The Devil Rides Out (21 page)

‘I must warn you that it is not our policy to rent out to couples. We prefer single men.’

Do you now?

‘Can I take you and your friend’s names please?’

‘Paul O’Grady and Ang—erm, Andrew Walsh.’

I was granted an interview for the following evening but first I had to find an Andrew Walsh to take along to the interview with the owner of the androgynous voice. I had no male friends in London, they were all up in Merseyside, but Angela produced a boy named David from her class at drama school who was willing to play the role.

The gender of the voice on the end of the phone turned out to be male, and if I were a casting director looking for someone to play the part of Rumpelstiltskin then Lionel Crawley would’ve got the job without question. He hopped about the room like a rook on hot coals, wearing one of those red nylon overalls that are meant to look like jackets and are usually found on barmen in social clubs. To make up for his lack of stature he wore boots with platforms at least three inches high and a wig that stuck out on top, a vain attempt, I assumed, at realism but it only made him look ridiculous. In addition, the back of this dusty old teaser had a tendency to curl up like a threadbare doormat peeking over the end of a tenement landing, flapping open each time he waved his hands excitedly about and putting me in mind of the gills of a fish gasping for air.

The superior property turned out to be a two-room/kitchen and bathroom ground-floor flat in an old Victorian house situated on a leafy, tree-lined road near the library. It was a big flat, with high ceilings and large windows, a bugger to heat, I heard myself thinking, echoing my mother. Whoever had designed the decor of this flat was either blind or had dropped a tab of a powerful hallucinogen and gone on a rampage in a shop specializing in hideous furniture and psychedelic paint and wallpapers. It was a homage to bad taste that made your eyes bleed if you stared too long.

The floor of the living room was covered in battered and scuffed turquoise lino (did you know that they made turquoise lino?) and an orange rug in the centre had paisley whirls in brown, mustard and green woven into it. The three-piece suite had a six-seater sofa, wonderful if it hadn’t been covered in the most disgusting red and gold velour fabric and then adorned with fringing and tassels. If there was a giantess knocking about Crouch End who fancied becoming a burlesque stripper then here was her brassiere.

Despite the generous dimensions of the rooms I didn’t take to this flat at all, in fact I hated it. The rent was more than we could afford at ninety pounds a month, nothing by today’s standards but a sizeable chunk out of your income when your take-home pay was around thirty quid a week, plus Crouch End seemed miles away from anywhere. It would mean more to pay out on bus fares, and disappointingly it also seemed pretty dull compared to the raucous rough-and-ready nature of Camden Town. I came to the sorry conclusion that if it was excitement I was looking for then I wasn’t going to find it in sleepy Crouch End, a hamlet that looked like it shut down at teatime.

Nevertheless I was desperate, and besides I was sick of having to trawl unfamiliar streets each night looking at slums to rent, and so, despite my reservations, I agreed to take it. Lionel was delighted that he’d be providing shelter for two ‘lovely boys’ and it was agreed that pending suitable references and more importantly a month’s rent in advance I’d be able to take possession in a week’s time.

‘It’ll do until we find something better,’ I said to Angela in the pub later, not realizing that I was to stay there three years.

Before Crouch End became gentrified in the 1980s and long before the hedge funders and media types moved in with their skinny lattes and pavement cafés, the area was predominantly bedsit land. The only eateries I can recall were a couple of caffs, a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a kebab shop. Our lifeline out of the place was the 41 bus, an unreliable and intermittent service. I believed it was the stuff of legend, a vehicle that only appeared when the moon was full and a mist lay low on the ground, to be driven wildly through the streets of Crouch End by a headless driver.

I spent hours stood at that bloody bus stop on Crouch End Hill, silently willing a 41 to suddenly appear from around the corner. When the damn thing eventually did creep up the hill it was impossible to lose your temper with the clippie. She was one of the old brigade who wouldn’t have put up with any lip anyway, one that my aunty Chris would’ve approved of: in her sixties, immaculately made up and smartly dressed in a neatly pressed uniform with a gossamer-fine hairnet dotted with tiny beads covering her neatly waved blue hair.

One book that I’d read was about the Highgate Vampire and I was very taken by the tale of supposed sightings of a vampire in the west part of the cemetery. The story caused quite a fuss when it broke in the early seventies. Huge crowds gathered in Swains Lane after ITV televised a live interview with Eamonn Andrews, of all people, and a couple of vampire hunters.

I could well believe that vampires existed among the vandalized headstones and overgrown crypts. The decaying angels and the marble faces that embellished the ornately carved tombs, taking their final bows before the all-suffocating ivy finally enveloped them for eternity, certainly fired my imagination. The entrance to the magnificent Egyptian Avenue is pure D. W. Griffith, the perfect setting for a scene out of his 1914 silent film
Judith of Bethulia
.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Highgate Cemetery was the lengths that vandals and would-be ‘worshippers of the occult’ had gone to and the desecration that they’d inflicted. The Victorians buried their dead with some very nice pieces of jewellery, worth a fortune or so the legend went. Consequently the tombs were smashed and the coffins inside forced open, their mummified contents ransacked and left hanging over the side, grinning obscenely at us. Hammer Horror couldn’t compete. I took these images home with me, we both did, and we became so obsessed by the Highgate Vampire and the fear that he might just pay us a nocturnal visit that we pushed the beds together and sprinkled a circle of salt around them to protect us.

Angela and I seemed to go to a lot of parties. There was always someone in her drama school having a ‘do’ and Lozzy’s friend over in south London was forever throwing parties in her flat in Victoria Mansions. Apart from the partying we lived a fairly frugal lifestyle. We had to, we were permanently skint. Angela was barely getting by on her student grant and I found it impossible to live on what I earned at the hospital, so I looked for a part-time bar job. After all I was well qualified.

I got a job in a gay club on Westbourne Grove called the Showplace. It was owned by Mr Stavros, who seemed to spend most of his time playing cards with his cronies in a local gambling den, leaving the running of the club to Peter the manager, a tough little Irishman, and Alana, his much younger and very attractive ‘business partner’. Alana’s job was to stand guard at the till, slowing the process up by taking the money from us and putting it in the till herself just in case we were tempted to fiddle or undercharge our mates for drinks.

Trusting no one, least of all the bar staff, she treated and spoke to us as if she were a Chinese empress dealing with the eunuchs of the Forbidden City and the only way to get into this petulant female’s good books was by flattery. While some of the staff crawled to her on their bellies like reptiles I’d have much rather kicked the supercilious woman in the arse than kissed it, but needs must when the devil drives and if occasionally buttering her up meant getting her off your back, then so be it.

‘Does it?’ (Mock surprise as she preened in the mirror behind the bar.)

‘Yeah, especially that big long one growing out of your nose and the tufts hanging out of your armpits.’

I didn’t dare say it, but I thought it.

At the time I thought the Showplace was very smart but looking back I see a long room with two dimly lit bars, one with a dining area, and a DJ console in the style of a ship’s prow complete with figurehead overlooking the dance floor. Typical 1970s nightclub decor.

If you have any knowledge of London then you’ll appreciate that Westbourne Grove is a hell of a way from Crouch End, especially at two thirty in the morning, but undeterred and to save on cab fares I’d walk some of the way home after work, trying to get as far as Edgware Road tube before finally giving in and flagging a cab down. Out of the four quid a night I earned for five hours’ work, two of it went on a taxi home and the rest on bus fares and dinner money the following day. I stuck it out because it got me out of the flat and allowed me to ‘go clubbin’’ and get paid for it, and as I hardly knew anybody in London this was a good way to meet like-minded people,
i.e.
gays. However, I didn’t expect that I’d meet my future wife.

It was a different story at the Showplace, where there was a noticeable segregation of the sexes. The men gathered around the top bar, the women the bottom and very rarely did the twain meet, seemingly having nothing in common apart from the love of their own sex. I tried to keep out of the way of a middle-aged woman called Jake, who if she had a psychotic condition, which she undoubtedly did, then you could bet it would be hard to pronounce. She was a vicious bully, proud of her reputation for being barred for life from the women-only club the Gateways, and existed solely to terrorize those weaker than herself, which meant
99
per cent of the Showplace lived in perpetual fear whenever she was in. Tall and rangy with a teddy boy quiff, her hard masculine face set in a permanent scowl, she stalked the club, an anachronism among the trendy young lesbians, in search of trouble.

‘Large dark rum,’ she snapped at me, elbowing her way to the front of the bar one busy night. I ignored her, pretending that I hadn’t heard.

‘Are you fucking deaf?’ she shouted. ‘I said I wanted a large rum.’

Reluctantly I stopped what I was doing and slammed a large rum into a glass from the optic. She snatched the drink out of my hand and threw the money in my face. Before I had time to respond, Theresa the Portuguese barmaid stepped in.