by Julian Clary
I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, a far more amusing lifestyle had presented itself back at Brownhill Road.
I first encountered Catherine on the landing at Brownhill Road when I had been living there for about three weeks. We came out of our rooms simultaneously, she on her way to work, me to the bathroom, and we almost bumped into each other.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I said. ‘Didn’t see you there.’
It took me a moment to register the vision in white. The woman I had almost knocked to the ground in my desire to bag the bathroom was in her nurse’s uniform, the small starched hat nestling in her lacquered blonde hair like a paper chalice. A smouldering cigarette hung from her glossy lips as she stared at me for a long moment. I had left music playing in my room and the sound drifted out into the corridor.
‘Hi, there,’ she said, in a clear Essex accent. ‘Like a spot of Dusty Springfield of a morning, do we? I strongly suspect you’re a homosexual.’
She had a face like that of a porcelain doll, with fine, delicate features and a rosebud mouth. Her makeup was a perfect mask. Pale foundation and frosted blue eye-shadow clouded seamlessly into white beneath a finely drawn eyebrow. Her lips were baby ink, and smiled knowingly. She resembled an extra from The Rocky Horror Show. Her cloud of perfume hit me and my nose twitched.
‘Don’t think I’ve overdone it with the Chanel, do you?’ she said.
‘No, it’s nice. It’s No. 5, isn’t it? My favourite. I’m Johnny. I moved in a few weeks ago.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard you. Are you a student at the drama school by any chance? Only I heard you attempt ‘On The Street Where You Live’ sixteen times in a row the other night. Much more of that and you’ll have to find another street. You’re way out on the C sharp, too.’
‘Sorry if I disturbed you.’
‘Oh, I was already disturbed, darling. Welcome to the madhouse, Johnny. My name’s Catherine and I’m off to slop out some bedpans and see who’s pegged it in the night.’ She dropped her cigarette on the lino and stepped on it, swivelling her ankle three times to ensure it was extinguished properly.
‘Have a good day, then. See you later,’ I said.
‘It will be a good day if Mr Pickering’s passed on, that’s for sure. His shit stinks.’ She clacked off down the stairs.
I giggled. This was the first glimmer of hope I’d experienced since I’d arrived in Lewisham that I might meet a kindred spirit to keep me amused. Perhaps Catherine was the friend I’d been waiting for.
Later that night I was in my room rehearsing my part in the class studio production of a musical about Wendy Richard. At about eight thirty there was a knock on my door. I opened it and there stood Catherine with a bottle of wine in one hand and two glass tumblers in the other. She was wearing a dark blue embroidered kimono and smelt strongly of jasmine mixed with Benson & Hedges. ‘Enough of that shit. Party time!’ she announced, and minced into my room. ‘Mr Pickering’s still with us but Mr Lawson’s shuffled off, thank the Lord and sweet baby Moses in a basket.’ She set the glasses on my cluttered yellow-Formica dressing-table and clumsily poured us each a glass of warm Chardonnay. ‘To the life hereafter!’ she said, raising her glass.
I grabbed mine and we chinked. ‘Bottoms up!’ I said.
It transpired that Catherine worked on the geriatric ward at Greenwich Hospital. ‘Fucking coffin-dodgers,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind the ones who can wipe their arses and know their names, but I’ve got some who can’t do a thing except eat. Well, it’s a waste of food, isn’t it?’
I giggled again. Something about Catherine was refreshing after all the fake luvviedom of college. Her honesty and openness were a blessed relief.
Almost immediately, we charmed each other and found immense enjoyment in each other’s company because we laughed so much and so hard, and there is little as seductive as laughter.
‘Ooh, you’re a scream, you are,’ said Catherine.
If we were in the mood, we could howl at a blank sheet of paper. Mostly, though, it was the absurdity of human behaviour that amused us: the stiffness of a nervous newsreader, a man at the bus stop unaware of the bogey hanging from his nose, or the gauche bartender trying to make a pass at one of us.
Apart from my mother, I had never been so entranced by a woman, and before long we were meeting up every night to drink, talk, tell each other stories and make each other laugh hysterically. She helped me cope with the hostility I was enduring at college and I saved up incidents and anecdotes for her at the end of the day.
‘That Sean erased my face with his biro on a lunchtime-production poster on the noticeboard. Imagine!’
‘No!’ said Catherine. ‘The evil bitch. I say we push her emaciated frame under a train!’
I had never met anyone like her. I found myself rushing home from college and waiting for her to come in. I could soon recognize her three-taps knock and would hurry to answer.
‘Cup of tea, Cowboy?’ She nicknamed me ‘Cowboy’ because of my Kentish Lad background. ‘Or are you too immersed in Grease?’
One night she tapped and swanned in without waiting for an answer. She handed me four Valium. ‘Listen, babe, these are for you. Wesley’s coming over shortly and there might be a bit of noise. They’ll help you sleep. Good luck to you and your family.’
The door swung closed.
I adored her for the exquisite campness of such encounters. She provided me with quality comedy on a daily basis. I loved the idea of the nurse off to work in full slap, reeking of alcohol; I thrilled to her casual announcements of tragic deaths, and admired the tough, ever-present survival instinct that ensured she always came out on top in any situation and by any evaluation.
That night she entertained Wesley so royally she should have handed out Valium in Deptford, too. Imagine a hyena giving birth to a pineapple and you’re getting close.
‘You amaze me, Catherine,’ I said to her once, when she showed me the black pearls she had liberated from a confused pensioner. ‘You really are the most unusual nurse I’ve ever met.’
‘I have to keep my sense of humour, Cowboy. I work in God’s waiting room. When one of my patients dies and the relatives, if there are any who can be arsed, have said their goodbyes, we pull the curtains round, strip them naked and wash them head to foot, inside and out, before they go down to the morgue. Most of the other nurses don’t like doing it so I always get the job when I’m on duty. I don’t mind. I take a pride in my work. My stiffs are spotless. I’m the last hand to touch them, probably the last person to look at them. I clean their nails and comb their hair. I talk to them, tell them what I’m doing, and how nice and clean I’m making them. Hygiene’s important, I think, especially when you’re dead. And as I do it, I wonder what sort of lives they’ve lived. I’m far nicer to them once they’re gone, really. They scratch my back and I’ll scrub theirs. And with each old penny dreadful, I make the sign of the cross. Rest in peace, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen.’ She looked at me solemnly. ‘And then I see if I fancy any of their jewellery before I send them down to the freezer.’
Being with Catherine was never boring. As well as her dark and dangerously hilarious anecdotes about life and death on the geriatric ward, she would, without premeditation, make sure that every evening had a beginning, a middle and an end. She had a gift for creating a well-structured social occasion. Frequently, after we had downed the wine she provided, we ended up in our local pub, the Cocky Sailor.
Out of uniform, she dressed demurely in black and burgundy blouses, perfectly pressed skin-tight jeans and kitten heels. She insisted we drink white wine, favouring the oaky, rich Chardonnay that rolls down the throat like Spanish semen but gets you drunk and tired all the same.
We’d talk the whole evening, getting drunker and drunker. Occasionally a Lewisham lad would saunter over and try to chat her up. She gave them very short shrift, usually, and would send them packing with admirable efficiency. If they offered to buy her a drink she’d say, �
��Yes, thank you, I’ll have a large Chardonnay and so will my friend Johnny.’ And when the unfortunate chap elivered the glasses: ‘Ta. Now fuck off and take your button-mushroom cock with you.’
I loved her wry take on life, and I think she was amused by my naïvety. Besides calling me ‘Cowboy’, she never missed an opportunity to refer to me as a country bumpkin. ‘This must be quite a shock to your system, coming to London. Electricity and cutlery, washing more than once a month! Quite a steep learning curve for a teenage sheep-shagger from Kent …‘
The ‘middle’ of the evening might be an altercation with a parked car as we staggered home, or Catherine’s sudden need for a wee behind a wheelie-bin parked on a busy junction. The end was always the same: Catherine and me screeching with laughter back in my room as we reviewed the night’s highlights.
If we weren’t at the Cocky Sailor, we stayed in for what Catherine called ‘girly nights’, enjoying cheap white wine or Tesco’s vodka with a Chinese takeaway while we applied menthol face packs and talked about our futures.
One night, Catherine produced a joint from her designer handbag and we lay top to tail on my single bed, smoking until we were nicely high.
‘What is it about you, Cowboy?’ she asked. ‘It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to spot sadness in your aura. I wish you’d cheer up. From what I understand about gay life, you’d all shag a sleeping policeman if it was dark and you’d had a few Bacardis. But you’re not like that so there’s only one explanation. You’ve fallen in love, haven’t you? Or you think you have, probably with someone unattainable, like a cartoon character or a nameless shadow you met in a bus shelter.’
Catherine could usually prise anything out of me but this time I wasn’t giving anything away. I knew what she was like. She’d make a joke of all that had happened in my past, and I wasn’t sure I could take it. It was still a tender wound and I could hardly bring myself to think, let alone talk, about it. I wouldn’t allow anyone to mess with the man who lived in my head.
‘Oh no. There’s no one,’ I said carelessly.
Catherine gave me a meaningful look. She knew me well enough by now to guess that I wasn’t being honest. ‘Well, love, if you want to keep it to yourself, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t dwell on these things. If it’s all come to nothing, move on. That’s what I’d do. You know what my motto is? “Eat life before it eats you. Or you’re a loser.” And the best way to get over someone is to get under someone new. I’ll send Wesley over, shall I?’
Wesley sounded like an experienced and memorable lover. But I couldn’t — wouldn’t — betray my true love. As tacky as it sounds, I was keeping myself nice. I answered ironically, with a poem by Robert Herrick:
‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.’
‘Whatever. I catch your drift,’ she said.
My mother had raised me on poetry almost before I could talk, and my photographic memory meant that I could recall a wealth of popular and metaphysical verses, so it had become my habit to quote pertinent couplets or stanzas when they popped into my head. Sometimes it seemed the best way to express what I was thinking. Certain poets squeezed a lot of meaning into a few words, and I liked their economy.
‘What about you?’ I asked, handing back the joint as swirls of aromatic smoke floated up to the ceiling. ‘What are your dreams? Are you going to stay a nurse all your life?’
‘I’m twenty-six, Cowboy. Time to find a husband. I want a doctor or a lawyer. Three kids, big house, swimming-pool. I want the whole lot, even love.’ The next sentence she spoke with uncharacteristic vehemence. ‘And I’m going to have it, too.’
We paused to absorb her slightly embarrassing display of ruthless ambition. Catherine’s laugh rumbled first, but I wasn’t far behind. Within thirty seconds we were rolling around on my rusty bed, holding our sides. Eventually we peaked, and our laughter died slowly, bar the odd reprise, to a giggle that did not prevent talking.
‘And you?’ said Catherine, picking up where we’d left off. ‘What in the name of Terry Wogan do you want?’
‘Oh, I’d like to live with my gorgeous, faithful, well-balanced, sexually insatiable boyfriend, of course,’ I said, without hesitation. ‘Next door to you, if that could be arranged. I want to live happily ever after, too. He will be remarkably earthy and Neanderthal but a rock in every respect: sober, fit, self-contained, yet madly in love with me and happy to dedicate his every waking hour to my continued happiness. And hung like a draught-excluder, natch.’
‘Dream on,’ said Catherine, yawning shamelessly. ‘And if you think you’re getting your grubby mitts on my Wesley, you can go fuck yourself’
‘Charming.’
Not long afterwards, I discovered another side to Catherine.
There was a communal telephone by the front door and several times I answered it to an Oriental-sounding woman asking for her. Once summoned, Catherine would take a pen and pad to the phone and write down some details. Thirty minutes later she would be off, dressed to the nines, in a cloud of Chanel.
After this had happened three times in quick succession, I asked her whether she was being invited to parties.
She laughed. ‘I suppose that’s one way to describe it. Parties for two. If they pay, I party. Snatch for cash. I thought you’d twigged by now, to be honest. Most nurses are lucky if they can afford a polyester skirt at the market. I’ve got a Gucci tampon case. Did you never wonder? Think about it, Cowboy.’
She explained that she was registered with an agency that allowed her to supplement her modest nurse’s wages with occasional escort work. She made no bones about her activities. ‘It’s business, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Pay to lay. Very discreet, though, none of your rubbish. All done through the agency. Foreigners, mainly, in need of a little feminine company. I get wined and dined, keep the conversation going, laugh at their stupid jokes, and I’m paid for it. If they want any extras — and they always bloody do — we make our own arrangements. I can’t live on a nurse’s pay. It’s not a wage, it’s a fucking tip.’
I was fascinated by and impressed with her business-like attitude to her sideline.
‘I’ve seen a lovely pair of boots in Dolcis. Time to shag an Arab. Quote me a bit of Shakespeare, honey, while I put my cap in.’
‘For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’
‘Oh, really? I do hope so.’
We laughed about it, because we laughed about everything, but her mercenary approach was clearly a means of emotional survival. If she’d had a particularly unsavoury encounter she would flinch in telling the story, shuddering as she recalled the misshapen penis or the bitter semen she had been tempted to swallow for an extra fifty quid. She would sit on my bed and stroke the wad of grubby twenty-pound notes to comfort herself.
‘In for a penny, in for a pound. His wife should be very grateful to me, if that’s what she has to do to keep him happy,’ she said sadly, gazing into the distance. Then she snapped out of it, switching into comedy mode in the blink of a mascaraed eye. ‘Still. Down the hatch to grab the cash!’ She gave one of her rare but beautiful smiles, and threw herself back on the bed, tossing the money into the air and laughing as the notes fluttered across and around her.
I was in awe of her. She made prostitution seem glamorous. I even loved the horror of it. It appealed to me, in my secret agony, that such an activity could deaden the spirit.
Catherine burrowed, expanding and bewitching, further and deeper into the territory of my mind without my realizing it. My life revolved round her, and although there was no sexual attraction, on my part at least, there was every other variety.
One evening Catherine called me from the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane. ‘Get your arse down here,’ she said urgently. ‘I’m with Prince Howsaboutit, or whatever his name is, from Bahrain. He’s
got a friend who’s in the mood for a nice English boy. What’s more, he’s gorgeous — think Brazilian footballer wearing a sheet. They’re handing out Rolex watches like they were after-dinner mints.’
I didn’t need to think twice. ‘I’m on my way,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you in the foyer in forty-five minutes.’
‘Attaboy,’ she said, with satisfaction. ‘I knew you’d be up for it. No jeans or trainers, Cowboy. Wear your suit.
I hung up, excited. Her secret world as a hooker had seemed so enthralling when she talked about it. Now I would see for myself what it was like.
As arranged, Catherine met me in the foyer and led me through to a luxurious, expensively lit bar. ‘Just stay calm and act cool and you’ll be absolutely fine,’ she muttered, as we approached a discreet, leather-lined booth.
Inside sat two handsome, exotic men in their mid-thirties. Catherine introduced them to me as Assam and Shazad, and they tood up and shook my hand. Assam cast an approving glance at Catherine, then patted the seat beside him, beckoning me to join him. They were drinking peppermint tea and his breath was fresh and sweet. He was undeniably handsome, built like a sportsman, with limpid, dewy eyes that lingered on my face, then scanned my body approvingly.
‘Very pleased to meet you,’ I said.
‘You are handsome boy,’ said Assam. ‘Drink champagne, please.’
‘If you insist, Assam.’
After half an hour of polite chit-chat, he whispered to Catherine that he would like to invite me up to his suite.
‘Assam wants to show you his etchings. You’d love that, wouldn’t you?’ she said to me brightly.
