by Paul O'Grady
A thought suddenly occurred to me. What would it look like if the police turned up right this very moment and found me on my knees with a stash of greenbacks in my hand and an old lady dead in the bed behind me? They’d think I’d murdered her. Quickly I undid the elastic bands and unwrapped the tea towel with trembling hands. There was a wad of notes all right, a decent-sized one at that; it was just a shame that they happened to be pre-decimalization ten-shilling notes.
After the ambulance had taken Edna’s body away, I left a note of explanation for the home help, washed up the milk pan and mugs and let myself out into the cold of the early morning.
And now here I was, almost a year later to the day knocking on Edna’s door to see if anyone had moved in. I had a story worked out in case someone answered the door – about how I was one of Edna’s great-grandchildren – but there was no need for me to go into my patter as no one seemed to be home. I tried the key and, as I’d hoped it still worked. Quickly I let myself in before any of the neighbours saw me, and found the place exactly as I’d left it a year earlier. The note I’d written for the home help was still propped up against the ashtray with a crumpled packet of Winstons in it and the indentation of Edna’s body still visible in the mattress.
Time had stood still for the last twelve months and it seemed that the council had completely forgotten about this place. Time to change lodgings!
Before we abandoned ship, Chrissie and I drew a series of obscene and highly graphic cartoons depicting Vera and the landlord in compromising sexual positions on the living-room wall. Vera wasn’t amused in the least and went round the room closely examining them, sniffing with disgust while Chrissie and I rolled around on the floor, beside ourselves with laughter.
Late one Friday night we finally said goodbye to Crouch End. Rolling up a couple of mattresses and securing them with pairs of old fishnet tights, we left in style in a black cab. I was sad to leave the place that’d been my home for the past three years, as were Chrissie and Vera, and even though I hadn’t liked it at first we’d had some good times there. Angela had long gone, working in theatre in Northumberland, and I told myself as the taxi drove off and I took one last look at the place that it was right to be leaving. Not that we had much choice in the matter: the bailiffs were arriving in the morning to evict us, led no doubt by the self-righteous landlord.
We’d made frequent trips to Edna’s, washing down walls and floors and packing her personal items away in binliners, squashing them into the only storage cupboard in the hall. Vera didn’t fancy sleeping in Edna’s bed and nor did I but Chrissie had no such reservations.
‘That’s a good-quality horsehair mattress, that is,’ he remarked, dismantling the iron bed frame to make more room. ‘I don’t care who died in it. You don’t think you sleep on Crown bedding in the nick, do ya?’
The living conditions were cramped for one person, let alone three, added to which we had mountains of drag hanging from the picture rail and lining the walls and the enormous blond bouffant wig that Hush had created was perched on top of the telly. Things had changed since we’d met Miss Hush. He’d sold us old costumes that he no longer had any use for, including a pair of crinolines complete with hoops that were now wedged behind the bathroom door. Hush pointed me in the direction of Hairaisers, a wig shop on Lisson Grove that sold wigs in every colour and size including the white-blond that I’d searched in vain for. It was one of the major requirements for the look I had in mind, that of a big blonde hard-bitten slapper. He also made us new costumes quickly and cheaply, much to Chrissie’s annoyance who had been made redundant since Anne had reclaimed her Singer sewing machine.
After a couple of months living together in what was beginning to feel like a theatrical hire shop we were really getting on each other’s nerves. All those petty grievances that had been simmering away suddenly erupted, resulting in a punch-up between Chrissie and me. He’d been in one of his moods and we’d had a bit of a set-to in a West End club called Scandals, for which he’d been thrown out. When I got back to the flat he jumped on me with eyes like a bedlamite, hitting me over the head with a heavy glass vase and sending blood splattering up the walls. I in turn went for him with the bread knife, fully intending to kill him before he did me, while Vera, trapped on his mattress in the middle of the room, searched frantically for his glasses that had been kicked across the floor in the struggle. The police turned up. Chrissie made a swift exit, leaving it to me to explain. He vanished into the night and across the river to stay with Lozzy in Victoria Mansions and we didn’t speak to each other for over a year.
I didn’t go home for Christmas. We had a booking at the Black Cap on Christmas Eve and another in an East End pub on Boxing Day and, believing you should never turn work down, I spent a jolly Christmas Day with Joyce and his flatmate instead of my family.
I was growing increasingly unhappy living at Edna’s. Not being one of nature’s squatters, I was tired of lying to the persistently inquisitive neighbours and living in constant fear of a knock at the door. My new year resolution was to find a flat, but although bookings had increased we still weren’t earning a lot of money from the act and I certainly couldn’t afford to give up the day job yet. Still, there were some good offers of work for the coming year: a three-week tour of the north and a month in a club in Denmark plus the bookings we had in town. Maybe things were starting to look up after all.
On New Year’s Eve I dropped in on a family I’d been working with for the last few months. After cajoling the father every day, I’d eventually worn him down. Tired of my lectures, he’d finally roused himself from his stupor on the sofa, had a shave and begun to care for his remarkable children for the first time in his life. He’d really smartened up his act and as a New Year’s Eve treat, instead of spending it in the pub, he was taking his family for a pizza and then on to a firework display. The flat was tidy, the kids were happy and there was food in the fridge and I knew that I was no longer required.
This display of domestic harmony had an effect on me and I suddenly felt the urge to get in touch with my own parent. I rang her from a stuffy phone box stinking of tobacco and pee at the station before catching the tube up to Camden Town to see 1980 in at the Black Cap.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, I’m just getting ready to go out. I’m going on a cruise on the Royal Iris up and down the Mersey with a fellah I met at mass,’ she replied casually.
‘Really?’
‘Don’t talk bloody soft, I’m just about to get into my nightie and watch Murder on the Orient Express on the telly. You know I can’t bear New Year’s Eve. I’ll be glad when it’s over.’
So would I. New Year’s Eve made me fretful. Whatever I was doing, as I waited for the clock to chime midnight, I was always tense, and in the back of my mind there was a niggling suspicion that I wasn’t having quite as good a time as I should be and that somewhere else a wild party was in full swing that I was missing out on. Tonight was a big one: the dawn of a new decade. I really felt that instead of standing pressed against a wall with half a pint of lukewarm cider in a Black Cap packed with people I hardly knew, I should be celebrating in the grand style, dancing on a table perhaps, drunk on champagne at somewhere like the Café de Paris, the air thick with balloons, streamers and champagne corks, with all my friends and family around me, dancing frantically to a big band.
‘You shouldn’t be staying in on your own tonight,’ I said, suddenly saddened by the thought of her alone on New Year’s Eve. ‘Why don’t you go up to Aunty Anne and Chrissie’s or our Sheila’s?’
‘Oh, I can’t be bothered,’ she moaned. ‘Annie and Chrissie bugger off to bed by nine and I’m not hiking up to Sheila’s. No, I’m quite happy here, thank you.’
‘Talking of which,’ she said, completely changing the subject, ‘that Penelope Keith’s on the telly tonight in some rubbish called Goodbye to the Seventies. D’ya think she’s really that posh or is she just putting it on? She makes th
e Queen sound like she was dragged up in Back Exmouth Street.’
‘No, I think she talks like that all the time. Anyway, I haven’t rung up to talk about Penelope Keith, I’m ringing to wish you all the best before I go out.’
‘Oh, aye. And where are you off tomcatting it tonight, may I ask?’
‘Oh, just a pub with Alan and a couple of friends in Camden Town.’
‘Camden Town, eh? You’re certainly living the highlife down there. Well, enjoy yourself. Just make sure you keep out of trouble.’
‘I’m only going for a drink.’
‘Exactly. You could get into trouble in an empty house. It’s your middle name.’
‘Happy new year, Mam.’
‘Happy new year, son.’
Outside the Black Cap a fairly well-dressed man standing at the bus stop was berating the revellers as they queued to get in.
‘You’re all living on borrowed time,’ he roared. ‘The day of reckoning will soon be upon you, forcing all sodomites to repent their sins.’
‘Good luck to you,’ a chirpy little Irish queen shouted back from the queue.
‘Look at them,’ he ranted. ‘Blind, every one of you, as blind as the poor fools on the Titanic, playing games, blissfully unaware that the ship is about to go down.’
‘Ah, shut your mouth and go home, you’re pissed,’ someone shouted out.
‘You’re all doomed, can’t you see? Doomed,’ he carried on, unabashed. ‘The storm clouds are looming, death is imminent.’
‘Now let me guess,’ a familiar voice said in my ear. ‘She’s either a) blind drunk or insane, probably both; b) a religious fanatic; or c) a journalist for the Daily Mail.’ It was Reg, dragging a suitcase and two binliners containing wigs and costumes behind him. ‘Make yourself useful, de-ah, and help me in with this lot instead of standing there listening to this maniac. Go home, de-ah,’ he shouted to the drunk, ‘you’re making a fool of yourself.’
‘No, it’s you who’s the fool,’ he muttered ominously, making a drunken sign of the cross. ‘You’re on a sinking ship.’
‘Where the fuck do you think you are, darling, Wapping?’ Reg shouted back to the amusement of the queue. He picked up a binliner, leaving the other heavier looking one and the suitcase for me to carry.
‘Shall we purchase our ticket then, my de-ar,’ he said grandly, turning to me as he swept into the pub, ‘for our passage aboard the Ship of Fools?’
At that moment something walked over my grave. Shivering in the cold night air I followed him in.
A SHORT GLOSSARY OF POLARI TERMS
Bona: good
Cod: naff
Eek: face
Jarry: food
Lallies: legs
Latty: flat, room
Naff: bad
Omi: man
Omi palone: gay man
Palone: woman
Pots: teeth
Riah: hair
Slap: make-up
Varda: look
Vogue: cigarette
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Also by Paul O’Grady
Prologue
1 The Ghosts of Holly Grove
2 Wine Lodges and Babies
3 In Which I’m Introduced to the Finer Art of Drag Artistry …
4 Formosa Street
5 The Abattoir
6 The Conny Home
7 London Calling
8 Littlehampton
9 Crouch End
10 Wedding Bells
11 On the Bash
12 A Savage Debut
13 Invading Poland
14 Manila
15 The Glamazons
A Short Glossary of Polari Terms