‘Hurrah, and they are what you have been predicted as well! We will have a lawyer in the family. Praise be to God for allowing my genes to come through. Openi fu oluwa. Praise be to God!’
‘What do you mean allowing your genes to come through?’
‘Ah! Your father! This morning when we read the letter together he said, “With a criminal law degree Stephen could have a good career at the Citizen’s Advice Bureau!” Can you believe it? No, you will be a lawyer! Sometimes I think that your father’s head is not correct. Biwon shiman shine ei. That’s how he does it!’
I smiled as she hugged me. Lost in her ample bosom, I thought that this could be the start of something new, my golden ticket out of here. I didn’t care if it was a degree in criminal law or animal husbandry. It meant I could move out! Go to live in a hall of residence! Be independent! Even read my own letters first!
‘So, don’t think about work for now. You will enter college and no job will interfere. The student grant will even cover our living expenses.’ Before I could have a chance to digest those words the logo of ‘Donkey Kong’ finally appeared on screen. Mum turned around and scolded me. ‘Ay! What are you doing wasting your life with this fantastical nonse—’ But she caught herself midway through the sentence and swallowed her words. I’d never seen that happen before! I didn’t even mind getting in trouble again because I wasn’t going to need computer games to escape any more. My second life had already begun.
14
BOTH DUSTIN AND I got into Westminster Poly and we moved into the same halls in Camden together as well. They were a dump by normal standards, but my standards were quite low so the leaky toilets and drab, cluttered surroundings didn’t bother me at all. The rooms were tiny boxes big enough for a single bed, a sink and a desk. Everyone complained about them but for me – I was just pleased to have my very own room for the first time.
The students were from all different walks of life and some of them totally baffled me. I remember there was one really posh girl called Charlotte who lived down the corridor. She’d gone to Harrow but used to always wear dashikis and had dozens of bangles on her wrist. When she saw that I was living there she went and wrapped an African headscarf over her blonde hair and tried to make friends with me.
‘Hi, Stephen, I’m Charlotte. Wicked, yeah?’ She offered me her fist to touch.
‘Why are you wearing that on your head?’
‘I got it over the summer holidays when I went to Malawi. The plight of starving African children just got to me so much that I had to do something about it. I got my parents to sponsor me to go there and build a bridge.’
‘That’s nice. How does a bridge help feed the children?’ That got her.
‘Oh, everything was organized by my school. I had to get water from a well with a bucket and everything.’ I thought of Sunday and his lesson to me in baffing skills and smiled. ‘When I got there and saw these children looking up at me, I just felt so comfortable. Like I was coming home, you know? It changed me for ever. I may never wear Western clothes again.’
And then a month later she saw the film Che!, started smoking Café Crèmes and wearing a stupid beret. This was a girl who would take up any cause as long as she could wear a silly hat while doing it. Actually, the last time I saw her was a few years later in Brixton when she’d decided to really piss off her parents by becoming a squatter. She was wearing huge bomber jacket, had shaved off all her hair and was sitting by a huge sound system that was belting out dub music. She was trying to pet the feral squatter kids who were biting and scratching her back. How authentic! She must have been in heaven.
For me, being a student was an expensive business. Sure we got a grant. Sure we had accommodation provided. But that beer wasn’t going to buy itself. As such, most people took whatever jobs they could get or face the stigma of being left out of the rounds at the student bar. To help me get by I took a job working at a supermarket in Camden. I went in at entry level and my job was to go around the car park and collect the trolleys. This may seem like the world’s most futile and boring job. Collecting trolleys just so that shoppers could pick them up and disperse them again. And it was futile and boring. The only fun part was dangerously competing with my workmates to see how many trolleys we could collect together and then drive around like a caravan of rusty listing camels across the busy car park without crashing into a car, the wall or a pedestrian.
It was while working there that I got my first promotion. They promoted me to the shop floor so that at least I wouldn’t have to freeze all day outside. It wasn’t the champagne-popping experience it might have been – they made me the mince man. By which I don’t mean that I stood behind the counter saying, ‘Oooh. I like your beef,’ in the style of John Inman. No, I made the mince. I’m sure these days the supermarket holds itself to rigorous standards but back then it didn’t. The way we made mince was to take the old cuts of beef, mince them up with some fat in a grinder, and for colour? Add blood. Yum! Then we’d sell the whole lot on a half-price special and hope no one turned up with salmonella the next day.
One job that I took was actually the result of a drunken challenge. Although I’m tall and quite big now, when I was younger, I was rake thin. I virtually had a concave chest and would not have got very far in a fight. So when I noticed an advert for a job in the paper to be a security guard and told my mates about it, all of my friends laughed their heads off. So I thought that I’d show them, and applied to be a security guard on the Orient Express. And I got it.
Wow! I thought. I’d get to see the world. Mix with the glitterati. Maybe meet a rich widow who’d marry me and lead me off to a life of leisure. This was in the days before the Internet, but I should have done some research beforehand. If I’d looked into it then I would have seen that the train normally travelled from Paris to Istanbul and so when I was told to report to a railway siding in Wandsworth I should have realized that I was a bit off track. I was in fact put in charge of looking after the Orient Express trains. But when they were stationary and getting repaired in England.
It was my job to man the security booth and check the workers’ badges as they came in at eleven in the evening and then to do the same thing in the morning after they’d finished work. I literally had to sit there and say, ‘Good evening. Good evening. Good evening,’ with my head whipping back and forth to catch a glimpse of their security badges as they rushed past me, and do the same thing six hours later. There were about a hundred workers and so I developed a serious strain in my neck doing this job. Up until then I thought you could only get RSI in your wrist.
But being unqualified for a job has never stopped me from applying. After I finished university, I worked for an entire year for the Merton Housing Repair Department and you couldn’t meet a less-handy man than me. For example, about a year ago I was on a national tour and I got a flat tyre on the way to Woking. Myself, my warm-up act and the driver were all standing by the side of the road like buffoons for twenty minutes trying to figure out what to do. The tyre was definitely flat. Was there an iPhone app that could help us? What is that thing in the boot? Is it a jack? Is it a wingnut? Is it a batwing? Could we call Batman to help us? We felt like those apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey when they find the monolith. We ended up calling the RAC.
My point is that I’m not mechanically minded and I’m not repair minded either. Which is why I’m amazed that I managed to get the job at the Council. It was up to me to go around to people’s houses once they’d vacated for whatever reason (done a runner to avoid paying rent/drug dealer/child support), spruce the place up a bit and get it ready for the next tenant. I didn’t do the repairs myself but would go in with a bunch of burly builder types who’d do the actual work.
Sometimes the new tenant wouldn’t be very happy with the finished result. I remember one guy who called us in because he wanted a second deadlock installed on his front door. I duly went round.
‘This lock’ll never do. Anyone could break in,’ he declared while
pounding dementedly on his own front door.
‘We’re only allowed to pay for one lock. But if you want another one then you can install it yourself. It looks quite solid to me.’
‘Solid?! Solid?! This wouldn’t keep someone out for two minutes. I know that for a fact. I’m a burglar by trade.’ Well, you can’t really argue with that if you want to leave the block with the same number of fingers you had when you went in. We installed a new lock for the gentleman.
Sometimes, if they’d left in a hurry, you’d get a bizarre insight into how someone had lived their life while still a tenant. Some were quite clearly totally mad and clearly obsessive. I once had to clear out a one-bedroom flat that had been rented by a ‘creative’ madman. What this guy had done was really weird. He’d laid car tyres flat across all the floors. Then he’d laid plywood on them to raise the floor by six inches throughout (I’m sure this all makes sense when you’re tripping on acid). After that he’d had to saw off the bottom six inches of all the doors so that they could open (of course). Weirder still and completely unconnected (except I’m guessing it was very strong acid) is that he’d got someone to draw around him in red marker pen while standing against the wall. In profile with a huge erection. And if there was any doubting his clear virility, he’d traced the profile of a heavily pregnant lady in green marker on top of each of his little portraits. Going into that flat we felt like we’d entered a hall of mirrors from The Twilight Zone.
Aside from being a really good place to work if you are nosy, the people I worked with at Merton Council were great. When I told them I was leaving, they all clubbed together and got me a leaving card with twenty quid inside. It was like a Christmas present from your gran. We all went for a drink afterwards and I was sat next to my co-worker Leslie. She was really hilarious because she was in charge of rehousing the local travelling community who’d been given a strip of land to settle on. Before we went for a visit, she’d call to give them a chance to chuck all of their dubious plants in the bin in advance. As we’d arrive at the site, all of the men would be driving away since most of the tenants were registered as single mums to get their benefits. Leslie would always joke that they should just save the weed plants and offer her some next time.
At my leaving drinks, Leslie was very friendly and then all of a sudden she got very jumpy. She turned to the table and very earnestly said, ‘Something terrible’s happened. I’ve lost a wrap of speed on the floor somewhere. If you find it, it’s yours.’ And then she abruptly left. I didn’t know what speed was at the time, but suddenly all of my co-workers dived for the floor. About an hour later, I had to call a friend of mine to come and pick me up in his car as my ex-boss wouldn’t stop hugging me and telling me how much he’d miss me. I just thought – what a nice place to work!
Drugs are bad. And drugs and work do not go together. Although maybe the one place that they might go together could be Amsterdam. Somehow the place still seems to function. I don’t know how people working in coffee shops can do things like give correct change, cash up, lock up and make coffee.
I went to Amsterdam for a gig a few years ago and I was sitting in a coffee shop, smoking a joint, when some guy came in and offered anyone who wanted it a day’s work picking magic mushrooms in a city greenhouse. About a dozen stoned gap-year dropouts stumbled after him. I thought, That’s not going to be a good day for the poor kids. They’re already stoned out of their brains – I use the term loosely – and after a day of back-breaking labour that multicoloured wizard will probably pay them with a handful of spiders. They’ll be running home as fast as their tentacles can carry them. You know when you catch your brain thinking something it shouldn’t be? Well, at that point, laughing to myself uncontrollably I decided it would be best to leave the coffee shop, never smoke a spliff again and go back to my drug of choice: beer.
Working at the council was pretty good compared to some of the succession of dreadful jobs I had when I was younger. Ever since I was legally able to work I’ve always had jobs as it was the only way I could ever get any cash to spend. I once asked Mum for pocket money and she said, ‘Pocket money!? Your pocket is for your hands!’ Which is never a good thing to tell to a teenage boy with holes in his pockets. It amazed me that some parents just give their kids money. What is this mysterious allowance or payment for chores that I’d heard of? We did chores for nothing. So if I wanted anything at all I had to earn the money to get it.
One of the first things Dad told me about the world of work is that you have to pay your dues. Unfortunately, he never properly explained what ‘dues’ were. So until I was sixteen I thought your ‘dues’ were a 50 per cent tax that you had to pay to your parents every week. During school holidays, I’d have a paper round and come back in from work and Dad would say, ‘Ah! Stephen! Pay your dues!’ And I’d have to hand over twenty quid. On top of that, Mum would always open my post so she would know exactly how much I was being paid, so I couldn’t even try to be sneaky with my wages. By the time I was fourteen, all of my friends were building treehouses and Scalextric sets. I was the only one building my own letter box.
At Olympus Sports, where I met Viola, I got to earn a little bit and I got to spend a couple of months out of the house. However, it was really badly paid and so, as soon as I’d earned enough to buy a few pairs of trainers, I told the manager to go fuck himself and I quit. My dad had always told me that nothing felt better than having a job. He was wrong. Nothing feels better than quitting a job and telling your boss to go fuck himself. Actually, the manager wasn’t a bad guy at all.
My record for the shortest time in employment is two hours. It was another job I’d had while at university and I’d been hired to work in the kitchen at a local greasy spoon café. Even though it was my first day on the job I admit that I had been out the night before and I was really hungover. Not only that but I’d pulled the night before and there was a nice warm person in my bed at home while I was in a hot smelly kitchen, cracking eggs onto a skillet with a pounding headache. Now this was no gourmet affair but the chef acted like he was Gordon Ramsay, running around the tiny kitchen with a bandana round his head shouting, ‘Service!’ Which meant two builder’s teas and a bacon sarnie. He was halfway through earnestly teaching me how to butter bread when I thought, Stephen! Is this really worth the £3.50 an hour? It wasn’t. I quit.
The very worst job I ever had was when I was sixteen and employed as a door-to-door salesman selling tea towels. It was unbelievable. The boss would pick us all up in a van and drop us off at the bottom of a long street and pick us up at the other end. I don’t think I ever sold one tea towel. I mean, think about it. I was going to peoples’ homes, the one place where they are likely to have a lot of tea towels, and offering to sell them more tea towels. It’s like offering to sell dough to a baker. Plus, if you picture the scene, this was the late eighties and I was a pimply black teenager ringing on strangers’ doors. Let’s just say that even though I must have looked like a desperate orphan boy, no one greeted me with open arms. It was more open suspicion. The boss was like a cross between a gang master and the child catcher and I was basically playing a shit version of the children’s game ‘knock and run’, where I always got caught.
I’ve quit a lot of jobs in my time but there is only one job that I actually managed to get fired from. I loved animals, but as a kid I could never have any kind of pets as my Mum and Dad hated anything that lived and required feeding that couldn’t eventually be expected to earn a living for them. I was still living at home at the time and, when I saw a job in the local paper for a vet’s assistant, I applied for it and got it. Looking back, I’m glad that I just got fired and not prosecuted or condemned to hell. I will never get my hands dirty like that again.
The title ‘vet’s assistant’ turned out to be a bit of an overstatement for the actual role I was given. This was a South London vet and so we were basically like an extermination and sterilization camp for dogs that couldn’t cut it in the illegal-fighting clubs of Tooti
ng any more, or for cats who’d outgrown their litter boxes. The animals would be put down humanely by the vet and it was my job to store them in the freezer until they were collected once a week and incinerated. It was a horrible job, but I was saving to buy a car at the time so I just put up with it. I never actually saved enough to buy a car until I was in my twenties but it was a goal. You’ll take any job when you’re young if a babe-magnet on wheels is the prize you’re working towards.
My only consolation was trying to arrange the animals into peaceful poses so that when the time came for them to be picked up they weren’t frozen into weird shapes. I felt a bit like a deepfreeze taxidermist. Or the doggie Damien Hirst. Looking back, I can’t believe that I put up with it. Anyway, the job was going on in a business-as-usual way with a steady stream of spayings and slayings and little Samson the Cheshire cat had just gone up to kitty heaven. The little guy was nestled in the freezer ready to be picked up the next day for cremation when we got a call from the owner. Her daughter wanted to see little Samson one last time.
When you first start out in the world of work you can take the whole ‘customer is always right’ thing too far. Or maybe you’ve not had the experience of trying to defrost a dead cat to teach you how to say, ‘No. You’ve had your cat put down. You should have thought of your daughter’s feelings beforehand.’ But when you’re seventeen and thinking about how sad it must be for the daughter not to have seen her favourite pet before its untimely death you say, ‘Sure thing. Come on in before the end of the day’, and get busy with the hairdryers. After two hours, I really felt like some kind of evil serial killer or a witch doctor. And then a miracle: Samson came back to life! No, he didn’t. I’m not Jesus.
Samson looked like he’d had a very bad day at the hairdresser’s and the whole vet’s reception smelled like dead biscuit. Sort of dry and soggy at the same time. When the woman and her daughter came on this scene, it wasn’t a pretty sight and, once the child started screaming and crying, it got a lot worse. The vet came out to see what all the commotion was about and he fired me on the spot. It was a total relief to get out of there because what started out as a totally good intention had spiralled way out of hand. It was like if you were to innocently sponsor an African child only to have a teenaged Idi Amin turn up at your door proclaiming, ‘Mummy! Daddy!’ (well, rather that than have him attempt to eat your friends and family).
I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey Page 14