Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
Thankfully Andy lay unhurt but squawking like a parrot upside down in his chair, trapped in the folds of the velvet curtain that ran around what was once the orchestra pit, while his nemesis Stephen sat shaking in his chair, what bits he could still shake, tears of laughter running down his cheeks. What could I say to him? I was roaring with laughter myself and besides, it did your heart good to see him having fun even if it was at Andy’s expense.
Stephen was a brave lad who accepted the curse of muscular dystrophy without complaint. After I’d been at the home nearly three years I came in one morning to find his mattress rolled up and his locker cleared out. I didn’t have to ask where he was, I knew what had happened by the red eyes and trembling lips of the other housemothers and fathers. It was Shelagh, a housemother unsurpassed at caring for children, who took me into the sluice and gently told me that he’d died in the night. I was devastated.
‘Where have all his pictures gone from around his bed,’ was all I could think of saying, ‘and the little radio I bought him?’
‘Mrs Dickie took them all down earlier. She wants us to take his mattress downstairs to be fumigated and—’
Before she could finish the sentence I was off in a blind rage
and down to Dickie’s office, barging in without even bothering to knock. How could she be so clinical and unfeeling towards a boy who she knew we were all so fond of?
Dickie was sat behind her desk, Stephen’s pictures of the Bay City Rollers spread out in front of her. She gave me a sad little look that silenced me in my tracks. ‘Yes I know, dear,’ she said calmly and quietly, ‘I’m so very sorry as I realize how close you were to him, we all were, but you must remember that we still have other children in our care. Their welfare comes first and foremost and we must remain professional at all times, regardless of any heartbreak. Life must go on as normal for the children’s sake. Now go and get yourself a cup of coffee and gather your wits.’
It was at that moment I realized just what a supreme nurse Mrs Dickie was. All the bullying and cajoling to motivate us, the obsession with cleanliness and high standards, it was all for the sake of the children. If hospitals today had the likes of a Mrs Dickie at the helm then I dare say there would be no such things as MRSA or E. coli; no self-respecting germ would dare put its slimy foot near any of Mrs Dickie’s wards. I’ve seen her sit up all night nursing a child who was having a severe asthma attack when she should have been off-duty, and watched her roll her sleeves up and get stuck in when we were short-staffed. The woman was a bloody legend.
I was three years working at the Conny Home, the longest I’d ever stayed in any of my jobs so far, and it was during this period that I first met Vera. Aficionados of Lily Savage will know that Vera was Lily’s sister, but how many realize that Vera actually exists? Diane and I were in one of our ‘getting on like a house on fire’ periods; we’d even spent Sharon’s first Christmas together, although if I recall rightly
we were at each other’s throats come the Queen’s Speech. However, during this relatively halcyon phase we thought we’d enter a fancy dress competition at the Bear’s Paw. Sharon was a toddler now and no longer screamed like a banshee if she was left alone in a room with me. These days she preferred to glower at me mistrustfully from her high chair, her bottom lip the size of a Suri tribeswoman’s and wobbling dangerously.
I’m not very impressed with tiny babies. Their sole purpose in life, as far as I can see, is to eat, sleep, shit and scream and turn perfectly sane and amiable adults, who once had lives of their own, into complete baby-obsessive bores (‘I’m sure she smiled at me today’ … ‘Who drank nearly a whole bottle this morning then?’ … ‘She slept all through the night, didn’t you? Yes you did, who’s a good little girl for her mummy?’ … ‘Would you like to hold her?’ etc.) and indeed I do like to hold them as long as I can give ‘em back but I much prefer them as toddlers, when they’re far more interesting. Now that Sharon was nearly two I was beginning to get over my earlier fears and even secretly finding her very appealing.
The three of us, Diane, myself and the baby, went over to a fancy dress hire shop that we’d heard of in New Brighton to see if we could find anything suitable for the Bear’s Paw’s fancy dress do. I felt quite proud pushing Sharon along the prom in her buggy, trying to pretend that Diane wasn’t with me as she trailed behind, her nose running in the biting wind, shuffling along in unsuitable footwear like an old Chinese concubine with bound feet, moaning, ‘Hang on, will you? I can’t walk very fast in these shoes.’ Why pay a small fortune for a pair of shoes that don’t fit you, are crippling to wear and are impossible to walk a couple of yards in without screaming in silent agony just because you think those killer heels
will make you the envy of every other woman on the street? I know, I know, it’s a woman’s thing … an unfathomable mystery to most men unless you happen to be a tranny or a drag queen and something I didn’t understand myself until I started forcing my size nine and a halfs into a pair of size seven mules from Huddersfield market. My feet look like quavers today, a legacy of twenty-five years of Lily bloody Savage – even though eventually, when I was earning a few bob, I started having Lily’s shoes handmade by Mr Savva of Chiltern Street and oh, the bliss of that, handmade stilettos crafted out of soft kid leather.
Our trip turned out to be a bit of a wasted journey as there wasn’t much of a selection in this drab little shop which, not surprisingly, is now long gone. There was just the usual grimy tat and dusty Am-Dram cast-offs for which you’d need a tetanus jab before you’d dare put one on. In the end we made the best of a bad job and hired two ballet dancers’ outfits, but only after Diane assured me that she’d have these two louse-ridden costumes with their greasy seams and dubious stains dry-cleaned before we wore them on the big night. I was going as Margot Fonteyn and Diane as Rudolf Nureyev, not my ideal choice, but given the circumstances and our highly limited finances there was no other choice. We sat in a café and had fish and chips before making the trek back to the flat in Bootle. The waitress made a huge fuss of Sharon, remarking to Diane while looking at me, ‘She’s the ringer of her dad, isn’t she?’ I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. To be mistaken for part of a cosy domestic scene terrified me.
Later that afternoon, when we made it back to Diane’s, she found that she had unexpected company.
‘Hiya, girl, yer downstairs neighbour opened the front door
for us and since your flat door was open we thought we’d come up and wait for yer, hope you don’t mind.’
It was Penny. Penny was one of the first ‘real’ queens I’d come across after a guy I’d met took me to the Lisbon, a Liverpool gay pub. I’d been a little wary of Penny at first, not being impressed in those not-so-distant days with men who acted like women and called themselves by female names. However, exposure to the gay scene had made me a lot more liberal-minded and less uptight, and besides, who was I to throw stones at glass houses seeing as I was now renowned in certain circles as ‘Lil’. Penny was a real character, hard as nails and always on the mooch, and if you were short of funds then you could always count on Penny to find a ‘mush’ to buy you a half of cider. Diane’s make-up was spread all over the kitchen table and Penny was carefully smearing foundation on a younger queen’s face.
‘This is me mate, Alissssssse.’ Penny drew his ‘S’s out like the snake in
The Jungle Book
. I recognized this Alice as someone I’d once refused to serve when I was working as a barman in the Bear’s Paw. He’d come in one night just before closing time absolutely out of his mind and stood swaying at the bar like an Indian fakir’s cobra, his watery eyes starting to meet in the middle behind a pair of round John Lennon specs tinted orange. He was incapable of coherent speech and clutched on to the bar top for dear life as he tried to steady himself and order a drink before a combination of booze and gravity got the better of him and he finally hit the floor with a loud slap and a low moan. I can visualize him now being helped to a bench by a couple of customers: slightly smaller than me, as thin as a lath (he made Olive Oyl look clinically obese), shoulder-length blond hair parted down the middle, the specs with lenses as thick as milk-bottle bottoms sliding down his
nose. His ensemble consisted of a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs T-shirt, skin-tight denim loons, torn and frayed at the hem, a ratty old fur coat and flip-flops. ‘Bloody drugged-up hippy,’ I sniffed, giving him a filthy look my ma and my aunty Chris would’ve been proud of.
I looked at him now, sat in Diane’s kitchen with a full face of badly applied make-up and squirming uncomfortably on a kitchen chair. Penny stood back, sucking on a tail comb, and proudly admired his handiwork.
‘I’ve always been good with make-up,’ he boasted without a hint of irony in his voice. ‘She’d easily pass as a real woman, don’t ya think? Look at her, she’s as camp as Christmas, aren’t you, queen?’
Penny spoke to Alice in the same way Hylda Baker spoke to Cynthia and it was very hard not to laugh. Alice brought a new meaning to the word ‘camp’ and at first glance it was hard to tell whether he was a girl or a boy. He peered myopically at me through blind eyes before frantically rummaging among the make-up on the table for his glasses. His face fell when he recognized me and you could see him flushing a deep shade of crimson even under the inch-thick make-up.
‘Hiya,’ he muttered, mortified with shame.
‘Hiya,’ I answered back, trying not to laugh. Little did I know that this Alice and I were to become lifelong friends (give or take a couple of years when we fell out).
‘I’ll go and wash this off and get changed,’ he mumbled, making his way to the bathroom. It was only then that Diane realized what he was wearing.
‘Get my halter top off, please,’ she shouted after him as he skulked out of sight. ‘And my earrings if you don’t mind. Honestly, bloody queens.’
‘Wot turm uz a, Lully?’ translates into ‘What time is it, Lily?’
Anyway, Diane had a bottle of wine which I convinced her to crack open and after a few glasses we all became quite matey and jolly, eventually convincing Vera (the artist formerly known as Alice) to come to the fancy dress with us. ‘I’ve never dressed up as a woman before,’ he protested. Bloody hell, you haven’t got far to go, I thought Vera, confident after a couple of glasses of Blue Nun, confessed that he’d never liked me and had always referred to me as ‘that long snotty streak of piss who always swept into Sadie’s, nose in the air, with those two other long streaks of piss trailing behind’. By the two other streaks of piss I assumed Vera meant Nina and Ron. We buried our past loathing for each other and proceeded to get on like long-lost brothers, or should I say sisters?
We came from totally different backgrounds. He’d been born in a tenement block in the Chinatown district of Liverpool, the second youngest of a large family, and as a boy
to earn a few coppers he’d minded the car of a Chinese prostitute called Miss Wong while she visited one of the Chinese gambling dens. He was very bright and extremely funny and worked at a place called the Rod Mill, making pillowcases on an industrial sewing machine and then stuffing them with feathers. What really sealed our friendship was the discovery that we shared a mutual obsession in life – going out clubbing, preferably seven nights a week and, in Vera’s case, seven afternoons as well. Yep, you’ve got to hand it to Vera. No, I mean it, you really do have to hand it to him, he’s as blind as a bat and would drop the glass otherwise.
Diane rooted out one of her sixties monstrosities for Vera to wear for the fancy dress and so, clad in a hideous full-length floral dress and straw hat complete with umbrella, he went as Mary Poppins and came second, the bastard. Diane and I were flaming, after all the effort we’d gone to we’d come nowhere. I knew from the start that we shouldn’t have gone as a couple especially in these nasty costumes – me in my cheap sateen leotard with sagging net tutu dotted with fag burns slung around my waist, wrinkled tights and scuffed ballet slippers, a child’s plastic tiara that I’d bought in Woolies pinned to an ash-blond ball of frizz that I had the nerve to call a wig; Diane in her brown and orange velvet tunic with a Coke bottle that I’d shoved down the leg of her tights, despite her many protestations, as a crude representation of Rudolf’s masculinity. During the course of the evening the Coke bottle slowly slid down her leg, finally settling at her ankle, causing people to think she had a peculiar deformity. Vera won five quid for coming second and promptly spent it all across the bar. Say what you like about Vera, he’s always first up to the bar when it comes to getting the bevvies in, providing he’s in funds.