Billy Elliot (2 page)

They were quarrelling again that morning.

‘Come on, Dad! We’ll be late! Stop faffing about!’

Tony was rushing about the place, pulling on his boots, slapping his hands together. But Dad wanted to make the place look pretty. He’s always worrying about Nan being on her own in the house.

‘I’ve time to do your nan’s breakfast, haven’t I?’

‘For f***’s sake! Billy can do it. Come on!’

‘Hang on.’ Dad ran out into the yard. Tony walked up and down, clucking to himself. I just sat there and picked out the tune. It’s like this all the time. Quarrelling and fighting. It’s all they ever do.

Dad came back in with the coal scuttle. ‘There’s not much of this coal left.’

‘We’ll be digging it out of the ground again next month.’

Dad stood there with his mouth pulled down. ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ he said.

Tony looked at him like he was made of poison or something. You could feel the air freeze. Tony hates that sort of
talk. ‘You’d just pack it in and stay in bed if it wasn’t for me, wouldn’t you?’ he said.

‘Tony,’ Dad began, but Tony was off.

‘Suit your bloody self, I’m not waiting for youse.’ He grabbed an armful of placards and made for the door.

‘Tony! Tony, wait for us!’ yelled Dad. But Tony was gone.

Dad didn’t chase him. He just stood there. Tony reckons he’s had it. He reckons he’s given in. I dunno, maybe he’s right.

I carried on with me tune.

‘Shut it up, Billy, will you!’ he yelled at me suddenly.

I took no notice. ‘Mam would have let us,’ I told him, picking away. He came up behind me and slammed the lid down. He only just missed my fingers. Then he ran out the door after Tony. What’s he want to stop me playing for, when he’s not even here?

‘I’ll see you later at the Social,’ he said on the way out.

Bugger! I thought. I hate it when he comes to watch me box.

‘Listen. I boxed. Me dad boxed. You box.’

That’s me dad. What he did two hundred years ago is what his dad did two hundred years before that and it’s what I’ll be doing two hundred years from now. That’s how come my dad knows what’s what. My brother used to take the piss out of him when he was younger.

‘Yer can’t tell me – Ah know!’ he’d say. That was in the old days, before he turned into me dad as well. Now he’s just as bad. And that’s why every Saturday morning I put the gloves around me neck and I go down the club to punch someone’s head in for them.

I could get into the boxing if they let me be. The thing is, I have my own ideas about it, and they don’t like that. The thing about boxing, see, it’s not what you do with your hands. It’s what you do with your feet. George the trainer and dad, they don’t understand that. They think it’s just a question of how hard you hit someone in the head, but that’s wrong. Look at Muhammad Ali. You can’t hit him, he’s not there. ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.’ If George had to sing that, it’d be more like ‘Stand still as a bloody rock, punch like a bloody lorry.’ He’s always yelling at me and telling me to stop dancing about the place.

He hates it. ‘Hit him! Hit him! Stand still and fight!’ he yells at me. Stand still and get hit, he means. He thinks I only do it to annoy him. Once he actually climbed in the ring and held me still so the other bloke could hit me properly.

If they let me alone until I wore out the other blokes and got ’em tired in the legs, then I’d start belting ’em. But they can’t wait that long. They don’t think. It’s tactics, see. They don’t bloody think.

W
ell, I worry for the boy. There’s no one to look out for him since his mam died. I do what I can for him, but a boy needs a mother. Especially a boy like that.

Look at this fight we’re in now. It’s a fight for our future, for our community. It’s a fight for my job and for Tony’s job – but is it a fight for Billy? See our Billy a quarter of a mile underground hacking the coal out, the sweat running black, in your eyes, down your back. That’s not our Billy. All I could ever do for him was pay his way and I can’t even do that now.

And I’m not sure I ever will again.

Tony thinks I’m going soft. We’re owed. That’s how Tony sees it. Aye, well, he’s right but so what? Being owed never won owt. I remember my dad on strike in the thirties. They weren’t owed then – they had power. The coal they dug ran the factories, lit the streets and the houses, drove the ships across the water. Without coal the whole bloody country dragged to a halt. Look at it now – natural gas, oil, nuclear energy. You don’t have to go and dig oil and gas out of the ground with your bare hands, you just tap down into it and it shoots up like a bloody fountain. Nice and easy. And cheap.

And then, of course, there’s the luxurious lifestyles folk like us insist on. Gold bath taps. Caviar with every meal. That’s
why it’s cheaper to float coal over from Argentina than it is to pay us to dig it up out of the ground.

I don’t think.

Well, I’ll tell you what. If Thatcher came here today and said to me, Look, we’re going to close down the mines and we’re going to open up a whole bloody great town full of shiny new factories ... I don’t know rightly if I’d say yea or nay, but at least it’d be some sort of hope. Not like this. Not like, you lot aren’t cost-effective, so sod off. That’s Thatcher. She must have a fist where her heart is. The whole bloody community is going to be left to rot. She just doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about us – that goes without saying – but she doesn’t care about anything else either. She doesn’t care if the whole bloody country gets closed down, so long as she runs it her way. She’s already shut down half of it. The mills all gone, half our industry closed down or sold off abroad. Now it’s our turn. At first I thought we could do it. I thought we could teach her a lesson the other workers couldn’t. Now I’m not so sure.

Well. Maybe Tony’s right. Maybe I’m just going soft. I’ve seen it before – old blokes like me with too much to lose who’ve lost too much already. And me, I’ve already lost just about everything. My lovely Sarah gone, gone from me for ever. Every day I wake up and I think, Can she really be dead? How could that happen? It’s unbelievable to me. And yet somehow, you know, here I am out of work and time on my hands, but I never seem to have a chance to even think about her. I’ve got my boys to bring up on my own. I’ve got the strike. You understand me. It’s hard, it’s very, very hard. I keep at it for Tony’s sake because ... well, what is there for Tony if we lose this? After all, if the world stopped tomorrow, I’d have
been in love and I’d’ve worked and lived and had my kids. But Tony? What’s he got? He was brought up to be a miner, and what’s a miner without a mine?

So here I am. Fighting for Tony, even though I don’t know if we can win. Fighting for Billy, even though I’ve got nothing for him even if we do win. I’ve got nowt else for them. No job. No mother. No future. Just me, here and now. It’s all I’ve got left.

I go down every Saturday I can to watch Billy box. I miss the beginning because of the picket, but it puts you in the right frame for boxing. It gets bloody rough out there. The police, don’t tell me they don’t have orders, they don’t need to be gentle but they don’t have to be that rough. Mind, I’ll tell you this, if we ever get our hands on the men in those coaches going through that line, we’ll tear the bastards limb from bloody limb. Some of the young lads like Tony, they want blood. They chant it sometimes. ‘BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD!’ Imagine sitting in that coach listening to that. And then knowing you’re going to meet us at the shops or on the street or wherever the next day ...

I don’t agree with violence. That’s not going to get us anywhere, there’ll always be scabs – but I can understand it. Rows and rows of men, going without, putting their community and the future before their own families – and there’s those bastards riding in behind a police guard to try and bring us down. Scabs. When you see men you’ve worked next to, men you thought were your friends – men you went to school with, or your son went to school with, people you thought you could trust – and there they are riding in behind a police guard five men thick! Well. It makes you want to kick
their bloody heads in. As if it wasn’t enough having to fight the bosses. To have to fight your own an’ all!

So – I went in that day ready to see my boy dish out some stick. I remember the feeling when your glove connects – tok! – it goes right up your arm and into your shoulder. It’s some-thing I did, and me dad did, it’s something Tony did too. Now it’s Billy’s turn. I keep telling him, ‘You’ve got to be able to fight, lad. If you can’t fight you can’t stand up for yourself, and if you can’t stand up for yourself ... well, what’s the point?’

They were using the downstairs as a soup kitchen for the strikers, and so the ballet class was in the hall as well. Rows of little girls in pink going up and down, up and down.

‘Bottoms out!’ called the woman doing the class. I thought, Bloody hell! Ballet and boxing, what a mixture! It made me chuckle while I sat down. Ballet and boxing! They ought to put the little girls in gloves and put the lads in those poncy pink shoes they wear. That’d be a laugh!

Our Billy was in the ring.

‘Go on, Billy!’ I shouted. I could see the little girls turning to look at me. I nodded at our lad. I thought, Let them have a look at him, see what he can do. I hadn’t been for a while. He didn’t use to be much good, but he’s improved lately, he’s been telling me. Says his footwork’s improved and his punching’s coming on. ‘Footwork,’ I said, ‘aye, you need to have footwork, just make sure you whack him one in between steps.’

Old George was checking the gloves, getting them ready.

‘Go on, lads, fight fair. Give it all you got!’

The other lad was a big chubby bloke. He was taller and stronger than our Billy, but he was a bit of a porker. Footwork, I thought – Billy’ll leave him standing!

Then out he came. And I thought ... Oh, Christ!

I mean. What was he playing at? Muhammad Ali? More like bloody Fred Astaire. Jumping and twisting and twatting about. He was even twirling round in circles and giving his back to his opponent.

‘Oh, not this again,’ George groaned. ‘This is man-to-man combat, not a bloody tea party. Hit him! Hit him! For god’s sake ...’ He looked over to me. All I could do was shake my head.

Billy was prancing about, occasionally going up close and doing a little jab. The other bloke was just standing there hiding behind his gloves, watching.

‘He’s just pissing about, Greavesy,’ said George. ‘Hit him one. Get stuck in. He’s like a fanny in a fit.’

‘Watch him, Billy!’ I yelled. Too late. Whack! Greavesy walked right up and smacked him one. Bang! And there was Billy on his back.

‘Jesus Christ!’ George was furious, absolutely furious. I suppose he felt he was letting me down as much as anything, but it’s not his fault. The boy’s unteachable. All that stuff about footwork! I might have known he was just daydreaming again.

‘Billy Elliot, you’re a disgrace to them gloves, your father and the traditions of this hall. You owe us fifty pence.’

I couldn’t look any more. All I wanted to do was come along and give him some support, and what happens? I have to watch him get humiliated. I was so angry. What could I do for that boy? What had I got for him? If he can’t even bloody look after himself against a fat prat like that, what is he? Eh? What is he? And what does that make me?

‘
G
o on – hit it. Where’s your sense of rhythm? Bang bang bang! You’ll stay here until you do it properly, Billy Elliot.’

Bang bloody bloody bang bang bang! How dare he! I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. In front of my dad! How bloody dare he! He knew exactly what he was doing.

‘You’re a disgrace to them gloves, your father and blah blah blah ...’ Bastard! I tried to imagine the punchbag was his face but I was so cross I was just swinging and swiping and missing the sodding thing.

‘I’m going to glue your bloody feet to the ground, Elliot! I’m going to stop you pratting about if it’s the last thing I do. Go on ... hit it!’

Bloody bloody ... bang bang bang! How dare he? F*** him!

‘Bottoms in. Feel the music. And – one and two and three and four. And five and six. Lift your arms. Feel the music! Susan! Drop that hip.’