The Devil Rides Out

by Paul O'Grady

  ‘Come in,’ he would shout imperiously after what he considered a respectable passage of time and I’d enter to find him draped across his chaise longue, engulfed in shawls and with a papier-mâché sculpture belonging to his landlady, Helen, on his head that we’d nicknamed the Conch. ‘What makes you think you are suitable for the position of personal maid? Do you speak Russian and Japanese?’ And the game would begin. Most of the time when he wasn’t being Russian or a ballet mistress we’d eat his homemade spaghetti bolognese, drink cider and dance like maniacs to his collection of 78 LPs.

  *

  It’s not true that pulling pints gives you the advantage of pulling customers. Most of the customers hardly even notice you; they just want to get their drinks in and return to their mates. Well, that was more or less the case for me anyway. Choices of romance were limited to the dregs and drunks who were left hanging around at closing time as I went round the tables collecting the empties. Needless to say I preferred the long wait for the bus that went through the Mersey Tunnel to a tail home with any of that lot even though it meant not getting home till the early hours of the morning. I’d gingerly slide my key into the front-door lock and slowly, ever so slowly, open it, taking care that it didn’t stick and make the knocker rattle so as not to disturb my ma. Like Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon every move was done in slow motion, barely hovering over the stairs, taking infinite care to avoid the bottom two that creaked and hardly daring to breathe all the while in case I should wake the Kraken, which I invariably did.

  ‘Where’ve you been till three in the morning? Out tomcatting it?’

  ‘No, I’ve been working, Mam. Go back to sleep.’

  ‘I’d like to know what kind of work keeps you out till this hour of the morning, nothing respectable that’s for sure. I wish you’d go and find yourself digs instead of creepin’ in here like Marley’s Ghost at all hours. There’s a nice slice of beef in the fridge if your hungry.’

  After Diane’s phone call, that hateful morning after my father died, to announce the unwelcome news that I was going to be a father, I sat on the stairs unable to comprehend the enormity of what was happening to me. I had no idea what to do but an increasing sense of panic told me that I had to get out of the house. It was still fairly early and I had no idea where I was going. I headed off across the park, stunned by the way my life had been turned upside down in a matter of hours, walking around in a daze asking myself a thousand questions.

  Top of the list was ‘How the bloody hell am I going to explain this one to my mother?’ I felt sick at the mess I was in, and dry retched on what was probably the twentieth fag I’d smoked that morning. This was it. Life over. The end of my world as I knew it. Sitting on what was left of a bench I weighed up my situation. Dad dead, mother seriously ill in hospital, and to cap it all I’m about to be saddled with a baby – a piece of news that I really could’ve done without, especially on today of all days.

  For a moment I contemplated ‘doing a runner’, following a white rabbit who would lead me down a hole, vanishing forever from my increasingly complicated life, or curling up in a ball somewhere and going to sleep, pretending none of this had ever happened.

  I thought about my father and my devastated mother and the tears came again.

  Oh, the sheer hopelessness of it all. And yet I knew deep down, no matter what my fears, that I’d never be able to run away as, apart from a genuine affection for Diane, good old guilt would step in the way and prevent me from doing so. No, I’d stay and face the music. It was the first sensible solution to my problems that had entered my head that morning and I felt instantly more relaxed for it.

  Lighting up yet another cigarette, I watched as a man crossed by the children’s swings, a canvas bag swinging from his shoulder that almost certainly contained his ‘carry out’ – a lunchtime meal of cheese or egg sandwiches and a flask of tea – no doubt lovingly prepared by his wife this morning.

  An alarming thought sent me panicking again as I watched him vanish down the hill and in the direction of Cammel Laird.

  Jesus tonight! What if I was expected to do the decent thing and marry Diane? No, that was definitely out of the question. I could see us, unhappily married and living in her flat in Bootle, pushing a pram around Stanley Park, skint and miserable and hating each other as we played Mummy and Daddy for the baby’s sake, a baby I’d bitterly resent.

  The notion that I would be a father in nine months’ time did nothing to awaken any paternal urges that might be lying dormant. I loved kids, I’d been ecstatic when I first became an uncle and was never away from my sister’s house. I’d spend a good part of my wages each week on books and toys for my nephews and nieces and had happily babysat nearly every weekend. I was crazy for them, yet the idea of having one of my own did not appeal in the slightest. Maybe I’d change my mind when I saw it, I thought. I might just fall instantly in love with it, but then again I just might not. As for a full-time relationship, should I give it a go? Millions of others do it, I thought, so why not me and Diane? Probably something to do with the fact that I was gay and saw Diane more as a friend than a lover. No, it just wouldn’t work and I was determined to ‘have it out’ when we met up the next day in Liverpool, sitting at an out-of-the-way table in the Lisbon pub to discuss what we were going do.

  Diane was as shell-shocked as me at the news she was going to have a baby as she’d foolishly believed that it was impossible for her to conceive. I was too naive to believe otherwise. Ha. If only I’d listened to my aunty Chrissie’s warning to make sure that I always put a rubber on it. Having sowed my wild oats I’d prayed for crop failure, as some old drag queen once said, but my prayers had obviously fallen on deaf ears as the bloody crops had gone and flourished this year.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure the baby’s mine?’ I blurted out.

  ‘Of course it’s yours. There’s been nobody else. Cheeky sod.’

  A lad came down the steps carrying a wicker basket on his head and began moving amongst the tables, shouting, ‘Prawns, cockles, whelks.’

  ‘You don’t want to get married or anything, do you?’ I asked her hesitantly after the seafood seller had passed by.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she replied, a little too quickly for my liking. ‘What do you think I am? Mad?’

  ‘That’s all right then. In that case are you having …’

  ‘No, I’m not having an abortion!’

  ‘Who mentioned abortions? I was only going to ask if you where having another drink.’

  And so on 16 May 1974 I became a father.

  I rang the hospital as soon as I got into work.

  ‘Can I ask who’s calling?’

  I hesitated before replying, ‘I’m the … er … father.’

  It sounded strange admitting to a complete stranger that I was the father as so far I’d kept the news of impending fatherhood to myself. My mother had no idea. Ignorance is bliss was my maxim as far as she was concerned. My sister Sheila was about to drop her fifth child and thankfully her constant visits with the children had kept my ma preoccupied and her suspicious mind off me. If there was one thing my mother worshipped above all else it was her grandchildren.

  There was a woman at the Citizens Advice Bureau I’d spent an hour with, pouring my confused heart out to her in her little office in Hamilton Square. She was sympathetic and very kind but in the end she was unable to tell me anything that I didn’t already know. I was grateful to her though, then and now, but failed to keep my promise to stay in touch and let her know what the sex of the baby was. She knows now if she’s reading this.

  ‘Mother and baby are doing well.’

  ‘Great. Can you tell me what she had?’

  ‘A little girl.’

  Well, it would hardly be a six-footer, would it, I wanted to say but chose not to. Instead I answered flatly, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ my tone of voice lacking any conviction or enthusiasm whatsoever.

  ‘You can visit any time after lunch … and oh, congratulations,’
she said somewhat doubtfully as I thanked her and placed the phone slowly back on the receiver, returning to the bar unsure of just how I should be reacting to this news. Worried and scared were the top notes, but surprisingly there was also a slight whiff of pride lurking in the background. Maybe I’d enjoy being a daddy after all? Unable to resist the urge to break the news to someone, I told Jean.

  ‘I’m a father, Jean.’

  ‘You’re a what?’ she asked, slightly irritated at being bothered by what she considered nonsense. I tried to explain the saga as she poured wine from a tap in the barrel into a dock.

  ‘You mean you’ve got a girl into trouble.’ She shook her head as she tried to make sense of it, and after serving her customer went off to tell Molly, who was sat as usual at the end of the bar perusing the Echo.

  ‘Bloody fool’ was Molly’s only comment, and she didn’t even bother to look up from her paper. She let me go early though to visit mother and child. ‘Here,’ she said as I was leaving, pushing a tenner into my hand, ‘a bit of luck for the baby. You’re going to need it, lad.’

  A smiling nurse showed me into a shiny ward where Diane lay in the middle bed of a row of three, beside which the tiny newborn babies lay in their cots. Nervously approaching the cot next to Diane’s bed, I felt the blood rush to my cheeks as I became conscious that the eyes of all the new mothers and nurses in the ward were on me. All of them were waiting to get a kick out of seeing a young father’s reaction to the first sight of his newborn child.

  Diane, sitting on the bed, her face flushing a bright red to equal mine, was just as embarrassed by the situation as I was. She quickly said, ‘Why don’t you have a look at her?’ I noticed she avoided my eyes as she spoke.

  Leaning over the crib I tried to adopt the Little House on the Prairie approach as was obviously expected of me by the mums. Look at baby, look up and around at the eager faces, my own face a mask of incredulous joy, pick baby up and examine it closely, cradling it gently and making suitable cooing noises to convey a first greeting to the child, then kiss mother tenderly on the forehead to an audience of blissed-out women. Tears optional.

  ‘You’re looking at the wrong baby, mate. That one’s mine, yours is over there.’ The kid’s mother was pointing to a cot on the other side of Di’s bed. This went down a treat with the mums and nurses, setting them off screaming with laughter and me scuttling over to take a peep at my own child, feeling more like Carabosse than a loving father.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ Diane asked, still unable to look at me.

  I wasn’t sure what to think. Amazed? Confused? Or just nothing? Could this minuscule object with the scrunched-up face and the tight little fists really be my own flesh and blood? I kept waiting, hoping for a rush of fatherly love as I lifted her nervously out of the cot. She was a sweet little thing, yet I felt distant. I was ashamed of myself. What was wrong with me? Didn’t I come from a loving, stable family? My father had been an excellent role model and yet here I was, a false grin fixed firmly on my face, hoping that it would mask my true inner feelings as I stared with blank eyes down at this cuckoo in my nest. The answer is clear to me now. I was a very immature and scared teenager who didn’t want the responsibility of a child – simple, but back then I thought myself to be unnatural, an abomination against the laws of nature, a freak who was incapable of bonding with his own daughter, heaping more shovelfuls of guilt into that already overloaded sack that I seemed to be permanently carrying around. I remember tentatively sniffing her scalp. She smelled nice although it has to be said that all babies smell the same really, a mixture of milk, sick and Johnson’s Baby Powder – providing the heart-stopping stench of a full nappy doesn’t assault your nostrils first.

  ‘Why are you sniffing her?’ Diane asked.

  ‘I don’t know, it’s obviously a primeval instinct to react this way, inhaling the scent of your child to see if you recognize it.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, and do you?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  I felt awkward and wished that this moment could’ve been a private one. No mothers, nurses or Diane gawping at me, eagerly waiting to see my reaction. Why couldn’t it be just me and the baby left on our own for a while to quietly get to know each other during these important first moments?

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ Diane asked again, a note of anxiety in her voice. I did my duty and grinned at the mums, kissed Diane clumsily, telling her unconvincingly that the baby was beautiful before quickly handing her over as she’d woken up and was starting to cry.

  ‘She wants her feed,’ Diane said, taking her off me.

  No she doesn’t, I thought. She knows, she sensed it. I don’t know what to do with her.

  When the time came for them to leave hospital I collected them both and we went back to Diane’s flat on the bus.

  I stayed over those first few days and nights. Sharon cried non-stop, an exhausted Diane seemed to be forever pressing the baby on me, eager that I got to know my daughter, but every time I went near her she screamed the place down. She reckons today that the reason she cried for such long periods was down to croup, but back then I was convinced she could sense my fears.

  Diane and I were used to spending long periods together and on the whole we would have a good time. Not surprisingly, the arrival of the baby put a load of new stresses on our relationship and I was now with her not because I wanted to be, but out of a begrudged sense of duty. Nevertheless, while we may have had our differences (wow, and that’s the understatement of the year) for the moment we were still good friends.

  When the baby was old enough we took her to be registered. There had been some dispute between us over a suitable name. I wanted to call her Gypsy, Diane had other ideas and understandably put her foot down, adamant that she was to be called Sharon, which I thought was boring.

  ‘I can just hear you,’ I sneered. ‘“Sharrrin, gerrin fer ya tea.”’

  ‘I don’t talk like that as well you know and I don’t care what you say, I’m not calling her Gypsy, it sounds like a poodle’s name.’

  So Sharon it was but as a consolation prize I was allowed to pick her middle name, providing it was sensible. I chose Lee, whether it was after Lee Remick, who I had the hots for at the time, or Gypsy Rose Lee I can’t really remember.

  Diane could make a pound stretch all week if she had to; she was thrifty and put money aside for that rainy day. Since she’d been hit by a tsunami, she quite rightly worried about her future finances. I was an idiot with money. Even though I religiously handed over my housekeeping each Friday to my ma out of my wages, the rest would be spent by midweek and I’d end up borrowing it back. Diane wanted to come to some sort of legal arrangement to make sure I contributed to Sharon’s care, and without hesitating I agreed. She took out an affiliation order against me and I was summoned to appear along with Diane at Bootle Magistrates’ Court.

  Stupidly I was under the misapprehension that we’d sit around a table with a kindly member of the legal profession and have a friendly discussion until both parties reached an amicable agreement. Instead I found myself in the dock again, standing in front of an elderly female magistrate who, judging by the look she was giving me over her pince-nez, had a very low opinion of errant fathers who evaded their duties. Even though I’d gone to court voluntarily I felt as if I were on trial. Obviously in Madame Beak’s jaded eyes I was just another lowlife scally, dragged before the courts to be forced to contribute to his child’s upkeep.

  Diane sat opposite me holding the baby in her arms, looking suitably pathetic, the picture of the eternal martyr who at that moment could’ve passed for a survivor of the Irish Potato Famine. All she needed was a raggedy shawl. I could’ve killed her. Following a lengthy character assassination, in which the Beak denounced me as the archetypal yob incapable of keeping his pecker in his pants, she made her decision.

  ‘You will pay three pounds a week towards the support of this child. If you fail to do so then you will go to prison. Y
ou, young man, need to be made to face up to your responsibilities.’

  Three pounds sounds such a pitiful amount, laughable now, but it’s a sizeable chunk of your income when your take-home pay is eleven quid a week, five of which goes to your ma for board and keep, then a couple of quid a week to pay off the catalogue, and train fare to work, ciggy and dinner money to find. There was hardly any change to play with.

  I left the court annoyed that I’d found myself in such a situation, for having worked in the courts it had been naive of me to think that the procedure would be as jolly and simplistic as I’d assumed. Now I’d been made to feel like a criminal and was seriously pissed off with Diane for what I considered to be a masterful stroke of duplicity, although, to be fair, she was as ill informed about the procedure as I was.

  ‘You coming back to the flat?’ she whined, as I marched on ahead of her.

  ‘No,’ I shouted, not waiting for her to catch up. ‘The only place I want to go back is in time.’ Standing sulkily at the bus stop, my shoulders hunched against the miserable drizzle of rain that had started to fall, I watched Diane pushing the pram across Stanley Road and felt sad for us all. I felt, rather dramatically as usual, that I was part of a particularly depressing scene from Love on the Dole, only in this instance it was all very real and I’d better do something about earning some cash.

  Since this was my day off I indulged myself in the luxury of taking to my bed as soon as I got home, wallowing in self-pity and angry at the injustice of it all. I hadn’t been, as the magistrate had accused me, an absent father. I’d spent a lot of time with Diane. Even if it was after extreme pressure on the guilt rack, hadn’t I even babysat on the odd occasion? And on a Saturday night! The Greatest Sacrifice! Mother of God, the abject misery of babysitting a screaming child on a Saturday night when you want to be in town, stood in the middle of a packed club with your mates, knows no bounds.