Funny billies

Mum was walking on the marsh again. Mrs Herbert at The Salting’s spotted her in a cardigan and slippers during one of the first frosts, staring over the kissing gate towards the sluice. The farmer drove her back. She kept saying, “can you just plug me in?” nodding at the seat belt.  She was getting forgetful but refused help. On the Wednesday I took the day off and drove up.

“I want you to make sure the letter of complaint is sent first thing.” We sat in mum’s kitchen among a bundle of unpaid bills. The table was strewn with her plant cuttings. In another age she would have been burnt as a witch. She was filled with the saltmarsh, the tenacity and sudden intensity of the sea lavender appearing between tides swelled up inside her into a crimson flush. “It’s a complete racket; the house insurance has gone up 60 quid. They don’t make it easy but finally I got the address of the omnibus-man…”

“Ombudsman,” I corrected.

“That’s what I said, smart-arse.”

In the past I saved up these verbal entanglements to amuse my girlfriend but now it felt more treacherous. The doctor’s letter lay on the table spattered with marmalade. I glanced at it. “No obvious neurological damage but some lesions and a little patch of white matter, wear and tear…” Marsha was in good condition for 75, daily 5-mile walks, cold water swimming and lots of kale and cashew nuts.

"I'm staying here, Tom. I don't care what Dr Biswas says. They want this house for the new development." Her face was sharp, the unwavering glare of one of the local gulls watching you sideways as you scoffed your chips in the bus shelter.  “I don’t want him fiddling with me and all his bloody mumbo jumbo. It’s called getting old.”

We finished our coffees mum using her finger to scrape the froth around the rim. “Let’s stretch our legs, Tom. Have a miranda while the sun’s out.”

The verbal missteps opened up more meaningful avenues than our usual exchanges about friends with cancer or her feigned interest in my boring work. I admired her. She was stripping things down: fewer and fewer possessions, bleak sea views, mornings on the sea wall. We walked out past the caravan park where the Colne lay still and milky. She was as much part of this place as the turnstones scrabbling over the rocks.

“They’ll be coming for me soon. Just like Don.”

“Who’s coming?” I said.

“The funny billies.”

The name briefly resonated.

Don was an old boyfriend and neighbour; he whittled away at wooden figurines almost to the point of nothingness. Figurines salvaged from the rotted groynes, dreadlocked with seaweed, sticking out of the mud. They were dancing and capering around his bedroom. From the moonlit road mum thought he was having a party. She mentioned how after hearing of his last illness she was on “tender-hooks all night.” That was exactly right: tender hooks is how we connect; how me and mum still connected through these tender and loving barbs that got caught under the skin and tear the living tissue. Tender hooks just about sums up our relationship.

 “There’s one up ahead…”  and she nodded her head in greeting.

The road now was rocky, crisscrossed with rivulets as we approached the ford where we like to sit and eat our sandwiches looking out at the remains of the old railway bridge, a tangled downward spiral, that once connected our town.

“Another sheep?”

“No. Another one of those funny billies. I don’t know where they all come from. They seem to like the quarry where you used to smoke pot with your sister…”

The funny billies were a new sort of entanglement. They hinted at something ghostly, funny-peculiar things that mum sometimes saw on the lawn or gathering in the fields. Don had started her off when he warned her to lock her doors shortly before his fall.  “They’re tame as anything but very wild in appearance like they’ve been asleep all winter on the marsh. Wildflowers and brambles tucked into pockets and old velvet buttonholes. They like to come in from the cold, that’s why you need to lock up. They left a dreadful mess in my studio. Blackberries all trodden into the carpet.”

She reminded me when I was a little boy just after dad left, lying on my tummy on the pine floorboards of my bedroom drawing in my book, that it was me who came up with the word.

“Funny billies that’s your phrase. It’s always stuck. I kept the drawings of them all in their finery, dancing and capering in the dusk. Don’t you remember?”

My bedroom looked over gardens and school playing fields; beyond was the sea wall and estuary. Figures silhouetted against the sea and sky moved along the sea wall, the funny shadowy effect flattened them out, elongating arms and legs. I saw plenty of strange things from the window. Not only figures but boats that floated in the air, one with peculiar towers and minarets like the skyline of a fantastic city. The air was so refined that it let things through.

We sat on the waterproof blanket by the inlet with the islands saturated with muted browns and green, beyond the thick sludge waders dabbled.  I poured out coffee from the thermos, passed a cup to mum and a thick homemade cookie stuffed with pecans and walnuts.

“Funny billies,” I said. The word trailed in its wake the residue of a bad dream.

“Of course, you remember.”  She sipped her coffee. “Put the fear of God in me the first time.  You said there was one in Dad’s old study, before I got rid of every trace of him. The bastard.  A funny billy with orange hair, hunched up in Dad’s swivel chair – the one we were all forbidden from sitting in. Sitting there sort of stupidly, staring at dad’s typewriter, poking at it with a twig.  Bits of bramble were tucked around the photos of the printing works. I thought we had a burglar.  In hindsight I reckon he was decorating. If Dad was still  around, you would have caught it.  He would have knocked you into next Wednesday.

I wish you’d greet them as well,” she said. “Don told me they like to be acknowledged.”

She had me properly wound up but when I stared into the mist there was only an old red trainer and a plastic bag snagged on the barbed wire.  “Like me, they improve with age. When you’re ready to go they start showing up, near mist and water. They are very particular about who they appear to.”

In the kitchen I unpacked groceries and filled the freezer with vindaloos and fruit pies.  Mum was staring out the kitchen window at her shingle garden. “Ever so bold, they are, Tom. They have lost their way.”

“Where do they want to get to?” I asked.

“That’s just it. They get stuck out here between sea and sky. Better here than trapped in a care home.   We have forgotten we’re meant to be someplace else, so we turn up the telly.  We can’t switch it off. It seems so simple getting from A to B. I come into a room, and I don’t know what I came in for. I let my feet carry me wherever. See. They’re laughing now!”

 I drove home past the golf links and the caravan park. I missed the turn off at Elmstead, but it didn’t matter. When you don’t know what the point of it all is, one roundabout is as good as another.

The next week in the printing works I phoned Dr Biswas and left a message. I was checking the proofs of the new wildlife calendars.  I stopped at a photo that looked like mum’s garden: the golden shingle fenced off with ropes, a rotted old boat planted up with lavender. In the corner where the tamarisk thinned there was a wraith-like face, peering through the feathery pink tufts.  The gap-toothed smile lingered in the air, savouring my discomfort before disappearing into the tamarisk.  The copyright was registered to Don Parry.

                                                                       *****

The next morning, I got the call I was dreading.  I can’t say it was unexpected.  Mum was out on the marsh. She had been spotted in the caravan park and further along at the kiosk where the beach huts ended.  The place they call millionaire’s row. The huts look out at the point where the estuary opens up into the North Sea.  The waves were slopping over the promenade, turning and smacking down heavily with the slap of sumo wrestlers. The piled chunks of the breakwater looked sharp and forbidding. 

 When we found her, she was frozen, a light frosting of snow on her dressing gown. The weird thing was her pockets were stuffed with wildflowers, fresh summer pickings in January. Her long white hair, blowing loosely around her bare shoulders, was dotted with Californian poppies uncrumpling in the winter sun.

“I never knew her to wear lipstick,” I said to the woman from the kiosk.

“That’s not lipstick. Look at her stained fingers.”

One of mum’s hands was partly balled up into a fist. Squatting down I could see through the opening: green leaves, brambles and dark squishy fruit.

The woman pointed to the little arrowed footprints, dancing around mum.  This was where we shared our last picnic. Curled up there she looked more like a fox than my mum, a wild thing gone to ground.