The Devil Rides Out (20 page)

I stood among the flowers in my bare feet and inhaled deeply. She was right, I had never smelt anything like it and seeing her garden illuminated by moonlight, it seemed almost magical. Time seemed to momentarily stand still and I controlled my breathing so as not to disturb the silence, staring across the Mersey, as still as a mill pond, at the lights of Liverpool in the distance. Why would I want to leave all this?

‘Mind where you’re standing,’ my mother roared in her stage whisper, emerging from the house with her secateurs, ‘you don’t want to be standing in cat shit. Now shift yourself while I dead-head that rose.’ I was going to miss moments such as these, gardening at two in the morning.

I was also going to miss Ryan. Our relationship had grown pretty intense. He was keen and didn’t want me to go to London. But I had to go, I’d promised Angela and didn’t want to let her down, her or Lozzy, who’d gone to the trouble of finding me a job in the first place. Besides, I tried to convince myself, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life working behind the bar in a bingo hall, surely I had more going for me than that?

Life was certainly a worry and on that note I went indoors and back to bed.

I wouldn’t be impolite or out of line if I was to describe the flat as a dump, for that’s what it was, but it was a cosy dump and Jamestown Road wasn’t the smart little series of bijou des reses that it is today. It was run-down and seedy and most of the properties housed sweatshops, where women were busy on sewing machines day and night. Around the corner in Arlington Road was a flophouse or, to use its correct term, a working men’s hostel where Brendan Behan had once stayed and where the drunks shouted abuse as you passed on your way to the café in Inverness Street. All in all it wasn’t the most salubrious of addresses but it was in a great location, plenty of shops, near a tube station and a stone’s throw from Regent’s Park. There was even a gay pub, the Black Cap, the self-styled ‘Palladium of Drag’.

I was in love with Camden Town. It had everything going for it as far as I was concerned and I felt totally at home there. Each morning hordes of hungover Irish navvies congregated outside the tube station, hoping to be picked for a job. There was a pet shop on Parkway that was like a zoo, selling every creature from monkeys to white mice. I can remember the window being piled high with tortoises, with a great blue and scarlet macaw keeping watch over them. Inverness Street was (and still is) a thriving fruit and veg market. It was also home to our favourite greasy spoon café, which we’d pile into every Saturday for pint mugs of steaming tea and beans on toast.

The nursing staff at the Royal Northern Hospital were mainly Irish. Nearly all of them (the women that is) sported the Purdey bob made popular by Joanna Lumley in
The New Avengers
. The trend for this pudding-basin hairstyle swept through the hospital like dysentery in a prisoner-of-war camp and while it may have suited the lovely features of Miss Lumley it didn’t have quite the same effect on a twenty-stone nurse with a face like a full moon. Still it was manageable and, more importantly, tidy so it met with the approval of the tyrannical sisters who ran the wards. Sister Woods ran the men’s surgical ward with an iron fist. Mean and wiry with a face like a plucked boiling fowl, Woody allowed no crease ever to sully a counterpane on her ward. A broken thermometer was a hanging offence and God help the poor unfortunate fool who wandered off or on to her ward without permission. She treated the patients’ visitors as a necessary evil, one that was not to be indulged for a minute extra after she’d rung the bell to indicate that visiting hours were over. She’d clear the ward quicker than a tear-gas attack simply by standing there and glowering at them.

I had my wisdom teeth out at the Northern and was under a general anaesthetic as they were impacted, and after the operation I was put in a side room on Sister Woods’s ward to recover. Anaesthetic, apart from making me ill for months afterwards, has a very strange effect on me and, like alcohol, it makes me lose all inhibitions and do and say things that even I in my worst moments wouldn’t normally dream of. Consequently, as soon as the porter’s back was turned, I escaped, running first on to the ward and exposing myself to Sister Woods before legging it down the Holloway Road, my bare backside hanging out of my hospital gown, with a couple of hysterical nurses in hot pursuit.

My worst job, apart from post-op evacuation that is, was manipulating the freshly hewn stumps of the amputees, raw and bloodied and resembling for all the world a nice joint of marbled sirloin. What I found most disturbing at first was the way the amputees would implore me to scratch imaginary itches on a foot that was no longer there.

‘You OK in there, Mrs Moore?’ I shouted behind the screens to my favourite patient, surgical stocking rolled down to her ankle to reveal her mottled leg propped up on a stool to allow her ‘bad knee’ half an hour of microwave treatment.

‘Yesh thanksh,’ she’d reply gummily, her false teeth temporarily wrapped in a clean hanky and sat on her lap to ‘give her poor gums a rest’.

A lot of male patients with sports injuries came into this department. Joss would do anything to avoid having to give ultrasound for a hernia as this involved rubbing a torch-like instrument soaked in oil round and round in a slow circular motion in the groin area. Occasionally, some of these virile young men lying spread-eagled and naked from the waist down on a bed with an appealing young woman’s hand centimetres away from their tackle couldn’t control their emotions and would find themselves with an involuntary erection.

Two of the male physiotherapists, Dennis and John, were partially sighted, one of them to the point of near blindness. Their hands, in particular their fingertips, were a remarkably accurate substitute for any ocular deficiencies. Dennis claimed that he could ‘see’ through his fingertips into the very tissue, sinew and muscle that lay under the flesh. Watching the Master at work on a patient stricken with a crippling and debilitating back injury as he probed, manipulated and applied just the right amount of pressure to certain areas until his patient, finally released from the misery of constant pain, could walk out of the hospital unaided, I could well believe it. Dennis was a real inspiration, curing a bout of painful sinusitis that I was suffering from by gently manipulating the vertebrae at the top of my spine, causing me to consider physiotherapy as a career even though I was hopelessly unqualified.

Dennis was called up to the private wards one morning as a female patient recovering from knee surgery was requiring treatment. This woman was from Holloway Prison, a stone’s throw away from the Royal Northern. The ice machine on ‘privates’ was broken and so I was sent up with a bowl of ice, Miss Handley quietly informing me as I waited for the lift that the woman I was about to meet was high security and I wasn’t to engage in conversation with her or even look at her.

‘Who is she?’

‘I can’t say, but I’ll tell you this: the woman is evil personified.’

‘Hello,’ she sang out cheerily, fixing me with dead eyes that belied her tone. ‘Have you come to look at my knee as well then?’

I started to explain, forgetting Miss Handley’s instructions outside the lift, but was silenced abruptly by Sister Brogan, a terrifying specimen of womanhood with the raw-boned features and jutting masculine jawline of a Russian peasant.

‘Shut up and get out,’ she barked, grabbing the ice off me and manoeuvring me out of the door and back into the hall. ‘There’s no need for you to be here now we’ve got the ice to bring down the inflammation, thank you very much.’

Who the hell was this woman I wasn’t allowed to speak to, I asked one of the officers on guard outside the door.

‘If I tell you, will you promise to keep your mouth shut about it?’ he said.

‘I won’t say a word,’ I lied.

‘It’s Myra Hindley.’

So that was who she was, none other than the bloody moors murderer herself, unrecognizable as the subject of the familiar mugshot of a bleached blonde child killer with dark circles under her eyes. I was glad I had been thrown out. I might have said something.

Searching for decent accommodation in London when you’re trying to exist on a limited to virtually non-existent budget is without doubt, as anyone who has experienced it can testify, one of the most soul-destroying ways to pass a winter’s evening. Each miserable night after work, Angela and I would tramp the streets of the less salubrious parts of north London to view the various flats to let from the ads at the back of the
Evening Standard
.

I recall a hovel in Highgate: they were all hovels, but this one was as welcoming as the back bedroom of 10 Rillington Place. We stood in the middle of this grim little room and listened to our prospective landlord reassure us that if Angela happened to fall pregnant he’d be more than happy to perform an abortion on the premises, a service that I assumed wasn’t included in the rent.

Our search for a home was made doubly difficult by our different sexes. Two males, fine. Two females? No problem. A male and a female? ‘Sorry, the flat’s been let.’ Landlords seemed to be under the misapprehension that as soon as a couple moved into one of their grubby rented rooms they’d start breeding like rabbits, dropping babies with the alacrity of Queen Victoria. These Rachmanesque landlords existed solely to cheat the desperate and the vulnerable like Angela and me and we’d begun to give up hope of ever finding somewhere to live. Again, it was Lozzy who came to our aid, pointing me in the direction of a supposedly reputable letting agency near Archway. I rang up first to make an appointment.

‘And how many of you are there looking for accommodation?’ an officious voice asked on the other end of the phone. I couldn’t make out if it was male or female.