The Storytellers (13 page)

C
HAPTER

B
ILLY strode into the Blue Moon off Belmont Street. He'd finished a three-week shift on Transworld 58, the rig sucking oil from the Argyll Field, 200 miles east of Montrose. The skills he had come by in Texas had brought him back to Britain. Who'd have thought it? Certainly not him. With more money in his pocket than most of the locals and a Texan lilt, Billy had little difficulty attracting companions. Life was exceptionally good. He knew he should call his mother. He
would
call his mother – later. Although it was only October, she was sure to ask, as she always did whenever he called, which was not often, if he would be home for Christmas, a home he had not seen in twenty-four years.

“What'll it be, Billy?” Mark the bartender asked. Since coming to Aberdeen from Houston, Billy had become a regular. “A boilermaker?”

“Yeah, let's start with a boilermaker. I intend to get properly fried tonight.”

“Why's that Billy?”

“Fog. Two weeks became three weeks. They couldn't get the eagles down, so we just kept hauling ass. I don't think there was one of us not floating by the close. Where does all that shit come from?”

“Do you know Paul?” Mark asked, fulfilling his other function as social facilitator.

Billy looked at the young man on the barstool next to him. He was small but neat, with a narrow face and pretty hands.

“How you doing, Paul? Can I get you something?”

“A screwdriver, thank you,” answered Paul.

“A
screw driver
,” repeated Billy, trying to copy the young man's rather genteel accent. “Naht a screwdriver? I like it. Where you from, Paul?”

“Edinburgh,” the young man answered, although his answer was almost swallowed by the other voices filling the Blue Moon.

“Come to check out the oil crowd then?” Billy shouted. “I've been wanting to go to E-din-burg,” he confessed, having absorbed his adopted countrymen's difficulty with the word. “Ah hear it's a fine city.”

Gathering the drinks from Mark and asking him to open a tab, Billy assumed command over his new friend. “Now let's go 'n get a table, Paul, 'afore they're all roped.”

Billy led the way and found a vacant stall in one of the rooms off the main bar. The two men sat down and Billy took down a third of his glass in one swallow.

“My, that was good!” he exalted. “There's no booze and no sex on the rigs, just work.”

Paul sipped at his screwdriver and tried not to show the discomfort he felt with the word ‘sex'. That was his father's doing. The subject was not one for polite conversation – or any conversation.

“So what do you do, Paul?”

“Student. I'm a student.”

“Well that's just great. I never got to do that myself. Left home at sixteen. Made my way to Liverpool. Got a job on a boat and after fourteen days, found myself in the Port of Houston. I wasn't supposed to go ashore without papers, but some of the older boys
had a way and I tagged along. There was a bust-up in a hen house we'd gone to with police and everything. It got pretty nasty. One of the ladies hid me – Shelly was her name – a real nice person. When everything had quieted down, she said I should get back to my boat, but that spelled trouble to me. So I stayed a while in the hen house, doing odd jobs. One day, Shelly asked if I'd like to work on a farm. I told her I never had, but would be happy to learn. So she wrote a note and I took it to this farm north of Houston. It belonged to her ma and pa and she knew they needed help. I never did let on what Shelly really did. I just said she worked in a hotel, as she'd told me to.

“I worked on that farm for five years and loved every doggone moment of it. But then Old Man Peterson had a heart attack and died and Ma Peterson had to sell up and move into town. She and Shelly opened a boarding house together. That was when I got work in the oilfields. I became pretty good at it. It was hard, but I liked what I did and the money was good. When the company I was with had to send men here because there weren't the skills locally, they picked me. I don't know how they sorted my papers, but they did. And here I am.”

“You never went back home then?” Paul asked. He had barely touched his drink while Billy told his tale; he was so engrossed.

“Nope.”

“Did you mind? I mean, did you miss home?”

“Sometimes I guess I did. But I must be one of those curious types. I was always too interested in what tomorrow would bring to get that wound up about what I had left. And you can take that both ways.”

Paul seemed to be hanging on Billy's every word. He sat there, staring, just sipping from his glass as his new friend talked and consumed a succession of boilermakers brought by serving girls familiar with his appetite and generous tips.

“Oil sure will be a shot in the arm for the UK economy,” he was saying. “But you do things different here. What with the royalty
payments, the special tax levies, not to mention the cost of the drilling licences, your government's the main beneficiary. I'm not saying that this town hasn't done well, Paul, but you should see Houston. Now that's a city! When the oil here's gone, what will be left? A mighty metropolis with new industries, or the bitterness I left behind in South Wales when the coal stopped selling?

“My pa, now he was for the union and for coal, in that order and still is as far as I know. What does your father do, Paul?”

“He's a doctor,” Paul answered.

“A good profession, but ah'm thinking you're looking for something different. Now ah'm not a union man like my pa and ah'm none too set on government running my life either. Which is not to say that the boys with money are saints – that they ain't, but you kinda know where they're coming from. They want to make more money and for that they have to keep doing more things right than wrong.

“If it's not oil it has to be summat else and that keeps Houston growing – unlike Detroit which is pure union these days and in bed with Washington for any favours it can get.” Billy's intake was slowing. He'd lost count and his eyes started to wander around the room in search of activity, before alighting once more on the youth in front of him. “So what
are
you looking for, Paul?”

“I don't know,” Paul admitted. “The courage to find out I suppose,” he added disarmingly.

“Well, the first thing's to become free. Now to be free you must be able to pay your way, and to pay your way you must find work you can do. That'll be your passport, see. What are you studying at college?”

“Political science,” answered Paul.

“Doggone it, Paul! What's that going to do for you, if you don't mind me asking?”

That had been a question Paul had been asking himself, so he just shrugged.

“Take my brother, Joseph,” Billy continued, “I'm told he is a chef and if his mother is to be believed, he's become a pretty good one. That's his passport, see. People will always want feeding.”

“My father wanted me to study medicine,” said Paul, “but it didn't work out, so I switched to politics – the university had places.”

“Fathers! Can't see beyond their own dicks, if you'll excuse my French. And did you ever wonder why your university had places, as you put it?”

“Not really,” admitted Paul.

Just then, two girls passed by, dressed up and on the pull.

“Hi there, Billy. Who's your friend?” Jackie Shannon called out. She and her friend Wendy Arbuthnot often came to the Blue Moon to see what was cooking. “Youse wanting some company?”

“Jackie, my darling. I've been thinking of you and only you. This is Paul,” he said, getting up. “We were just going our separate ways.”

Wendy looked disappointed, but Billy put an arm around both of them.

“How about I take you fine ladies to the Howard Hughes for a steak dinner? I'm famished. A man can't live on boilermakers alone.”

The girls giggled enthusiastically.

“Well it was mighty nice meeting you, Paul,” Billy said, feeling just a twinge of guilt at leaving such a lost soul on his own. “Get a passport and be your own man. The rest of it, frankly, is crap.”

As he left with the two girls, regaling them with how it was Howard Hughes Senior who had invented the oil drilling bit, a piece of information they would instantly forget, Wendy cast a backwards look at the lonely figure in the booth.

Passing the bar, Billy saw a familiar face. “Jeremy, you old queen,” he called out. “What are you doing here?”

The two embraced.

“I owed Mark money,” Jeremy said, casting his eye over Jackie and Wendy. “I guess I can't entice you over to my side of the aisle
just yet!”

“No you can't! Though there is a lonely young man called Paul in a booth at the back struggling to make sense of his life. You might see if you can straighten him out – or un-straighten him, I guess it would be. But for heaven's sake take the lad somewhere else. The two of you are likely to get flattened in here when things heat up.”

Billy Preston paid off his tab and left with the two girls. He would call his mother in the morning, for sure.

* * *

In October, a housing act gave Britain's council house tenants of three years' standing the right to purchase their homes. Shortly afterwards, long distance bus routes were deregulated and what would become a multi-million-pound business was started by a sister and her brother in Perth where they lived. They called their first route between Dundee and London, The Stagecoach. The government might have had its hands thrust firmly into the North Sea oil trough, but elsewhere the state's tentacles were being cut.

It wasn't until December that Billy finally called his mother and it took a news item to prompt him. On Monday 8th December John Lennon was shot outside his apartment building in New York. Fame had attracted the infamous. An uncompromising character had been compromised by little more than a plain man's urge to kill a butterfly and revel in the notoriety of his act.

Along with most men on the rig the following day, Billy felt a keen sense of loss. Part of his emotional landscape had been removed, but how? Were the songs gone? No. Had he ever met the man? No. Was he ever likely to? Not now. Had he any sense of songs to come that now would not? He didn't believe so. Was he a sentimental fellow? His life hardly suggested it. Had the past, in some subtle way, been altered by the present? To be so would be the realm of science fiction.
In the end he decided that the singer-songwriter's death had brought him face-to-face with his own mortality and the random nature of existence. It got him thinking about what he had achieved and the mark he would leave on life. The self-sufficiency he took such pride in was something, certainly, but would his passing be noticed by any more than the last crew he had worked with, the last barman he had bought a drink from or the last lady whose bed he had shared? And then it dawned on him – his mother would miss him.

* * *

“Mother, it's me, Billy.”

“Billy, is that really you? Where are you?”

“Aberdeen, Scotland.”

“How long have you been there?”

“Recently arrived, Mother,” he lied.

“So are we going to see you this Christmas?” she asked, as he knew she would.

“I was thinking so.”

“Are you married?” she asked. “Or will it just be you?”

“No, I'm not married, Mother.”

“Well you should be married Billy,” she counselled. “A man without a family is a man without a life.”

“How are John and Joseph?”

“John's a union man now. He's still working and Joseph is a chef, I think I told you.”

“Yes, you did. And Pa? How is Pa?”

There was a pause.

“Your father was laid off a month ago. There was a redundancy payment, a nice one on account of the years he's worked for the company, but he hasn't taken it well.”

“I'm sorry. But he must have been close to retirement anyway?”

“Everything's changed Billy. Thousands and thousands of jobs have gone. Whole communities have gone, although I don't suppose it's as bad here as it is in the valleys. We visited Auntie Rita this summer.”

Billy could just remember his one trip to South Wales, on the train, to the beach at Swansea. Many years later, the town had been declared a city at the investiture of the Prince of Wales, an event his mother had cherished and which had even made its way into the Houston Chronicle. She'd posted him cuttings. He remembered thinking what an awful job a king-in-waiting must be.

“I'll call you when I know my shifts.”

“Now you will come to see us, Billy, won't you?”

“Yes, Mother. I'll come.”

His parents seemed so rooted. In part, it was that rootedness he'd wanted to leave behind. But now, aged forty and with the money he'd not spent on booze and broads safely in the bank, perhaps it was time to root himself, otherwise, what was the point? And perhaps, too, the destruction of communities already built was as wanton as the murder of an iconic man.