A Place of Hiding

Paul looked to see his brother had joined them, uninvited as usual. Billy lolled in the doorway, against the jamb. He was licking the frosting from an untoasted Pop-Tart. “Sounds like our Paulie’s not going somewheres else to live the high life after all. Well, all’s I c’n say is I like that, I do. Can’t think what it’d be like round here without Paulie wanking off in his bed every night.”


“That’ll do, Bill.” Ol Fielder rose and stretched his back. “I expect you’ve some sort of business to see to this morning, like the rest of us.”

“You expect that, do you?” Billy said. “No. I don’t have no business to see to. Guess I’m different to you lot, huh? Not so easy for me to get employment.”

“You could try,” Ol Fielder said to Billy. “Tha’s the only difference between us, Bill.”

Paul shifted his gaze between his brother and his father. Then he lowered it to observe his trouser knees. He saw they were thin to the point of shredding at a touch. Too much wear, he thought, with nothing else to choose from.

“Oh, tha’s the case, is it?” Billy asked. Paul flinched at the tone because he knew that his father’s declaration, while completely well meaning, was the invitation Billy wanted to spar. He’d been carrying his anger round for months, just waiting for an excuse to let it fly. It had only got worse when their dad had got himself taken on by the road crew, leaving Billy behind to pick at his wounds. “Tha’s the only difference, is it, Dad? Nothing else, is there?”

“You know the fact of it, Bill.”

Billy took a step into the bedroom. Paul shrank into the bed. Billy was of a height with their father and although Ol outweighed him, he was far too mild. Besides, he couldn’t waste the energy to spar. He needed all the resources he had to hold his part with the road crew every day, and even if that hadn’t been the case, he wasn’t ever a man to brawl. That, of course, had been the problem in Billy’s eyes: the fact that there was no fight in their father. All of the stalls in the St. Peter Port market had got the word that their leases would not be renewed because the whole place was going to be shut down, to make way for a redevelopment scheme that meant trendy boutiques, antiques dealers, cappuccino stalls, and tourist shops. They would be displaced—the whole lot of butchers, fishmongers, and green grocers—and they could take it in the neck one at a time as their leases came up, or they could go at once. It hadn’t mattered to the Powers That Be, as long as they were gone when they were ordered to be gone.

“We’ll fight ’em,” Billy had vowed at the dinner table. Night after night, he’d laid his plans. If they couldn’t win, they’d burn the place down because no one took away the Fielder family business without paying the price.

He’d reckoned without his dad, though. Ol Fielder had long been a man of peace.

As he was at this moment, with Billy in front of him, itching to get into it and looking for an opening.

He said, “Got to get to work, Bill. You’d do best to find yourself a job.”

“I had a job,” Billy told him. “Just like you. Just like my granddad and great-granddad as well.”

Ol shook his head. “That time’s past, son.” He made a move towards the door.

Billy took him by the arm. “You,” Billy said to his father, “are a useless piece of shit,” and as Paul gave a strangled cry of protest, Billy snarled at him, “And you stay out of it, you wanking little twit.”

“I’m off to work, Bill,” their father said.

“You’re off to nowhere. We’re talking about this, we are. Right now. And you are looking at what you done.”

“Things change,” Ol Fielder said to his son.

“You let them change,” Billy said. “That was ours. Our work. Our money. Our business. Granddad left it to you. His dad built it up and he left it to him. But did you fight for it? Did you try to save it?”

“Had no grounds for saving it. You know that, Bill.”

“It was meant to be mine like it was yours. It was what I was s’posed to bloody do.”

“I’m sorry,” Ol said.

“Sorry?” Billy jerked his father’s arm. “Sorry won’t do shit. Won’t change what is.”

“And what’ll change that?” Ol Fielder asked. “Let go m’ arm.”

“Why? You scared of a little pain? That why you didn’t want to take them on? Scared you might’ve got messed with, Dad? Little bunged up, maybe? Little bruised?”

“I got work to go to, lad. Let me go. Don’t push at this, Billy.”

“I’ll push when I push. And you’ll go when I say you c’n go. Right now we’re talking this out.”

“No purpose to that. It is what it is.”

“Don’t you say that!” Billy’s voice rose. “Don’t you sodding tell me. I worked the meat since I was ten years old. I learned the trade. I did it good. For all them years, Dad. Blood on my hands and on my clothes, the smell of it so strong that they called me Roadkill. You know that, Dad?

But I di’n’t mind ’cause it was a life. That’s what I was building, a life. That stall was mine and now it’s nothing and that’s what I’m left with. You let it all get snatched away ’cause you di’n’t want to get your hair mussed. So what’ve I got left? You tell me, Dad.”