Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
The Devil Rides Out (4 page)
What was that then? I distinctly heard it, there was no imagining the shuffling and scratching slowly approaching from behind. Unable to turn round and look behind me, I could hear something feeling its way at the top of the step that led down into the kitchen. The urge to scream and run was now overpowering, and yet I couldn’t. I was still rooted to the spot with fear. I could hear it plainly now – a rush of breath from whatever it was that was hovering behind me, just audible above the blood pounding in my ears and the roar of the gas jets and the hiss of the kettle as it began to boil.
I swallowed hard. The noise I produced sounded as if I’d dropped a brick in a swamp. A voice suddenly came out of the darkness and I levitated at least three feet in the air
‘Don’t just stand there in the dark like one of Lewis’s, you soft bugger,’ the demon said through a yawn. ‘Turn that kettle off and come in here and find me purse, the ten bob for the meter’s run out.’
S
URPRISINGLY, AS IT IS NOT THE FAMILY TRADITION TO BE
anything other than a little crabby first thing in the morning, my ma was in a party mood and having a smashing time as I passed her sat on the stairs, phone in hand, filling her sister Annie in on the night’s shenanigans.
‘’ey up, Lazarus has just risen, Anne,’ she remarked, laughing as I slithered past her, ‘although he still looks half dead to me.’
It was good to hear her laugh again even if it was on me and just for that moment it felt like life was back to normal. I half expected to see my dad sat in his armchair studying his pools coupon. Taking my fags off the mantelpiece and lighting one, I sat on the sofa and stared at his empty chair. From out of the blue a mawkish verse that I’d read in the In Memoriam column of the
Liverpool Echo
came to mind:
An empty chair,
A silent prayer,
Always wishing you were there.
It was an anger that she directed full blast at me, a rage that spurted furiously and unexpectedly when the frustration, born out of the panic that came from the overwhelming realization that her loved one really was gone for good and would not be coming through the front door looking for his tea ever again, rose to the surface. She felt that my past skirmishes with the police and general tomcatting (as she put it) of late had contributed to the stress that had brought on the fatal coronary. I was inclined to agree with her. The burden of guilt that I was carrying on my back was growing heavier by the day as I quietly mourned the loss of my dad’s reassuring presence.
For my mother his absence was still a raw gaping wound, and sometimes in the night I’d hear her sobbing in bed and calling out my father’s name. I’d bury my head in the pillow to try and drown out her cries. It was the loneliest sound in the world.
I was slow and lazy that morning as I mooched sleepily out of the house and made my way down to Green Lane Station to catch a train to work. I’d eventually gone back to my own bed but hadn’t slept very well and felt that a nice lie-in of, say, another ten hours wouldn’t come amiss.
Everyone seemed to have moved on. Tony, my bosom pal from the Bear’s Paw who had opened my eyes to the gay scene and introduced me to a slice of life that I had previously thought only existed in films, had been promoted by HM Customs and Excise and transferred to Southend. Friends from school were training to be nurses or learning a trade, some had married and settled down, others had simply vanished. And where was I? Eighteen years of age, living at home with my grieving mother, going nowhere fast and working in a wine lodge that was one of the roughest drinking holes in Liverpool for lousy pay and to cap it all, the cherry on top of the steaming, stinking mound of dog doo-doo that currently represented my life, there was A Baby on The Way. Great, just what I wanted. In short, I was up shit creek without a paddle. But even though my prospects didn’t look that good there was still a trace of optimism lurking in the background leading me hopefully to believe that opportunity was waiting somewhere in the wings.
I’d resigned from the Magistrates’ Courts. I wasn’t really
cut out to be a trainee court clerk, and like every other job I’d had so far the wage wasn’t up to much and besides, I was bored with it all and it showed. A few of the magistrates had complained about my appearance, in front of a packed courtroom. The stipendiary magistrate had leaned over the bench to stare in disbelief at my red corduroy jacket and pink tie and enquired sarcastically if my job description had read court clerk or court jester. It was a case of jump now or wait to be pushed, so I did the decent thing and handed in my resignation to my long-suffering boss. It was a relief for both of us. I’d gone back to my old ways, my timekeeping was atrocious and I frequently skived off and went missing in the endless tunnels that ran from the back of the courts and seemingly went on for miles. They were full of ancient court ledgers filled with charge sheets in which a long-dead clerk had recorded the past crimes and misdemeanours of Merseyside in a beautiful copperplate hand. ‘Kathleen Kelly. Fined five shillings for allowing her chimney to catch fire.’
Another reason I was keen to leave the courts was the gossip going around about Diane’s pregnancy. We’d become the topic of much speculation in the office and I wanted out. I wasn’t really bothered about what job I did just as long as I got one and seeing that Yates’s Wine Lodge in Moorfields, just around the corner from the courts, was looking for a barman I’d applied for the job.
The wine lodges of the seventies were bleak, basically empty halls with bare walls and wooden floors and a few chairs and tables dotted about. A long high bar ran the length of the room with four enormous wooden barrels behind containing the various wines and sherries that were served to the customers in ‘docks’ – plastic beakers as opposed to glasses. Diane and I would frequently pop in, thinking it was camp to
knock back a couple of large Aussie whites before hitting the clubs, living life a little dangerously, or so we thought, by drinking in a Yates. It’s not unfair to say that Yates’s wine lodges had the reputation for being rough, last chance saloons frequented by alcoholics and hardened drinkers who could get hammered on the potent wine at not too much expense, the Moorfields lodge was considered one of the roughest.
This establishment was run by Molly and her sister Jean, the latter deeply suspicious when I offered my services as Yates’s new barman. She couldn’t comprehend why I would want to leave a ‘respectable’ job in the Magistrates’ Courts for one behind the bar in a wine lodge and told me to come back when her sister was in. I duly returned the next day to meet her and was interviewed by a woman with coal-black ringlets and a face covered in a deep olive pan-stick. She wore a plain black dress and a lot of old gold rings and bracelets with a pair of bomb-shaped heavy gold earrings that swung back and forth from her lobes each time she took a pull of one of the many fags that she smoked. She had a hacking cough that made the building shake and I liked her on sight, a cross between Anna Magnani and Edith Piaf, laid-back and worldly wise. The interview was brief and informal and I managed to make her laugh with a few tales about life working in number three court and the regular clientele of winos and prozzies who passed through its doors.
‘You won’t find it much different working here then, lad,’ she croaked. ‘Start on Saturday morning, half nine prompt and we’ll see how you go.’
And so, after a very boozy leaving do, I said goodbye to a career in law on Friday evening and hello to a life in the licensing trade behind the bar of Yates’s on the Saturday morning, some of the bemused patrons asking if I knew there
was a fellah working in the Magistrates who was a dead ringer for me. Predictably, my mother went crazy when she found out about my change of employment and ‘took to her bed’, demanding to know why I was hell-bent on breaking her heart.
Molly’s sister Jean was tall and slim with eyes like a hawk and seemed quite imperious until you got to know her, when she’d give you a ciggy and chat with you at the end of the bar. I only ever saw her lose her cool when Wally the rat-catcher visited, a born comic with a purple face and a club foot who came by in an official capacity once a month. He’d brought a brace of drunken rats up from the cellar, holding his catch aloft by their tails before slapping them down on the bar, sending Jean and the rest of the women screaming out into the street, leaving Pete the barman unsure if he should stay with the grinning Wally and his inebriated vermin or risk a dent to his masculine pride and leg it after the women. It was no contest for me. I was the first one out of the building.
Every morning the floor was religiously swept out and mopped, the toilets scoured with bleach until the air made your eyes sting and the bar tops, with what little brass there was, polished. Not that there was much varnish left on the bar top as it had supposedly been eaten away over the years by the spillage of Yates’s fine Australian white. By the time Jean was satisfied that the place was up to her high standards, the air was
95
per cent Jeyes Fluid and 5 per cent oxygen. Yates’s Wine Lodge, Moorfields, might have looked bleak but its startling cleanliness was a testimony to the powers of industrial-strength detergents and a lot of elbow grease, and had the occasion arisen we could have performed open-heart surgery on the bar top without any risk of infection to the patient.
The Irish workmen who were building the new metro station over the road spent their wages across the bar each night, skilfully avoiding the clutches of Tattoo Pat and Taxi Annie, two geriatric working girls so named because the former’s body was rumoured to be a mass of tattoos, ranging from crude Indian ink lettering to elaborate professional jobs, and the latter as she allegedly took care of her punters in the back of a cab. Not that either of them had witnessed that many eager customers beating a path to their red-lit doors in
recent years, but like the troupers they were they carried on regardless, prowling the pubs and the streets for prospective and hopefully none too picky clients. Leaning on the bar half pissed, they’d mourn the good old days when pickings were rich, concluding that business was slack for professionals like themselves because ‘too many friggin’ scrubbers were giving it away free’. I’d nod sympathetically, politely ignoring their advancing years and grubby appearance.