That Close

by Suggs

  Mum was working in a bar in Soho and she didn’t get back till late. She was out for the count. I slipped past her bed and straight into the gas rebate stacked neatly on the table, three cardboard 10ps, a couple of Chinese coins and two pounds fifty. I took thirty pence, four fags from the packet of Player’s Navy Cut and headed out. The landings were open to the elements. The stairs were deadly, completely worn down. Smooth and hard as marble. Only drunks or babies could survive a fall down these.

  We lived on the seventh floor. I gazed out over the balcony across the rooftops of my kingdom. Wet and grey, and winter. Down in the courtyard Tiger and my best mate, Andrew Chalk, who everyone knew as Chalky, were kicking around a soggy leather football, to no great avail. Chalky was born on Halloween and I was born on Friday the thirteenth. A right little pair of nightmares we were too.

  Bong! The ball slammed into the enormous metal bins that lined the outside wall.

  ‘Go on there, Jeoorjie Best!’

  ‘Piss off … come down and play!’ exhorted a puffing Chalky.

  It’s almost impossible to get an exciting game of football going between two players, but when one of them is Tiger (who’d just come over from America and hadn’t really got the hang of ‘saccer’) it never gets going. His mum and dad were even more American. I’d no idea why they were here, I think it was something to do with Speakers’ Corner.

  I gingerly slid down the rest of the slippery steps and out into the courtyard. The ball squirted in my direction and I booted it as hard as I could. Jesus, the soggy thing was like concrete, and even though I didn’t connect properly I felt like I’d broken my foot. I sliced it at a right angle smack against a basement window and down into the area.

  The area was about five feet deep and three feet wide and ran like a moat around the entire building. Maybe it was something to do with the war. Although who or what we were being protected from I could never work out. Maybe it was to keep us in.

  I climbed resignedly over the railings and down. It was dark and spooky and no one liked going down there. Every twelve feet or so a bridge to one of the stairwells ran overhead and plunged the whole thing into complete gloom. It was knee-deep in years’ worth of newspapers and rubbish, and as I kicked through the debris looking this way and that for the ball, one of the basement windows behind me burst open.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was one of the mad old geezers of which the flats had more than their fair share. Most probably driven mad by the smacking of soggy footballs against their windows.

  ‘Want yer ball?’ he said, none too kindly, making moves to climb out of the window. He had a face like the dad from Steptoe and Son, only with fewer teeth. He was wearing a red and white striped bobble hat and looked ominously sprightly for an old darzer. With one hand on the sill he leapt through the window and landed in the rubbish, grinning maniacally. He was about ten feet away, and the ball was in the space between us. I was weighing up the chances of grabbing it and running, when he suddenly hopped forward and from behind his back produced a Second World War bayonet.

  The drizzle drizzled, and I backed away. ‘Here, take it easy,’ I mumbled. ‘Want it, dooooyer, yer Jerry bastard.’ He lunged; I stumbled backwards and fell into the rubbish. Through a closing curtain of chip wrappers I saw him lift the bayonet above his head with both hands and plunge it down.

  AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!! BANG! HISSSSssss. He’d killed the ball, stabbing it to death. ‘Oi, you old bastard,’ shouted Chalky from above. ‘Leave it alone. He still thinks he’s in the trenches!’

  I scrambled to my feet, the MOG (mad old geezer) brandishing the ball on the end of his bayonet, grinning, toothless and victorious. I turned and ran, churning through the knee-high rubbish. ‘Go on, English Tommy,’ shouted Chalky, laughing. I scrambled round the corner and out of sight, frantically looking for a way out. As I waded forward the rubbish in front of me was mysteriously jumping up and down. I scooped off the top layer to reveal a pigeon flapping around, unable to fly. With the fate of the hissing football still fresh in my mind I scooped it up, stuck it through the railings, and clambered up. The MOG had given up the chase.

  The pigeon had a broken wing, and a plume of feathers sticking out the top of its head, like it had been got by a cat. I carefully picked it up and wandered round the corner to see Tiger and Chalky leaning over the railings, still ranting and raving at the MOG who’d already gone back inside with his prize.

  ‘The guy is crazy,’ said Tiger, in his stating-the-obvious American kind of way. ‘Yeah, and that was a good ball,’ ranted Chalky. ‘My ball, you old bastard! I’m gonna get you for that, you old git!’

  ‘Never mind your effing ball, he nearly killed me!’ I said.

  ‘What the hell is all the noise?’ shouted Mrs Pirimaldi from the window above.

  The Pirimaldis lived on the second floor and owned the newsagent’s over the road. There were seven of them.

  ‘It’s Saturday morning, you bloody hooligans. A day of rest. Have some flippin’ consideration. Some of us have to work the rest of the week.’ And BANG, down came the window.

  On each landing of the Mansions there were two flats, and somehow Mr Pirimaldi had contrived to get both of them allocated to him. On the inside, unbeknownst to the council, he had knocked them through. He had installed a cupboard in the hole with doors at the front and back, in case the council came round. This cupboard didn’t lead to Narnia, just to the second half of their illegally enhanced council flat. They had the most palatial pad in the whole building, and two front doors. Whenever I knocked for Alex, the eldest son, I never knew which one would open.

  SOHO

  ‘I must have been eighteen or nineteen. I was working in Manchester for a chap, they called him Bill “Man Mountain” Benny’, Mum said.

  ‘He was a wrestler and gangster. I sang in his clubs. Sometimes four in one night. I had a good voice. I had a great voice. Got “Best Jazz Newcomer” in Melody Maker. Eighteen. Eighteen! I was young, I was naïve. Bill used to slobber over all the girls. But I stood up for myself. The clubs were full of gangsters. I was going out with a burglar at the time, although I didn’t find out till later. They were amazing times, they were amazing people, they really were.’

  And she laughs.

  ‘They found Bill naked on the dance floor of one of his clubs. Dead. He’d had a heart attack. There was this terrible screaming for what seemed like an age, before they discovered the poor girl trapped underneath him. They had to get a winch to get him off her!

  ‘I even sang at the Blue Angel Club in Liverpool, where Cilla Black and The Beatles used to come after sessions at the Cavern. The carpet there was so sticky the house band stayed for thirty years. One night this really nice fella starts chatting to me and he gives me his card. Says I’m too good for Liverpool, said I should try my luck in the bright lights of London.

  ‘You should have seen his face when I knocked on his door in Soho.’

  ‘So what? That was my dad?’

  ‘Noooo. That’s when I got a job at the Colony Room Club.’

  There’s a lull in the conversation and I hear myself say, ‘Mum, what did happen to Dad?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Er … anything?’ He left when I was a baby, is all I knew.

  She looks at me for a second.

  ‘He was jazz mad. I met him in a coffee bar just round the corner.’

  ‘In Soho?’

  And she starts to tell me stuff she’s never told me before.

  *

  The ‘wicked lady’ heroin destroyed him. He had so much potential. He was passionate about music, about jazz, but even more passionate about photography. He used to work in a photography shop in Hastings. They’d lend him the cameras, and he’d take arty pictures around town.

  He worked as a smudger on Folkestone beach down the road, to make ends meet, but he had greater ambitions in photography.

  ‘Hold on a minute, Mum. You knew Dad was a heroin addict?’

&nbs
p; ‘No, not until after we were married. We started living together very innocently. But I came back from work one day and found him with a needle hanging out of his hand. So I took it out, broke it, and poured all his stuff down the sink.’

  ‘He ended up in Tooting Bec asylum. He tried to inject himself with paraffin.’

  ‘Mum, what?’

  ‘Look, I fell in love with him. He was the nicest man I’d ever met. He was a very talented, funny, bright man. He was a beautiful person. He was just like you.’ I was stunned not by the heroin but my Dad was a ‘nice man’.

  ‘He turned up when you were probably twelve years old. He’d got out of the asylum and wanted me to help him stay out. I went to see the doctors. They said there was nothing I could do for him. I am afraid I could not afford to have him back in my life with you to bring up.’

  *

  The sixties Soho that Mum arrived in from Liverpool was an extraordinary place, perched on the edge of Covent Garden fruit and veg market, where the pubs opened at 5 a.m., and the magic of theatreland, filled with tinsel, glitter and greasepaint. It was a run-down area and the rents were cheap. You could find queues of musicians carrying their instruments heading to the Musicians’ Union in Archer Street, looking for work in one of the big bands. Gangs of sailors on a big night out. Girls in feather boas making their way from the working women’s hostel to one of the big shows. Coffee bars that stayed open all night. In the sixties drinking hours were highly restricted and gambling and homosexuality were illegal. Small, discreet, so-called members’ clubs were springing up all over Soho.

  The Kismet, where my mum worked for a period, was one of the more famous. It was also known as ‘Death in the Afternoon’. In fact George Melly was asked by a friend, when opening the door to go in, what the strange smell was. ‘Failure, dear boy,’ he said, as he swept down the stairs.

  Having made sure the pigeon was safely in the cardboard box in which I’d hidden him on top of the cupboard in my bedroom, I headed up west to get some money off my mum for tea. She was working in the Colony Room, bang in the middle of Soho. What went on in the Colony, as they say, stayed in the Colony. They just seemed normal to me, my mum’s mates.

  You could be anything you wanted in there, anything except boring. The place was run by Muriel Belcher, a redoubtable old Hungarian bird, who shrieked and swore at every new customer. She didn’t care if you had no money, but if you were boring you were out. No questions asked.

  I got off the bus and walked down Denmark Street. I love Denmark Street. It’s where all the music shops are and you can get any kind of musical instrument. It’s also where songs are written, and sometimes you’d hear the strains of a piano and the voice of some young hopeful drifting out the window. It was also known as Tin Pan Alley. The story goes that in the olden days budding songwriters filled every floor, and so that their competitors couldn’t hear a new hit composition they were playing on the piano, they’d employ a kid to stand under the window, in the street, and bang a saucepan to drown it out.

  I stopped for a coffee at Bar Italia. Going there as a teenager in the mid-seventies was a real treat, proper coffee with froth, cocoa, the lot. I sat outside and watched the world go by.

  And what a world! Man, you wouldn’t even get this stuff at the pictures. Maltese fellas standing about in ground-length camel-hair coats smoking cigars. Girls milling on the corner in stilettos and tatty fur jackets – ‘That was never caught, it gave itself up’ – chatting and laughing loudly, eyelashed eyes out for tricks. Old chaps in bowler hats and rain macs ducking in the doorway of a shop that just says ‘Magazines’. Blond-haired teenage boys, about my age, wearing lipstick, heading for Piccadilly.

  Aldo, the owner, came out, put his espresso down and sat next to me. ‘How’s it going, son?’

  ‘Not bad, Aldo. How’s yourself?’

  ‘You know, times are hard, son, but we’re doing OK.’

  Everyone knew Bar Italia did more than OK. Cash business, small denominations, it was the envy of every trader in Soho. But they worked very hard for it, it was open twenty-four hours a day. Aldo’s dad was interned during the war. Yeah, they just came one day, made him take down the sign and took him away to a camp on the Isle of Man. Aldo’s got pictures of it, his poor old man up a ladder taking down the Bar Italia sign, and then to the fucking Isle of Man. No wonder he felt angry.

  One of his uncles ended up in a camp built on Peckham Rye Common. Eight Nissen huts with a fence round them in the middle of the park. But the security didn’t last long. When the locals realised there was more fun going on in the inside than the out, they left the gate open so the Italian POWs could come and go as they pleased. More importantly, the locals could get a bit of what the interns were cooking up from their vast and well-tended allotment.

  Aldo took a sip of his coffee. ‘Your mum tells me you got nicked last week.’ Here we go I think, everyone knows your business in Soho. That’s the irony, as it’s the place people come to for anonymity, to get on with what they wanna get on with, away from prying eyes, yet it’s really a village. Bar Italia was the post office.

  ‘I didn’t get nicked.’

  He took another sip. ‘Mum tells me she had to come and get you out of West End Central the other afternoon.’ He put his cup down.

  ‘I wasn’t nicked. We were just messing about with a fruit machine, and the nonce police or whatever they’re called came in. You know, that new lot, the protecting minors from dirty old men branch, or whatever. They took us down the station for our own good. They wanna get down Piccadilly.’

  ‘Why’d they take you to the station?’

  ‘Well, from what I could make out, so’s the chief inspector could give us a lecture on the dangers of marijuana. Didn’t know what he was on about. He opens the blinds to point out a squat across the road. “See them hippies?” he says. “I know what’s growing in them window boxes. D’you understand what I am saying to you, boys? You’ll go nowhere, like them grubby hippies, if you don’t. Do you understand?”

  ‘We all nodded, but we didn’t, we just wanted to get out of there, obviously. What it had to do with us I don’t know. Then he spent another half-hour umming and ahhing round the delicate subject of kindly old men in raincoats with sweets in their pockets. We weren’t nicked. They just called Mum. Who had to come and get us. She took us all for an ice cream; she wasn’t bothered. The other parents went ballistic, they’d read about Soho in the papers. I’ve never felt unsafe here. I feel safer here myself than on the Tube. A packed compartment, that’s where the old bastards grab your arse.’

  ‘Your mum’s a good woman. She works hard. Don’t be upsetting her,’ said Aldo.

  ‘Honestly, Aldo, she really wasn’t bothered. It was nothing.’

  ‘How long you got left at that school of yours?’

  ‘Two years.’

  ‘Well, you stick at it, son, you get yourself some qualification, get some of them levels, make your mum proud.’ He ruffled my hair. ‘You’re a good kid, bright. Don’t waste it.’ He got up and went back inside.

  Two butch fellas came past with a poodle. I finished my coffee, paid, and headed round the corner to Dean Street. The entrance to the Colony was a small green door. I pushed it open and went up the dingy staircase, past the giant tins of Cyprus potatoes and into the tiny club on the first floor. The whole place, floor to ceiling, was decorated in bilious green. The walls were covered in various pieces of art, from cartoons to oil paintings. Donated in return for unpaid bar bills. It was basically just a small shabby room with a toilet and telephone at one end and a battered upright piano, but full of the most incredible characters.

  A thick fug of tobacco smoke hung permanently across the bar, just above my head. Mum was singing at the piano, Muriel, the owner, sitting, as always, on her throne, a stool by the door. ‘Hello, it’s little cunty’, she said, as I wandered in. Every new entrant would be greeted with a barrage of good-natured expletives. It was a rite of passage that not everyone could deal
with.

  A test, because the crew could get a bit rough of an evening on the good ship Colony and the conversational sea very turbulent. One poor chap wandered in one afternoon to be greeted with: ‘I don’t think you’ll find any of your friends in my bar.’ He replied: ‘But I’m here to meet someone.’

  ‘She’s not a pretty little lady, is she?’

  ‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life.’

  ‘On your way, Lottie, or I’ll give you a fourpenny one.’

  There’s a story about Muriel, where one night at closing time she spotted four red eyes glaring at her from under the bench in the corner. It was two rats. ‘You two can fuck off.’ But being a kind woman, she explained, ‘You see I’ve called last orders, and anyhow you’re not members.’ She opened the door and the rats left without argument.

  There was always a colourful mixture of characters in there, swearing good-naturedly, smoking and knocking back the whiskies. As I say, you could be anything you wanted in there, it was a haven for every kind of social misfit: jazz musicians, writers, painters, toffs, artists, poets, coppers, strippers (often still in their feather boas), gangsters, transvestites and plain old drunks. There was no need for a bouncer in the Colony, Muriel’s razor tongue would slice any would-be opponent to shreds.

  But she was a kind person, the regulars were like family, she called Francis Bacon her daughter, and if you had no money it would go on the tab, until you were flush again. Whereupon you would be ordered to ‘Open your bead bag, Lottie.’

  Amongst the minor villains, strippers, theatrical types, toffs and coppers you’d find the likes of George Melly holding court in the corner, the writer Jeffrey Bernard leaning on the bar getting progressively more aggressive, and one or both of the champagne-drinking painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Francis had originally been employed by Muriel to bring in gay clientele when homosexuality was still illegal. He got a fiver a punter, in those days good money.