Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
‘Why are you sniffing her?’ Diane asked.
‘I don’t know, it’s obviously a primeval instinct to react this way, inhaling the scent of your child to see if you recognize it.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, and do you?’
‘Not particularly.’
I felt awkward and wished that this moment could’ve been a private one. No mothers, nurses or Diane gawping at me, eagerly waiting to see my reaction. Why couldn’t it be just me and the baby left on our own for a while to quietly get to know each other during these important first moments?
‘Well, what do you think?’ Diane asked again, a note of anxiety in her voice. I did my duty and grinned at the mums,
kissed Diane clumsily, telling her unconvincingly that the baby was beautiful before quickly handing her over as she’d woken up and was starting to cry.
‘She wants her feed,’ Diane said, taking her off me.
No she doesn’t, I thought. She knows, she sensed it. I don’t know what to do with her.
When the time came for them to leave hospital I collected them both and we went back to Diane’s flat on the bus.
I stayed over those first few days and nights. Sharon cried non-stop, an exhausted Diane seemed to be forever pressing the baby on me, eager that I got to know my daughter, but every time I went near her she screamed the place down. She reckons today that the reason she cried for such long periods was down to croup, but back then I was convinced she could sense my fears.
Diane and I were used to spending long periods together and on the whole we would have a good time. Not surprisingly, the arrival of the baby put a load of new stresses on our relationship and I was now with her not because I wanted to be, but out of a begrudged sense of duty. Nevertheless, while we may have had our differences (wow, and that’s the understatement of the year) for the moment we were still good friends.
When the baby was old enough we took her to be registered. There had been some dispute between us over a suitable name. I wanted to call her Gypsy, Diane had other ideas and understandably put her foot down, adamant that she was to be called Sharon, which I thought was boring.
‘I can just hear you,’ I sneered. ‘“Sharrrin, gerrin fer ya tea.”’
‘I don’t talk like that as well you know and I don’t care what you say, I’m not calling her Gypsy, it sounds like a poodle’s name.’
Diane could make a pound stretch all week if she had to; she was thrifty and put money aside for that rainy day. Since she’d been hit by a tsunami, she quite rightly worried about her future finances. I was an idiot with money. Even though I religiously handed over my housekeeping each Friday to my ma out of my wages, the rest would be spent by midweek and I’d end up borrowing it back. Diane wanted to come to some sort of legal arrangement to make sure I contributed to Sharon’s care, and without hesitating I agreed. She took out an affiliation order against me and I was summoned to appear along with Diane at Bootle Magistrates’ Court.
Stupidly I was under the misapprehension that we’d sit around a table with a kindly member of the legal profession and have a friendly discussion until both parties reached an amicable agreement. Instead I found myself in the dock again, standing in front of an elderly female magistrate who, judging by the look she was giving me over her pince-nez, had a very low opinion of errant fathers who evaded their duties. Even though I’d gone to court voluntarily I felt as if I were on trial. Obviously in Madame Beak’s jaded eyes I was just another lowlife scally, dragged before the courts to be forced to contribute to his child’s upkeep.
Diane sat opposite me holding the baby in her arms, looking suitably pathetic, the picture of the eternal martyr who at that moment could’ve passed for a survivor of the Irish Potato Famine. All she needed was a raggedy shawl. I could’ve killed her. Following a lengthy character assassination, in which the Beak denounced me as the archetypal yob
incapable of keeping his pecker in his pants, she made her decision.
‘You will pay three pounds a week towards the support of this child. If you fail to do so then you will go to prison. You, young man, need to be made to face up to your responsibilities.’
Three pounds sounds such a pitiful amount, laughable now, but it’s a sizeable chunk of your income when your take-home pay is eleven quid a week, five of which goes to your ma for board and keep, then a couple of quid a week to pay off the catalogue, and train fare to work, ciggy and dinner money to find. There was hardly any change to play with.
I left the court annoyed that I’d found myself in such a situation, for having worked in the courts it had been naive of me to think that the procedure would be as jolly and simplistic as I’d assumed. Now I’d been made to feel like a criminal and was seriously pissed off with Diane for what I considered to be a masterful stroke of duplicity, although, to be fair, she was as ill informed about the procedure as I was.
‘You coming back to the flat?’ she whined, as I marched on ahead of her.
‘No,’ I shouted, not waiting for her to catch up. ‘The only place I want to go back is in time.’ Standing sulkily at the bus stop, my shoulders hunched against the miserable drizzle of rain that had started to fall, I watched Diane pushing the pram across Stanley Road and felt sad for us all. I felt, rather dramatically as usual, that I was part of a particularly depressing scene from
Love on the Dole
, only in this instance it was all very real and I’d better do something about earning some cash.
Since this was my day off I indulged myself in the luxury of taking to my bed as soon as I got home, wallowing in self-pity
and angry at the injustice of it all. I hadn’t been, as the magistrate had accused me, an absent father. I’d spent a lot of time with Diane. Even if it was after extreme pressure on the guilt rack, hadn’t I even babysat on the odd occasion? And on a Saturday night! The Greatest Sacrifice! Mother of God, the abject misery of babysitting a screaming child on a Saturday night when you want to be in town, stood in the middle of a packed club with your mates, knows no bounds.
If I was looking for sympathy then quite rightly there was none forthcoming from Diane.
‘Now you know how I feel,’ she said smugly, going upstairs to check that Sharon had survived the night in my care.
My ma hadn’t questioned my absences from home as my sister Sheila had given birth to a boy, Martin, and she was in her element, helping with the new baby and having the children over at weekends. I was in the way, she’d complain, and she couldn’t be bothered with a troublesome teenager under her feet and prayed for the day when I’d finally leave home for good. If I arrogantly assumed that this was just another of her fanciful rants and she didn’t really mean a word of it, then I was about to find out otherwise.
‘That’s it, pack your bags and sling your hook,’ she roared, bursting into my bedroom and waving a bit of paper at me. To my bowel-dropping horror I could see that it was my summons, the damn thing must have fallen out of my pocket when I threw my jacket on the sofa.
‘Who is she?’ my apoplectic ma demanded. ‘Who is this poor girl that you’ve gone and got into trouble, you dirty little sod? Well, God love her, that’s all I can say, getting mixed up with a lying cowboy like you.’
I tried to interrupt but it was pointless attempting to stem the tide of abuse.
‘You fornicating, no-good, dirty big who-er, how old is this poor girl?’
Diane was older than me. It made no difference to us or anyone else, for she certainly didn’t look or act her age.
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘She’s how old?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
I didn’t like the tone of her voice nor the way things were going.
‘What?! Twenty-bloody-seven, nine years older than you? Nine years!’ she squawked. ‘And pray tell me who is this Jezebel preying on daft young lads?’
Oh good, she’s changed her tune, I thought as it began to dawn on me that there might be a way of getting out of this mess relatively unscathed. I was swiftly going from villain to victim, the wronged son seduced by the older vamp.
‘Oh Paul, fancy letting some predatory middle-aged woman get her claws into you. Where did you meet her, the She Club?’
‘I’ve never been in the She in my life,’ I protested. ‘It’s full of desperate old divorcees looking for a fellah.’
‘Exactly.’
‘C’mon, you can hardly call twenty-seven middle-aged, can you? She’s nice, me dad met her.’
That did it.
‘Don’t be bringing your poor father into this,’ she yelled, laying into me with her fist. ‘Just as well he’s not alive to hear all this carry-on because if he was he’d be in his grave.’
‘Eh?’
‘Bloody fool, getting caught out like this. You’ve ruined your life, d’ya hear me, you’ve ruined your life.’
‘It’s not the first time I’ve sat in this room with a silly fool and had a conversation not dissimilar to the one we’re having now, you know.’
‘When was the last time then?’ I foolishly asked.
‘When do you think, soft lad?’ She looked at me pityingly. ‘When our Chrissie was sent home pregnant with John in the war.’
‘Well, that turned out all right in the end, didn’t it? Look at our John, he’s the most well-adjusted of all of us.’
‘The things he comes out with,’ she said, directing her conversation towards the wardrobe. ‘Well-adjusted, like he’d know anything about that, the bloody lunatic. Now straighten that bed then come downstairs pronto, I want to investigate this carry-on further.’
I told her everything and except for the odd flare-up of temper she took it quite well on the whole – apart, that is, from the court order demanding three pounds a week for sixteen years.
‘Why oh why did you have to go like a lamb to the slaughter into a court? Why couldn’t you just do a runner like everyone else?’ she wailed, throwing me completely off my guard by this unexpected change in attitude. ‘If anyone had come looking for you I’d have just said that I didn’t have a clue about your whereabouts. I wish you’d told me, you daft bugger, I’d have helped you.’
This was so out of character for my mother, thinking of covering up for me, condemning herself to a lifetime of confession to atone for the lie she’d told to protect me. My ma,
honest as the day was long, was actually prepared to lie for me, even though she considered it to be a mortal sin. I was amazed. But then she never ceased to amaze me.
‘Well, I’ve got to pay me way, haven’t I?’ I said, not trying to curry favour with her but acknowledging that I had a responsibility to help support the kid.
‘Yes, but did you have to go and settle it through the courts?’ She got up from the sofa and shut the window in case any of the neighbours heard us. ‘They’ll be on your back for sixteen years, that’s a long time. If you miss a payment you’ll have the worry of being put away hanging over you like the Sword of Damocles. Honestly, son, you’re so daft I’m beginning to think that you shouldn’t be allowed out on your own.’
I was praying that she wouldn’t want to go over to Liverpool and have it out with Diane but thankfully for the moment she expressed no interest in getting involved with Diane or the baby and chose to let the matter simmer on a back burner until she felt able to deal with it.
‘If I were you I’d get myself down to the Labour Exchange and have a look for a decent job with a proper wage instead of that hell-hole of a wine lodge. You’ve got maintenance to find now.’
She was right, I couldn’t exist on the wages I was earning at Yates’s and the occasional night at the Bear’s Paw, but there didn’t seem to be much going in the way of well-paid jobs on Merseyside for an unqualified barman. Maybe it was time to venture forth again and give London another try. Chris and Billy, a couple of gay guys I’d stayed with for a few nights in their Maida Vale flat, had offered to put me up on their sofa as a paying lodger if I ever returned to London to look
for work. They’d thrown me out the last time I’d stayed with them for bringing a girl back from an Irish club one night. It had been a purely platonic affair – she didn’t have her cab fare back to whatever outer region of north London she lived in so I’d offered her a bed, or rather a floor for the night. Chris and Billy – a pair of dyed-in-the-wool misogynists unless of course you happened to be Rosalind Russell or Mae West – were not amused the following morning when they found a hearty Irish girl sprawled across their front-room floor and slung us both out.
We’d made up since then and I gave them a ring to see if their offer still held. Thankfully it did, and so that night I gave Molly a week’s notice. I’d have left for London immediately but I’d grown fond of Molly and Jean and didn’t want to run out on them, and besides, I had yet to break the news to Diane. Jean wasn’t very happy at my leaving, nor was Molly, and had I known that my going would upset them so much I might have been tempted to stay.
Diane was surprisingly philosophical at the news that I was off again but wondered what I was going to do for a living down there. Chris had told me over the phone, in all seriousness, that if I ever considered stripping as a way of earning a living then he knew of an agent he could have a word with who booked male strippers for the pubs.
‘You don’t have to go all the way,’ he added as an incentive, ‘or be hung like a horse.’