The Devil Rides Out (31 page)

B
ACK AT WORK
, I
FOUND MYSELF CARING FOR THREE SISTERS
recently abandoned by their mother in a Swiss Cottage slum of unimaginable squalor. I arrived to find Maura opening every window in the flat in a vain attempt to get rid of the overwhelming stench of poverty and neglect. Our kitchen in Crouch End could get in a state, with the sink frequently piled high with abandoned dirty dishes and the odd dried-out tea bag hanging from the leaning tower of crockery by way of ornamentation, but I’d never seen anything in my life like the kitchen I was standing in. You couldn’t even see the sink for the mountain of plates and rotten debris that covered it, pouring over the side and on to the floor. What little food there was in the broken old fridge was moving, having decomposed months ago, the packet of cheap supermarket mince now a breeding ground for a teeming mass of maggots. The smell took your breath away and I rushed back outside to throw up, Maura close behind me.

The three little girls had obviously been pitifully neglected and, in addition to the many bruises and welts on their emaciated frames, they were crawling with nits and scabies, which they promptly passed on to me.

As promised, the Blitz Squad lived up to their name and I moved in with the girls. Understandably, after a lifetime of abuse and finally finding themselves free from the tyranny of their mother, they transformed from timid little mice into spitting, hissing, hair-pulling hell-cats. Finding foster parents for this tribe wasn’t going to be easy and my heart sank at the realization that my stay in Swiss Cottage might not be a short one.

Since the girls had never been to the theatre I thought it might be nice to take them to see
Annie
at the Victoria Palace. Maybe they’d relate to the story of the plucky orphan girl who overcame adversity to find happiness with a new father? After the debacle with the Robinsons at
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
I made sure that I sat behind the girls so I could keep an eye on their every move, just in case they fancied getting up on stage and joining in ‘It’s The Hard-Knock Life’. Miss Hannigan, the irascible drunk who ran the orphanage, played to perfection by Sheila Hancock, struck a chord with me when she vented her frustration in the song ‘Little Girls’. I could empathize with this poor woman, driven to the end of her rope by the monsters in her charge, and offered up a silent prayer that the same fate wouldn’t befall me.

Their social worker was going to love me.

‘Who are you staring at?’ I asked, aware that Amy, the youngest girl, had been studying me intently for the last five minutes, a habit in children that gives me the creeps. It’s like they know something you don’t.

‘You should be Miss Hannigan,’ the Midwich Cuckoo came out of her trance to observe.

Charming. So this was how the child saw me: an old pisspot with an evil temper, and female to boot.

‘No you should, you’d be good.’

Was my slip showing or something?

I remembered this conversation on the bus twenty years later, in my dressing room at the Victoria Palace, larding on the slap to play Miss Hannigan in the 1998 revival of
Annie
. The child was a prophetess.

I’d worked so many hours since becoming a peripatetic that I wasn’t surprised to find out I was owed over four months’ time off in lieu. It’s all very well having lots of time off if you’ve plenty of money but as usual I was skint, so I got the Access card out of hiding to buy presents and together with Vera returned home for an extended Christmas break. The weather was foul, I was housebound thanks to a heavy fall of snow and trapped with my ma for a memorable couple of days with no electricity and water cascading through the bedroom ceilings from the pipes in the loft which had burst, as they always did whenever the temperature dropped. My cup runneth over.

Towards the middle of January, Maura rang to ask if I’d consider coming back to work early as a job had come up she really needed me for. It was the usual story: mother in hospital leaving a two-year-old and an eighteen-month-old baby, lovely little kiddies, at risk … It would be better if a man went in as there was a history of violence with the father.

‘Didn’t you get my letter of resignation?’ I asked her.

‘Of course I did, but I took no notice and put it in the bin. It’s the weather getting you down, that’s all,’ she replied, adding hopefully, ‘So we’ll see you on Monday then?’

And so I went back, and moved into a furnished rat-hole in Camden Town to look after the two ‘lovely little kiddies’. Two nights later the father, on the run from the police, turned up drunk and, mistaking me for his girlfriend’s latest squeeze, tried to kill me. I locked myself in the bathroom with the two kids, who by now were extremely distressed, and prayed the door would hold, leaning heavily against it as he tried to kick it down. Thankfully he gave up after a while, transferring his attentions to the room next door.

‘I’m going to burn the fucking place down,’ I could hear him ranting as he smashed up the furniture. ‘D’you hear me? Burn it down to the ground.’

So here I was, trudging along Camden High Street in heavy snow at ten o’clock on a Sunday evening, carrying two frightened kids wrapped in towels and searching for a phone box that hadn’t been vandalized. The Pearl White of the Peripatetics. All I needed was an ice floe to cling to with a couple of wolves howling in the distance. Whoever said that the streets of London were paved with gold obviously hadn’t visited Camden Town. The streets were paved with dog shit and drunks, plastic bin bags filled with festering rubbish piled high on the pavement spilling over into the road. The bin men, or refuse collectors if you like, along with just about everybody else were on strike.

‘First you can’t get your hands on a bloody loaf,’ my mother had said on the phone, ‘now you can’t even bury your dead. Bloody gravediggers going on strike, there’s coffins piled high up in Landican Cemetery and you can’t get a space in the mortuaries and funeral parlours for love nor money. I hope I don’t drop dead in the next couple of weeks, that’s all I can say. We’ll be overrun with rats next and what’s that Callaghan doing about it? Sweet bugger all, that’s what.’

‘Earning a living,’ I shouted back. They must’ve thought I was a courier for a baby farmer. While I waited for the police the manager got me a drink and an orange juice for the two-year-old, who was bawling his head off. The baby, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the noise and commotion coming from the club and slept contentedly in my arms, Adam and the Ants seemingly having a soporific effect on him.

The police came and took us off to a children’s home in Hampstead. As I had left my coat behind in my haste to get away from the kids’ father I had no money and no means of getting home to Crouch End, but the police were unsympathetic. ‘Sorry,’ one of them said as they were leaving, ‘but we’re not a taxi service.’ The woman who ran the home rang for a cab and lent me a fiver. Why did Maura have to go and ignore my resignation?

I hammered on the flat door for ages until eventually Rip Van Vera was roused from his slumber. I could hear him squawking, ‘Hang on, hang on, will ya,’ as he made his way to the door. He had on a knee-length baggy T-shirt with ‘Oh Bondage, up yours!’ written on the front and a pair of flip-flops. He looked like Gandhi at a Sex Pistols concert.

‘What’s happened?’ he quacked, firing a barrage of questions at me. ‘I thought you were at work? Where’s your keys? And your coat? What’s gone off?’

Huddled over the feeble gas fire in the bedroom, sucking on a cig for warmth, I briefly explained.

‘Who?’

‘Ryan. He wants you to ring him, I’ve got his number for you.’

Ryan, as you may recall, was my old squeeze from Liverpool. He was in London for a few days and we arranged to meet for a drink. I hadn’t seen him since his last visit to London when I’d rudely given him the cold shoulder and I wondered how our relationship stood.

Would we pick up where we left off in Liverpool in spite of my treatment of him or were we now ‘just good friends’? He seemed more than happy to see me but I got the impression the Love Boat had capsized and we were sailing into different waters on the good ship Platonic. As the night drew on I began to regret letting this one slip through my fingers and wondered if it wasn’t too late to patch things up.

Ryan was going back to the Far East to work for an oil company in Manila and he was insistent that I should join him in the summer. Was this the offer of a reconciliation? I couldn’t tell, he was so hard to read. Anyway, whatever the outcome, a chance to visit a place as exotic as the Philippines was hard to turn down and the more I thought about it the more determined I was to get there.

After spending twenty-four hours cocooned on a plane the riot that was Manila airport came as a complete culture shock. It was overwhelming. The first thing to hit me was the heat, followed by the sheer volume of noise from the traffic and the mass of people gathered outside the airport. Ryan came to meet me. He was living in a small apartment in a hotel in the Malate district, an area with a distinctly Bohemian atmosphere. Artists, writers and those in the entertainment industry tended to gravitate towards Malate and despite the Marcoses’ dictatorship an interesting and varied nightlife was beginning to flourish. The apartment turned out to be small and basic, shower and toilet with one double bedroom separated from the kitchen/living area by a set of sliding doors. There was also a small balcony overlooking some shanty houses and a dilapidated water tower, and for those who fancied sunbathing or a swim there was a small pool and a roof area with views across the city towards the harbour.