by Paul O'Grady
I’d been fairly confident that I’d get the job at the Coleherne, a gay pub in Earls Court that had always been our first port of call when my friend Tony and I took the weekend saver down from Liverpool. It was predominantly a leather bar and at first glance the clientele, with their shaved heads, walrus moustaches and leather outfits, could be quite intimidating. But when I eavesdropped on their conversations it seemed they were more interested in opera than beating me up. The queens who carried crash helmets around with them, leading prospective trade to believe that there might be a Harley Davidson parked on the pavement outside, invariably went home on the tube. The helmets were more a fashion accessory than of any practical use.
I reckoned I was just what the Coleherne needed – a tasty young bit of Birkenhead fluff in among all that ageing leather – and felt sure the job was in the bag. What I hadn’t reckoned with was the landlord, an Irishman called Pat McConnon, who took one look at me and turned me down flat. He was a surly bugger and dismissed me with a grunt and a wave of his hand. ‘Nuttin’ here for you,’ he muttered, showing me the door. ‘Stick your job,’ I shouted over my shoulder, ‘I wouldn’t work for a narky old bastard like you in a million years.’ I got that one badly wrong, as time will reveal.
The phone rang, causing me to leap out of my skin. Jesus, nicotine withdrawal makes you jumpy.
‘I hope you’re up and out of that bed, dear, and giving the flat a good clean.’ It was Billy. ‘I don’t want to come home to a mess.’
‘Yes, yes, I was just cleaning the kitchen when you rang,’ I lied. ‘What time will you be home?’
‘And why do you need to know?’
Because I want to get my hands on your ciggies, French or not, and smoke my bloody head off.
‘No reason. Just wondered, that’s all.’
‘Aye, dear, you may well wonder. I’ll be home to find a clean flat, that’s when I’ll be home. And don’t forget to clean out the cat-litter tray. The Baby won’t use it if it’s full.’
The prospect of picking out the Baby’s turds from sodden cat litter on an empty stomach didn’t appeal to me in the least, but then maybe a bit of housework would take my mind off the hunger pains and the craving for a cig. It would also get Chris and Billy off my back and put me in their good books. Perhaps they’d even bring food home and cook something to eat? No, that was going too far.
Starting in the bathroom and making my way down to the kitchen, I became rather over-zealous in my quest for cleanliness as I hoovered the staircase and thought it’d be a good idea to give the posters on the wall a bit of a light run-over as well. They were coated in a film of dust, particularly a faded old thing for a movie called The Women. I watched in horror as Joan Crawford vanished down the nozzle, followed closely by Norma Shearer and Paulette Goddard. Instead of switching the Hoover off, I stood transfixed as I saw The Women, one of Chris and Billy’s all-time favourite films and, I dare say, posters, crumble and tear like ancient parchment and disappear into the machine. Snapping out of my trance, I managed to turn the damn thing off just in time to see a large strip bearing the words ‘All Star Female Cast’ get sucked away. What the bloody hell was I going to do now? They’d kill me.
I carted the Hoover up the stairs and flung it into their bedroom, narrowly missing the Baby, who leaped on the bed and spat at me. How was I going to tell them that I’d destroyed, albeit accidentally, one of their prized movie posters?
‘Hello, you two. Had a nice day at work? If you’re wondering why there’s a big gap on the staircase wall, it’s because the poster that used to be there is now in the belly of the Hoover. OK? Good. I just knew you wouldn’t mind.’ Rearranging the other posters on the wall in an attempt to fill the gap left empty by The Women, of which all that now remained was the letter N and a half of Rosalind Russell’s face, I quickly tore this evidence down and buried it along with the contents of the cat-litter tray at the bottom of the kitchen bin. I hated that litter tray, its acrid stench always hit the back of my throat and made me retch. Chris and Billy were immune to the smell but it was always the first thing that hit me whenever I came in the front door.
The craving for a cigarette had lessened; it was hunger that gnawed away at me now. Cleaning the kitchen I prayed that I’d come across a morsel of something fairly edible that I might have missed on my cupboard search earlier. I did. It was a bag of oats, only trouble was they were for the rabbit. Sitting on the kitchen floor I thought about my mother and her daily bowl of muesli. Rabbit oats never harmed her. Following her heart attack my ma seriously changed her diet. From information she’d gleaned in the Reader’s Digest, the Nursing Mirror and books about coronary heart disease in the reference library, she took to eating muesli to lower her cholesterol. She’d buy a large bag of oats from the health food shop on Argyle Street and, mixing some with a little water or fruit juice and leaving it overnight in the fridge, she’d make a bowl of muesli for her breakfast, adding apple or prunes depending on her mood and the state of her bowels.
‘Paul! Pop down and get us some oats from the health food shop, will you?’
It was a bit of a schlep to trail all the way down Birkenhead just for a bag of oats, so I used to buy them from the pet shop on Church Road instead. It was a lot nearer and they looked exactly the same as the oats in the health food shop, the rabbits seemed to thrive on them, so why not my mother? It was a while before she found out and that was only after the pet shop changed their bags. Whereas they’d once been plain brown-paper bags, they now had a jolly rabbit on the front proclaiming ‘Oats! Bunnies Love’Em’. I think the only suitable word to describe my mother’s reaction after she’d uncovered my deception is ‘ape-shit’.
If she could only see me now, pouring a decent handful of rabbit food into a bowl and adding some warm water, then setting it aside to soften. Divine retribution. Yum, yum!
Going back upstairs, I cleared a load of junk mail from the lid of the record player and put a record on. I tackled their bedroom while I waited for my lunch to turn to mush, and lifting the end of the mattress up off the floor to tuck the bed-sheet in I spotted it. Half a smoked Gauloise stuck to the side of a well-used tube of KY Jelly. This was no time to be fussy, I told myself, peeling the stump off the tube, refusing to consider how long it had lain there or what condition it might be in. Instead I took the precious, lovely little stump and lit it off the gas stove. French cigarettes didn’t taste like a real ciggy, they were too strong for a start and I found it impossible to inhale the smelly things without coughing and inevitably dry-retching. This time I wasn’t so particular and took a long drag and inhaled deeply to the bottom of my lungs, feeling instantly light-headed and blinded by a blaze of colored lights as my legs buckled under me and I slid down the side of the gas stove and hit the floor in a dead faint.
When I came to, it took me a little while to work out what, who and where I was. Hauling myself up from the floor, the first sight to greet me was the Baby. She’d jumped on to the work surface and was eyeing my muesli, sniffing it suspiciously and giving it little dabs with her paw. ‘You’re welcome to it,’ I said, reeling over to the sink to get myself a glass of water. Upstairs, the phone was ringing. I ignored it. Let it bloody ring. It was probably Billy checking to see if I was ‘hard at it, dear’. I was now past caring and taking myself off upstairs I lay on the front-room floor to recover. The phone started ringing again. Bollocks. I crawled along the floor and picked it up.
‘What!’
‘Is that any way to answer a phone?’ It was my mother. ‘I don’t know what kind of manners you’re picking up down there. You’re not on drugs, are you?’
‘No, Mam, I’m not.’
‘And I certainly hope you’re not hanging around those amusement arcades in Piccadilly Circus either. I’ve read about them. They’re magnets for dirty old men who are looking for lads.’
At that moment in time if I could’ve found a dirty old man I’d have done it for the price of a bag of chips and a ciggy.
&
nbsp; ‘You’ve had a tax refund,’ she chirped down the line. I could imagine her in the hall looking through the nets on the front-door window to see if there was any activity outside. ‘Forty-seven pound.’
The words were music to my ears.
‘I paid it into my bank account as I can imagine what state yours is in. You probably owe them a fortune, don’t you? Anyway, I’ve sent the money down to you, well wrapped up inside a card. There’s two twenties and a ten. You owe me three pounds, by the way.’
‘Fifty quid! When? When did you post it?’ I was as happy as a sandboy, whatever one of those is.
‘On Thursday afternoon. I meant to ring you but I had the kids down to give our Sheila a break, not that they’re any trouble, God love them, but it should have arrived by now. Mind you, the post is probably different down there. Are you sure you haven’t had it? Oh, don’t tell me it’s gone missing, you can’t trust any bugger these days.’
I could hear the rising panic in her voice. This could go on all afternoon if she started dreaming up the various fates that could have befallen the missing fifty quid.
‘I’ll ring you back, Mam.’
I phoned Chris at work. He’d left before the post had arrived. Then I rang Billy.
‘I hope you’re not running up the phone bill, Sadie. What do you want?’
‘Did a letter come for me this morning?’
‘Aye, I put it on top of the record turntable before I left for my work. Is that all you’re ringing for?’
There was no sign of the bloody letter. Maybe it was amongst the junk mail I’d swept off the lid earlier. I pulled the cabinet out and looked down the back of it, praying that the letter containing fifty beautiful smackers was there. It was.
Hallelujah! I danced around the room, unable to believe my luck. God bless the Inland Revenue and my wonderful mother! I rang her back.
‘Sex ett dabble tu.’ She always answered the phone by giving the number out in her telephone voice.
‘I’ve got it, Mam.’
‘Thank Christ for that. I was sweating cobs there worrying in case it had gone missing.’
‘Thanks for cashing it in for me.’
‘I signed the back of the cheque for you. Do you think they’ll find out that I forged your signature? They used to boil forgers alive in Elizabethan times, you know, and poisoners.’
‘Stop worrying,’ I said, itching to get off the phone so I could run downstairs and buy twenty cigs and something to eat. ‘I’d better go, Mum, they don’t like me using the phone in the day as it’s so expensive.’
‘Quite right as well, the price of it. I’m off to the library. Make sure you pay your maintenance before you go squandering all that money, you don’t want to end up in nick. Behave yourself. Ta-ra.’
Billy was full of praise when he got home to find a clean flat and two weeks’ rent waiting for him on the table. Chris had met an old squeeze and brought him home, a former male model slightly the worse for drink, and staggering up the stairs he stumbled, ripping a couple of posters down as he made a grab for the wall to steady himself. While Billy was helping Chris get him into the bedroom I seized my chance.
Running into the kitchen I salvaged what was left of The Women, brushed the cat litter off it and took it down to where the carnage lay, pinning it back on the wall.
‘Chris’ll be livid when he’s seen what he’s done,’ Billy sighed, leaning over the banister to take a look. ‘Those posters have had it. Oh well, serves him right. Put them in the bin, Sadie, and let’s have a cup of tea.’
CHAPTER 5
The Abattoir
I MANAGED TO LAND A JOB IN A PUB IN COVENT GARDEN, WHICH was still a working market back then in the early seventies. It was a market traders’ pub and one of the biggest drawbacks was the hours. I had to start at 5am, which meant getting up at four, an unholy hour of the day to have to get up for work as far as I was, and still am, concerned. The memory of my first and only morning in that place is vague to say the least. I can recollect tobacco smoke thick as a pea-souper hanging low in the air and circling a sea of male faces across the bar, all clamouring to be served: ‘Come on, Scouse, move yourself, we’aven’t got all bleedin’ day.’ Jesus, they could drink. Confused at not knowing where anything was or, if I did manage to find it, how much it cost, I tear-arsed around in the confined space behind the bar, wild-eyed and demented, pulling pints, serving food and mixing some sort of hot toddy that the porters liked to drink. Come late midday when my shift thankfully came to an end I fell out of the door, dazed, knackered and with my ears still buzzing from the sheer volume of noise inside. Even though I badly needed a job I quit there and then, the landlord begrudgingly handing over my four pounds’ wages for the eight hours of torture I’d just put in, vowing to myself that wild horses wouldn’t get me back into that madhouse no matter how dire the predicament I might find myself in in the future.
Taking myself off to the Brook Street Bureau, an employment agency with branches all over London to see if they had anything exciting on their books, I ended up working for them as one of their ‘jobfinders’. After a short induction course on how to sell jobs to unwitting secretaries and office clerks in search of a change of career, I found myself sat behind a desk in the Fleet Street branch, painfully aware that I was totally out of my depth. It was all about selling and meeting quotas, and it was obvious that I was the worst salesperson ever to flip through a card index as I declared unconvincingly to the hapless victim before me that ‘I might have the perfect position for you.’ I quit before they unmasked me as the inept fraud that I was, taking with me the details of a job in a pub on the river. I was better off behind a bar than a desk, that I was sure of.
The Samuel Pepys was a pub restaurant in what is now a building called Globe Wharf. The customers were mainly City types, it was a pleasant atmosphere to work in and the guv’nor was a decent chap. In the end I stayed there for over three months, even managing to get a promotion from barman to wine waiter in the restaurant. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t a clue about wines apart from those Yates’s had sold as the Pepys could hardly be accused of having an extensive wine list, and if asked by a diner to recommend a wine I’d suggest the ones that I could pronounce.
There was a girl called Tawny working as a waitress and we quickly became mates. Forthright and inquisitive, a brilliant photographer and artist with a quirky sense of humour, she was small, wore wire-rimmed glasses and had soft curly hair. Before opening time every morning we cleaned the bar and the restaurant together, singing along to the radio. She taught me the words to Pirate Jenny’s song from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (she was that type of girl) and we’d belt it out with real meaning as we wiped down tables and washed the floors.
I thought she was ‘frightfully posh’ as she ‘spoke nice’ and lived in a beautiful old house in Hampton Court with her lovely family. I couldn’t help wondering what the hell an extremely intelligent, articulate, brilliant girl with so much potential was doing wasting time waiting tables.
‘I’m treading water, just biding my time,’ she explained, waving a Camel about in the air. (The ciggy, not the animal.) ‘Just waiting for the boyfriend to whisk me off to Seville and marry me.’
I rechristened her Fudge, God knows why. The name just seemed to suit her and anyway she was delighted with it.
Fudge drove me up to Birkenhead for a few days in her little car. She was desperate to photograph Liverpool’s waterfront and explore the art galleries and museums, while I was desperate to get away from Chris and Billy, who seemed to think that even though I was paying a fiver a week rent they were entitled to use me as their very own domestic servant. Admittedly I was allergic to the household chores but their constant demands were worthy of Cinderella’s stepsisters and I had frequent rows and spats with them, Billy in particular.
At night as I lay on the living-room floor in my makeshift bed I’d harbour dark thoughts, fantasizing about the great day when I would eventually snap and wring his bloody
neck.
Poor Billy, having an untidy teenager around who played records at full volume, was late with his rent and never stopped talking was no holiday for him either and I’m surprised he didn’t throw me out.
As soon as we got to Birkenhead I realized that I wanted to stay. Fudge was having none of it and tried to reason with me.
‘Look at what you have in London and then look at what you have up here.’
I did and decided that up here was the better option. The bitter realization was this: nothing was going to happen for me in London, it would be a life of bar jobs and sleeping on people’s floors. I was kidding myself if I ever thought I’d make a decent living down there and as for saving enough money to rent my own flat, well, dream on, kid. Plus, if I was really honest with myself I was lonely in London. I only knew a handful of people there, yet up here in Birkenhead and Liverpool I had my family and loads of mates. No, best quit while you’re ahead, I told myself, and come home. Now all I had to do was get round my ma.
Since I’d left home my mother had discovered a new lease of life. She’d joined St Joseph’s Union of Catholic Mothers, made a whole new circle of friends she went on outings and coach trips with to the various shrines that the Virgin Mary had reputedly appeared at, spent her weekends with her grandchildren and, although she still mourned my father, as she explained to Tawny she was slowly discovering that life as a single gal was not without its advantages.
‘I’m not at anyone’s beck and call, can come and go as I please and I don’t have the worry of lying in bed waiting for this big article to get home from a night tomcatting it over in Liverpool till all hours. Now would you like another little sandwich, Tony?’ she asked, getting up from the sofa.
‘It’s Tawny actually, Mrs O’Grady.’
‘Oh is it? That’s a very unusual name. Did your mother like owls then, love?’
We drove back to London on the Wednesday morning, and while I put up what I considered a good pretence of looking forward to getting back, inside I was screaming, ‘Turn the car round, I want to go home.’ We arrived in London and pulled up outside Formosa Street around four thirty in the afternoon: good timing as it meant Chris and Billy wouldn’t be home from work yet. Perfect. I’d just enough time to get in the flat and grab what few items of clothing I’d left without any nasty confrontation. There was a little matter of two weeks’ rent being overdue, not that I had it. I had just about enough for a single ticket on the coach. Be easier to leave a note and send the rent on when I found myself in funds again – whenever that might be.
