Still Standing: The Savage Years (26 page)

As I stood in the queue for the bathroom a greasy little chap in a leather biker’s jacket at least five sizes too big for him punched me hard in the arse. ‘How far do you go?’ he mocked. ‘How much can you take?’

I looked at his thin weedy moustache growing above his nicotine-stained teeth like an unpleasantly hairy fungus and marvelled at the cheek of this rat in a leather jacket.

‘About all I can take from you,’ I snapped at him. ‘So piss off. I’m not into stuff like that.’

‘Then why have you got that hanging out your back pocket?’ he demanded, pointing to the red handkerchief I’d stuffed into the pocket of my dungarees. ‘You know what that means in the hanky code, don’t you?’

The penny dropped. I’d completely forgotten that a red handkerchief in the back pocket meant that the wearer was into what’s known in the business as ‘that practice that got Julian Clary into trouble on the Comedy Awards’ when he made a gag about doing it with Norman Lamont. There was
a wide variation on this theme. White meant masturbation, light blue stood for oral sex, and as for yellow and brown, well, use your imagination.

‘Oh,’ I said, suddenly apologetic, quickly pulling the offending rag out of my back pocket. ‘It’s not what it means.’

‘Then you shouldn’t go round sending out signals if you’re not prepared to follow them up.’ The rat in the jacket turned round in contempt to reveal his own back pockets. ‘Look at me.’

Hanging from the pockets of his 501s was an assortment of hankies in every conceivable colour, making his backside look like the rear end of a May Day float. By the look of things this queen wasn’t leaving anything to chance. And it would take an open university course before the observer could attempt to decipher this array of multicoloured bunting. What in God’s name was a tartan hanky meant to indicate? A predilection for having it off while listening to Jimmy Shand?

‘C’mon,’ Chrissie said, mooching out of the kitchen. ‘Some old dog is being shagged over a sink full of plates in there, hard-faced bitch doing it right in front of me as I was eating a bowl of chilli, put me right off. Let’s go home.’

As we were leaving I heard Chrissie saying to the yeti who’d let us in, ‘Bless you, my child. Would you like to kiss my ring?’

Chrissie had been using this line as a way of introducing himself all night and like everyone else he’d tried it on the yeti was unimpressed.

‘Suit yourself,’ Chrissie said cheerfully, sailing off down the landing towards the lift. ‘That’s the trouble with leather queens – no sense of humour,’ he said, smoothing down his cassock and straightening his mitre before our descent in the lift. ‘And no sense of style either.’

On 1 February 1985 I finally got my wish and moved into my very own council flat in Vicky Mansions. Karen, a neighbour Chrissie was friendly with in the next block, was vacating her flat for pastures new and offered to sell me the keys for two hundred quid, a practice that was fairly common then. She took me down to the housing office to get my name on the rent book by telling the woman that I’d been living with her for the last five years and wasn’t it about time I was recognized as a co-tenant?

I’d worried myself into the ground before this interview in case the council failed to believe us and my chances of getting hold of that holiest of grails – a flat in the Mansions – were cruelly dashed. As it turned out the woman behind the desk couldn’t have cared if Karen had been shacking up with the entire Court of St James, and instead of the grilling that I’d anticipated she simply waved a form in our direction and told us to sign it.

The morning I finally got the rent book and keys I stood in the empty front room beside myself with bliss in the knowledge that finally, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, I had a place I could call my own.

The vacating tenant had obviously never bothered to decorate for years, and as she’d denied access to workmen when the Mansions were being modernized and given a major makeover in the early seventies the flat still had the original fireplaces, now boarded up and painted a hideous shade of bilious green, all the original light fittings, and Bakelite round-pin plug sockets – of which there were only three in the entire flat. My bathroom was painted a deep chocolate brown, which Karen explained made the room feel womb-like and comforting – even though I secretly thought that it
looked more like a cell in the H block that had seen some heavy activity during a dirty protest – while the kitchen, which was a respectable size, was straight out of
A Taste of Honey
.

Russell, a friend of mine from the Vauxhall whom David Dale likened to my familiar, was small, cute and sexy. He came across as a little toughie but was as soft as a freshly dropped cowpat, and although he had the face of a cherub he was as mischievous as one of Satan’s imps. It was Russell who offered to change my pre-war electrics. I had my doubts about his skill as an electrician, but he assured me in adenoidal tones that there was ‘no need to worry, Liwl’. He removed the solitary socket in the front room and I stood in the tiny hall waiting for his instructions to turn the electricity off and on again when the time came for him to do whatever he was doing in there with two bare live wires in his hands.

‘Off, Liwl,’ came the cry, and I duly obliged.

‘On, Liwl.’

‘Off, Liwl.’

I stood in the hall flicking the switch on the fuse box up and down in time to this mantra.

‘On, Liwl.’

Click.

‘On, Liwl.’

Bored click. A bit slower this time. I was obviously losing concentration owing to the tedium of standing in the dark little hall flicking a bloody switch on and off.

‘Off, Liwl.’

Bang!

Following the explosion there was a flash of light and a peculiar smell and through the crack in the half-open door I could see Russell being hurled across the room by an
unknown force. I rushed in to find him slumped against the skirting board drooling, his eyes slightly crossed.

‘I said off, Liwl,’ he moaned in a tiny voice, one eye looking at me, the other gazing over towards the fireplace. ‘Off.’

Sitting on the sofa drinking tea after his impression of Lon Chaney in
Man-Made Monster
, Russell confided in me.

‘I went for one of them HIV tests,’ he said casually. ‘I got the results back today.’

‘And?’ I asked.

‘It came back positive,’ he said, drinking his tea thoughtfully before asking, ‘What happens now? Is it serious?’

‘Didn’t they tell you up the hospital?’

‘Nah, they just said to come back if I felt ill. I’m not going to die, am I?’

‘Don’t talk rubbish. After all, it’s not Aids, is it?’ I said, trying to sound knowledgeable and convince myself in the process that this HIV business was nothing to panic about. ‘It’s only a virus, like a cold. I bet you it clears up in no time and even if it doesn’t I dare say they’ll have found a cure for it soon. You’ve got nowt to worry about.’

That’s how naive we were in the early days. We were completely ignorant of the facts about the killer disease that was soon to be labelled the ‘Gay Plague’ by the tabloids.

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said, obviously reassured by my pathetic prognosis. ‘I won’t worry about it then. I’ll put that light fitting up for you.’

I watched him as he climbed the ladder, trying to put the news of his test results out of my mind together with the feeling of impending doom that, try as I might, I couldn’t get rid of. Listening to him chatting away up at the top of the ladder and enviously admiring his six-pack as he reached up to unscrew the old fitting, pulling his T-shirt out of his jeans, I
couldn’t imagine life without him. We shared the same evil sense of humour and Russell was a willing and inventive accomplice when it came to winding someone up, usually at my instigation. No, Russell wasn’t going anywhere for a long time yet, I told myself. He was too young and healthy to die. Suddenly I wanted badly to rush up that ladder and hug him tight, promise him that everything was going to be all right and swear that no lousy American disease called Aids was going to finish off the likes of my lovely little mate.

Although ours was a platonic relationship we loved each other dearly, but we didn’t go in for either private or public displays of emotion or affection. ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I gabbled, making my way hastily to the kitchen, fighting to hold the tears back. Standing by the sink I tried to drink a cup of water but the hard lump in my throat wouldn’t allow me to swallow.

‘Please don’t let Russell die, God,’ I begged, calling upon this Lord of my childhood who seemed in those days to listen to my frequent petitions and was nearly always quick to lend a helping hand, a God surprisingly easily mollified simply by a reckless promise to ‘never be bad again’.

He’d obviously got wise to my ruses since then, as despite repeated supplications in Westminster Cathedral, and the lighting of hundreds of offertory candles to show that I meant business, heavenly intervention was not forthcoming and, like so many, within a few years Russell was dead.

I went to see him just before he died and this time I did hug him tightly, openly weeping for the beautiful boy now degenerated into the wizened, incontinent, senile old man I held in my arms by this appalling disease, the threat of which hung over us all like the sword of Damocles.

First thing I did on moving in was throw a party. Bernard Padden, a brilliant writer and actor from Manchester who had written
The Lion Roars
back at the Donmar, had gathered a group of actors together and formed a company called Nervous Kitchens that was putting on a trilogy he’d written called
The Scythe of Reason
at the Ovalhouse theatre just up the road from the flat.

I was obsessed with these surreal yet very funny plays and to describe the trilogy as off the wall wouldn’t do it justice. I went nearly every night that it was on, dragging various friends along with me, some of whom were totally unable to understand my enthusiasm. Chrissie, even though he didn’t really enjoy it, was effusive in his praise after the show as he considered every production at the Ovalhouse, good, bad or incomprehensible, to be ‘art’, and to dismiss one would be seen as seriously uncool. I loved it, and found that enjoyment of this strange trilogy was enhanced if one sat through it heavily stoned.

The first act was set in a café and involved two men who were lovers having an argument while a waitress kept popping in and out to take their order. Reg played one of the lovers and an actor named Kate Ingram fresh from the success of the film
Scrubbers
was the demented waitress. This waitress morphed into a character called Madame in the second act and Kate had a ball with it playing the eccentric medium with a benign grin on a face that she’d partly covered with a face pack. On her head sat a hat similar to Nina la Roche’s conch from the Canning Street days, and from under this she’d occasionally reach up and produce a Jaffa Cake and then nonchalantly eat it. Watching her was a masterclass in comic timing.

Reg played a homophobic ‘geezer’, employing all the
mannerisms Reg believed geezers had, such as sitting with his legs wide apart resting his arms on his thighs, nodding his head and sucking his lower lip. Bernard had given him an awful joke that he had to come out with during the séance scene that went ‘What’s the miracle of Aids? It turns a fruit into a vegetable’, which made the audience angry and uncomfortable, exactly the effect that Bernard was seeking. Of course Reg loathed having to say it.

Bernard wrote some wonderful dialogue, such as: ‘He falls in love at the drop of a hat.’

‘Really? I had no idea that plummeting millinery was such a powerful aphrodisiac.’

The last act involved Madame in a nuclear plant, sitting on the floor with her legs wrapped around a bucket doing something with a potato on her head while the rest of the cast danced around her desperately trying not to corpse.

On their last night I threw a party for them in my empty flat, and since Chrissie had told me that the majority of actors who performed at the Oval were vegetarians I made a vegetable stew on the accident-waiting-to-happen gas stove that Karen had left behind. They weren’t, so someone went and got a bucket of spare ribs from the Kentucky.

At the party Bernard told me that there was a chance that the play would be transferring to the Latchmere theatre in Battersea and asked if I would be interested in playing Madame, as Kate would be unavailable. Reg was very put out on hearing this news as he wanted to play Madame, and would no doubt have been wonderful. He was far more suited to the role than me, but as I was so desperate to say those crazy lines and be part of the company I jumped at the chance, although the proposed transfer took some time and I didn’t get my chance to play Madame until 1988.

With the help of Chrissie, Hush, Russell and Scott I gave the flat a much needed scouring. Karen had not been one for domesticity and the walls ran yellow with nicotine as we washed them. Once they were clean Russell and Chrissie ‘threw up’ a few rolls of woodchip and lashed a pot of magnolia emulsion around while I painted the windowsills and skirting boards with white gloss: an unimaginative colour scheme, I know, but as Chrissie said at least it was ‘clean-looking’.

What savings I had were evaporating fast as I went on a spending spree to furnish my new home. Invading Habitat I bought everything from plates and lamps (which I still have) and blinds (which I don’t) for the kitchen and front room. The bedroom curtains Hush was going to run up for me, as despite being offered good money Chrissie had declined, claiming grandly that being a couturier he ‘didn’t do curtains’. I caught the bus up to Clapham and bought a Carnival gas cooker from the gas board to replace the wartime experience Karen had left behind, rented a telly and video recorder, ordered carpets for the front room and bedroom from a discount carpet shop and, pushing the boat out in Arding and Hobbs, a brand new double bed. Going home on the bus I chain-smoked in a frenzy on the upper deck from the shock of spending so much money and from the excitement of it all.

Chrissie laid the carpets for me, and from a shop at the back of the Mansions that sold ex-catalogue merchandise I managed to furnish the flat for next to nothing. In the midst of my gleaming magnolia front room one thing really jarred, and that was the fireplace. Even though I’d covered the hideous green paint with layers of white gloss it still stuck out
like a sore thumb and was not, as interior designers would have you believe, aesthetically pleasing nor in harmony with the ambience of the room. I wondered what lay under all the layers of paint, bought a large tin of paint stripper, and set about scraping off the years. By about three o’clock in the morning a dappled light brown tiled hearth had been revealed.