The Devil Rides Out (22 page)
Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
‘Get out, bitch,’ she growled at a disbelieving Jake. ‘I said get out. Who do you think you are, throwing money in his face? Now leave before I kill you.’ Jake, who nobody had ever
stood up to before, leaned across the bar and tried to grab her.
‘Touch me and you’re dead,’ Theresa said, calmly meeting Jake’s furious gaze. ‘I’ll cut your throat.’
Jake threw her drink over Theresa and in a flash the normally placid Theresa went for her. All hell broke loose, Jake tried to jump over the bar but was grabbed by Bill the bouncer, Peter the manager and a couple of strong-armed women, and dragged cursing out of the club.
‘Crazy bitch,’ Theresa said, laughing, wiping her denim shirt down with a dishcloth. ‘But I had to do something before she killed you.’
I’d liked the good-natured Theresa from the moment I first met her. She was über-cool and laid-back and was a big hit with the women customers, who all fancied her David Cassidy good looks. She was working in a local hotel as a chambermaid by day, supplementing her income behind the bar of the Showplace by night. Originally from Lisbon, Theresa was under tremendous pressure from her devout Catholic family to find herself a husband. Little did we realize as we swigged our Bacardi and cokes that she was soon to become the future Mrs O’Grady …
One night I turned up for work at the Showplace to find the place locked up. The lease had expired and the owners weren’t renewing it, or so I was told as I gathered outside on the pavement with the rest of the staff.
‘Don’t worry,’ Peter the manager said. ‘As soon as we’ve found new premises we’ll all be back in business.’
Theresa’s work permit was about to expire and she was dreading having to return to Portugal and face the numerous suitors that her mother, unaware of her daughter’s true
sexuality, had lined up as possible husband material. I listened to her woes as we sat drinking in the restaurant on Westbourne Grove that we frequented after work because they sold booze after hours, and on a whim I offered to marry her.
People assume my motives were venal. They weren’t. I married her simply because I liked her and wanted to help her out of a tricky situation and for no other reason. And so we set a date for May.
O
N
A
PRIL
F
OOL’S
D
AY
1977, V
ERA ARRIVED FOR ANOTHER
weekend but this time stayed three years. Since he didn’t have a job he needed to sign on and so I duly went round to W. H. Smith to buy a rent book which I then gave the ‘treatment’, enabling Vera to claim rent. I was an expert at ageing rent books, fancying myself as a master forger, the John Myatt of rent books.
My technique was simple but effective. I’d start by rubbing both sides of the cover with a used tea bag until it had reached the right depth of sepia to pass, even under the closest of scrutiny by the most officious of social security employees, as a document of suitable maturity. A little fag ash rubbed on to parts of the cover for depth, the corners dilapidated with a few dog ears and then, as a finishing touch to this masterly piece of fakery, my signature mark – a casually placed ring from a coffee cup on the cover and a couple of doodles and phone numbers scribbled hastily on the back. Inside I’d laboriously fill in the dates and the amounts supposedly paid over the months, using a selection of different biros and
adding a little extra of course to the amount Vera would actually be shelling out in the way of rent as a way of making the entire enterprise financially viable. I could put years on a brand new rent book in under an hour, and by the time I’d finished with Vera’s it could’ve passed for the one that Mary and Joseph had used to pay the rent on that stable.
As it happened, after all that work Vera didn’t bother using it. He got himself a job in a pub in Islington called the Sportsman instead.
The Royal Northern was downsizing and both the physiotherapy and the occupational therapy departments were told to shed a few staff. As it was a case of last in first out I was one of the first to go. Privately I’d often felt that I was superfluous to requirements anyway, often finding myself on a quiet day with nothing to do, and wasn’t particularly surprised when I was given my marching orders. The blow was softened by the two months’ wages and three weeks’ holiday pay that came with it.
First thing I did was pay off the Access card that I’d allowed to build up when I’d overused my ‘flexible friend’ to pay for Christmas presents and clothes, and then I rented a black and white telly from DER. There was no aerial on the roof of the house so we had to make do with an indoor one that proved to be absolutely useless. The reception was – and still is, I’m reliably told – crap in Crouch End and it wasn’t until Vera replaced DER’s standard
My Favorite Martian
aerial with a bent wire coat hanger that we made contact with Weatherfield and were able to enjoy
Coronation Street
, providing you didn’t mind watching the newly married Len and Rita interacting in what looked like a dense fog and intermittent lightning storms.
Although I’d worked there for some time now and had proven myself to be honest and reliable I still wasn’t trusted enough to be given a spare set of keys to open up, but instead had to wait outside the club for Stavros to arrive and let me in. He was never on time, often over an hour late, and sometimes if he was having a run of good luck in a card game he’d forget about me completely and I’d be left standing like a fool in the street cursing him for a fat, balding, inconsiderate little creep as the early evening turned to night and the street lamps came on.
*
Vera, resplendent in a mint-green double-breasted suit, and Theresa’s latest girlfriend, a beautiful Swede called Inga, acted as witnesses, with Kate and Angela in matching blue dresses and flowers in their hair in attendance as bridesmaids. The bride wore a white trouser suit whilst the groom was in his old faithful – the cream suit bought with Norman’s birthday money. The star of the show was undoubtedly Lozzy acting in loco parentis as the groom’s mother (the real model having been wisely left out of the equation for obvious reasons). She wore a picture hat the size of a cartwheel with a couple of fox furs draped nonchalantly over her arm, and stopped the traffic. At the end of the ceremony, after the immortal words ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ had been uttered, the registrar turned to me and said, ‘C’mon, you know what to do now, don’t you?’
‘Pay the fee?’ I replied.
‘No, dear, kiss the bride.’
To a chorus of wolf whistles and cheers from the congregation I leaned forward and planted a chaste kiss on the cheek of my blushing bride. I was a married man.
The Showplace was my sole source of income and the fact that if someone asked me what I did for a living I’d have no choice but to reply ‘scrubbing toilets and serving drinks’ was something I found depressing. I’d applied for other jobs with not much success and was beginning to feel despondent at the frightening prospect that I might be trapped as a lowly paid skivvy in a shitty north London lesbian club for life. There seemed to be no way to escape from my present
circumstances and I was the most lachrymose cleaner in London. As I mopped the dancefloor, I reflected bitterly that this latest bite from the London bug was fast turning septic.
The flat was becoming a place of refuge for other hopeful Scousers in exile. As well as Vera, Angela and myself we now had David, known to us as Ruth, and a couple of young hairdressers, Alma and Anne. These two girls changed the colour and style of their hair on a daily basis. Anne, who in a dark wig was a dead ringer for Shirley Bassey, would leave for work in the morning a peroxide blonde and return that evening bright orange. Between them they went through every colour in the Koleston Tint range. The habit proved to be infectious and soon Vera was sporting a bubble perm, tighter than anything my mother had ever come home with on a Wednesday afternoon, whilst I was what Alma described as a ‘dazzling shade of strawberry blond’, which in the cold light of day turned out to be ginger. To complement my new look I grew a beard, which to my surprise came out bright red. I tried to dye it to match my hair but only succeeded in intensifying the red tones until it glowed an even fierier ginger than the barnet. Angela suggested toning the colour down with a coat of mascara but after coming to the reluctant conclusion that it only made matters worse I regretfully shaved it off.
Anne and Alma had their own unique styles. Devotees of punk, they had a pretty inventive and original wardrobe of clothes between them and they spent hours getting dressed and applying their make-up, chattering away like a couple of budgies as they applied coat after coat of technicolour cosmetics.
Mornings in the flat were bedlam as those who had jobs or college to go to vied to get into the bathroom. Ruth, who was
very particular about his toilette, would lock himself in until Angela, growing more anxious by the minute that she’d be late for class, threatened to kick the door in. Ruth never had a hair out of place. He’d lay his clothes out for work, neatly pressed, the night before and polish his shoes. Previously he’d lived in a very nice flat in Birkenhead and was used to the order and routine that come from living alone and which become precious. The chaos we existed in must have been a shock to his system and in an attempt to gain some privacy he built a sort of Berlin Wall out of the four wardrobes, lining them up in order of height across the bedroom floor and sleeping behind them. I’d watch him from my bed as he scuttled from the bathroom in his silk dressing gown and vanished like the white rabbit behind the wardrobe wall, marvelling when he finally reappeared at how anyone could look so perfectly groomed and immaculately turned out at such an ungodly hour of the morning. He seemed content in his cosy billet behind the wardrobes until the night I came home from the Black Cap slightly the worse for drink with the devil inside me and pushed all the suitcases, which were piled high on top of the wardrobes, over on to his sleeping form below. Not surprisingly he was nervous after that and must have been relieved when he moved to an equally small living space in a house off Baker Street run by a ferocious landlady.