by Paul O'Grady
On the bus home the girls were rapturous, jabbering like excited monkeys as they discussed the show among themselves. ‘Well, we’re not going anywhere,’ I heard the eldest say, ‘until a billionaire offers to foster us, right?’
Their social worker was going to love me.
‘Who are you staring at?’ I asked, aware that Amy, the youngest girl, had been studying me intently for the last five minutes, a habit in children that gives me the creeps. It’s like they know something you don’t.
‘You should be Miss Hannigan,’ the Midwich Cuckoo came out of her trance to observe.
Charming. So this was how the child saw me: an old pisspot with an evil temper, and female to boot.
‘No you should, you’d be good.’
Was my slip showing or something?
I remembered this conversation on the bus twenty years later, in my dressing room at the Victoria Palace, larding on the slap to play Miss Hannigan in the 1998 revival of Annie. The child was a prophetess.
I’d worked so many hours since becoming a peripatetic that I wasn’t surprised to find out I was owed over four months’ time off in lieu. It’s all very well having lots of time off if you’ve plenty of money but as usual I was skint, so I got the Access card out of hiding to buy presents and together with Vera returned home for an extended Christmas break. The weather was foul, I was housebound thanks to a heavy fall of snow and trapped with my ma for a memorable couple of days with no electricity and water cascading through the bedroom ceilings from the pipes in the loft which had burst, as they always did whenever the temperature dropped. My cup runneth over.
I was actually contemplating not going back to work. The money was lousy, I’d been repeatedly attacked, caught nits and scabies and seen enough human degradation to last me a lifetime, added to which a tooth infection that had made my face swell up like Jabba the Hutt wasn’t helping my bleak mood. Soon I was writing my resignation to Maura. Unemployed again, but this time of my own volition
Towards the middle of January, Maura rang to ask if I’d consider coming back to work early as a job had come up she really needed me for. It was the usual story: mother in hospital leaving a two-year-old and an eighteen-month-old baby, lovely little kiddies, at risk … It would be better if a man went in as there was a history of violence with the father.
‘Didn’t you get my letter of resignation?’ I asked her.
‘Of course I did, but I took no notice and put it in the bin. It’s the weather getting you down, that’s all,’ she replied, adding hopefully, ‘So we’ll see you on Monday then?’
And so I went back, and moved into a furnished rat-hole in Camden Town to look after the two ‘lovely little kiddies’. Two nights later the father, on the run from the police, turned up drunk and, mistaking me for his girlfriend’s latest squeeze, tried to kill me. I locked myself in the bathroom with the two kids, who by now were extremely distressed, and prayed the door would hold, leaning heavily against it as he tried to kick it down. Thankfully he gave up after a while, transferring his attentions to the room next door.
‘I’m going to burn the fucking place down,’ I could hear him ranting as he smashed up the furniture. ‘D’you hear me? Burn it down to the ground.’
It was now or never. I had to make a run for it. The kids were in their pyjamas so I wrapped them in towels, picked them up, took a deep breath and opened the door. If Dame Kelly Holmes had seen me running she’d have given up there and then. I was nothing more than a blur as I legged it down the hall, out of the door and down the stairs and didn’t stop running till I reached the High Street. I’m amazed that I didn’t slip on the snow and ice and can only assume that I was moving so fast my feet weren’t actually touching the ground, à la Billy Whizz.
So here I was, trudging along Camden High Street in heavy snow at ten o’clock on a Sunday evening, carrying two frightened kids wrapped in towels and searching for a phone box that hadn’t been vandalized. The Pearl White of the Peripatetics. All I needed was an ice floe to cling to with a couple of wolves howling in the distance. Whoever said that the streets of London were paved with gold obviously hadn’t visited Camden Town. The streets were paved with dog shit and drunks, plastic bin bags filled with festering rubbish piled high on the pavement spilling over into the road. The bin men, or refuse collectors if you like, along with just about everybody else were on strike.
‘First you can’t get your hands on a bloody loaf,’ my mother had said on the phone, ‘now you can’t even bury your dead. Bloody gravediggers going on strike, there’s coffins piled high up in Landican Cemetery and you can’t get a space in the mortuaries and funeral parlours for love nor money. I hope I don’t drop dead in the next couple of weeks, that’s all I can say. We’ll be overrun with rats next and what’s that Callaghan doing about it? Sweet bugger all, that’s what.’
Typically, all the phones in the tube station were broken, the ticket booth was closed and there wasn’t even a guard about. In desperation I fought my way through a crowd of punks gathered outside the Electric Ballroom to ask a bouncer if there was such a rarity as a phone I could use. The Lurkers and Adam and the Ants were playing and it was bedlam but the bouncer was a gent and after a brief explanation he escorted me and the kids downstairs to the office. Bemused punks glared at me as I pushed past with the kids, a couple of them aggressively asking what I thought I was doing bringing kids into a club.
‘Earning a living,’ I shouted back. They must’ve thought I was a courier for a baby farmer. While I waited for the police the manager got me a drink and an orange juice for the two-year-old, who was bawling his head off. The baby, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the noise and commotion coming from the club and slept contentedly in my arms, Adam and the Ants seemingly having a soporific effect on him.
The police came and took us off to a children’s home in Hampstead. As I had left my coat behind in my haste to get away from the kids’ father I had no money and no means of getting home to Crouch End, but the police were unsympathetic. ‘Sorry,’ one of them said as they were leaving, ‘but we’re not a taxi service.’ The woman who ran the home rang for a cab and lent me a fiver. Why did Maura have to go and ignore my resignation?
I hammered on the flat door for ages until eventually Rip Van Vera was roused from his slumber. I could hear him squawking, ‘Hang on, hang on, will ya,’ as he made his way to the door. He had on a knee-length baggy T-shirt with ‘Oh Bondage, up yours!’ written on the front and a pair of flip-flops. He looked like Gandhi at a Sex Pistols concert.
‘What’s happened?’ he quacked, firing a barrage of questions at me. ‘I thought you were at work? Where’s your keys? And your coat? What’s gone off?’
Huddled over the feeble gas fire in the bedroom, sucking on a cig for warmth, I briefly explained.
‘Oh,’ he said. Unimpressed, he took off his glasses and got back into bed, mumbling as an afterthought before slipping back into the arms of Prince Valium, ‘Guess who was in the Cap tonight?’
‘Who?’
‘Ryan. He wants you to ring him, I’ve got his number for you.’
Ryan, as you may recall, was my old squeeze from Liverpool. He was in London for a few days and we arranged to meet for a drink. I hadn’t seen him since his last visit to London when I’d rudely given him the cold shoulder and I wondered how our relationship stood.
Would we pick up where we left off in Liverpool in spite of my treatment of him or were we now ‘just good friends’? He seemed more than happy to see me but I got the impression the Love Boat had capsized and we were sailing into different waters on the good ship Platonic. As the night drew on I began to regret letting this one slip through my fingers and wondered if it wasn’t too late to patch things up.
Ryan was going back to the Far East to work for an oil company in Manila and he was insistent that I should join him in the summer. Was this the offer of a reconciliation? I couldn’t tell, he was so hard to read. Anyway, whatever the outcome, a chance to visit a pl
ace as exotic as the Philippines was hard to turn down and the more I thought about it the more determined I was to get there.
Since he wasn’t offering any help towards the fare, I wondered where in hell I was going to find the price of an air ticket. The answer came courtesy of my fairy godmother, the good old Inland Revenue again (that’s the last time you’ll ever hear me describe them so favourably, I promise), in the form of a sizeable tax rebate, out of which I bought an open return. I flew the 6,679 miles via Amsterdam, Rome, Karachi and Bangkok, sending postcards to my mum and Vera at each stop-off. This was an epic adventure for me and I was as excited as a pig in a ditch full of truffles for the entire journey, taking everything from the menus to the sick bag home with me as a souvenir.
After spending twenty-four hours cocooned on a plane the riot that was Manila airport came as a complete culture shock. It was overwhelming. The first thing to hit me was the heat, followed by the sheer volume of noise from the traffic and the mass of people gathered outside the airport. Ryan came to meet me. He was living in a small apartment in a hotel in the Malate district, an area with a distinctly Bohemian atmosphere. Artists, writers and those in the entertainment industry tended to gravitate towards Malate and despite the Marcoses’ dictatorship an interesting and varied nightlife was beginning to flourish. The apartment turned out to be small and basic, shower and toilet with one double bedroom separated from the kitchen/living area by a set of sliding doors. There was also a small balcony overlooking some shanty houses and a dilapidated water tower, and for those who fancied sunbathing or a swim there was a small pool and a roof area with views across the city towards the harbour.
I liked the Tropicano Apartments on sight. The decor was very ‘60s Americana, the type of place where you’d expect to find McGill from Man in a Suitcase in reception. The staff were incredibly friendly, as were the majority of fellow guests; the only drawback was the wildlife. Walt Disney cockroaches, an unwelcome and unavoidable presence in all buildings in the city, had the tendency to scuttle up the wall or across the floor when you least expected it, their crazy antennae waving like the arms of a wailing widow in full flight. The tiny green lizards that darted across the bedroom ceiling worried me the most. I lived in constant fear that one would lose its grip and fall into my open mouth as I lay sleeping below and so, as a precautionary measure, I slept with my head under the pillow.
Walking around the streets of Manila was like stepping into a musical. Everybody sang. All you had to do was turn the radio on and if a popular song was playing then the whole bloody street would join in. It got on my nerves at first, as did the constant smiling. Having lived in London for a while I was unused to passers-by greeting me with a cheery ‘hi’, for if anyone behaved like that on the streets of Camden Town they were invariably drunks or nutters or both and were not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged. My first impression of Manila wasn’t good, in fact the place horrified me. It was all so different and after a couple of days I’d had enough and wanted to go home, just as my mother had when as a young wife and mother she’d first visited my father’s family on the farm in Ireland. Well, they do say what’s in the bitch comes out in the pup …
Back in Liverpool, Ryan and I had had what Mills and Boon would have described as ‘a fleeting but highly intense affair’ which naturally had cooled since my move to London, particularly on my side. Previously we’d never spent more than a couple of days at a time together and now here we were, living in a small apartment and attempting unsuccessfully to recreate a relationship we’d once shared in what seemed like another lifetime. We were no longer the same people. We’d changed – not radically but enough to make a big difference – and at times the air was as heavy with tension as it was with the sour smell of citronella mosquito repellant. Light the blue touch paper and stand well back.
*
My introduction to what the city had to offer in the way of cuisine and nightlife got off to a bad start. Walking around the unfamiliar streets, I was introduced to the horror that is balut. Seeing I was curious as to what a young boy carrying a large wicker basket and calling out ‘BALUT!’ at the top of his lungs was selling, Ryan called him over. Underneath a grubby piece of flannel was a basketful of eggs.
‘Here, try one,’ Ryan said, buying an egg off the boy. ‘They’re nice.’
I don’t like eggs. If I’m in the mood I can just about manage a small plateful of them scrambled on toast, but a hard-boiled egg? Not for all the tea in China.
‘This is different, not like your average egg,’ he persisted. ‘Crack it open and have a look.’
I held the warm egg wrapped in a piece of newspaper tentatively in the palm of my hand while the boy deftly peeled the shell back with a small knife. To my horror, what lay inside was a creature straight out of Alien – the nearly fully formed embryo of a boiled chick wallowing in a glutinous grey liquid.
‘Suck, suck,’ the street vendor instructed, urging me to hold the egg up to my mouth and draw the monster out.
‘It’s a delicacy,’ Ryan remarked casually. ‘Get it down you, it’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac.’
I tossed the egg into the street and threw up. The kid laughed like a drain, clapping his hands as I ranted on about dirty filthy bastards mid-retch.
‘Go on, bugger off,’ Ryan laughed, dropping a couple of dollars into the boy’s basket, ‘and see if you can find anyone selling corned beef hash and chips.’
As always I wanted to go clubbing, and Ryan said he knew of a place across town called the Oddball which made Sadie’s back home in Liverpool seem like the grand salon of the palace of Versailles.
‘They have shows on in here,’ Ryan said, paying the entrance fee to the reptilian lad on the door, who despite his youthful appearance bore all the hallmarks of a canny pro. The club was stifling hot, nothing more than a claustrophobic sweat box devoid of any form of air conditioning, the fetid air thick with cigar smoke and the smell of clammy bodies. The motley clientele was made up of grubby teenage boys and seedy middle-aged men. Seated at the table next to ours, a corpulent Australian, his shirt soaked through with sweat, was slyly fondling a semi-naked boy, who was curled up on his lap giggling like a geisha.
A spotlight hanging dangerously from the ceiling pointed towards the tiny stage and unexpectedly flooded the gloom with light, reflecting off the mirrored wall behind and temporarily blinding everyone. No fancy lighting in this establishment then to herald the arrival of cabaret time, no compère to warm the punters up before bringing you on stage with an encouraging ‘Let’s have a big hand for a fabulous act.’ At the Oddball it seemed to be a case of get your bony arse out on that stage, do your stuff and then get off. The Disappointer Sisters wouldn’t have approved, that’s for sure, and I wondered how the local drag fared.
The first act on the bill was a scrawny lad who unceremoniously trotted out and impaled himself on a litre bottle of Coca-Cola. My jaw hit the floor. The fat Aussie next to me starting cheering and bellowing for more. More? What in God’s name did he do for an encore? Make a crateful vanish? To quote Frankie Howerd, my flabber had never been so gasted.
The next act on the bill was a young man who bent over, spread his cheeks apart and systematically opened and closed his anus like a sea anemone, enough of an act to stir the sweaty old men who leaned forward eagerly in their seats for a closer look. I’d had enough. Winking sphincters was not exactly what I was expecting when Ryan mentioned there was cabaret, so picking my jaw up off the floor I got out of there smartly, Ryan following close behind.
‘What kind of a place was that?’ I ranted at Ryan in the street, genuinely appalled by what I’d just seen. ‘What are you doing bringing me to a club full of dirty, sweaty old bastards salivating at the sight of a couple of manky little scrubbers shoving half the bar up their arse? It’s disgusting!’
‘Climb down off your high horse, will ya, this isn’t Birkenhead, it’s the Philippines – a third world country with a maniac in charge busy running it into
the ground. Those “manky little scrubbers” as you call them are probably kids from the country who’ve arrived in this shitty city to find the only work they can get is sitting on bottles in a sex show.’
I got the feeling my outburst had rattled him.
‘There’s no job centres here, you know, no social security. Nothing. They do what they have to do or starve, so don’t be so bloody snotty. Good God, do you realize that in some parts parents are selling their kids for sex for the price of a few days’ food?’
No, I didn’t know. I’d assumed that the lads on the Oddball were in that line of work because they were born hustlers and chose to be. Manila wasn’t quite shaping up to my expectations. There was no evidence of banyan trees and coral sands and Nellie Forbush and the whole kit and caboodle that South Pacific on the telly of a Sunday afternoon had promised, just a dirty, sprawling, poverty-stricken metropolis.
‘I’m’omesick.’ It came out before I could stop myself.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t be soft, you daft get.’ Ryan put his arm around me, laughing. ‘Stop acting like a prissy old schoolmarm. Manila’s a great place, you’ve just got to go with the flow. Why are you so uptight? Loosen up. C’mon, we’ll go to a bar you just might like.’
Famous last words, as my mother would’ve said.
Gussie’s bar was nothing spectacular but it had bucketloads of atmosphere. A dimly lit smoke-filled room, intimate you might say to be kind, with a smattering of punters, two of whom I was cheered to see were American sailors, not the best-looking boys in the fleet but sexy nevertheless in their naval whites – sitting around a dance floor that was no bigger than your average coffee table. I was also happy to see that the entertainment didn’t include anything untoward involving Coke bottles, just three lads with a drumkit, piano and guitar attempting to make music.