Whatever Happened to Billy Parks. Gareth Roberts

know it’s there. I know it is sitting on the table in my kitchen, at least half-full. It has been growing in my mind over the last few days as I have waited for my release from hospital and is now the size of one of those giant bottles that you see on advertising hoardings: a giant bottle of vodka.

      ‘No more drinking now,’ Dr Aranthraman says, ‘remember, just one more drink could kill you,’ and he smiles, because he’s a nice fella, and I smile, because I am the twinkling, dazzling Billy Parks. And then Maureen, who has come to pick me up and take me home, bless her, smiles, but she does so with thin lips, because she knows the weakness in me.

      ‘You look after him now,’ says Dr Aranthraman, ‘he is a famous footballer.’

      ‘Oh I’ll do my best,’ she says, looking at me like I am a naughty boy. I smile up at them both, but in my mind, I am being chased by a six-foot bottle of fucking Smirnoff vodka. I know that it is there, on my kitchen table. It is there and it has grown and now fills all the space in my brain with its wondrous evil presence.

      We get into Maureen’s car. As ever she is immaculately turned out; all teeth and hairdo and posh knickers, that’s Maureen. I catch a glimpse of stockinged thigh as she changes gear. I know that underneath her clothes there will be a complicated and exotic system of underwear that is designed to deflect attention from the signs of wear and tear on her fifty-five-year-old body. It works too. Usually. But not today. After two weeks in hospital, even I, Billy Parks, can’t think about getting me leg over. All I can think about is the vodka bottle on the kitchen table.

      ‘So,’ she says, ‘how are you feeling?’

      ‘I feel fantastic,’ I say, ‘like I’ve got a new zest for life.’ The words float easily from my mouth, they’re not weighed down by truth.

      ‘That’s great. I kept a couple of clippings from the newspapers for you.’

      She’s good like that, Maureen, she’s been doing it for the entire time we’ve known each other; she’s already told me that there was a paragraph in the Sunday People, saying ‘Former West Ham favourite, Billy Parks collapsed while out watching a park game’, which is a load of cobblers, I was on my way to the pub; while the Mirror ran a story about ‘Billy’s Booze Battle’. I don’t mind. They’ve got their job to do. They’ve got to sell their newspapers. And, for me, I can’t lie: it’s nice to be talked about.

      We drive down round the Elephant and Castle and I look out of the window at the light of the day. After ten days in the hospital, the world seems huge, a bloody frightening, fast moving chaos; the cars are giant metal beasts, careering around corners and across junctions, carrying life and normal, ordinary people. And as I watch them the vodka bottle grows bigger and more powerful.

      I try to take my mind off it. I’ve got to. Dr Aranthraman told me: booze, no new liver, bad end; no booze, new liver, life. It sounds easy.

      I try to chase the vodka bottle away by changing the subject.

      ‘Funny thing happened,’ I say, ‘in hospital, a very funny thing; this old geezer, Gerry Higgs his name is, he used to be like a coach and groundsman at the Orient when I was a kid.’

      She pouts and her eyes narrow a bit as she’s taking in what I’m telling her. ‘He was there when I fell over in Southwark Park and he comes to visit me.’ I stop, because it still doesn’t make any sense to me. ‘He must be well into his eighties, because he was old back in the day.’ I pause and the image of Gerry Higgs back in 1965 shouting and bawling at the apprentices drifts into my mind. ‘Well anyway, he tells me that I’ve been selected to appear before some kind of committee of footballing legends.’

      ‘Footballing legends?’ she says. ‘What’s that?’

      I shrug, then sigh, ‘I dunno.’ Because I don’t know, I have no clue what Gerry Higgs meant. ‘Perhaps it’s some programme on ESPN or Sky Sports or summat, anyway, it was nice of him to visit me.’

      Maureen turns to me now. ‘Visit you?’ she says. ‘Those nurses told me that the only person to visit was me.’

      ‘No,’ I say. ‘Gerry Higgs was definitely there.’

      She drives on. She’s not interested in the Council of Football Immortals. Instead she tells me that in the back of the car she’s got something for me: a jigsaw. A jigsaw. I’m confused. A jigsaw? Me, Billy bloody Parks. I once scored a hat-trick inside twenty minutes at Maine Road, pulled Mickey Doyle all over the place I did – God love him.

      What do I want a jigsaw for?

      ‘It’s a competition I’m running at the pub,’ she tells me. ‘There’s a prize for the person who can complete the jigsaw in the quickest time. You text me when you’re about to start and then text me when you’ve finished, and I put the times up in the bar. Little Brian Staplehurst, you know that bloke who works at Lloyds Bank, he’s already posted a time of seventeen hours. And anyway – it’ll keep your mind off drinking and going to the pub – you heard what the doctor said.’

      The vodka bottle grows a little bit more and casts me in its magnificent, vicious shadow.

      ‘Seventeen hours,’ I say. ‘Is he blind or something?’

      ‘No.’

      She laughs.

      She has a nice laugh does Maureen, that’s what I first liked about her; she has a light laugh, flirty, but not quite accessible, yes, that is Maureen. It’s why we’re not an item, never have been, not properly – she’s a landlady with a nice laugh and great underwear who has been let down by better blokes than me and knows how to enjoy a bottle of wine and listen to all the bullshit and be seductive without allowing you to get too close. I’ve known her for years. I like her. If we’d met when we were younger, before the bad blokes, before everything, then, who knows?

      We park up. And make our way up the stone piss-smelling staircase to my second floor flat.

      It’s not there.

      It’s not bloody there. The vodka bottle is missing from the kitchen table. It’s not bloody there. It’s not there and its absence has blasted a hole through my very being. How can it not be there? I don’t want to drink it, of course not, one more drink might kill me, but I want it to be there, more than anything. I want the chance to drink it.

      I turn to Maureen. ‘The vodka bottle,’ I say, ‘the bottle that was on the table – where is it? Where the fuck is it, it was sitting on the table, half finished?’

      She looks at me, her face crumbling with incredulity at what I am saying, and I know that’s the right reaction, but I just want the fucking massive bottle of vodka, the fucking beautiful massive bottle of vodka which has been chasing me and has caught me and dragged me closer to its open mouth.

      ‘Billy,’ she says. ‘Billy, are you mad? You can’t drink vodka, I chucked it down the sink when I came to get your clothes for you.’

      ‘You silly cow. You silly fucking bitch.’ The words just shoot out of my mouth. I’m not thinking; I’m like a cobra, a thirsty horrible black cobra crawling on my belly; I just want it to be there. Is it too much to ask? What has it got to do with her, what does she care if I have a quick vodka now I’ve been released from hospital? I mean, she’s just a friend; we haven’t fucked each other for months.

      ‘You silly, stupid bitch,’ I say, and I’ve gritted my teeth and I’m so, so wrong. And I’ve clenched my fists and for a second I am so angry that I want to punch her, but instead I slam my hand against the empty kitchen table.

      Maureen puts her hand up, she’s dealt with much worse than me. ‘Billy,’ she says, ice cold, colder than the North Pole, colder than the surface of Neptune, she sighs, and shakes her head. ‘Just fuck off and kill yourself.’ And with that she’s gone, out the door.

      I’m left alone. For about an hour I frantically go through the bins and the cupboards and drawers, looking for a drink. I throw things on the floor and rip out stuff