by Paul O'Grady
I quickly reminded myself that the reason I was in my ma’s bed in the first place was because I was terrified to sleep in my own in case The Exorcist got me. I was less terrified now, still scared, but at least my hair was no longer standing up on end. However, I didn’t think I was quite brave enough to go downstairs and face the back kitchen just yet and considered suggesting we leave the cup of tea till the morning.
‘Well, go on then,’ she prompted. ‘What are you waiting for? The dawn?’
‘You don’t want tea at this hour of the morning, surely?’
‘I know why you won’t go down and put the kettle on. You’re scared, aren’t you?’
‘No.’
‘You are! You’re terrified, admit it.’ She was like a cat with a mouse.
‘I’m not.’
‘Then kindly tell me what the bloody hell you’re doing in my bed?’
‘Shh, keep your voice down, Dot-Next-Door will hear you.’ I didn’t want her knowing I was sleeping with my mother.
‘Well, honest to God,’ she crowed, leaning across the bed and giving me a little shove, ‘you should be ashamed of yourself at your age, scared of ghosts. Don’t you know that the dead can’t hurt you, it’s the living you’ve got to worry about? Now get down those stairs and put the kettle on and mind out for Ellen.’ Reluctantly I crept out of the room and felt for the landing light in the dark, holding my breath and resisting the urge to run for cover.
I could hear her laughing behind me. ‘Wait till I ring our Annie first thing,’ she cackled. ‘Wait till I tell her about this bloody carry-on, disturbing your poor mother in the middle of the night, who, by the way, is still recovering from a heart attack in case you’d forgotten …’
I went for it and ran down the stairs, moving quickly into the front room and turning the light on as I went, not daring to look left or right as I made my way to our freezing kitchen.
By the light of the fluorescent tube that I normally hated but was now extremely grateful for, as it illuminated the tiny kitchen like a football pitch, I quickly filled the kettle, lit the gas and put it on to boil. So far I’d managed to avoid looking out the window and into the darkness of the back yard by busying myself with the complicated process of putting teabags into mugs and getting the milk out. But however hard I tried to free my mind of all matters spiritual, I couldn’t ignore the unsettling feeling that I was being observed from the shadows of the yard – and then, typically, right on cue, the lights inexplicably went out, plunging the kitchen into darkness and rooting me to the spot, terror-stricken.
I was aware that the pounding sound I could hear was my heart furiously beating and the tidal wave of blood rushing to my ears, and as my eyes slowly became accustomed to the moonlight I could see to my horror that, quite clearly, something that looked very much like a face partially covered by a white caul was staring in at me. I screamed, or at least I opened my mouth but nothing seemed to come out. The ghost of Ellen might have mistaken me for ‘The Scream’ by Munch.
My jaw relaxed as it slowly began to dawn on me that the apparition that had me in such a state was not the ghost of Ellen but was in fact a tea towel hanging on the washing line. It was one that my ma had brought back from the Isle of Man and I’d mistaken the Laxey Wheel for a face. Fool, I told myself, get a grip, there’s no such thing as ghosts …
What was that then? I distinctly heard it, there was no imagining the shuffling and scratching slowly approaching from behind. Unable to turn round and look behind me, I could hear something feeling its way at the top of the step that led down into the kitchen. The urge to scream and run was now overpowering, and yet I couldn’t. I was still rooted to the spot with fear. I could hear it plainly now – a rush of breath from whatever it was that was hovering behind me, just audible above the blood pounding in my ears and the roar of the gas jets and the hiss of the kettle as it began to boil.
I swallowed hard. The noise I produced sounded as if I’d dropped a brick in a swamp. A voice suddenly came out of the darkness and I levitated at least three feet in the air
‘Don’t just stand there in the dark like one of Lewis’s, you soft bugger,’ the demon said through a yawn. ‘Turn that kettle off and come in here and find me purse, the ten bob for the meter’s run out.’
CHAPTER 2
Wine Lodges and Babies
SURPRISINGLY, AS IT IS NOT THE FAMILY TRADITION TO BE anything other than a little crabby first thing in the morning, my ma was in a party mood and having a smashing time as I passed her sat on the stairs, phone in hand, filling her sister Annie in on the night’s shenanigans.
‘’ey up, Lazarus has just risen, Anne,’ she remarked, laughing as I slithered past her, ‘although he still looks half dead to me.’
It was good to hear her laugh again even if it was on me and just for that moment it felt like life was back to normal. I half expected to see my dad sat in his armchair studying his pools coupon. Taking my fags off the mantelpiece and lighting one, I sat on the sofa and stared at his empty chair. From out of the blue a mawkish verse that I’d read in the In Memoriam column of the Liverpool Echo came to mind:
An empty chair,
A silent prayer,
Always wishing you were there.
I could hear it being recited by an old woman with a broad Scouse accent that had a slightly pious tone to it and I grinned in spite of everything as I slowly eased myself into the day, idly blowing plumes of smoke into the broad shaft of sunlight cutting across the room from the window. Listening to my mother chatting away cheerfully on the phone made me hope optimistically that she was learning at last to come to terms with her grief and allow the anger that she still felt deep inside to subside.
It was an anger that she directed full blast at me, a rage that spurted furiously and unexpectedly when the frustration, born out of the panic that came from the overwhelming realization that her loved one really was gone for good and would not be coming through the front door looking for his tea ever again, rose to the surface. She felt that my past skirmishes with the police and general tomcatting (as she put it) of late had contributed to the stress that had brought on the fatal coronary. I was inclined to agree with her. The burden of guilt that I was carrying on my back was growing heavier by the day as I quietly mourned the loss of my dad’s reassuring presence.
For my mother his absence was still a raw gaping wound, and sometimes in the night I’d hear her sobbing in bed and calling out my father’s name. I’d bury my head in the pillow to try and drown out her cries. It was the loneliest sound in the world.
I was slow and lazy that morning as I mooched sleepily out of the house and made my way down to Green Lane Station to catch a train to work. I’d eventually gone back to my own bed but hadn’t slept very well and felt that a nice lie-in of, say, another ten hours wouldn’t come amiss.
Walking slowly past what had been Henshaw’s shop, I saw the windows were now empty, like an East German grocer’s, the shelves bare apart from a few tins of soup dotted about here and there, reminding me of a mouth full of missing teeth. Normally I was used to moving swiftly past the shop in case the sight of me reminded Eileen of unpaid paper bills. But there was no Eileen in her white overall marking up papers, no George with a pencil behind his ear cutting a neat wedge out of a round of Cheshire cheese with a wire. They’d moved on and out of my life, as had their son, who had sat in the back room and was now, to quote my mother, ‘doing well’ and most likely holding down a fabulous job while I was off to do another day in Yates’s Wine Lodge.
Everyone seemed to have moved on. Tony, my bosom pal from the Bear’s Paw who had opened my eyes to the gay scene and introduced me to a slice of life that I had previously thought only existed in films, had been promoted by HM Customs and Excise and transferred to Southend. Friends from school were training to be nurses or learning a trade, some had married and settled down, others had simply vanished. And where was I? Eighteen years of age, living at home with my grieving mother, going nowhere f
ast and working in a wine lodge that was one of the roughest drinking holes in Liverpool for lousy pay and to cap it all, the cherry on top of the steaming, stinking mound of dog doo-doo that currently represented my life, there was A Baby on The Way. Great, just what I wanted. In short, I was up shit creek without a paddle. But even though my prospects didn’t look that good there was still a trace of optimism lurking in the background leading me hopefully to believe that opportunity was waiting somewhere in the wings.
I’d resigned from the Magistrates’ Courts. I wasn’t really cut out to be a trainee court clerk, and like every other job I’d had so far the wage wasn’t up to much and besides, I was bored with it all and it showed. A few of the magistrates had complained about my appearance, in front of a packed courtroom. The stipendiary magistrate had leaned over the bench to stare in disbelief at my red corduroy jacket and pink tie and enquired sarcastically if my job description had read court clerk or court jester. It was a case of jump now or wait to be pushed, so I did the decent thing and handed in my resignation to my long-suffering boss. It was a relief for both of us. I’d gone back to my old ways, my timekeeping was atrocious and I frequently skived off and went missing in the endless tunnels that ran from the back of the courts and seemingly went on for miles. They were full of ancient court ledgers filled with charge sheets in which a long-dead clerk had recorded the past crimes and misdemeanours of Merseyside in a beautiful copperplate hand. ‘Kathleen Kelly. Fined five shillings for allowing her chimney to catch fire.’
Another reason I was keen to leave the courts was the gossip going around about Diane’s pregnancy. We’d become the topic of much speculation in the office and I wanted out. I wasn’t really bothered about what job I did just as long as I got one and seeing that Yates’s Wine Lodge in Moorfields, just around the corner from the courts, was looking for a barman I’d applied for the job.
The wine lodges of the seventies were bleak, basically empty halls with bare walls and wooden floors and a few chairs and tables dotted about. A long high bar ran the length of the room with four enormous wooden barrels behind containing the various wines and sherries that were served to the customers in ‘docks’ – plastic beakers as opposed to glasses. Diane and I would frequently pop in, thinking it was camp to knock back a couple of large Aussie whites before hitting the clubs, living life a little dangerously, or so we thought, by drinking in a Yates. It’s not unfair to say that Yates’s wine lodges had the reputation for being rough, last chance saloons frequented by alcoholics and hardened drinkers who could get hammered on the potent wine at not too much expense, the Moorfields lodge was considered one of the roughest.
This establishment was run by Molly and her sister Jean, the latter deeply suspicious when I offered my services as Yates’s new barman. She couldn’t comprehend why I would want to leave a ‘respectable’ job in the Magistrates’ Courts for one behind the bar in a wine lodge and told me to come back when her sister was in. I duly returned the next day to meet her and was interviewed by a woman with coal-black ringlets and a face covered in a deep olive pan-stick. She wore a plain black dress and a lot of old gold rings and bracelets with a pair of bomb-shaped heavy gold earrings that swung back and forth from her lobes each time she took a pull of one of the many fags that she smoked. She had a hacking cough that made the building shake and I liked her on sight, a cross between Anna Magnani and Edith Piaf, laid-back and worldly wise. The interview was brief and informal and I managed to make her laugh with a few tales about life working in number three court and the regular clientele of winos and prozzies who passed through its doors.
‘You won’t find it much different working here then, lad,’ she croaked. ‘Start on Saturday morning, half nine prompt and we’ll see how you go.’
And so, after a very boozy leaving do, I said goodbye to a career in law on Friday evening and hello to a life in the licensing trade behind the bar of Yates’s on the Saturday morning, some of the bemused patrons asking if I knew there was a fellah working in the Magistrates who was a dead ringer for me. Predictably, my mother went crazy when she found out about my change of employment and ‘took to her bed’, demanding to know why I was hell-bent on breaking her heart.
Molly’s sister Jean was tall and slim with eyes like a hawk and seemed quite imperious until you got to know her, when she’d give you a ciggy and chat with you at the end of the bar. I only ever saw her lose her cool when Wally the rat-catcher visited, a born comic with a purple face and a club foot who came by in an official capacity once a month. He’d brought a brace of drunken rats up from the cellar, holding his catch aloft by their tails before slapping them down on the bar, sending Jean and the rest of the women screaming out into the street, leaving Pete the barman unsure if he should stay with the grinning Wally and his inebriated vermin or risk a dent to his masculine pride and leg it after the women. It was no contest for me. I was the first one out of the building.
Every morning the floor was religiously swept out and mopped, the toilets scoured with bleach until the air made your eyes sting and the bar tops, with what little brass there was, polished. Not that there was much varnish left on the bar top as it had supposedly been eaten away over the years by the spillage of Yates’s fine Australian white. By the time Jean was satisfied that the place was up to her high standards, the air was 95 per cent Jeyes Fluid and 5 per cent oxygen. Yates’s Wine Lodge, Moorfields, might have looked bleak but its startling cleanliness was a testimony to the powers of industrial-strength detergents and a lot of elbow grease, and had the occasion arisen we could have performed open-heart surgery on the bar top without any risk of infection to the patient.
Before the doors were opened to the public I was sent out to a tiny café on Dale Street to buy the crusty cobs filled with chips for our mid-morning break. These were washed down with mugs of Peggy’s super-strength tea and after a quick fag the doors would be opened and the first of our punters would trickle in for their mid-morning livener. Yates’s customers were a real mixed bag. As in any pub there were a few lairy arseholes, but on the whole the majority of the punters were agreeable. I had my favourite alcoholics. An extremely pleasant and highly intelligent middle-aged woman who had the misfortune to teach in a school with a notorious reputation, would arrive promptly each evening at five thirty and proceed to drink her way through one of the barrels of white until by closing time, when her lips had turned blue, she would be having a heated argument with herself. A smart city type, who although he was a regular rarely spoke to anyone except to furtively order his wine, would become extremely agitated at the approach of closing time, knocking back large docks of white wine with a whisky chaser as if Prohibition was about to be enforced. I worried about him and the teacher and used to wonder what sort of home life they went back to each night, if any at all, until Jean would tell me not to be so bloody soft and get them docks washed.
The Irish workmen who were building the new metro station over the road spent their wages across the bar each night, skilfully avoiding the clutches of Tattoo Pat and Taxi Annie, two geriatric working girls so named because the former’s body was rumoured to be a mass of tattoos, ranging from crude Indian ink lettering to elaborate professional jobs, and the latter as she allegedly took care of her punters in the back of a cab. Not that either of them had witnessed that many eager customers beating a path to their red-lit doors in recent years, but like the troupers they were they carried on regardless, prowling the pubs and the streets for prospective and hopefully none too picky clients. Leaning on the bar half pissed, they’d mourn the good old days when pickings were rich, concluding that business was slack for professionals like themselves because ‘too many friggin’ scrubbers were giving it away free’. I’d nod sympathetically, politely ignoring their advancing years and grubby appearance.
Annie, with her frizzy ginger hair stuffed under a hand-knitted tartan tam-o’-shanter, probably wouldn’t see seventy again and put me in mind of Super Gran, while Pat, with her greasy black locks, straight a
s a yard of pump water, pulled back severely from her waxen face and held in place by two hair clips, had a look all of her own that said ‘I’ve just come back from a funeral’. Indeed, she could’ve easily passed for the corpse. Her usual ensemble consisted of a strangely perverse 1950s black gaberdine mac, shiny with age, which she wore buttoned up to the neck with a little black beret gripped to the back of her head. Ed D. Wood, the director/writer responsible for gems such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, would’ve loved Pat. They certainly fascinated me, these two old brasses. Women like that always have and the little snippets of their conversations that I’d catch I’d relate back to Molly, perched on a stool at the end of the bar with a mug of tea and a fag, studying the racing page.
I enjoyed my time at Yates’s. It might have had a reputation for being dog rough but in my six months working there I only ever witnessed one fight. Even so, on slow days I’d lean across the bar and gaze out of the open door at people passing by on the street outside and couldn’t help thinking that maybe I really had missed the boat.
I still worked the occasional night at the Bear’s Paw. I’d given up my job behind the bar after my father died, but strapped for cash as always I’d asked Gordon, the owner, to take me back on. He let me have a few weekends, even allowing me to start late as I didn’t get out of Yates’s till gone eleven. I was grateful for the work but secretly not happy to be back pulling pints behind the bar; as usual, I wanted to be out front drinking them with my mates.
One of my favourites was a student from Plymouth, where he had been known as David but had been rechristened Nina la Roche since his arrival in Liverpool. He was as tall and gangly as a beanstalk, rapier thin. Trailing scarves and waving arms covered in bangles, he would stand on his toes in his wooden clogs like a giant praying mantis and frighten the ‘straight’ queens off the dance floor. He rented one large room in an eccentric old household on Canning Street and you never knew which one of his many personas would answer the door. Sometimes he was a member of the Russian aristocracy and, answering the door first as the maid, he would tell you to wait in the hall, and then rush into his room to prepare himself for the role of a Romanov princess.
