by Liam Livings
“Thanks.” I left the minibus, with a bit of paper someone had written Ross’s number on, closing the door. Took a deep breath, walked to Bruce and then started to panic. Far enough away so no one else could hear, I told him what the others had just told me. My heart was beating quickly in my chest. My hands were sweaty.
Bruce stared at me. “Calm down. It’s only five minutes.” He held my flapping hands. “The fact the others all got here in time is a miracle. I still refuse to panic. Not yet.”
I dialled the number and it went straight to voicemail, left a message, all bright and breezy about us wanting to leave, but wondering where he was, and could he please get to the minibus as soon as he got this message. I put the phone down. “How about now, are you going to panic now?”
Bruce pursed his lips. “Maybe a little bit.” He checked his watch. “Ten minutes. Keep trying. I’ll be back.” He strode off, long steps, arms moving at his sides like a power walker, head held high.
“Where you going?” I shouted after him.
“Stay there, keep trying, don’t panic.” He shouted back, still facing away from me.
Tony appeared next to me, asking what was wrong. When I told him, he put his hand on his mouth. “Shit. What are you going to do? Shall I go with Bruce? You stay here, and I’ll try his phone.”
I grabbed him by his shoulders, stared into his eyes. “We have it all under control. Go over there, have a fag. I refuse to panic about it.”
“Yes. That’s good. I’ll be over here if you need me.” He walked to where I’d pointed and lit a cigarette, playing with the packet and lighter with his hands, juggling them between his two hands.
I followed the first two of his instructions, alternating calling Ross’s number, and asking inside the minibus if anyone had heard from him, trying to keep a light airy tone to my voice, in an I just wondered, by any chance way.
Half an hour after we were due to leave, Bruce reappeared, holding a muddy hand of a very dirty looking Ross. He looked like a used tissue left out in the rain and picked up a few times and reused.
Bruce got a spare jacket from the front of the minibus and, handing it to Ross, said, “Take your T-shirt off, put that on. And if you’re lucky we’ll stop for a hot drink at a service station. And if you’re even luckier, I won’t tell your parents where I found you and what you were doing.”
Ross followed his instructions, got into the minibus, accompanied by a cheer from everyone, then was lynched by everyone asking him what he’d got up to, and why was he so late, and what was that on his jeans.
“Can I sit up front with you, or do you want me in the back, keeping order?” I asked.
Bruce patted the passenger’s seat next to him.
I put the seatbelt on, slammed the door. “What was he doing, and where did you find him?”
Bruce started the engine and, looked into the rear-view mirror, checking the float was flat packed and ready for high-speed transport. He leant over to me. “Let me put it to you like this: he was being a very enterprising lad making some money and really enjoying his work.”
“Shameless! Are you gonna tell his parents?”
“No, they’ll stop him coming to the group, which won’t help anyone. But I’m going to lend him a clean pair of trousers when we get back to the Portakabin cos his have worn right through at the knee. And then I’m going to give him a little talk about sex, and self-respect, and how many laws he was breaking in that wood, on his knees.”
I shook my head. “And I thought me and Tony had done it all.”
“I’m never surprised.”
WE DROPPED EVERYONE off at the Portakabin where they dispersed, waving and some of them thanking Bruce and me for a wicked day.
I checked everyone off my list, safely conveyed on their way home, quickly said bye to Tony with a kiss and a hug, then walked back to the empty minibus.
Bruce got back into the minibus, starting the engine. “See you next week. Get there a bit early and we can go over today. Not now, I’m knackered.”
“Where you off to now?” My eyes drooped at the thought of driving home.
“Drop this back at the council garage. Go!”
“Don’t you need me?”
“I said go. You did well today. Be proud of yourself. Staying calm. Doing everything I asked. Couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Whatever.”
“All right, don’t take the compliment then. I’ll tell you to fuck off, any better?” He paused, smiling, putting the minibus in gear. “But I mean it. Have fun in the woods, did you?” He winked.
“How did you?”
“I see and hear everything.” He tapped the side of his nose. “I’m like the stazi, a network of informers everywhere.” He waved and disappeared in a cloud of black diesel fumes.
Shit. I thought I’d got away with that, a sneaky little bit of action hidden from Bruce. I drove home exhausted from head to toe, every bone in my body aching, my eyes hardly staying open, and not driving over thirty miles per hour. But when I remembered Bruce’s words, replaying some of the events of the day, I smiled to myself, felt a warmth in my stomach, as it spread out to the rest of my body. So I somehow, from somewhere, found the energy to get home safely, and tumble through the front door, upstairs into bed, still with a smile on my face.
Chapter Forty-Two
SEPTEMBER 2000
Lovely, marvellous, efficient, doggedly determined and charming Ian had secured me a last-minute slot at a gay pub called UB7 near Heathrow airport in a village called Harmondsworth—I didn’t know you could get villages in London suburbs, but that’s what Ian had told me. Confused by the pub’s cryptic name, Ian explained it was the first half of the postcode of the area. He said one point a few years ago, there had been a craze of landlords renaming their venues along those lines, only now it looked a bit passé, and many hadn’t bothered to reinstate the original name of The Red Bull or whatever it had been originally.
So anyway, with directions from the M4 junction, turn by turn, Ian had given me, I managed to navigate my way to a white pub with a red tiled roof, a little church behind it, all in front of a village green. I parked round the back, not quite believing there would be a gay pub there, never mind one with a trio of drag acts performing on the one night.
Leaving my outfit and makeup in the car, still not believing this was the right place, I gave the blonde, red lip-sticked and busty in pink polo neck jumper and tight jeans, barmaid my name and asked whether this was the pub with the cabaret on.
She shouted to the barman, Everard, so the whole pub heard, “It’s another one of the drag queens, I’ll be upstairs showing him where to hang his knickers.” Adjusted her hair, with her very large I thought for a woman hands, she pulled her jumper down to try and conceal her bosom, but failed, then led me up a narrow staircase of red floral carpet, white walls and fake beams.
Ian had mentioned an Everard, it was ringing a bell with me now, so I still held out hope of this not being an elaborate hoax. I ducked to avoid hitting my head on the beams.
She opened the top half of a light wood stable door, to reveal two half-dressed men in dresses and makeup, sitting on old swivelling office chairs, one smoking a cigarette and the other trying on a long very blonde wig. “Should be a stool in the corner. You can leave all your stuff on the table. And if the light by the mirror packs up, give it a thump and if that doesn’t work, give the floor a thump and I’ll get Everard to come up and give it a twiddle with his screwdriver. First one’s on in an hour. I’ll bang the ceiling as a five-minute warning.” And she was gone.
We introduced ourselves. The man with the long blonde wig was Olivia Neutron Bomb, and the one with the cigarette was The Marilyn Monroe Experience. Olivia lived in a one-bedroom flat in Ealing and said she “didn’t normally come this far out into the burbs, but it was a favour to Everard, he’s trying to make this place the venue to come to in UB7.”
“Are there many other gay cabaret places in UB, whatever it was
?” I asked, hopefully, but sort of already knowing the answer.
“Just here.”
As I thought about that, I nipped back to my car to collect my makeup and clothes. Apparently, the MM Experience had just come from staying at her boyfriend Paulo’s place and this was the second time she’d done this venue.
I sat next to her. “How exotic. Where’s Paulo from?” I asked, imagining an exotic Spanish lover. Mi chico Latino and cheeky smiles as I set up my makeup and clothes on the coffee table then sat on the third seen better days, grey swivelling old office chair.
“Windsor. Well, Slough actually, but he likes to say it’s Windsor. He’s an old queen, a neighbour of The Queen,” she laughed.
So much for mi chico Latino then. I turned to the mirror.
I LISTENED THROUGH the floor as the other two went on before me, both to uproarious applause. Olivia, once she’d warmed them up with some songs from Grease, went on to sing a few from Xanadu, which was, in her words, “A bat shit crazy musical Olivia did, with ELO. Shitty film, amazing soundtrack.”
I recognised the title track and found myself tapping my foot to the other song she sang.
Marilyn was very predictable, but who said predictable has anything wrong with it? They were promised a Marilyn drag queen, and that’s what they got. “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”, “Happy Birthday Mister President” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, which I hadn’t heard before and as she was humming it in the changing room, she’d explained “From Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, the film, love. If you’ve not seen it, you need to. It’s full of material for an artiste like yourself.”
So, I’d made a note to hire the video from the library when I got home or ask Ian about it.
Now, she was coming to the end of the Baby Jane song, and I knew it was me on next. After careful discussion with Ian, I’d decided to make a feature of being from the provinces, way out west, in the sticks. So I emphasised my slight west country burr, adding a bit of Bristol accent for good measure. And after a few bits about how I was sorry I wasn’t who they’d been expecting, but the drag queen who was due to appear had been involved in a very unfortunate accident, she’d fallen off a roofer and damaged her back, my first song was “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No” from Oklahoma! which I sang in the style of the naive character from the musical, who I’d always loved. I soon had them joining me, walking from side to side of the stage, and singing along with the chorus.
After a round of applause, I tried a bit of audience banter, I’d prepared. “Where is this exactly?” I peered to the back of the audience.
“UB7 you twat!” someone shouted.
“I know that, but I was told it’s a village, but it’s just outside Heathrow airport, and right next to two motorways. Where I come from, a village has one bus in the morning and one in the evening and a postman cycling around on his bike every morning.”
“Where do you live, in the sixties, love?” The same person shouted from the back.
“No, fair comment. But I’m sorry. Call me old-fashioned, call me a bit simple, but really, how far away is London. Proper London, not suburban London. Cos I looked on a map and it looks bloody miles away. I asked the barmaid actually. Lovely girl. I’d give her a job as my sidekick, she’d make me look more like a woman.”
That got a laugh. And a shout of “Fuck off cheeky!” from the barmaid, who was leaning on the bar, resting her large pendulous bosoms on the bar next to the beer pumps, and filing her bright pink nails.
“Lovely girl, she said it was almost an hour. Almost an hour to get to London. I live in a little village outside Salisbury and I can get to London in not much over an hour. Is there some magic time warp once you get inside the M25 where time stretches to go a few miles? Cos it goes on and on and on doesn’t it, London? I went up Bristol the other week, that’s posh where I’m from, that’s a proper day shopping. When I told my neighbours I was up London tonight—cos as far as I was concerned it was up London, you’d have thought I’d said I was flying to the moon in my bra. They shook their heads, said what did I want to go doing that for. Hadn’t I gone to the pubs and clubs in Bristol?”
The audience laughed.
“Sir, you at the front, where do you live?”
“Hayes.” This was followed by a few boos and a few cheers.
“Interesting reaction. Is that a place? They make those manuals for cars, don’t they?”
Some laughs from the front.
“I dunno how you do it, the tube, trains, all the walking you have to do. I came up London—proper London, not out here near the M25 London—to visit my friend at uni. Well, I ask you, getting there on the train and tube I was worn out already. Then we went up that Oxford street shopping. Anyone done that, have you?”
Some shouts of yes from the audience.
“Innit long? Eh, that Oxford street. Innit long? The length of it we walked, and he said there was all these other places too, some garden or another, and this high street and that high street. How’d you know which one to go to? Back home, it’s into town—tat’s Salisbury for me—or you go posh and go up Bristol, and that’s it. Those are your two choices. I’ve never walked so far when I went to London. All day, walking to the train, walking on the tube. What’s the bloody point of the tube if you’ve still gotta walk nearly as far as if you’d stayed above ground, in the natural air, and not gone underground with all the dirt and coughing people? Eh, tell me that?” I continued in this vein for a while, the audience were eventually laughing and shouting for more. I stood as they shouted and clapped, then said, “Who wants a classic? I wanted to end on something you’d remember me for.” I paused, put my hands either side of my head, nodded to the music man and waited for the instrumental intro, then sang, “It won’t be easy, you’ll think it’s strange…” to applause and cheers from the whole pub.
I knew it was the right song to end a night of camp cabaret on—“Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”—and I wasn’t disappointed. I sang it twice, the second time, the whole pub stood singing with me, and doing the moves I’d learned from the film with Madonna, the audience were all holding their arms either side of their heads. I was so pleased I’d put in the extra rehearsal hours getting the moves and words perfect. Ian had said, “Oh darling, think of it like a get-out-of-jail-free card. If you’re dying on stage, you can pull this out, and you’ll have them eating out of your hand. No gay pub in the land will resist that chorus, love. Trust me.” And I had, and it was working now, on stage in that little pub in some village on the outskirts of London, the whole pub, all the gays, all the lesbians, all the bisexuals, all the transgender, even the arsey barmaid were all doing the moves and singing the words to the song I was doing on stage now. And that was a pretty amazing feeling.
AS I LEFT, I said goodbye to Olivia and Marilyn, promising to keep in touch, then having changed back into my normal clothes, the barmaid handed me a business card with the pub’s details she’d fished out of her ample cleavage. “Come back if you fancy. Everard said you filled in the gap well. Better than he thought.”
Better than he thought, now that’s something to put on my business cards, not. Book Kev, he’ll be better than you think. Marvellous. I smiled at her and put the card down my top, but since I wasn’t wearing a bra or breasts, it fell straight through onto the floor. Picking it up with a laugh I mentioned the fee.
She laughed, said something about the till being locked and could she send me a cheque?
I’d been here before, and Ian always arranged for payment on the night, unless he told me otherwise. He hadn’t told me otherwise, so it was payment on the night. “Can I speak to Everard please?”
“He’s busy.”
“I’ll wait. I’ve got all night.” I didn’t have all night, and really wanted my own bed, but the alternative of endless unanswered phone calls chasing the money was too much to bear, so I stood, propping myself up against my suitcases next to the bar.
She disappeared, spoke to Everard who was
talking to some customers at the other end of the bar. She returned shaking her head. “He says cos you were last minute, he’s not got the cash to pay you. Not tonight. He didn’t think you were coming, so he only had the money for the others, I’m afraid. He will send you a cheque as soon as possible. If not before.”
Leaving my suitcases where they were, I marched round the bar to Everard, a dumpy man with a terrible fitting brown toupee. I rapped my nails on the bar until I got his attention. “Hello, love. I am very sorry, but I’m afraid I won’t be leaving until I get my fee. As much as I love this, it is my job, so if I don’t get paid, I don’t put petrol in my car, pay my rent, buy food. You know, those mad luxuries like that.”
“Sorry, love, but I’ve not got enough. She’s told you.”
I was on the verge of giving up, agreeing to a cheque, and getting in my car and leaving. And then I remembered the pig of a journey I’d had, the pretty piss poor changing area, and the long drive home in front of me. “I’ll take what cash you have and a cheque for the rest.”
Making a big show of having to stop talking to his customers, he walked to the till and started counting notes. He returned with my whole fee, less sixty-five pounds.
I took it with a smile. “I’m not implying anything of you or your establishment, but you must appreciate I’ve been in this unfortunate situation before. It’s embarrassing for me, and for you, and it gets so much more embarrassing if I have to chase payment. It’s so distasteful. Especially if you’d like me to come back. Would you?”
He nodded, then leant forward and said very quietly, “Fair play to you. I asked her to give it a go. I would have paid you, but because you were new, I thought I’d leave it a bit. But you don’t let anyone take the piss. And fair play, we were trying to take the piss out of you a bit. Cheque for the rest?”
“That would be wonderful. I would say put it in the post, but it would probably defeat the point of this little segment of the evening.”