The Devil Rides Out

by Paul O'Grady

  Things went from bad to worse between Norman and me. I’d got to the stage where I couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him, let alone the same bed, and the highly implausible excuses I invented to avoid any physical contact with him grew increasingly wild with each telling. I should’ve done the decent thing and gone home. For the gold-digging tramp I was reputed to be (I’d overheard one of his friends calling me that at the party) I was certainly mining a barren seam. Ever since I’d taken up my new career in the frozen dessert business I’d been contributing towards the food and rent. So much for being kept. Whatever happened to happy ever after, living in the lap of luxury in a villa on the beach? I was flogging ice cream eight hours a day for a pittance, sleeping on the couch in a basement flat in a one-horse town with a control freak who was far too old for me.

  Being with Norman dampened my spirits. His idea of a good time was to sit in the flat of an evening, holding hands on the sofa and watching the telly, the prospect of which was anathema to me. Instead I’d carry on behind his back in the sand dunes with a member of the CHE and go up to London once a week to visit what Barbara Cartland would delicately refer to as a lover. Poor Norman, our relationship hadn’t lived up to his lofty expectations and his ‘bit of rough’ (something else I’d been described as at a party) was most certainly not the person he’d originally envisioned spending the rest of his life with. Getting through the week was hard enough, never mind a lifetime.

  In the end it was Norman who decided my fate. Angela came to stay for the weekend and I insisted that she shared the bed with me while Norman took the couch. Bit of a bloody cheek really, throwing the man out of his own bed, and we ended up having a huge argument that nearly came to blows. Angela tried to act as mediator, even offering to go to a bed and breakfast, but I was adamant that I was not sleeping with Norman. I got my way in the end but it was a pyrrhic victory, and typically and not unjustifiably Norman sulked, morose and alone on his sofa, drinking brandy and listening to Leonard Cohen and Timi Yuro records until finally he passed out.

  He got up early the next morning and left for work, leaving me a note to say that it would be better for all concerned if he didn’t find me there when he got home. Next to the note was a letter addressed to me that had been opened. It was from the London lover telling me that he didn’t want to see me again. It seemed as I mulled over both my Dear Johns that I’d not only killed two birds with one stone, I’d flattened the whole bloody aviary. And so, packing up the LPs again, I took the train with Angela, who was a little miffed at having her seaside holiday cut short, to London.

  By the time we’d pulled into Victoria Station, Norman and Littlehampton were ancient history. I had over fifty quid in my post office savings book and two weeks’ wages in my pocket and for the first time since I’d half-heartedly believed that I could make a go of it with a complete stranger in a quiet little seaside town I felt liberated. It was a beautiful summer’s day and I splashed out on a taxi to take us to where we were staying with a friend of Angela’s from the drama school. Angela’s sister Kate got wind that we were in town and, desperate to get a look at Angela’s ‘boyfriend’, demanded that we paid her a visit.

  Kate was an aspiring actress who had only recently left drama school. She shared a tiny flat in Camden Town with an occupational therapist called Louisa, a willowy blonde, tall and slender, who I thought to be the height of sophistication. Louisa – or Lozzy as she was to become known – was well travelled and smart as a whip with a rather vague and disinterested air about her that masked her extremely practical side and zest for life. She had fine baby-blonde hair which she tried to keep in check with an assortment of diamanté clips and hairpins adorned with feathers and she painstakingly attached individual false eyelashes to her eyelids with the aid of a pair of tweezers and a little tube of black glue. After a while they went haywire and either fell off altogether or stuck out at odd angles like the hairs on an old paintbrush.

  Kate was small and voluptuous with long brown hair swept up in a Wilma Flintstone-style hairdo that gave her that just got-up look, which she probably had. With her heart-shaped face and big eyes she came across as sexy yet vulnerable, a working-class Liz Taylor, except Miss Taylor probably didn’t wear her keys and lighter slung around her neck on a bit of string.

  Both Kate and Louisa had a penchant for causing a stir when they went out on the town. They were full of enthusiasm, dressed outrageously and always the first up on the dance floor. Kate’s terpsichorean skills involved hurtling around demonstrating a vigorous interpretive dance routine while Lozzy dreamily floated about on tiptoe in her pink leotard and tutu, trailing a moth-eaten feather boa and assorted bits of chiffon and tinsel behind her like a discarded Christmas tree hanging out of the back of a bin wagon. Angela was no slouch herself when it came to partying and would join in with gusto. They’d flirt and cavort and dance and drink like three wild women, yet at the end of the night they always kept their knickers on and went home together, unsullied, like the well-brought-up Maid of Kent and the two Liverpool Irish Catholic gals that they were.

  For some reason I bought two cheap wigs from a shop in Camden Town, a curly brown Afro which I immediately plonked on my head, firmly believing it was undetectable as a teaser, and a violent red wavy creation that Angela teamed with an emerald-green velvet frock and high heels that made her look like a 1950s Irish barmaid. We went busking in Camden Town, or rather she did, playing an ancient squeeze box and singing Irish songs while I stood by, slightly self-conscious but putting a brave face on, holding out a cap and greeting passers-by with an optimistic ‘Thank you’. It felt like begging to me and I was hesitant to give it the hard sell … that is, until people started dropping coins in the cap, which prompted me to have a quick change of heart and turn into the most enthusiastic spieler on Camden Lock. ‘There’s money in this lark,’ I said to Angela later as we spent some of her earnings on ice cream at Marine Ices in Chalk Farm.

  We slept late, ate in cafés, visited everyone Angela knew and seemingly went to a party every night. It was a halcyon time and I discovered that this was a London I liked. After my many previous abortive attempts to settle here, I began to feel at ease with the place, less of an alien, and decided on the spur of the moment to give it another go. Angela would be returning to drama school after the summer and would be looking for somewhere to live and someone to share the rent with her. I could be that someone.

  Lozzy came up trumps with a job idea for me, saying that she’d have a word in the physiotherapy department of the hospital where she worked to see if there were any vacancies for physiotherapists’ aides. There was. One of the aides would be leaving to go to college and there would be a vacancy in a couple of months. Perfect. Even though I had no idea what a physio’s aide was or did, it sounded glamorous enough and I duly went along to the Royal Northern Hospital for an interview with Miss Peggy Handley, Senior Physiotherapist, full of enthusiasm. My eagerness must have won that lady over because she gave me the job.

  I was thrilled that I was going to work in a hospital and had visions of myself in a starched white coat, mopping the brow of a dying patient (‘Quickly, nurse, more morphine’), willing him back to life (‘No one dies on my watch’), or teaching a child, supposedly paralysed for life, to make those first few tentative steps before bravely rushing into the arms of his mother, her face wet with tears of gratitude. Oh yes, I was going to become indispensable to the physiotherapy department of the Royal Northern Hospital, beloved by patients and staff alike and the trusted right-hand man of Miss Peggy Handley, Senior Physiotherapist.

  CHAPTER 9

  Crouch End

  ‘PHYSIOTHERAPIST’S AIDE?’ MY MOTHER’S VOICE WENT UP A few octaves and she looked at me as if I’d just declared that I was taking up a career in the armed forces. ‘Physiotherapist’s aide?’ She kept repeating it to herself as she pulled at the tight ball of hard, unnatural curls that she used to call hair before the hairdresser on Church Road had got her hands on it. />
  ‘Look at me bloody hair,’ she moaned, poking it with her index finger and watching in the mirror on the front-room wall. ‘It’s like a Brillo Pad. I don’t know why I go to her, I really don’t.’

  I did. It was half-price on a Wednesday for pensioners, not that you would dare to refer to my ma as a pensioner. The word was anathema to her. ‘I told her,’ she ranted on, ‘I clearly said I wanted it loose. A loose perm. Does this look loose to you? It’s like a pan of winkles, and she’s scalded the gob off me under those bloody dryers. She leaves you under them for far too long, y’know. There’s no need, half of those pensioners have hardly got any hair on their head in the first place, just a couple of strands teased up around their face. I don’t know what we must look like, a gang of old women sat like battery hens in plastic capes reading the Woman’s Own having the’eads roasted off us for an hour.’

  ‘It’s nice,’ I lied, trying not to laugh at the red welts across her forehead and down the sides of her heat-blotched face where she’d had the’ead roasted off her. The smell of setting lotion was so overpowering she could’ve been used as a general anaesthetic.

  ‘And I’ve had a rinse as well,’ she went on, ignoring me. ‘Supposed to be Burnished Copper. Burnished Copper my arse, look at it! I look like Elvis!’

  I gave her my letter of acceptance from the hospital to read. ‘I don’t know how you go from selling cornets one day to working in a London hospital the next,’ she said examining the letter sceptically, turning it over in her hands to see if she could find any signs of fakery. ‘When are you finally going to settle down and get a proper job?’

  ‘This is a proper job,’ I protested.

  ‘They’ve all been proper jobs, son,’ she sighed, handing me back the letter. ‘And what’s come out of them, eh? You’ve either ended up in court or back here on the bones of your bare backside. Anyway, what are you going to do up till then? It says there that you don’t start until September. You needn’t think you’re hanging around here, I can’t afford to support you.’

  The post office savings had long gone. The ring that Norman had bought me along with a couple of others I’d acquired on the way had been pawned by Vera in a pawn shop in Liverpool. I was too ashamed to go in but Vera, no stranger to the pawn shop, had no such qualms, even haggling to get me a better price for my paltry bits of jewellery.

  So I got a job as a barman in the Plaza Bingo Hall on Borough Road where surprisingly the women were extremely generous, particularly if they’d had a win, and I earned more in tips than wages. Aunty Chris was a regular at the Plaza, sweeping into her usual seat in her good camel coat, her face a mask of concentration as she checked nine books, fag in one hand, felt tip in the other, scanning the numbers up and down, ready to pounce.

  Out on the town one dull Monday night with Vera, we met a couple of fellahs who were strangers in town. One was a huge Dutchman who looked like he had his enormous head on upside down, with his bald pate and ‘old Dutch beard’, the type that flared outward in width at the bottom. He bore a striking resemblence to Bluto, Popeye the Sailor’s arch enemy, and found his Olive Oyl in an unresponsive and reluctant Vera, who he wooed relentlessly but unsuccessfully. His mate was called Ryan, a good-looking lairy Jack-the-lad Scouser, fresh from working in the Far East and now running his own business. We had quite a fling. He took me to Amsterdam for a weekend, the first time I’d ever been ‘properly’ abroad, and it was certainly a bit of an eye-opener. On the way home we were detained by Customs. Ryan had lots of stamps in his passport from the Far East and since we were on our way back from Amsterdam the Customs officers assumed we were international drug smugglers. Taken into a separate room and questioned, I was unclear what they meant when they asked, ‘Are you sure that you haven’t even brought a little bit back for yourself?’ A bit of what?

  ‘You do realize that you’ll go down for a long time if you’re caught smuggling marijuana?’

  Marijuana?! I’d never smoked a joint in my life, let alone shoved a couple of pounds of the stuff up my bum and hightailed it through Customs. And as for coke, that was something you either drank or burned. My heart sank as a thought crossed my mind: maybe Ryan really was a drug smuggler and was at this very moment trying to explain why he had bags of white powder hidden in the false bottom of his suitcase. Perhaps he’d hidden some in my case? My mouth was as dry as a bone from fear and I couldn’t answer the officer rifling through my case when he asked what I was doing with a half-empty tub of margarine in among the T-shirts.

  I’d brought it back because of the name, Bona, which was Polari for ‘good’. I’d thought it was funny at the time but I wasn’t laughing now. He was threatening to strip-search me.

  Oh God, get me out of this one and I’ll never be bad again.

  How would I explain this to my mother?

  ‘Sorry, Ma, I won’t be home for my tea for at least ten years …’

  ‘That’s all right, son, at least I’ll know where you are of a night.’

  In the end they let us go. Ryan wasn’t an international drug smuggler after all and I’d been spared the rubber-gloved finger. I was never so glad to get out of anywhere in my life.

  When the time came round for me to go back to London I typically didn’t want to leave. Life was good at the moment so why change it? The summer seemed endless, the hottest on record the papers screamed, but then they always do, don’t they? A hosepipe ban had been introduced so my mother took to watering her tiny front garden in the dead of night, admitting that she’d rather deprive herself of water than see her precious flowers go thirsty. The warm night air was heady with the scent of nicotiana, night-scented stocks and evening primrose, mostly grown from cuttings she’d acquired on coach trips to the gardens of the stately homes of the north.

  ‘Come and have a sniff out here, Paul,’ she hissed from the front step in a voice she believed was inaudible to the neighbours yet could probably be heard in Rock Ferry. ‘You’ve never smelt anything like it.’

  I stood among the flowers in my bare feet and inhaled deeply. She was right, I had never smelt anything like it and seeing her garden illuminated by moonlight, it seemed almost magical. Time seemed to momentarily stand still and I controlled my breathing so as not to disturb the silence, staring across the Mersey, as still as a mill pond, at the lights of Liverpool in the distance. Why would I want to leave all this?

  ‘Mind where you’re standing,’ my mother roared in her stage whisper, emerging from the house with her secateurs, ‘you don’t want to be standing in cat shit. Now shift yourself while I dead-head that rose.’ I was going to miss moments such as these, gardening at two in the morning.

  I was also going to miss Ryan. Our relationship had grown pretty intense. He was keen and didn’t want me to go to London. But I had to go, I’d promised Angela and didn’t want to let her down, her or Lozzy, who’d gone to the trouble of finding me a job in the first place. Besides, I tried to convince myself, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life working behind the bar in a bingo hall, surely I had more going for me than that?

  Life was certainly a worry and on that note I went indoors and back to bed.

  It was raining as I stepped out of the tube station at Camden Town. No, not raining, more like an Indian monsoon. Camden High Street was flooded and I dodged the mini tidal waves caused by passing buses as they coursed down the street like liners, dragging my case and sodden carrier bags of LPs towards Jamestown Road and Kate and Lozzy’s flat. I was staying there temporarily until Angela and I found a flat of our own, which meant that four adults, two cats and a cat-litter tray with a life force all of its own would be sharing a tiny two-room-and-kitchen flat.

  I wouldn’t be impolite or out of line if I was to describe the flat as a dump, for that’s what it was, but it was a cosy dump and Jamestown Road wasn’t the smart little series of bijou des reses that it is today. It was run-down and seedy and most of the properties housed sweatshops, where women were busy on sewing machines day and night. Around
the corner in Arlington Road was a flophouse or, to use its correct term, a working men’s hostel where Brendan Behan had once stayed and where the drunks shouted abuse as you passed on your way to the café in Inverness Street. All in all it wasn’t the most salubrious of addresses but it was in a great location, plenty of shops, near a tube station and a stone’s throw from Regent’s Park. There was even a gay pub, the Black Cap, the self-styled ‘Palladium of Drag’.

  I was in love with Camden Town. It had everything going for it as far as I was concerned and I felt totally at home there. Each morning hordes of hungover Irish navvies congregated outside the tube station, hoping to be picked for a job. There was a pet shop on Parkway that was like a zoo, selling every creature from monkeys to white mice. I can remember the window being piled high with tortoises, with a great blue and scarlet macaw keeping watch over them. Inverness Street was (and still is) a thriving fruit and veg market. It was also home to our favourite greasy spoon café, which we’d pile into every Saturday for pint mugs of steaming tea and beans on toast.

  Today Camden High Street is populated by shops that sell mainly boots, jeans and leather jackets. Back then there were bakers and fishmongers, butchers and stationers, lots of in-dependently owned shops that sold almost everything. My favourite shop was on the corner of Jamestown Road, an art deco dealers that had a film star’s dressing table made of mirrored glass and chrome in the window that I coveted more than anything else. Further up towards the bridge was a barber and a tiny little shop that sold gay porn and was presided over by a large geriatric queen and his young sidekick. Dingwalls market wasn’t the conglomerate it is in present times. It was just a yard that sold second-hand clothes, with a stall by the entrance where you could buy a sausage served in wholemeal pitta bread.

  The nursing staff at the Royal Northern Hospital were mainly Irish. Nearly all of them (the women that is) sported the Purdey bob made popular by Joanna Lumley in The New Avengers. The trend for this pudding-basin hairstyle swept through the hospital like dysentery in a prisoner-of-war camp and while it may have suited the lovely features of Miss Lumley it didn’t have quite the same effect on a twenty-stone nurse with a face like a full moon. Still it was manageable and, more importantly, tidy so it met with the approval of the tyrannical sisters who ran the wards. Sister Woods ran the men’s surgical ward with an iron fist. Mean and wiry with a face like a plucked boiling fowl, Woody allowed no crease ever to sully a counterpane on her ward. A broken thermometer was a hanging offence and God help the poor unfortunate fool who wandered off or on to her ward without permission. She treated the patients’ visitors as a necessary evil, one that was not to be indulged for a minute extra after she’d rung the bell to indicate that visiting hours were over. She’d clear the ward quicker than a tear-gas attack simply by standing there and glowering at them.