Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ she screamed, waking up most of Tranmere, ‘do you want to give me another heart attack?’
Quite rightly outraged at this unwelcome intrusion, she began belting me with her library book and lashing out with her feet as she tried to kick me out of bed. Dodging the blows from a large-print Jean Plaidy I attempted to explain my peculiar behaviour, hoping that she’d show a bit of mercy. She was having none of it.
‘Well, serves you right,’ she crowed, suddenly remembering to keep her voice down to a respectable level in case Dot-Next-Door heard her, ‘going to see such rubbish when you know full well that the Pope himself has condemned it. You reap what you sow, my lad. You can’t expect to get a good night’s sleep when you mess around with the devil, you know.’
She was chuckling to herself as she leaned out of the bed to drop her library book on to the floor, pausing to squint at the travel alarm clock on the cabinet beside her.
‘It’s gone midnight, you big fool,’ she yawned, attempting another jab at me with her foot. ‘And if you think you’re
lying in my bed stinking the place out with the smell of fags and that pappy-poo you’ve squirted yourself with then you’ve another think coming, mate.’
‘It’s Musk.’ I’d given up on the Aqua Manda after Aunty Chrissie had sniffed the fruit bowl, complaining that she could smell a rotten orange.
‘More like Muck, you mean. Go on, sling your hook, you’re making the place smell like a whore’s garret.’
I lay on my back resignedly folding my arms across my chest as I listened to her prattle on. I was at her mercy: it was either stay here with my ma or face Linda Blair hiding under the bed with a host of incubi and succubi next door. Linda Blair was beginning to look like the hot favourite.
‘People have become possessed by demons after sitting through that filth, you know,’ she went on, warming to her theme. ‘Mind you, not that there’s much room left inside your soul for any more of Lucifer’s henchmen, the place must be chock-a-block by now.’
She was enjoying herself, wringing every last drop that she could get out of the situation.
‘You want to get yourself down to church instead of sitting in picture houses that show films that are not only blasphemous but downright pornographic.’
‘It wasn’t pornographic.’
‘
Not pornogra
…’ she spluttered, raising her voice a couple of octaves. ‘Well then, kindly tell me what you’d call the sight of a young girl effing and blinding and shoving a holy crucifix up her you-know-what?’
Her outraged face was shiny from the use of one of Avon’s night-time preparations and her hair was wrapped carelessly in a chiffon headscarf, with a blue plastic roller that had been randomly attached to a strand of hair poking out in front. She
never slept with the curtains drawn or the door closed. Both were always left wide open, not that the curtains would have been of much use to block out the light if she’d bothered; they were made of thin fibreglass and failed to meet in the middle by a good six inches. She’d bought them off the peg in Birkenhead Market to replace the heavier ones that kept the sun out when my dad was on nights and trying to sleep during the day, but she’d got the measurements wrong. However, since she quite liked the ‘mod’ design (black squares and oblongs on a turquoise background) she’d kept them.
‘I’ll have to take another Valium now,’ she snapped. ‘Me other one’s worn off thanks to you waking me up, you know I haven’t slept well since your father died.’
My father had been dead six months. My mother had been rushed to hospital after suffering a near-fatal heart attack and my father, on being told by the doctor that there wasn’t much chance that she’d survive, had had one himself and died that night. On the day of his funeral my mother, still seriously ill and forbidden by the doctors to make the journey to Landican Cemetery to bury her husband, lay numb with shock in her hospital bed, her sister Chrissie tight-lipped and grim-faced in a chair beside her. His funeral had been quite an affair. St Werburgh’s church was packed to the rafters, the Knights of St Columba had turned out in force as had half of Ireland, or so it seemed, and it was touching to see so many of the elderly people he’d visited regularly over the years as a Knight present as well.
After the funeral I’d gone to live with the aunties, Annie and Chrissie, in Prenton, not being trusted to live on my own in 23 Holly Grove. I didn’t object as I no longer cared, going about my daily business like an automaton. My clubbing days were behind me, my mood too bleak to even begin to
contemplate a night out at Sadie’s or the Bear’s Paw. I had a peculiar yet, to my mind, satisfactory sensation that I was fading, all colour and light slowly bleeding away from me until I was nothing more than a grey shadow, a monochrome ghost that would very soon evaporate into thin air.
My boss, Joe Black at the Magistrates’ Courts, must have noticed that something was wrong, judging by the number of times he called me into his office to ask if everything was OK. He’d been particularly solicitous since my father’s death and was aware of rumours that I’d got a woman in the Court Collecting Office pregnant.
‘You’re going around with the weight of the world on your shoulders, lad,’ he said, ‘and I find it unsettling that these days I always know where you are. I no longer have to tell you to stop chattering and get on with your work. It’s so not like you, Paul, you seem to have lost your spark, so if there’s anything at all, anything that you want to get off your chest, you know you can always talk to me. I’m pretty unshockable, you know.’
I contemplated this invitation to look upon Joe’s office as the confessional for a moment before uncharacteristically deciding to spill the beans, so to speak.
‘Well …’ I started slow, ‘I know my mum, who’s still in hospital, blames me for my dad’s heart attack and subsequent death, as does my aunty Chrissie, other members of the family and indeed myself. The rumours doing the rounds are all true. Diane from the Court Collecting Office is pregnant and I’m the father.’
‘Yes, I was aware of the situation,’ he said, sitting back in his chair and taking his glasses off while he had a think. ‘Have you two any intention of getting married?’
‘No, Mr Black, there’s no chance of that happening. You see, I’m … erm … well, I’m gay.’
‘I’ll get back to work then, thanks for the chat.’
‘Yes, yes, you do that.’
Poor Joe, well, he did offer a sympathetic ear for me to offload my woes into.
My mother was in hospital for quite some time. Before returning home she spent a few weeks convalescing at Arrowe Hall, a beautiful mansion in the middle of Arrowe park. When she was finally discharged she stayed with Annie and Chrissie, and living under the same roof as the three of them was akin to sharing lodgings with the three witches from the Scottish play that a superstitious nature inherited from the same three women forbids me to name. My mother’s grief had turned to fury and it felt as though I’d become her whipping boy. Chrissie was as brittle as spun sugar and snappier than a turtle with toothache and it was best to try and keep out of her way, while Aunty Anne sat quietly reading her
Sunday Post
engulfed in a pervading cloud of doom. Butlin’s it wasn’t but however uncomfortable and tense the atmosphere became at times it was infinitely preferable to going back to Holly Grove and being alone with my ma.
When she finally felt it was time to go home I tried desperately to be the model son, even going so far as to decorate the small front bedroom a somnolent shade of lilac to match a poster I’d bought in a trendy new shop on Borough Road. I discovered as I lashed emulsion haphazardly around the walls that painting and decorating wasn’t my forte – it probably
took less time to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel than it did that tiny bedroom – nevertheless my mother was delighted with it, remarking that the shade reminded her of Lent. Inspired by my bout of home improvement, she took a trip to this trendy little shop that I was forever singing the praises of to buy a very modern white cabinet for the middle room on which she arranged a few iridescent orange fruit dishes and plates – all that was left of a Carnival Ware tea set my uncle Hal had brought back from Hong Kong – a plastic statue of Our Lady filled with Lourdes water and her pots of medication (‘me tablets’) in a neat little line.
We were getting on better now. At first I could do no right and we fought constantly until eventually with the passing of time we settled into an uneasy truce, her anger finally abating as gradually she began to search for some form of normality and adapt to life without my father. Now here we were in bed together. The last time I’d done this I was a small boy on New Year’s Eve, listening to the ships on the river sounding their foghorns to welcome in the new year. It was a reassuring yet melancholy sound to my young ears as I drifted off to sleep dreaming of Popeye. Nowadays the river was a lot quieter, the only foghorn to be heard coming from the battleship lying next to me.
She yawned violently. ‘You’ll never guess who I bumped into in Birkenhead Market,’ she said, recovering from the ferocity of the yawn and gently smacking her lips.
‘Who?’
‘Go on, guess.’
‘I can’t be bothered, Mam. Who?’
‘That’s your trouble, you can’t be bothered. Well, I’ll tell you who it was. It was Eileen Henshaw.’
*
Eileen was extremely proud of her son and would sing his praises in the shop, much to my ma’s annoyance. At the age of eight, with the confidence born of a precocious brat, I naturally assumed that every adult I came into contact with would fall instantly in love with me. If I sensed that I didn’t quite have them in the bag then there was a range of tricks up my sleeve to bedazzle and charm … that beautiful smile, that face of a cheeky angel. How could the suckers resist? Eileen could, and did. She was impervious to my charms, probably because each time she looked at me she saw my ma’s perpetually overdue paper bill.
I can instantly recall those excruciating moments spent squirming in front of the refrigerated counter while Eileen enquired in a voice that could be heard down in Cammell Laird’s workshop if my mother had any intention of paying her paper bill in the near future. My mother was not very good when it came to managing money. It slipped through her fingers like water, not that there was an abundance of it in the first place. She could never seem to balance the books and, as she admitted herself, ‘As soon as I’ve got me wages off your dad and in me purse it vanishes like fairy gold.’ Consequently the paper bill at Henshaw’s slowly mounted up until eventually Eileen, quite justifiably, snapped and felt compelled to tell me to pass on a reminder of the outstanding debt to my
mother. At the time I’d crawl out of the shop, all eyes upon me, or so I imagined, my face burning with shame, to convey Eileen’s message to my ma. It would have an effect on her similar to lighting the blue touch paper on an atomic bomb.
As a means of revenge my mother, on the occasions when her paper bill was up to date, meaning that she could enter the shop in the knowledge that she was, albeit temporarily, in the black, would slyly make disparaging remarks about George’s succulent home-boiled ham and roast beef. Pointing towards the offending objects and sniffing disdainfully, she would enquire of Eileen, ‘Is that ham fresh?’
The gauntlet thrown down, Eileen would take up the challenge and a gentle battle of eyebrows arched and teeth clenched would commence. There was no love lost between them, particularly after I was sacked from my job as their paper boy. When I broke that news to my ma, she stood at the kitchen stove like Eleanor of Aquitaine with a chip pan, furiously shaking it as she ranted. Eventually there was nothing left of the crinkle-cut chips inside but cremated splinters that took the roof of your mouth off even though you’d softened the blow by slathering them in Daddie’s Sauce and vinegar and then wrapping them inside half a slice of buttered Mother’s Pride.
‘She was sympathetic about your dad, said how sorry she was,’ she said quietly. ‘We had quite a nice chat.’
She lay on her side with her back to me, thinking and looking up at the window.
‘She’s a decent woman, Eileen Henshaw,’ she said after a moment. ‘Grafted hard every day of her life running that shop.’ She sighed long and deep before picking up the thread again. ‘And I don’t bloody blame her for sacking you as her
paper lad when I think about it now,’ she added. ‘That could have been a job for life if you’d played your cards right.’
I nearly fell out of the bed. Was I hearing clearly? Could my mother actually be showering Eileen Henshaw, the very same woman who had been her sparring partner since my time began, with such glowing and tender accolades? Even taking her side and agreeing with her? Yes, she could and she was, and, being as contrary as the rich woman’s cat, she did.
‘A job for life? A paper boy?’ I sat up and stared at her, wondering if she could possibly mean what she’d just said and if she did then I was having her certified.
‘You know what I’m getting at. A job you could’ve had until you grew up and got a proper job … whenever that great day is finally going to dawn.’
I lay down, not wishing to reply to this in case it provoked further discussion on the highly contentious matter of the ‘career’, ruminating instead over how my dad’s death seemed to have healed old wounds between her and some of her fellow warhorses. Arriving home from work not long after we’d moved back into Holly Grove, I’d found Rose Long, our next-door-but-one neighbour and who my ma had fought the odd battle with over the years, washing a cup at the kitchen sink.
‘Before you take your coat off,’ she said authoritatively, putting her hand up like a border cop, ‘run up the shop and get your mam a pint of milk, she’s nearly run out, and while you’re there get a bit of something to make a butty with.’
I came back bearing the milk and a quarter of corned beef for the butty to find Rose and my ma, old grievances and rows discreetly put behind them like the cushions on the sofa on which both ladies now sat, enjoying their tea and each other’s reminiscences as they played ‘remember when’.