Whatever Happened to Billy Parks

I watch Gerry Higgs’s face crease up scornfully as I mention Roman Whatshisname from Chelsea. ‘Don’t talk to me about that gangster,’ he says. ‘No, Billy, I’m talking about proper footballing men, geniuses.’

Now, for the first time, it crosses my mind that Gerry Higgs might actually be a few players short of a full team.

‘Gerry,’ I say. ‘Mr Higgs, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

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.

4 (#udf1a4d3f-a94d-5ad4-bdfe-1a7d25e3c762)

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?’