It is May 2001, and the ballroom of the newly renovated Century Plaza Hotel on Los Angeles’ Avenue of the Stars is crammed with the newly renovated bodies, careers and faces of Hollywood’s A-List’, all bouncing to Stevie Wonder’s live performance of ‘Lean On Me’. Billy, in a pink silk Versace suit and black T-shirt, bumps and grinds with Cher, who tells him she brought a video of his movie Mrs Brown, one of her favourites, to watch in her limousine on her way home.
Billy takes the stage and I try to recover from the horror of witnessing Billy tell this particular audience an outrageous joke about haemorrhoids.
‘Someone …’ I shout in Dustin Hoffman’s ear ‘… should stop him!’
‘No, no,’ he thoroughly disagrees, ‘I was laughing so much I couldn’t speak.’
A petite Barbie doll lookalike trots past in a mini-skirt, bra-top and ‘follow-me-fuck-me’ shoes. Spotting Billy, she mimes obeisance to him and provocatively mouths the word ‘Wonderful!’ He hardly seems aware of her, so she repeats her circuit of the nearby tables four or five times, deliberately throwing him obvious, seductive glances as she passes. When Billy turns to speak to me, I am expecting a self-congratulatory smirk. ‘That woman,’ Billy finally remarks upon her presence, ‘has one of those tiny Olympus cameras. I think I’ll get one.’
Billy claims he never notices when women make passes at him. ‘It’s the last thing I expect… because I’m not the Kevin Costner type,’ he explains, as if that would come as news to the listener. ‘I’ve never been able to chat women up. When I was young, women would be howling at my jokes and I wouldn’t know how to make the transition between laughing and “get your knickers off”.’
In the sixties, when Billy looked like a hippie but sounded like a welder, he had the impression that women found such a mixture very disconcerting. June McQueen may have been taken aback when he began getting hairy but her response to his outrageous talk was always a trying-not-to-laugh: ‘Och, that’s disgusting!’
By the summer of 1964. June was worried about the progress of their relationship and didn’t want to ‘get into trouble’, the old euphemism for becoming pregnant. There came a point when Billy thought she seemed to be awfully interested in jewellers’ windows and he panicked. June’s pride was hurt when Billy started shutting her out. By contrast to June’s experience of Mona, Billy had always felt welcomed by June’s family. They seemed less bigoted than other folk and he was always up at their house, chatting to her father who worked as a caulker burner in John Brown’s Shipyard in Clydebank. Billy, however, still planned to be more exotic than he was, and knew that he was on the wrong track. June must have thought Billy was mad because, when she asked why he wanted to break it off, he replied, ‘Because I want to be a beatnik.’
Survivors of childhood sexual abuse often experience sexual confusion in adulthood and Billy was no exception. Billy knew he was attracted to women. He had certainly enjoyed ‘getting cosy’ with June but, because abusers always design their victims’ future sexuality to some extent, Billy had a nagging question about his sexual orientation and was drawn to seek a few experiences with other men to satisfy his curiosity. They were experiences that resembled the furtiveness of his abuse in both style and setting and he found them ultimately uncomfortable and unsatisfying. He eventually came to the correct conclusion that he was definitely a heterosexual man who had simply known homosexual abuse.
When Billy first met Iris Pressagh in 1965, he thought she was delightful, very beautiful and, moreover, she never once vomited on him. He was still recovering from an incident in Edinburgh involving a military sleeping bag he’d got inside one evening with a young woman who was feeling a little offcolour. He still deeply regrets tying up the neck of that bag.
Iris reminded him of Cher; there was an album sleeve of the lanky singer in a record shop up near Dumbarton road and Billy was struck by how similar they were. Iris had led a very sheltered life. She had done well at the high school in Clydebank before becoming a kitchen designer and attending night classes at Glasgow Art School. They met at the Polish Club where Billy was performing. Iris loved folk music and fully embraced the folk scene. She even bought an Autoharp and learned to play it. Their relationship grew steadily as they spent time accompanying each other to folk clubs and parties.
At first, Iris’s mother and father were not too keen on Billy. As far as they were concerned, there were five main strikes against him: he was Catholic, hairy, a freak and didn’t have a proper job. Moreover, they thought he was ‘on drugs’. In fact. Billy was far from being a junkie at that time; he always liked to imagine himself sitting happily on the porch of an evening, smoking a joint and listening to good music, but he found he couldn’t handle any kind of recreational drugs. ‘It’s just too profound,’ he realized. ‘I go places I can’t handle.’ At the height of the early seventies drug culture, when some high-flyers were snorting, smoking and ingesting the cost of a Mercedes-Benz at a single party, Billy’s friend Danny Marcus teased him for having a ‘five-cents-a-day habit’, although that was enough to have him hanging from the ceiling.
Iris was very accommodating. Billy appreciated that she did not attempt to keep him on a short leash. She barely complained when he abandoned her for long periods of time to hang out with his friends or play music, only phoning her whenever the mood took him. It was an ideal situation for Billy: she put no pressure on him, they seemed to get along and both of them enjoyed a ‘wee bevvy’.
Billy had steadily progressed from drinking every now and again, to drinking large quantities of beer as often as possible. During one of his frequent drinking sorties, a theatre director called Keith Darvel approached him. He was directing a play called Clydeside. ‘I believe you’re a banjo player,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for a musician for my play at the Citz [Citizens’ Theatre]. It’s about socialism on the Clyde beginning at the First World War. Do you think you could handle that?’ ‘Aye,’ affirmed Billy. He had never even seen a play before. ‘Can I bring my friend Tam? He’s very good.’
Clydeside rehearsals took place during the day, but it was difficult for Billy to attend because he was still a welder. Billy had already missed several weeks’ work on sick leave that year, when he contracted pneumonia with pleurisy and was taken into the same place Mona had gone, Knightswood Hospital. It wasn’t so bad to be laid up in hospital. Flora came to visit Billy and, defying the rules, sneaked him half a bottle of whisky. By bribing the porters for empties, he and Willie Bennett, a bookie from Temple in the bed next to him, saved up their daily allowance of Mackeson Stout (its vitamin content was thought to have restorative value) and spent their Saturday evenings in the ward toilets getting pissed on whisky with a stout chaser.
When Clydeside came along, Billy was a journeyman welder of three years’ standing, whose experience extended beyond the Clyde. He had been hired for a company in Jersey and had worked a six-week stint on an oil rig in Nigeria as well. The war had been heating up in Biafra so, in 1966, welders from all over Britain were employed to fast-track completion of the rig so it could be towed out to sea and out of harm’s way. It was exhausting work with little time for recreation. Alcohol was forbidden on the rig, but workers could climb onto a barge and buy Dutch ‘Oranjeboom’ beer from local people in canoes. When Billy set out to sample shore nightlife, he was tickled to discover that the shabby little shipping town of Port Harcourt boasted a ‘topless’ nightclub that turned out to be only roofless.
By the time Billy returned from Nigeria, he had become an excellent welder. He had high hopes when he went along to apply for a job at a company called Stewart and Lloyd Phoenix Works in Rutherglen. His fellow applicant was so wasted with alcohol, he was incapable of filling out his form, so Billy lent the man a hand. There was one question Billy balked at: ‘What school did you attend?’ It was an easy way to flush out Catholics. The pickled Protestant got the gig.
There was life beyond the shipyards, Billy knew it… still, it was hard to take the leap. Billy’s welding pals had been bemused at his ‘windswept and interesting’ metamorphosis. They absolutely lacerated him but, at the same time, Billy could tell they were ever so interested in his progress. At teatime, they would nudge him to elaborate about his antics in the folk clubs and Billy sometimes sang them funny songs.
Old Bugsy had played guitar when he was young and he always encouraged Billy to pursue his dream of being a folk singer. One day, just before the Clydeside rehearsals started, the two of them were standing around the fire when Bugsy suddenly asked:
‘What are you doing about that banjo stuff?’
‘I’m still playing nights,’ replied Billy.
‘That’s brilliant.’
‘I’m going to go professional.’
‘When?’
‘I was thinking the Glasgow Fair.’ This was in about six months’ time.
‘Och, you’ll never do it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘If you plan it six months ahead, when that comes you’ll plan it a year after that, and when that comes you’ll plan it eighteen months after that. If you really wanted to do it, you’d quit right now.’ There was an uncomfortable moment. Then Bugsy spoke from the depths of his own longing: ‘There’s nothing worse than being an old guy in here, knowing you could have got out when you were younger.’
His words chilled Billy’s soul. Billy quit on the Friday, with a good deal of nudging by the foreman who thought he spent far too much time yakking with co-workers. Billy picked up his wages and walked away for ever. The moment he left the shipyards, Billy felt like he had been sprung from jail. His heart had never been in welding.
So Billy played the banjo and Autoharp while Tam strummed the guitar and mandolin for Clydeside, which had been cast with some talented actors including Peter Kelly, whom Billy had seen at the cinema, and Richard Wilson, who would later appear in One Foot in the Grave. Billy knew nothing about live theatre. He and Tam sat in a corner with scripts they’d been given, but neither of them knew that the word ‘cue’ meant it was time for them to play. At their first rehearsal, they performed the opening music and, after a scene or two, it was their cue to play again.
‘Well?’ urged Keith the director, impatiently expecting them to start.
Billy thought he was asking him what he thought of the play so far, so he said. ‘It’s very good.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’ Keith raised one eyebrow. ‘Do you think we could have a little music?’ The actors were all tittering.
Billy said, ‘Sure, what would you like?’
‘Maybe the piece in the script would be handy.’
The director took them aside at lunchtime for a crash course in stagecraft.
After Clydeside was over, Billy and Tam continued to ramble around the Scottish folk circuit, enjoying their popularity and getting shit-faced on beer while they were at it. They usually mingled with the crowd after their gig, allowing people from the audience to either ply them with drink or proffer their autograph books.
One particularly wet and stormy evening, after a concert at the town hall in Dunoon, Billy was packing up his banjo when a sweet-faced, middle-aged woman approached him. ‘Billy Connolly?’ she inquired. Billy was irritated. He’d rather hoped a person who had just seen him on stage would know exactly who he was, but he nodded and took out his pen.
The woman failed to produce an autograph book. Instead, she took a breath and uttered three words that stopped Billy dead in his tracks: ‘I’m your mother.’ They stood staring at each other for a few seconds. Deeply shocked. Billy moved awkwardly towards her and buried his face in her coat. It was true. He remembered her smell.
They went back to Mamie’s house to drink tea and attempt to catch up on the past twenty-two years. On entering her living room, he saw Willie Adams sitting there looking exactly the same as he did all those years ago when he closed the door on Billy’s face. Mamie and Willie now had three grown daughters and a son.
‘I saw Florence once.’ said Mamie. ‘Right here in Dunoon. I was waiting for the bus, but then I followed her. Just looking at her.’
‘How did you know it was Florence?’ Billy asked.
‘I could tell from the way she walked,’ said Mamie. ‘I would have known from a mile away.’
Billy has often thought about the pain she must have suffered, feeling she couldn’t speak to her own daughter. He sensed something had gone horribly wrong with her life. He had a romantic notion that she was a tempestuous, free spirit whom others had always tried to tame. He began to get to know her a little, but it was a painful and disappointing process. When Mamie chided him for his excessive drinking, it didn’t go down too well. ‘What, does she think she’s going to be my mother now?’ he raged. He decided to keep his distance.
Billy wrote a song called ‘Back to Dunoon’ at this time, but it had little to do with his mother. Instead, it was a satirical jibe at Dunoon residents who lamented the paucity of tourists visiting the place:
‘Why don’t they come back to Dunoon?
This switched-on scene
Has two pubs, three cafés and a fire machine.
And hills you can walk on while the rain rung doon,
A night life that stops in the afternoon …
Why don’t they come back to Dunoon?’
After Billy and Tam sang this song at the Orange Hall in Paisley, they noticed a man with long hair and an intense expression sitting waiting for them as they came off stage. It was a young musician called Gerry Rafferty. ‘I really enjoyed your set,’ he enthused. ‘It was brilliantly funny. I’ve never heard anyone being funny like that before.’
‘Thanks,’ replied Billy.
‘We’re having a few beers up in the house. You want to come up?’
Gerry sang some of his extraordinary songs. ‘Holy shit.’ Billy turned to Tam. ‘Are they really his?’ Gerry seemed dreadfully strange. ‘He’s the kind of guy you’d expect to see hanging about in the darkest corner of a library,’ thought Billy. He liked that. Gerry was a couple of years younger than him, brown-haired with a Beatle haircut and he wore more conservative clothing than Billy. Gerry, on the other hand, thought Billy was a raving eccentric. ‘He looked like the Wild Man of Borneo,’ he divulges now.
Gerry fell in love with Billy’s slant on life and sense of the absurd and Billy appreciated those same things in Gerry. They were kindred spirits, both from the west of Scotland of similar Irish-Catholic descent, and shared a perspective on many things … parochialism for one, as well as antipathy to the Protestant work ethic, which was truly loathed by both.
The two shared a fury with the hypocrisy and ‘mind-numbing conformity’ inherent in the belief system of their early lives although, paradoxically, they also shared an affection for aspects of Roman Catholicism, such as certain favourite hymns and some of the Service rituals. Gerry took delight in Billy’s ‘Jesus’ impersonations, parodies of the ubiquitous ‘Sacred Heart’ prints of Christ, looking skyward in great pain and despair. Another thing they had in common was their Boy Scout troop. ‘You’re kidding!’ Billy was amazed. ‘I’ve never met anyone else who was a Peewit!’
But Gerry didn’t think the same way as Billy in all things. He noticed Billy’s heightened sensitivity to the slightest criticism. ‘Why do you bother your arse about that? They’re not going anywhere,’ he tried to soothe Billy when ‘lesser people’ nit-picked.
Gerry’s musical influences were also quite different, so between them they had a fine collaboration of musical tastes. They both wrote songs but Billy thought Gerry’s were much better and was left hoping he’d catch up. When Gerry was writing the popular ballad ‘His Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway’, Billy was writing his own lyrical history:
‘Oh I was born in Glasgow,
Near the centre of the town.
I would take you there and show you
But they pulled the building down …’
Billy had gone to visit a friend who lived in Dover Street. He had a very bad hangover that day and had tried to assuage it by splashing his face in the sink. As he did so, he happened to glance through the kitchen window, just in time to see the house he was born in crumble into dust. The house had been marked for demolition, but Billy’s reaction was predictable, for a hippie. ‘That’s fucking cosmic!’ he exclaimed.
When Billy invited Gerry to join the Humblebums, Tam was against the idea. He sensed the chemistry of such a trio would be uncomfortable, and he was absolutely right. For Gerry, the move was engineered to provide himself with a fast track to a recording contract. Billy and Tam had already made one album with Transatlantic Records, whereas, at the time, Gerry lacked an outlet for his songs. Unfortunately for Tam, the other two had so much in common that he soon found himself ousted while Billy and Gerry went from strength to strength, working together for three years and making two fine albums.
Billy’s motivational level was nowhere near Gerry’s. Billy had always thought it would be rather nice to be famous and maybe rich into the bargain, but above all he still just wanted to be windswept and interesting. He definitely wanted to have better denim than anybody else, to know where to have great boots made and to have a handmade guitar and banjo … maybe a nice hat too, and swan around looking good, playing well and singing great songs. Gerry was a highly ambitious man who taught Billy an awful lot about being very single-minded and proud of it.
‘I’m going to be the very best and don’t you forget it,’ Gerry would announce. ‘Remember where you were when I told you.’ He would say that to people. He was far more comfortable in recording studios than Billy, who was always a little in awe of his technical ability.
The two men became very close and even spoke to each other about their respective difficult childhood experiences. Billy confided in Gerry about his relationship with his father and the aunts. On one occasion, he even asked Gerry to accompany him to Dunoon to visit his mother. ‘We went to a little housing estate,’ says Gerry. ‘I sat in the taxi while he went to the door. A woman came to let him in but he was only in there ten or fifteen minutes. When he came out, he was as white as a sheet.’ It was a harrowing experience for Billy. Mamie pushed his buttons … ironically, by running down Margaret and Mona. ‘They weren’t heroes of mine, but she was in no position to do that,’ he complained.
Billy greatly appreciated Gerry’s very original sense of humour, although Gerry never displayed it on stage. Before Billy met him, he had worked in a shoe shop. Sometimes he’d turn up at the shoe store all covered with fake bandages. ‘I was in an accident last night.’ The manager would sigh, ‘Then you’d better go home.’ That would give him a chance to get away to play a gig with his previous band, The Mavericks.
Gerry was mucking around in the basement of the shoe shop one day when he found a pair of size fourteen hiking boots. He subsequently planned an elaborate scene that had Billy weeping with laughter when he heard about it. Gerry had a friend who happened to be a very small man with tiny feet, and he encouraged him to visit the shoe shop on a busy Saturday and ask for hiking boots. Gerry instructed him to reject any pair of boots he tried, on the grounds that they were too tight. The fellow turned up as arranged, and Gerry began to offer him a variety of sizes, beginning with the smallest. The man actually took an eight, but by the time they got to size twelve, he was still marching around the shop insisting, ‘No, no, they’re too tight!’
At this point, the place was a mess. There were hiking boots strewn all around the shop. Other people were trying to get shoes fitted but there were huge boxes everywhere and this dwarf was marching round with hiking boots that fitted him like skis. ‘No, no, they’re still too tight!’
Finally they got to the fourteen, the monster boot.
‘Try them on,’ urged Gerry.
‘Ah, these are great!’ the man exclaimed, whereupon he grabbed his own shoes and paddled towards the door. He went flying down the high street.
‘Stop! Thief!’ Gerry pursued him and wrestled him to the ground, then grabbed the boots and returned as the big hero.
Gerry complains that he found his own shyness something of a burden. He admired Billy for his more extroverted approach to life, yet Gerry himself could be courageous, particularly when it came to practical jokes. Gerry was already friendly with Danny Kyle and all three of them were on a Clyde ferry together one day, travelling to a gig. Gerry and Danny became bored so they began to open their instrument cases and take out their guitars. Other passengers noticed and started to gather around, looking forward to some entertainment. The two deliberately dilly-dallied in their task, tuning obsessively and mucking around with capos, so by the time they were ready to play, quite a sizable, expectant crowd had gathered. The two japers then proceeded to sing flat on purpose and got the words of well-known songs like ‘Doh a Deer’ completely wrong. Danny and Gerry managed to stay deadpan, but Billy laughed so hard, he peed his trousers.
On the road, Gerry and Billy used to amuse themselves by reading newspaper reports of unlikely court cases to each other, like the one about a man who slaughtered animals in an abattoir. In his passport he had described his occupation as ‘killer’; still he could not understand why he was refused entry to Spain.
They used to try to find ‘Hitlers’ in the phone book but they never found one, not even in Germany. They did find the Reverend Wildgoose in Cambridge, and a Harry Banjo in Solihull. Billy telephoned Harry Banjo, but there was nobody home. He always wanted to write a song about Banjo and Wildgoose meeting each other.
Gerry used to phone people at four in the morning to tell them that bricks would be arriving soon. ‘There’ll be two truckloads of well-fired bricks outside your door in a couple of hours,’ Gerry would advise them. It was the ‘well-fired’ bit that made Billy scream. People would be trying desperately to wake up. ‘See you later,’ Gerry would say, banging down the telephone. Gerry could keep a perfectly straight face when he did those tricks but Billy was useless. He would crack up and run for cover.
Gerry’s greatest improvisation took place in Rosyth. They were performing in a social club near the dockyard and arrived a couple of hours early so they were given an office to sit in. They changed their clothes, tuned up and then sat around with nothing to do. After a while Billy noticed Gerry talking on the phone with the phone book in his hand. He had dialled a number, and the person on the end of the phone said,
‘Is that you. Willie Johnson?’
‘Yeah. It’s me,’ said Gerry.
‘Well you’ve got a nerve, phoning here,’ the woman challenged him. ‘You were supposed to be down here cleaning that chimney at ten o’clock this morning.”
So Gerry launched into a diabolical invention. ‘I was just about to come to your house when I was listening to the radio and the new government regulations were being announced, and I realized I would be breaking the law.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We need a safety net if I’m going to be on your roof. Have you got such a thing in your house?’
‘No.’
‘Well, have you got bedclothes and blankets and such?’
‘Aye.’
‘Well, if you’d bring them out to the front garden, they’ll serve as safety nets. Keep the kids off school to hold the blankets. Do you have any scaffolding?’
‘What? No! What would I be doing with scaffolding?’
‘Well, we need scaffolding around the building. It’s the new safety regulations, you see. Look, what about furniture? You could take it outside and pile it up so we could use it as scaffolding.’
‘Aye, I’m sure we can do something.’
‘But here’s the hardest bit,’ warned Gerry. ‘With the new regulations I’ll need another four or five extra men on the roof to watch over me, and we’ll need breakfast for seven people. Nothing much. Bacon, eggs, sausage, fried bread and potato scones. Maybe a kipper or two.”
‘Well. OK then.’
‘I’ll see you at ten o’clock in the morning.’
As soon as he’d put down the phone, he lifted it again.
‘Hello, is that you, Willie Johnson?’
‘Aye.’
‘Well this is Jimmy Farrell. Where were you this morning?’
‘I’m sorry. I’m up to here.’
‘Well you’d better be at my place at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s our only opportunity.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Gerry had arranged a set-up that would have been worthy of Candid Camera. He and Billy never went to Jimmy Farrell’s place to see what transpired, but for months they speculated about what probably happened in the garden with all those bewildered people running around with furniture, breakfast for seven folk and children kept off school to hold the blankets. If only they could have seen the chimney sweep’s face.
With Billy and Iris, it was on and off. He had disappeared to Jersey and Nigeria, and Iris was still there when he came back. Then Iris disappeared to pick grapes in France with some friends and when she came back, Billy was still there. He had the urge to break it off but he didn’t have the heart. He saw some little signs that it wasn’t going to work. She was often plastered with drink, but then so was he.
Both Iris and Billy were still living with their parents. Billy could never get himself together financially, so it took him a long time to extricate himself from his father’s place. It was an uncomfortable situation. Out of kindness, Billy was always putting up destitute folk singers for the night. William would walk in at breakfast time and there would be two hairy men in the bed. Billy had taken to wearing patchouli oil, embroidered trousers with high platform heels, beads and earrings. William just didn’t have a clue what had happened to his son.
Billy was eventually flung out of the house for not going to Mass. The crunch came on Ash Wednesday when Billy finally exploded: ‘What are you talking about? I never go to Mass.” William retaliated, ‘Then get out of my house, you communist poof!’
When Iris told Billy she was pregnant, the two of them were in a room in Danny Kyle’s house. Billy went through to the living room to find Danny.
‘Danny, how do you get married? What do you do?’
‘Oh, it costs seven and sixpence. You go to Martha Street and give them the dough. They post the banns, give you the date and you turn up and do it.’
Billy did not expect his family to come. He left from William’s house to go to the registry office. When he was dressed he awkwardly faced his father: ‘Well, here I go.’
His father gave him an envelope containing twenty pounds. Billy had no idea why. ‘All the best,’ said William, staying put. His son wasn’t being married in a church so he wasn’t going to make the effort.
Billy’s entire wedding cost forty pounds. The singer Peter Sarstedt had given him some black mohair material that a local tailor fashioned into a smashing suit. Iris wore a white trouser suit with a floppy white hat and looked enchanting. Her mother turned up and so did Danny Kyle and his wife Helen. Gerry was Billy’s best man and his future wife, Carla, was Iris’s bridesmaid. After the ceremony, they walked to the pub and sang songs together before their evening concert. There was no honeymoon – Iris’s parents went on a trip instead, and left the newlyweds alone in the house. After a while. Billy and Iris moved into a small room and kitchen in Paisley, exactly like Billy’s very first home. At night they would take some lit coal on a shovel from the kitchen to the fireplace in the bedroom and lie there watching it flickering on the ceiling.
Jamie was born the following December, two days after Christmas. When Billy got up that morning, he phoned his father from a public telephone. ‘I’m going up to the hospital to see what the baby is.’ ‘It’s a boy,’ said William. Billy hit the roof. William had had the nerve to phone the hospital earlier, pretending to be the father. People laughed at Billy in the hospital elevator. He did look a sight in that environment, with his fringed jacket and beads. He overheard someone say: ‘Poor wee wean won’t know whether that’s its father or mother.’
Billy was very happy. His new son was a beautiful baby with a fine head of hair. They named him James Maxton Connolly after two of Billy’s heroes: the Independent Labour Party politician James Maxton had shoulder-length hair and fought for school milk in the early part of the century, while James Connolly was an Edinburgh-born socialist.
William felt sorry for his new grandson. He was mortified when he arrived at Billy’s poky tenement and saw Jamie gurgling in a laundry basket and he was utterly shocked to see their décor. Billy had sawn all the legs off the chairs so people sat low to the ground with their feet straight out. Billy thought it was an ingenious design idea of his, but William thought his son was an idiot and very hard up. The walls were orange and purple and Billy had cut shapes out of polystyrene and stuck them on the wall to make an abstract painting. The room smelled of incense, which William obviously mistook for marijuana. ‘What a den!’ he blasted.