Deborah Levy - Billy and Girl

Why don’t they all do something about my ‘welcome to the world’ breakfast? Like a smorgasbord of analgesics and a razor blade?

When Mom took me home she examined my fingernails first. ‘Look, Girl,’ she said, ‘they’ve grown right to the edge and over.’ So I would scratch my face with my sharp nails. Make little fists and raise them to my cheeks and scratch because it upset Mom and made her kiss me more. She’d sit in a blue bucket under the shower, the smell of lavender she had added to the water filling the steamy corridor where Girl and I sat waiting for her. ‘The lavender fields of Provence, Billy, that’s what you can smell,’ she shouted through the steam, and Girl and I watched the rain splash against windows, shivering in our second-hand T-shirts.

After she had bathed her birth wounds and done her hair — Mom wore a beehive that Dad said was a bit like Priscilla Presley — she limped downstairs to make Girl breakfast: banana fritters. Girl wanted banana everything. Banana milkshakes, banana blancmange, banana curry. Mom was a bit nervous of Girl and catered to her compulsions for fear her daughter would weep those catastrophic tears of hers and never stop. When Girl cries the world slows down. It’s like her thin white body is going to snap in two because her grief is so total and infinite. In the days we used to go for drives into the country, if she didn’t see a horse she’d scream and shout as if somehow this was a bad omen and the sky was going to fall on her head. Dad would get desperate and point to a cow grazing in a field. ‘There’s a horsie, Girl, see?’ The lie seemed to comfort her, as if just naming the beast completed the magic circle in her ash-white head, and she would calm down and fall asleep.

Girl has always invented games for me and her to play together. Her favourite used to be the Bolt Game. When she found a jar full of two-inch wrought-iron bolts in the cupboard under the stairs where all the nails and screws were kept, she showed them to me as if she had found gold in a cave. All day she brooded on what to do with them, hiding behind her fringe of ash-white hair when anyone dared speak to her. ‘It’s a pain game, Billy,’ she whispered when Mom went out of the room and the next thing I knew she had dragged me outside and was drawing a chalk line on the pavement which I had to stand behind. Then she measured twenty footsteps away from my line and drew another line which she stood behind. The idea was I had to keep completely still while she aimed the little bolts at my head. When they missed and got me on my shins or on my fingertips I was not allowed to cry. It was a pain game, after all, and success was measured by how stoic the person being hit could be. What would it be like never to feel pain? The day Girl broke the skin on my forehead and blood dripped down my face and onto my T-shirt, she screamed, ‘Don’t blink, Billy!’ and then hugged me for being well hard. When I pretended not to feel pain, I know that Girl felt it on my behalf. ‘You’re a hero,’ she said in her acid-drop voice, and licked the warm blood with her tongue while I pretended to meow like a kitten. Girl’s pain game prepared me for being bashed by Dad. Girl was training me up to receive pain. It was her way of protecting me. My very own personal pain trainer. The first time Dad smashed his fist into my kidneys I was seven years old. Mom was out and Girl was in. I hollered and my sister went very quiet. She smoked her first menthol cigarette then. Coughing but no words.

A few weeks after Dad set fire to himself at the petrol station, Mom took me on a coach trip somewhere near Newcastle to meet my grandfather. That’s my mother’s father. She packed tuna sandwiches and a flask of tea and sat me on her knee in the coach even though I was ten years old, so she wouldn’t have to pay for another ticket. I swear I could smell rubber on the tarmac of the motorway and the lacquer in Mom’s hair and when we arrived we heard a fat man in a pub sing, ‘England! Awake! Awake! Awake!’ I sat under the little tartan blanket and scratched my eyelids, all the time remembering my dad whispering, ‘Hell-oo, babykins, it’s your father here, over and out,’ scratch scratch, and Mom catching my fingers tight in her hands. Grand-Dad talked in whispers to Mom, sometimes leaning over me with his watery eyes and beery breath, checking me out and looking away again.

I swear by the time he had cracked three bad jokes, I thought, Jeez, I really need a fag.

‘You are my balaclava angel,’ Girl whispers to me as I hold up the mirror for her while she trims her fringe. No, I’m not. I’m a broken-hearted bastard. I want to be the bloke in the Haägen Dasz ads, with good-looking girls in their underwear pouring ice cream all over my big beautiful body. Instead I’m poor, white and stupid. I take my knife into cinemas and stab the velvet seats in the dark. That is my silent broadcast to the British nation. Pain is like lager and Elastoplast. It has made me who I am. There is a history to my pain. It is an experience in search of an explanation but I can’t remember what the experience was. There ain’t no ointments, surgery or insurance form going to heal my nerves and neurotransmitters. The making and unmaking of pain. Grief is like pain. Sometimes it’s hard to experience them apart. I still feel it along the pulses. You can excite pain by touching the parts that hurt. That is what we are going to do.

At night I hide in small gardens outside here and count the TV aerials. I click the heels of my new red trainers three times, take a deep breath, hold my nose, and wait for the wind to take me somewhere better than this.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because its mom disappeared and its dad set fire to himself. What that skunk Billy doesn’t understand is that pain is not a riddle. It’s a mystery because we lack crucial information. Billy’s skin is blue. In all weathers. Indoors and outdoors. Blue like the soil on Jupiter probably is. If they ever put Billy into a spaceship and spin him up to the planets, I know he’ll feel at home so long as he can take the TV and a stash of popcorn with him. I bought him a cowboy shirt to keep him warm. It’s got pearl buttons and an extra one sewn inside the cuff in case. Billy always checks the emergency button is still there when he puts it on. It comforts him just about more than anything else. He wants an emergency button for everything: to get out of nightmares, to call for help when the lift gets stuck, to get out of boring conversations.

Got a tattoo inked into his scrawny upper arm. An old-fashioned one like some virgin boy sailor who called men ‘sir’ and choked over his first Lucky Strike in a foreign bar full of hookers. I mean, I can’t believe he had that dopey tattoo done like all the other fat blokes in the world. It’s an anchor entwined with roses and doves. It says Mother, of course.

I don’t know why my mother called me Girl.

Sometimes I think she was just too lazy or too depressed to bother calling me by my proper name, Louise. So there are two of me: one is named, the other unnamed. Louise is a secret. No one knows about the Louise part of me. Girl stuck and that’s how it’s always been. Louise is England’s invisible citizen and when I read statistics about how many people live in this country, I always add one more: Louise.

When I was seven, instead of learning the times tables off by heart I learnt the name of every single cleaning product. My mother didn’t want a daughter, she wanted a slave girl. Instead of running through parks in little black patent shiny shoes and green ribbons on the end of my plaits like girls do in storybooks, I ran about the house in my knickers with a dustpan and brush. My hands were always in bowls of dirty water washing plates or tying knots in black bin liners full of rubbish. The day I sat my art O level at school all the other kids brought in bowls of fruit and vases of flowers to sketch in charcoal for the still-life exam. I brought in a J Cloth and an aerosol of furniture cleaner and signed my drawing ‘Girl’.