Eyecatcher

By Edmund Johnston

Meet my father. Lying Billy Wright. Lies are all you can expect from him. He knows nothing else. Billy Wright has spent half his life in rebellion against truth, sense and decency. A fervent apostle of lies and mischief, he has thrown himself into every kind of trouble he can imagine. He shares his life grudgingly with his son Alan and grandson Luke, a family of three men who have lost the women they loved. Now an old man, Billy finds his family disintegrating. As Alan buckles under the pressures of a desolate worklife, Luke makes his own bid for freedom by trying to demolish the family altogether. Billy’s formidable dishonesty may be their only hope. A story of lies, bad parenting and forgiveness. And a really big hammer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326675820

Book preview

Eyecatcher

Eyecatcher: The Folly of Billy Wright

The Stickleback Press, Bolton

First published in Great Britain in 2016

Copyright © Edmund Johnston 2016

Edmund Johnston has asserted his moral right

under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1998,

to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-1-326-67582-0

Cover photographs by Fiona Johnston

www.sticklebackpress.co.uk

Uncommon New Fiction

How the land lies

eyecatcher: a detail of a landscape or garden designed to draw the eye; a folly; a construction without purpose.

A drab Northern Parish Church, Sunday morning. A weary-faced vicar presides over his flock. A thin crowd, less than thirty in this big draughty building. Anglicans. Not as fervent as you might want, but dependable. An open door to all comers.

As he begins the Collect, a coffin is carried into the church. Something is unpleasantly wrong. There is no funeral planned; there rarely is on a Sunday. He eyes the congregation. This will not end well. They do not want to share their church with a corpse this morning, not without warning. Worse, the grieving family will be turned away. Repelled. No room for you here. It's not good enough. Here, of all places, there must be room.

He makes his decision. He will try to accommodate the mourners and their grief, but it won’t be a funeral. They will have to come back and go through this again at the proper time. Poor sods.

He continues as before, intoning his way through the liturgy, and tries vainly to catch the eye of his dreamy curate, in the hope of dispatching him to intercept the family and their corpse. He cranes his head meaningfully towards the young man, who notices nothing. Lost in devotion, perhaps. Hopeless. But then he realises with gratitude that there are no grieving family members following the coffin, just the four anxious pall-bearers, who seem strangely young for the job. They are visibly struggling with the weight, so much that he worries they might drop their coffin. He tries again to will the curate into life.

The boy pays no attention, but the bearers have realised their mistake. They stop at the far end of the nave, unsure what to do next. A mix-up at the funeral home, clearly. None of the congregation has noticed yet. The bearers can turn and take away their dead without disturbing anyone.

The young bearers do no such thing. They are not from a funeral home and they are not grieving relatives, but drama students from the nearby university. They have been paid and drilled and cajoled into their performance this morning, and they all wish they hadn’t. Too late now.

They wait for a signal, and then start to walk up the nave. A hollow wooden knocking marks time for them. Tap tap tappity tap. Tappity tappity tappity tap. The vicar falls silent, mouth open, as he realises what he is listening to. Tap tap tappity tap. A bony knuckle rapping on wood. Tappity tappity tappity tap. Whatever this is, it is horrible. He suddenly feels protective of his congregation. A few crane round to gape at the advancing coffin. They don’t deserve this, whatever this is. A prank surely. But that empty, bony knocking is hard to dismiss. And then a muffled voice. He can’t make out the words, but the voice is something low and guttural that lifts the hairs on his arms. The church is colder than it ought to be. He should pray, he realises. He must lead his flock in prayer. He scrabbles around for the right words, then settles for the obvious. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

The knocking and the footfalls and the horrible muffled voice continue as the coffin draws closer. The bearers come to a stop just below the pulpit, in full view of the congregation. It is suddenly quiet. The vicar begins again, determined to hold sway in his own church. Our Father, who art in heaven. A few dutiful members of the congregation join in. The rest goggle at the coffin and wait to see what will happen next. It has come in the wrong way round he realises, head-first.

There are no trestles out for the coffin. For a moment he imagines that the young men will put it down on the floor, but instead they stand and wait, with the box still high on their shoulders. They each shift their posture a little, bracing against the weight as best they are able. Something is about to happen.

The coffin quivers and wobbles, then the lid creaks open. Someone cries out in surprise or fear. Despite himself the vicar gasps, then ploughs on with his prayer. ‘How dare you?’ he thinks to himself. ‘In church. In my bloody church.’

In fact, just half of the coffin lid has opened, like a stable door. A pale, elderly man labours to pull himself up to a sitting position, then leans towards the congregation and lifts his large bony hands above his head. From the pulpit, the vicar can see only the back of his bald head, veined and unpleasant. The man in the coffin is wearing make-up, he realises. There is a tide-mark behind his ear where the corpse-pallor stops. The skin on the back of his head is flushed and mottled, ruddy. This man is not dead. It is an absurd thought, but a relief nonetheless. This man has never been dead.

The vicar feels strangely detached from what is unfolding in front of him. He is not part of the audience. His curate however stands aghast, transfixed. The man in the coffin must make for an imposing sight from floor level. He stretches his arms wide and high, then brings his knuckles down hard on the wood of the coffin. The noise is louder now, almost a drum beat, strangely martial. Brap brap brappity brap. Brappity brappity brappity brap.

‘Welcome!’ he shouts suddenly, startling everyone. ‘Welcome one and all! Welcome to my funeral!’ He notices the gape-mouthed curate and holds a hand out towards him. ‘Be not afraid. I am one of you. One of your own. I’m only dead, or dying at least. Edging towards my grave, the same as you.’ The curate is clearly terrified.

For a moment, the vicar thinks he might enjoy this nonsense, even approve of it. Upset and dismay have their place in the life of the Church, or they should. Only what is broken can be made whole. Perhaps this interloper is a preacher, some stripe of fundamentalist, here to shake them from their torpor. His voice is strong and resonant, a good voice for a sermon, but, the vicar soon decides, there is something glib and untrustworthy about him. Speaking well comes too easily to him. He shows no anxiety before his audience. He must not care what they think. This isn’t for their benefit.

He beats out his rhythm on the wood as he speaks. ‘Be not afraid. Or be afraid, if you prefer. It’s good to be scared sometimes; it shows you’re paying attention. But I will not harm you. I am safe in my box, snugly bedded in top-notch carpentry, right where I belong.’ Or not. The vicar can see now: the coffin is homemade. The joints are neat, but not professional, and the varnish is nothing like that of a proper casket. The whole thing looks a little cheap.

‘Safe in my box I am! Hoicked high on the shoulders of these four louts. Look at them. Fat faces, shaved heads, empty eyes. The usual.’ The bearers are concentrating too hard to react, and facing the wrong way for anyone to see their eyes. ‘Their time will come. Is coming, right now. We’re all on our way, all dying. They’re just a little less dead than me. A few decades in hand, no more.’

A dramatic pause, then he starts up again, his voice a stage whisper.

‘My funeral. My final appointment with the world. A summing up of my life. A moment of meaning and emotion.’ A pause, then he hisses, ‘See us for the little we are. A handful of animals in suits, scuffling about in a chilly church, pretending our respects to we don’t know what. But I do. I know what we honour, what we yearn to take seriously. Ourselves. We know how little we matter and it terrifies us.’

By now, he is straining towards his audience, bent almost double, arms outstretched and fingers splayed, as though desperate to reach them. Suddenly he relaxes, sits up and takes a breath. His voice when he speaks again is warmer, reassuring. ‘See us for what we are, then stop. Lay the truth aside. The truth never helped anyone.’ He mimes lifting something small and delicate, gingerly putting it out of his way. ‘I want you to think we matter, we five breathing, dying men. We don’t, but pretend. See in us a pattern, with a certain value. Why? Because that’s what patterns do, it’s what they are: they hold value, they catch it out of the air and hold it in place to be seen.

‘If you prefer, say simply that people matter, people have value. It’s no worse a lie than any other. People matter to people. People care about people, they value them, so they matter. People matter because what people care about matters. Hah! People only matter if people matter - they don’t! - and so on forever. I’ll stick with patterns myself.

The vicar yawns conspicuously. No one notices, but he is utterly bored. This is schoolboy stuff.

‘So,’ (suddenly back to full volume, startling the hapless curate), ‘the pattern moves in the connections between we five dead and dying men. These four are neither family nor friends to me – that tells you something. At first glance, we are strangers. I mean nothing to them. I do not touch them. That’s what they would say.’ He puts on a bluff, blokeish voice. ‘Just doing a job. Don’t know him from Adam. Don’t know him at all. But they cannot be right. We are connected, whatever they say or think. They carry my body for me. Their ailing bodies carry mine. What could be more intimate? I couldn’t need them more.’

The old ham leans to his right, groping under the coffin in the hope of laying a hand on a bearer. ‘This is the man. Blame him. He made them stumble. He made them think of the dead. Before that, they might have been on rails. They shuffled along with a dead man on their shoulders and not a care in the world. I might have been anything – timber, an old roll of carpet, diseased meat. Just a dead weight. They had truly forgotten their business. They forgot why they were here, what kept them from the sofa and the television. They forgot my funeral; the death, the life that they must carry. Most of all, they forgot that I needed them, and that it is impossible to touch another life without being touched in return.

‘This man arrived early.’ The hand waves wildly by the side of the coffin, almost slapping against the young man’s flushed cheek, but never connecting. ‘He arrived a split-second before his friend on my left. He alone lifted his foot up and then we had our moment.’ He slaps the wood hard, almost dislodging himself from his bearers’ shoulders. ‘His corner of the coffin was briefly that fraction higher. Suddenly he was alone with my weight, and he was afraid. Almost instantly, I slid away from him, pulled towards the ground, shunted by gravity towards his friends at my feet. It was not comfortable, believe me. All my weight cramped down into the narrow end of my plush carry case.’ Shoebox! thought the vicar.

‘An onlooker would have seen nothing. They did not drop me. A quick shuffling of feet and a bracing of shoulders and I was back under control. So it seemed. But they knew. As one, they remembered what it is they do. They carry the bodies of strangers. It makes them strangers to themselves. As one, they wondered: what the hell am I doing? Who am I to carry this old man’s body. Who indeed? And they are not alone. Any one busy with the bodies of strangers is just as burdened. The nurses and the doctors. The beauticians. The bored girls cleaning up the elderly and incontinent. They all carry the weight of stranger’s lives.

‘I should say, I feel for them. I hate it too. I want nothing to do with these hopeless boys, but I have no choice. They are what has been given to me. We are a mutual burden.’

The vicar grows peevish. He wants his church back. He tears strips of paper from the list of notices and flicks pellets at the blank, piggish faces of the bearers. He wills them to drop their load. He feels no sympathy for them, despite their discomfort.

‘The moment passed. We continued on our slow path, and perhaps they walked with a little more care now, determined not to drop me but eager to get inside the safe haven of the church, eager to put me down, eager to recover their own selves. But here we are and there is no relief. They are stuck with their burden.

‘It is not death they fear, but humanity. If a stranger’s body in a wooden crate can make a claim on you, then anyone can. The possibilities are endless and dreadful. Our lives are not our own.’

He reaches down and raps hard on the sides of his coffin. It is clearly an agreed signal. The bearers adjust their load, take a couple of steps backwards and then turn about to begin their progress back down the nave and out of the church. For the first time, the man in the box is facing the vicar. He grins and waves cheerily. The vicar lifts a hand in some kind of acknowledgement, one old showman to another, then checks his watch. The whole business has taken less than ten minutes. No real harm done. He will take up where he left off. But the show has not finished. The bearers have paused again, and the man leans forwards to shout something more to the congregation. He sounds less composed now, more urgent and sincere. The old fool wants people to take him seriously.

‘Remember! We must all scrabble in life’s dressing up box. It’s all make-believe. Choose the best costumes! There is no need to be cowed. Enjoy yourselves! Please. Enjoy your folly while you can!’ He might say more, but the bearers are bored and keen to get away. The old man looks bewildered and briefly afraid as he feels his coffin move beneath him, no longer moving to his commands. As he retreats, he mouths the words, ‘Good luck, good luck, good luck,’ but the vicar and most of the congregation are too far away to make out his words, leaving him mumbling to himself.

The bearers do their job – they carry him on to wherever he is going.

One

Meet my father. He’s not dead, he’s just an arsehole.

Lying Billy Wright. Lies are all you can expect from him. He knows nothing else.

And yet this time he is telling a truth, contrary old goat that he is. He will die alone. He will have no family or friends at his funeral, no warmth or affection, no mourning. Only strangers will mark his passing. He has driven everyone else away and alienated every person who cares for him. Most of all me, who cared the most.

It’s not just his nonsense. Anyone might love a self-centred old man. He’s a ludicrous show-off who claims every moment for himself, but people live with far worse. Billy has pushed hard to make himself unforgiveable. He is alone because he wants to be. He is gleeful in his disregard for other people. He has earned his isolation.

Did he do it? The whole rigmarole with the church and the coffin and his bearers and the big speech? He tried.

His congregation were not so awed or placid as he’d imagined. Half-way through his spiel, a stern woman with grey curls and a beige raincoat announced loudly that she had just phoned the police on her mobile. Billy’s young bearers panicked, clumping him down on the floor and running out of the church, leaving him stuck fast. The bottom half of his homemade coffin was screwed down, anchoring him firmly, to stop Billy gesticulating his way out of the grave. Releasing him was twenty minutes of a job, another task the young men had been drilled in. Instead, Billy spent a humiliating hour swearing impotently to himself as the service concluded over his head. Eventually, after the tea and biscuits, the vicar took pity and phoned the church handyman, the police having decided that they had better things to worry about.

Billy Wright. A noise and a stink of a man. A man hungry for mischief and trouble and everything forbidden. A man determined to be in the wrong and skilled at getting his own way. A man of energy and vigour, a restless, relentless student of bad behaviour. A man who lives to disturb the peace. A man you might admire, even dote on, if you set much store in wilful independence; a man you could pretend was a hero of sorts, but only for a short while and from a safe distance. No one to share your life with. No friend worth the having. No kind of father.

Is it obvious? I am furious with him. I have been furious with him for thirty years and I don’t plan to stop now.

It’s a simple enough story. He betrayed me. He betrayed my trust, just when I needed him, when I needed more than I ever had. Perhaps I needed him too much. I was twenty one, a child really. My mother had died unexpectedly. A little afterwards, while I was still reeling, he made his move. Callous old bastard. Perhaps he wanted to toughen me up. He always wanted me hard, resilient, a man in his own image. He didn’t get his way.

It’s a mystery to me. Why do fathers fear their sons’ vulnerability? My childishness was what made him into a father. He was more of a man for my being his son, for my needing him. He should have been glad, proud even, not ashamed.

What did he do? He changed. He went mad. He abandoned me. He killed off the father I knew and relied upon. Until that moment, I knew him as a stern dispassionate patriarch, perpetually and devoutly rational. No more. He declared himself a stranger. From that moment, he became a self-indulgent and capricious maniac, a liar, a gleefully untrustworthy charlatan. He did it quickly and deliberately, leaving me without a world to live in. He thrust into my face just how alone I was.

All parents hurt their children. It’s part of being human. No parent should delight in it. No father ought to relish the harm he has done.

For a decade or more, I tried to understand, despite my anger. He never wanted me to understand. He wants me to feel perplexed and repelled. He doesn’t want company, but an audience. Even now, thirty years later, he wants me as a witness to his nonsense. Every few months, he sends me a new bundle of papers through the post, filled with rambling invective, great screeds of rebellion against his younger, better self. I cringe to think of the hours he has put into troubling me.

The first few times, I sat down with the bundle he had sent and tried to make sense of it. I got nowhere. I wasn’t equipped for his cheerful idiocy. I wrote back, earnestly framing my doubts and disagreements, groping desperately for the dad I had lost. In reply, he called me a credulous fuckwit, blindly obedient to a logic both constipated and defunct. He clearly liked the phrase – he wrote the same sentence ten times over, as though he’d been given lines as punishment, then wrote twenty more pages of supposed education for me. I needed to lie more, apparently. Be less sincere, less rational. Forgot everything that he had taught me as a child. Be less of a fuckwit. Or more of one, if I could do it in style.

After that, I burned his letters. Once or twice I posted the ashes back to him, but it felt too much like joining in with his games. These days I put them straight into the recycling.

*****

So, he changed. He made a liar of himself. It sounds a small thing, but Billy takes a broad view of his responsibilities as a dishonest man. He is forever on the hunt for new lies to tell and new ways to offend. It bears repeating: he works hard at his mischief. Billy Wright is a determined man and he is determined to be irresponsible, unpredictable and infuriating. It’s not just his idea of a good time. Anything less would be a strait jacket to him and Billy loves his freedom. It is his life’s work.

He is banned from everywhere that can ban him, not just pubs and betting shops, but department stores, shoe shops, several butchers, the local college and at one time the whole town centre. In the same spirit, his finances are an arcane shambles, with such complex debts to so many different banks, building societies, pawnbrokers, credit card companies, loan sharks, utility companies, broadband providers and grocery delivery services that I suspect he has become a financial institution in his own right and may well be too big to fail. He writes regularly and affectionately to his many creditors and bailiffs, often enclosing tiny payments towards his debt as a token of esteem. By and large, they do not write back. He often tries to share his debts with me, and more than once he has had his bills put into my name. For a few months I did pay his gas bill without us ever discussing it. I assumed that he needed the help, until I realised that he was deliberately running up the charges. Driving by the house, I noticed the front door and all his windows standing open. He was out, but the heating was at full blast, the oven was lit with the door open and all four gas rings were burning merrily while the hot tap ran freely. Afterwards I couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole estate was a little warmer for his efforts. I stopped paying.

He has been evicted from many flats. He has elicited nuisance complaints from the roughest neighbours on the roughest estates. He is strangely fearless, or strangely fearful, depending on how you look at it: he is so afraid of ordinary life that he has no time to think of his own safety. He regularly gets himself beaten up. He goes into town on Friday nights to explain his ideas to random drunks. If all else fails, he tries to tickle the bouncers. He seems to enjoy a good beating, finding some instructive lesson in it. And it provides further opportunities for mischief. Twice he had me investigated by social services: he staggered into the Town Hall and told them his Friday night bruises were my doing.

He has been arrested more times than I can say. As soon as he starts making speeches in the cells, the police try to have him sectioned, but the doctors don’t want him, more’s the pity.

He’s a mess, and one entirely of his own making. He’s the most reliably unreliable man I know. One thing you can say for him. If you want someone to be angry with, he’ll rise to the occasion.

*****

For me, it starts with his name: William Frederick Wright, known to the world as Billy. The world, but not me. He taught me to call him William, just as he called me Alan, sincerely and without affectation. My mother was Helen. She probably wanted to be ‘mother’, or even ‘mummy’, but it was impossible in our precise, rational household.

Our home was a peculiar blend of freedom and