Whatever Happened to Billy Parks. Gareth Roberts

that then?’ I try to muster a clever joke, despite the pounding in my head. ‘Porridge every morning? Cod liver oil before you go to bed?’

      ‘No son,’ he says. ‘I went into the Service a few years ago.’

      Service. Service? What is that? What does he mean, Service? I rub my eyes again – my body becomes heavy. Why? What’s happening?

      The man’s eyes train on me. I need a drink. I turn away from him.

      ‘How’s your daughter, Billy?’ I hear him say, as though he’s talking from another room. I note the slightly sinister tone to his voice. I want to answer but I can’t. I want to ask him why he’s mentioned my daughter, Rebecca. But I can’t. I can’t muster an answer. I hear more words, this time from even further away, ‘And your grandson – what’s his name? Liam isn’t it?’

      I’m reeling now. What did Gerry Higgs know about my daughter and the boy?

      ‘I dunno.’ I’m stuttering, trying to shout. ‘How do you know about them?’

      The man smiles. ‘I know everything, son. As I told you, I’m in the Service. And now I want to help you, Billy. I want to help you to put everything right. You do want that don’t you? We can do that in the Service.’

      There was that word again: Service. What does he mean? My eyes blur and I feel something loosen in my mind. I don’t understand. Gerry Higgs. What does he mean – how can he help me? What is the Service? I look around for something to hold on to, and as I do an image forms in my mind of Becky and Liam – my daughter and my grandson. I’m not with them. I haven’t been with them for bloody ages, years. The image is one of longing and spiky, prickly, guilt. Why has Gerry Higgs mentioned them? Gerry Higgs, the groundsman at the Orient who coached the kids and drove the youth team bus on a Saturday. What did it have to do with him?

      Was it really him?

      I feel a little explosion in my mind then a cloying lightness that spreads throughout my body, starting with my eyes then rippling downwards, jumping from my torso to my knees that suddenly veer in spastic directions.

      No balance, no control.

      I fall. What’s happening? What the bloody hell is going on?

      Is this it? Is this the end? Is this death?

      For a few seconds everything is quiet. Nothing. Not a sound. There’s just me, Billy Parks, Parksy, bloody Billy Parks of West Ham United and England, legend, lying, alone, on the ground, crumpled and small and breathing with a violence that makes my body shudder.

      I can hear anxious voices in the distance. ‘See that, that old geezer’s fallen over,’ they say and the boys who’d been playing football start to run towards me.

      I’m not old, I think.

      And my lips move, silently.

      I’m Billy Parks.

       2

      I was six and I’d cried when I had to leave my cousins’ house. I’d gone on the bus with my mother all the way to Dagenham. All the way, just the two of us – her in a pretty cotton dress with red flowers on it, me in my Sunday bib and tucker. It had been the best day of my life. And when it was time to go I’d felt my head go down and sticky silent tears force their way into my eyes: proper painful tears brought on by the awful, heavy, horrible dread that I was going to have to go back home. I wiped them away furiously because you get nothing for crying, Billy.

      My cousins’ house had a back garden. My Uncle Eric had ruffled my hair and Aunty Peggy, gorgeous Aunty Peggy, who always smelled of the promise of something exciting that I didn’t yet understand, had smiled this lovely smile at me and my cousins, twins, Bobby and Keith and their sister Alice, as we ran around, laughing out loud, big carefree childish pointless laughs, and shouted and pretended to be Cowboys and Indians. It was the best day of my life and it had made the whispered tick-tock silence of home seem unbearable. I hadn’t wanted to leave. I wouldn’t leave. I would stay – why couldn’t I stay? Even Mother had seemed happy here in her dress with red flowers on it, sitting in the kitchen drinking only tea, smiling at me as I played.

      Smiling at me.

      God she was beautiful that day.

      We’d left, me with my head down and my mother’s hand in between my shoulder blades. I’d sulked all the way to my home where my father, Billy Senior, never ruffled my hair.

      Oh my poor, poor father. The poor, poor bastard.

      That day, as I played and my mother laughed, he had sat in his usual place in our house, in the open back doorway of our kitchen, looking out at the back yard and up into the east London sky at the clouds that passed on their heavenly journey, waiting for the day when his own celestial cloud would arrive and mercifully take him away. Every day. Every single silent, wasted, disappearing, bloody day.

      Sometimes I would stand in the kitchen with a little ball in my hand and look at the back of his head. Other dads played games, I knew this, I’d heard this, so I would shuffle my feet against the lino and make a noise before Mother would arrive and tell me to be quiet and go and do something else on my own.

      Home was sad silence. Home was doing things on my own. Home was listening to the footsteps of my sister Carol, who was ten years older than me, clip-clopping across the stone hallway on her way out of the house to wherever it was she went to seek solace. Home was the slow monotone sobs of our mother and my own breathing as I lay on my tummy and played with little toy cars and little wooden animals that I liked to line up in a quiet row.

      I had known nothing else, but then I went to my cousins’ house in Dagenham and I discovered a wonderful truth: not all homes were like mine. I was six. I was six and I’d had my hair ruffled and smelled the feminine smell of my lovely smiling aunty. And now, like an addict, I wanted more of that, that wonderful life.

      I feel guilty admitting that. I mean, my poor, poor bastard dad. It wasn’t his fault. He’d not always sat mute in the back kitchen. Once upon a time he and Mother had smiled and laughed too, once upon a bloody time he had held her and told her not to worry because he was only going there to ‘mend broken tanks, not to fight’. And she kissed him and pressed her breast against his chest and he had pulled his face away from hers so that he could see her and remember her, and as he looked at her he’d promised, ‘I’ll be fine, it’ll be just like being in Mile End’, and then he’d smiled his lovely smile with his twinkling blue eyes and joked, ‘Only hotter.’

      That, I discovered, was 1941 as he left for Burma.

      He was taken prisoner the next year and it was another five years until she saw him again. She saw him and she held him, but he never really returned to her. The poor bastard – the poor pair of bastards.

      He had tried. Or so I’m told. He had gone back to the garage on Woodgate Road and a pint down The Albion and West Ham on a Saturday afternoon. He had bounced Carol on his knee and smiled because she adored him, and he’d got on with the task of blotting out the images of Burma and the camp at Thanbyuzayat and the corrugated iron shack with the waist-high ceiling that had been his jail and the rats and snakes and scorpions and the slow death brought on by malnutrition and the exhaustion of working day after day on that bloody railway, or the faster, better, death brought on by dysentery and malaria and typhoid.

      He got on with the job of blotting out the images of his dead friends and of the camp guards with their sticks and their swords and the ‘Hellship’ home when the Americans accidentally torpedoed them, and the awful, overwhelming gut-wrenching feeling of guilt when he eventually reached home in 1946 and walked down what was left of our street, Scotland Street, in Stratford.

      It was the guilt that did it.

      At first he could block out the images. He could deal with the pain of loss. His body recovered, he put the weight back on, he was always an athletic man – but the guilt never