Rain Never Stops Play

A summer short story competition from Creative Tourist and Rainy City Stories

Thank you to everyone who entered our short story competition and all of you who voted. It’s been an inspiring project. Here’s one of our winning stories, ‘Troubles’ and you can read the other winner, ‘The City Is Leaving Me’ on Rainy City Stories. Enjoy!

Troubles

As Billy hauls himself into the driver’s cab of the old Daimler double-decker his dead mother speaks to him again.

‘Have you no sense of propriety, Billy McManus?’

He adjusts the seat and lights a cigarette.  This bus must’ve been out of service thirty years now, he thinks.  When was the last time he was in one of these?  He could remember how it felt to drive one: sitting up there in the wee cab, isolated from the passengers.  Not like now, in the one-man bus with all the collecting of the money and the people with no change and the kids giving you lip all the time.

‘Are you listening to me, Billy?  Have you no shame?’

‘There’s nothing to it, Mammy.  I’m just doing a favour for an old mate.  That’s all.’

‘And what sort of favour would that be, Billy, transporting a load of…’

He waits while she searches for the right word.

‘…sodomites.’ She almost spits it out.

Billy takes a long draw on his cigarette and blows the smoke out of the window.   ‘Shush now, Mammy.  Don’t go on like that.  Nobody cares what you think.’  A small shudder goes through him.  He’s got some nerve.

Behind him the downstairs of the bus is empty.  It’s a fine, sunny August day and all the passengers are upstairs on the open deck.

‘Up there displaying themselves for all to see!’

In his wing mirror, Billy can see rainbow flags flapping in the breeze and bunches of multi-coloured balloons tugging at their strings, and just in front of the bus twenty-eight members of the Gay Police Officers’ Association are organising themselves into rows, preparing to march in full dress uniform.  He looks at the clock on the dashboard and drops his cigarette out of the window.

‘Are you ready for the off then Billy?’  Michael Cullen shouts.

‘Aye.  As ready as I’ll ever be.’

He’d bumped into Michael a few months before when he went into town to collect his new glasses from the opticians.

‘Is that you, Billy McManus?’

‘Michael!  How are you doing?  How’s retirement treating you?’

‘It’s grand.  And how are you, Billy?  And that mother of yours?’

‘The Mammy passed away three years ago, so she did.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.  I’d not heard that.  Still, she was a good age, was she not?’

Billy nodded. ‘Eighty-four.’

‘And are you still up at the depot?’

‘I am.’

‘And you’ve not long to go ‘til you retire, I suppose?’

‘Me? Oh aye.  Fourteen months.’

‘Well, say ‘hello’ to everyone up there for me.’

‘I’ll do that.’

Michael began to walk away from him, but turned back and said, ‘Have you time for a pint and a pie?  The Queen’s Head’s only just around the corner.’

‘Aye.  Why not.’

Billy had been talking about his allotment, telling Michael about some of the other characters up there and about the damage done by the cats and slugs, when Michael said, ‘My partner and I like to garden a bit, too, but nothing on that scale.’

‘Your partner?  Have you set up a wee enterprise since your retirement?’

Michael smiled at him.  ‘Oh, no.  I’m all for having an easy life now.  No… Gerry’s my life partner.’

‘Life partner?’

‘Boyfriend.’

‘Boyfriend?’

‘Jesus, Billy, your face is a picture.  Did you not know?’

‘I didn’t.’  Billy thought about all the times he’d seen Michael at the bus station, getting ready for his shift, having a mug of tea and a bacon sandwich in the staff room.  Had there been any signs?

‘Well it was no big secret, although I didn’t take out an advertisement either.  I came out during The Troubles.  Do you remember how it was?  Going out on your shift and not knowing if someone was going to take a shot at you, or hijack your bus?  My nerves were shattered.  I realised then, Billy: you’ve only the one life and you’ve got to make of it what you can.  I’d been covering up for years, so I decided to come out, to stop living in the shadows.  It wasn’t easy.  I knew nothing about what they call the gay scene.  I thought being gay was all discotheques and suchlike: not for people of our age.  What was I then?  Forty-three I must’ve been.  I tried out a couple of those bars, but they didn’t suit me; I’d no wish to go out and get deafened.   And then I saw a piece in the Belfast Telegraph about a gay rambling club…’

‘And when did the Telegraph begin promoting sin?’

‘…which was where I met Gerry.  Twenty-odd years ago now.’

‘That’s a good long time.’

‘It is.  We’re going to have one of these civil ceremonies soon.  Gerry wants me to make an honest man of him and all.’

‘So does your family know?  I mean about…’

Michael had let out a loud guffaw. ‘Well I reckon so, Billy… unless they’re blind.’

‘And if you don’t mind me asking, did they not say anything about it?’

‘Only my mother, bless her… wanted to know could I not find myself a nice Protestant boy.  Now can I get you another pint?’

‘Go home now, Billy.  He’s an abomination in the sight of the Lord.’

‘Aye.  Why not?’

The trouble is, thinks Billy, as he turns out of Queens Square, I’ve never been any use at saying no.  I didn’t have to do this today; I could’ve been doing some hoeing, made an afternoon of it up at the allotment.  It was him all over.  It was the same at work: if they ever needed anyone to cover an extra shift they asked Billy.  So when Michael had given him a call a few weeks after their meeting, he’d found it impossible to refuse.

‘The Gay Pride is it, Michael?  And what does that entail?’

‘We just need someone to drive a bus.  We’ve got two lovely old Daimler CWA sixes with the open platform… like the old times.  Anyhow, I’ll be driving one myself, but we’re short of another driver.’

‘And have you asked up the depot, Michael?’

‘I haven’t.  I just thought of you first off, because I’m out of touch with the other lads.  You’d be doing us a huge favour.’

So here he is, driving in first gear along Royal Avenue towards the City Hall with a load of men and women in carnival mood dancing and hollering on the upper deck.  He’s surprised how many have turned out to watch.  The pavements are thick with people waving at the parade and wee kiddies blowing their whistles and what have you.  He’s had no chance to look at it himself, can only see the constabulary in front of him and a couple of floats in the rear view mirror – not that it would interest him at all.  When did this happen, he wonders?  When did people become so accepting?

He remembers a few years back: one of the drivers telling a story about stopping his bus up by the shipyard one night – the last bus home he said it was – and how he’d shut his door in the face of two men, shouting, ‘Sorry – no queers!’ at them as he drove away, and how all the other passengers had hooted along with him.  Billy had laughed, too, listening to the story in the canteen, but you wouldn’t laugh now.  Not in that way.  Not these days.

Elizabeth would like this, thinks Billy.  She was always one for the craic, which was probably why she never saw eye to eye with the Mammy.  God, the rows there were when she was living at home all those years ago.  He could remember one occasion – now this was going back – Elizabeth was mad for the Beatles and all the fashionable short dresses and what have you… he could remember her coming in late one night and the Mammy belting her one, calling her cheap, and shouting about sin and damnation.  He could still see it: Elizabeth on the floor, covering her face with her arms while the Mammy slapped her about the head, and him watching it all from the landing with his heart thudding.

His heart thuds now with the recollection of it and how he’d felt just a few days later when Elizabeth came home and said she’d been to the City Hall and married Bernard Shaughnessy and there was nothing Mammy could do about it because she was over twenty one.  Bernie had waited outside in his Vauxhall Victor while Elizabeth packed a bag with her clothes and then she’d come and found Billy in the front room and said, ‘I’m sorry, Billy.  I wish I could take you with us, so I do,’ and she’d all black stuff running down her face from her make up and all.

Now why would a man wear a dress?  Billy can’t for the life of him understand why you’d get yourself up like that.  And is that a wig?  Sure, it must be.  In his wing mirror he can see this man done up like heaven knows what in a red dress and long gloves with a big pile of blonde hair on his head.  He’s hanging onto the rail, leaning off the platform at the back of the bus, blowing kisses to the crowds, who are clapping and whistling and taking photographs of him, while he poses there for them.

Elizabeth only came back a couple of times after she and Bernie went to live across the way in England.  Crawley, was it?  She came back about a year after she’d wed, bringing her wee baby with her and the Mammy had counted on her fingers in front of her, saying, ‘No wonder youse were in such a hurry to get married, though why you had to choose a navvy…’ and Elizabeth had said, ‘You know damn well he’s not a navvy.  He’s a site foreman and the baby was premature,’ and Mammy had tightened her lips into a line and said you should try telling that to the neighbours.

‘See there: there’s still some people prepared to stand up against this filth, some who haven’t strayed from the path of righteousness.’

A small crowd of people is gathered outside the City Hall.  Billy tries not to look at their placards, at the big black letters spelling out words like sin and depravity.  A red-faced man in a grey suit is shouting into a megaphone, yelling words that can’t reach Billy in his cab, jabbing his finger at the crowd, while a man in a dog collar holds a bible aloft like a sword.  A row of police officers is lined up in front of them, cordoning them off from the onlookers, keeping order, and in front of them is a small cluster of Amnesty supporters with their own banners and slogans.  Billy stares at the scene.  Will you look at that?  There are people demonstrating against the demonstrators now.

He’d not seen Elizabeth since the Mammy died, although she was on the phone often enough, asking after him.  She’d come over to help with the funeral arrangements, the clearing out, saying ‘I’m doing this for you Billy, not for her.  I hope she rots in hell.’

‘You don’t mean that Elizabeth.’

She shrugged.  ‘I don’t know… I’m just glad the old cow’s gone.  Who’ll miss her?  Will you, Billy?  Will you miss working your fingers to the bone for her and listening to her carrying on at you, telling you week in and week out to be sure you buy the meat at Flanagan’s, and not to let them fob you off with rubbish, even though you’ve been doing all the shopping for thirty years.  Will you miss her pointing out the smears on the windows, and telling you you’ve not done this or that properly, telling you where you can and can’t go, who you can and can’t see, like you were a kid and not a grown man.’

And then, in a kinder voice, ‘What’ll you do, Billy?  Will you sell the house?  You could get a nice, little flat for yourself, come and go as you please, be what you want to be.’

‘I’m fifty-nine, Elizabeth.’

‘You’ve years ahead of you.’

‘And what do you think I should do?’

She took his hand.  ‘Whatever you want to, Billy.’  And he’d looked at her hand clasped around his and couldn’t for the life of him remember the last time anyone had touched him.

***

‘That was a grand day, Billy.  They say seven thousand turned out.’

The pub is quiet and cool after the heat and noise of the day – all worn oak and leather, peace and quiet.  Considering he’s done no more than drive a bus slowly through the city for a couple of hours, Billy feels exhausted.

‘You know, I can remember the first time,’ Michael says.  ‘We didn’t even call it a parade.  It was just a dander around the city centre: me and about fifty others with our home made placards.  It was like doing the walk of shame in them days.  I remember saying to Gerry… it’s the last time, Gerry; I’ll not put myself through that again.  My ears were still burning with embarrassment the next day and I’d to scrape egg off my jacket where someone had pelted us.  But see he’s always been more political than me – was up at Stormont with his banners back in the seventies – he said to me, these things always start small Michael, but you’ll see.’

‘It was a big crowd,’ Billy agrees.

‘And when I see the police marching with us, Billy… thirty-five years ago they’d have arrested us just for being what we are.’  His eyes are shining, although whether from elation, or the three pints of Guinness, Billy can’t tell.

The revellers have moved onto Custom House Square for the big party and by the time they leave the pub the street outside is almost empty.  Michael says he’s no wish to go and be squashed half to death so he’s off home to Gerry, who’ll have made him a nice dinner.

‘And how about you, Billy?  Will you walk home, or take the bus?’

But Billy’s eye has been caught by a discarded Amnesty placard, lying half in the gutter, with its wooden handle snapped in two.  Black letters on a purple background – ‘Love is a Human Right’ – and the egg-sized lump which had prevented Billy from swallowing the last mouthfuls of his pint, moves slowly up into his throat, so that he can’t answer.

‘Are you alright there, Billy?’  Michael moves closer to him and puts an arm around his shoulder.  ‘Billy?  Why not come home and have shepherd’s pie with me and Gerry?  Don’t go back to that empty house.’

And Billy lets himself be led up the street to the bus stop, listening to his mother’s voice becoming more and more distant.

‘Have you no shame, Billy McManus?’