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Do Not Go Gently
Billy character study. Completely unedited; I know the tenses are off. Just something I wanted to work out.

Part 1

November 16, 1983; the North Channel

He’s not going to wake up.

Billy remembers hearing the voice behind him, thick and strong and nothing like his own teenaged rumble–squeak, but he also remembers choosing not to turn and face its owner. His father was bleeding on the ground next to Billy, and Billy couldn’t quite turn his gaze from the gash he’d made in the man’s stomach. He’d expected Da to fight back—to at the very least haul off and hit him as he’d done on the pier six weeks before, only moments after they’d together hoisted that man—that friend of his father, that friend—into the freezing, grey North Channel. Billy had dared to ask why, and had received an answer across his jaw.

It would be the last question he ever posed to his father, at least aloud.

He remembers almost every detail. Not very often, and thank whatever saints there are for that, but he remembers it nonetheless. The voice had been right, of course: Da wouldn’t wake up, no matter how hard Billy shook him, no matter how many times he apologized, half–screaming, and tried to wipe away the blood now seeping into the woodwork of the pier. No matter how loud his cries became, until the voice from behind him shushed him.

Finish this, it said. Be done with it and go.

The screaming turned to sobs, wild and hiccupping, leaving him shaking on all fours on that wood, in that blood. He hadn’t meant to kill him. Hadn’t meant to hurt him, or even scare him—nothing scared Da, ever. How was he to finish something he hadn’t even meant to start? And go where? Home? No, not now, not ever again, not to face his mother and tell her what he’d done.

His sister would know. Margaret’s eyes were just like Da’s; her mind worked the same way, too. Billy wondered then as he does now if Maggie would have taken up their father’s work and words, given the chance. The thought made him nauseous then as it does now.

You have work to do, the voice had said, and Billy had stopped breathing for half a minute before he’d understood.

His father was a big man; not tall but stocky, hard and commanding in his own way. He should have absorbed the knife wound like he absorbed everything else—with a laugh that meant anything from the deepest joy to the most terrifying threat. He should not have fallen at one twist of the blade, one up and in, down and out—

He should not have been surprised, the voice had finished Billy’s thought.

Billy had closed his eyes and leaned down, pressing his forehead to his father’s chest, prayers falling from his lips—old prayers he’d learnt in old languages from old women and men. His hands fisted hard in Da’s coat, his palms growing by turns slick and sticky with blood that wouldn’t stop flowing. He’d been taught not to wait this long; that bodies finally at rest must be disposed of, displaced Da called it, as soon as possible. But the edge of the pier had seemed miles away through Billy’s fog, and the body was so heavy, and Billy so terribly small. So terribly young.

Billy doesn’t remember exactly how long he remained crying and whispering over his father’s body, only that it suddenly turned cold, bitterly cold in the way he should have recognized as common for the coast at this time of night. But then he’d never been out there so late—he’d never been party to something so inefficient. So slow.

We don’t grieve where there’s no loss, his father had once said, and while Billy had little idea what he was actually mourning that night, he knew the time to do so had passed. He raised his head, drawing ragged breaths that puffed warm and wet in the air, and reached for the knife, glittering bright against the dark wood of the pier.

The hilt was warm, still, as if Billy had never released it from his grip, and Billy rested the blade in both hands, weighing it, gathering an odd strength from steel and wood. An odd fearlessness that had come after hours of play with Da—and with Margaret when no one else was watching. The knife had been a gift, of course, delivered with the best and worst intentions, and now returned with the same. Billy slid it into the pocket of his coat reluctantly, nearly slicing his palm in the process, and took another breath.

“No loss, Da,” Billy had whispered then, his hands back in his father’s coat—

This time to pull through the fog, to crawl to the end of the pier.


Part 2

The thought occurs to Billy almost an hour after he’s left his father to the mercies of the North Channel: he could indeed go home. Mum wouldn’t be there, not for another day, at least, Billy thinks, trying to remember what she’d said on her way out the door and into the waiting taxi. A visit with a friend, to cheer both the poor girl and herself up after several difficult months, and then Mum would return, a bit kinder, but at the same time a lot less inclined to allow her children the run of the neighborhood in the evenings as Da had while she was away.

Billy’s father had always sat back, amused, as Billy and Margaret chafed against their temporary restrictions, but after a few weeks, he’d manage to talk their mother into loosening her grip. Sometimes he did so with sweet words and promises, other times with little gifts they both knew Da should never have been able to afford, no matter where (or for how long) his work kept him away. Just a few moments from his front door, chin tucked into his coat against the freezing November night, Billy wonders now, as he always has, why his mother never questioned Da’s disappearances or the small surprises upon his return. He wonders if she will question Billy’s own disappearance, or consider it just an act of disobedience—one of many Billy’s committed recently.

He wonders if he or his father will truly be missed.

Billy’s breath fogs up the brass of the door’s lock as he fiddles with his key. He doesn’t plan to stay long; just enough time to pack a bag and find the cash his father keeps—kept—underneath a scatted bunch of photographs in the middle drawer of his desk. They haven’t lived in this house long enough for Da to have decided upon a new hiding place, Billy decides, and besides, he’d always been somewhat proud that Billy always found the money, no matter where it had been hidden. Billy’s clever, Da had told Mum more than once. And he’ll live longer for it.

The first time he’d heard his father say such a thing, Billy had flushed and grinned for hours. The echo of those words now makes sweat break out on his forehead, and he shakes it off, taking the stairs two at a time to his little bedroom, next to Margaret’s. Inside, Billy pulls a large blue duffel from underneath his bed and begins to stuff it with too many books and too little clothing. It will be heavy and awkward, nearly toppling his small frame, but there are things he too has hidden, and he wouldn’t leave them behind for the world.

Closing his bedroom door and taking a deep breath on the landing, Billy’s not surprised that he can’t hear Margaret in her room. It is after all the middle of the night, and she’s a good sleeper, not like Billy at all. Mum had scolded her for it years ago, calling it quite a thing that a girl so naughty as Margaret could sleep like one with clear conscience. Billy had grinned over that, too, even when Margaret’s eyes had shot daggers at him from across the breakfast table.

The stairs creak a bit as Billy descends, and he frowns, cursing himself for forgetting that one step with the splintered edge Margaret warned him about a few weeks ago. If Mum had been home, that would have meant the end of this escape, but for now Billy’s still safe, and he drops the duffle next to the door silently before making his way to the desk, his hands already itching but not yet shaking. That will come later, he supposes. The money is where it’s meant to be, in short stacks of twenty pound notes and the odd fifty. Billy counts them off between his fingers and under his breath, pausing at three hundred and sixty before he feels it—feels and smells and knows her.

“Meggie—“

“What’re you thinkin’, Billy?” Margaret’s laughter is low and almost musical, a pretty contrast to the point of the knife she holds to Billy’s side—his own, turned on him for the first time.

“I have to go,” he whispers. “I’ve done—I did something. I can’t tell you.”

“You did something last weekend, too, didn’t you? I saw Da shunt you off to the loo the minute you came in, all shaky like a fucking girl, Billy. What’s different, hmm? And where’s Da?”

“I don’t know.” Billy closes his eyes, waits for the wave of nausea to pass. It’s not entirely a lie; he can’t know how far his father’s body has been carried by the waves. “’s got nothing to do with him.”

Margaret spins him to face her, the knife now pointed just below Billy’s chin, but in the air instead of against his skin. “You pulled a job without Da? ‘m I supposed to believe that?”

Her smile is sweet, like their mother’s, Billy thinks, but Margaret’s eyes are hard like Da’s, like pieces of broken green glass polished by decades in sand. She has always been her father’s daughter, more so than Billy has ever been his father’s son. “Believe whatever you want,” he breathes, meeting Margaret’s gaze with a resigned sort of fearlessness. “I’m leaving. And I need this, Meggie, and I’m taking it.”

“Look at you.” Margaret’s lips thin out, baring her teeth a little. “Ready to run. I’m going t’tell him you took it, Billy—“

“Tell him.” Billy laughs, relishing the surprise in Margaret’s face. “Find him first, then tell him. Tell Mum, too, and half the fucking town and country. I’m leaving.”

Margaret lowers her hand, twirling the short knife in her fingers. “Without this? That’d make a bad start, don’t you think?”

“What do you want, Meggie?”

Margaret tilts her head slightly, weighs the knife and taps the blade to her chin. “Half.”

“No.” Billy’s voice makes her eyebrows shoot up a fraction, but he’s not finished. “There’s more in the shed, behind the red bricks he’s been gathering. In an envelope. Meggie.” Billy meets her eyes again. “Please.” For a moment Margaret waits him out, and then Billy sees her pulse has quickened a bit, the vein in her throat visible even in the poor light of the room. “Meggie.”

“Am I going to have to run, too?”

“Meggie, no …” Billy shakes his head, then races his hands through his hair. “No. You need to stay. For Mum. She’s—it’s not going to be good.”

“I knew it,” Margaret whispers from between her teeth. “I knew you’d kill him.”

Billy pales, but doesn’t move. When Margaret extends her hand again, the knife’s hilt now pointed toward Billy, he closes his eyes again and takes it, willing his body not to shake.

“Get out, Billy.”

“Meggie … Meggie, I’m so sorry—“

“Go. Get out,” she hisses. “Don’t come back, ever. Because if I see you, Billy, I swear to the Lord above that I will murder you. Not for him. Not for me. For her. For your mother, Billy. For what you’ve done to her—“

“Stop it,” Billy gasps, eyes wide and shocked now. “You don’t know—“

“Go.” Margaret nearly screams. Billy steps backward, knocking papers and photographs from the desk onto the floor, and Margaret reaches for his coat before he can recover, pushing him toward the door and thrusting the duffel into his arms. “Go. Jesus, Billy, get out.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers one last time, but Margaret’s already leaving, scaling the stairs with her hand clasped over her mouth. Billy swallows and turns, pulling his key from his pocket and letting it fall to the mat on the floor before he steps back out into the night.

Finish this, Billy thinks. Be done with it and go.


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