoke and walk. Walk fast, smoke like there’s all the time in the world. Smoke like she’s on vacation wondering which beach taverna to drag herself to next.

FreezerWorld really is a good world because Girl has just caught sight of a Freephone to order a cab. What perfection. Girl is truly grateful. A cab will arrive in five mins, enough time for another menthol and to comb her hair, which is stuck to her scalp with warm salty nerve sweat.

Jeeezus!

Girl doesn’t know what to do. She has just seen Louise.

On the other side of the car park. The dark side. Louise is not on her own. She’s saying something. Her lips are moving. She’s not fully dressed, or rather, her dress is hitched up to her armpits. ‘I gotta go, Danny, I gotta go.’ Danny’s got his hands everywhere on anything to do with Louise. His jeans are undone, his face buried in Louise, lifting her up, putting her down, lifting her up, her arms wrapped tight round his neck, laughing and fighting at the same time. And then something terrible happens. Louise looks Girl straight in the eye. Her lips are moving. Her eyes poking into Girl’s eyes. Louise says, ‘I’ll be seeing you later.’ Girl knows the words are for her. When the cab splutters into the car park, she dives inside quick. Sweating.

Louise with Danny the prince. Denim round his ankles. Danny the dog prince. Doing it in the car park with Louise. Girl can feel a great girlhowl coming on, making its way west through her body.

Weather warning. Stay in your homes. Board up your windows. Switch off all electrical appliances. Call in the cats and dogs. Bring your pet rabbits and tortoises inside. Stop your washing machine mid-programme. Those of you unfortunate enough to be out walking, find a church and lock the door. Even the cab driver well used to motoring barely human life forms to their destinations — even he who is suprised not to be abused by his passengers — jumps in his seat when Girl asks him to stop outside Oddbins and wait.

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.