Still Standing: The Savage Years (17 page)

During Vera’s big number with the blue-sequinned bra and G-string decked in fairy lights, one of the women sitting opposite the stage lifted her skirt and, opening her legs wide, she calmly pulled back the crotch of her knickers and gave Vera a bird’s eye view of her vagina. Now Vera had never seen one of these before, especially at such close quarters and in the flesh so to speak, and this unexpected revelation of the female anatomy caused him to fall off the wedge in shocked horror, the extension cord attached to the fairy lights pulling the plugs out with him and all the sound with it.

Somehow we got through the rest of the show intact. The cherry on the cake was finding that somebody had nicked my shoes from the snooker room, which meant I had to go home in a pair of glittery kitten-heel mules I’d bought in Leeds Market for £2.99.

For New Year’s Eve we were booked into one of our favourite pubs, the Fleece in Bradford. We hadn’t worked there for a while and were looking forward to spending the night with Maureen and her cronies. There was a strange atmosphere that night as instead of the usual regulars the place was packed to the rafters with very young students who seemed unsure what to do with themselves.

You couldn’t move in there. Getting through the crowd to the stage was impossible and we both missed most of our
changes – not that it mattered much as it was obvious they couldn’t have cared less if a member of the royal family was up there giving birth to Siamese twins, let alone us two trying to kick in unison to ‘If You Don’t See What You Want Up Here’. Apparently they didn’t.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I told Maureen that it wasn’t worth going on for the second spot and went upstairs to get changed. As the bells chimed in 1983 we sat in the bathroom, me on the toilet with the lid down flicking ash into the palm of my hand as my aunty Chrissie had done and Vera perched on the end of the bath.

‘I’ve had enough, Vera,’ I said bitterly, painfully aware that at this moment we should have been celebrating the dawn of a new year, not stuck in a bathroom over a pub. ‘It has to stop. We’ve had a good run for our money but it’s just not worth all the effort any more. It’s time for a change.’

‘This is the second time we’ve had this conversation in the toilet of a pub,’ he said. ‘But I know what you mean, it’s no fun any more. It wouldn’t bother me if we quit.’

‘Let’s call it a day then,’ I said, glad we’d come to an amicable decision and relieved that tonight was the last of it. Just what I was going to do instead I really didn’t know.

CHAPTER 6

‘
DIRTY BITCH!
’ ERIC
shouted as we sat on the top deck of a bus on our way to the Tower of London. ‘
Arseholes and wankers
.’

The man sat in front of us turned round and glared. ‘If this foul-mouthed yob doesn’t stop swearing in front of these women and children I’ll throw him off the bus myself,’ he said angrily.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said apologetically, leaning forward in my seat so I could keep my voice down, ‘but he can’t help it, he has Tourette’s.’

‘He’ll have a fat lip in a minute if he doesn’t stop swearing,’ the man said, not in the least appeased by my explanation.

‘
Fuck face, smelly arsehole
.’

‘I’m so sorry but he really can’t stop himself from swearing. It’s called coprolalia.’

‘
Bollocks
.’

‘Are you a doctor then?’ the man asked sceptically.

‘No,’ I said in my best professional voice, ‘I work for Camden social services. I’m looking after him.’

‘
Cunt!
’

‘Well, you’re not doing a very good job of it, are you? Now if you don’t shut him up, I will.’

‘
PissFlaps!
’

A woman down the end of the bus piped up about how disgraceful she thought it all was and if the conductor had any sense he’d stop the bus and call the police to throw us off, pair of hooligans that we were … blah, blah, blah. I’d had enough. Grabbing my young charge, I dragged him down the aisle.

‘About time as well,’ the woman sniffed. ‘Such language! And you allowing it, you ought to be behind bars, the pair of you.’

‘
Old fucking cow!
’

‘What did he call me?’ the woman screeched.

‘An old fucking cow, would you like it in writing?’ I said, getting Eric down the stairs, off the bus and on to Tower Bridge Road. We’d got off the bus way before our stop but in view of such hostility I thought it was probably best. Back in the early eighties Tourette’s didn’t have the profile that it has now and people were less understanding about the disorder.

I was back working for Camden Council as a peripatetic and Eric was my first assignment. He was a big lad for fourteen, taller than me, twice as wide and blessed with a very loud voice and an extensive vocabulary of obscenities that would make a docker blush. People were intimidated by him, averting their eyes or crossing the road to get out of his way when they saw and heard him coming. We were thrown out of a café on Tottenham Court Road and asked to leave the British Museum, and once on a tube a woman kicked me as she got up to leave, denouncing me as ‘evil’ for allowing my ‘younger brother’ to swear the way he did. What saddened me the most was that if people had bothered to look beyond the disorder they would have found an intelligent and very endearing young man.

It was Beryl Chyat, my old friend the social worker, who eventually got me motivated again, encouraging me to reapply for my old job with Camden and even sorting out an interview for me. Since I’d given up the act I’d been working behind the bar at the Plaza Bingo, slowly vegetating as I pulled pints for the bingo fanatics, and Beryl was the one who bullied me out of my self-induced coma and back into life.

I went down to London for the interview, staying with Chrissie in his Victoria Mansions flat for a week. It was good to be back again after such a long time away and I realized just how much I’d missed it. Chrissie and I were on speaking terms again after our fight in the Camden squat and we went out every night, mainly to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, which was just down the road, to watch the acts.

After a week in London, Birkenhead seemed very quiet. I went back behind the bar at the Plaza Bingo and waited to hear from Camden Council. The interview had gone quite well, I’d thought, but as I still hadn’t heard from them after nearly a month I began to believe that I’d been unsuccessful and resigned myself to the bitter fact that I might be working at the Plaza ad infinitum.

‘Remind me when it’s three o’clock,’ my mother said piously. ‘That’s the time that poor Jesus died and I like to say a little prayer. And you can turn that bloody telly off when the time comes, show a bit of respect yourself.’

As far as I was concerned, there was nothing good about Good Friday. I felt like writing to the Vatican to ask them to rename it something a little more appropriate like Bleak, Miserable, Meat-free, Sombre, Funereal Friday. My mother had already been to church that morning and was nagging
me, as she always did, to ‘get down to church, you heathen, and say a prayer’.

‘I’m watching
The Ten Commandments
, aren’t I?’ I shouted after her as she made her way into our tiny hall to answer the phone. ‘That’s religious.’

You could always tell it was Easter as, apart from everything closing down, you could guarantee that Charlton Heston would be in some biblical epic on the telly.

‘It’s for you,’ my mother said, coming back into the room highly excited. ‘It’s Camden Council.’

They said that they were sorry they hadn’t been in touch and apologized for ringing me at such short notice, but could I possibly start work on Tuesday? A job had come up providing respite for the foster parents of a particularly difficult boy.

At that moment I’d have willingly agreed to give Magda Goebbels a break from the kids, I was so relieved to be offered the chance to get back to a decent job. I promised I’d be in the office on Tuesday at nine prompt.

Despite my longing to get back to London, when the time came to actually go, leaving home was tough as I knew deep down that this would be the last time. Although there would be frequent visits I felt I’d never return to live at Holly Grove again.

My daughter Sharon didn’t seem the least bit bothered at my leaving. I’d been in and out of her life so many times that one more vanishing act wasn’t going to matter and I was spared any tearful farewells. In fact I remember her being far more concerned with going out to play than hanging around me.

Vera and I had gone our separate ways as well. His brother
had returned home and Vera had gone to live in Keighley, working as a barman at the Fleece.

On the train down to London I told myself that at twenty-eight it was time to get my act together and do something with my life. This time I was determined not to end up, as I’d done in the past, crawling home to Mother with my tail between my legs, down on my luck and skint.

Chrissie’s flat in Victoria Mansions was what estate agents would call a studio and in typical Chrissie fashion the place was furnished courtesy of the skips of south London. He was forever bringing decrepit pieces of furniture home with him which he would patch up and repair, giving them new life. Even the fridge came from a skip in Dorset Road. It tilted violently to the side each time you opened the door but apart from that little tic it worked as well as any brand new model.

Chrissie knew everyone in Victoria Mansions. It was a lively block to say the least and there were frequent barbecues and parties on the roof, which had been transformed by the residents into an inner city garden filled with old kitchen sinks full of flowers, pots of honeysuckle and clematis climbing up the walls and among the chimney pots. The council eventually made the residents remove all trace of this lovely garden, claiming that it was damaging the roof. Bloody miseries.

Even so, Victoria Mansions was a great place to live. It was a friendly neighbourhood with a good bus service and handy for the tube and overground. The corner of the mansions was occupied by the surgery of an old German doctor who always, regardless of your ailment, gave you a powerful shot of vitamins that would have you buzzing for hours. Sadly he was hit by a bus and killed as he was crossing South Lambeth Road one evening.

The neighbours were a diverse lot to say the least. Among them were a rock singer and an opera singer, a theatre lighting designer, a writer and an actress, living side by side with married couples and single mums and an assortment of gay men, one of whom sold dope. I hadn’t had any experience of drug dealers and had no idea what to expect when Chrissie took me up there one night to buy himself a ‘little deal’. Apart from the time when I’d eaten some (described in my first book), I’d never smoked a joint, as the idea of sucking on a soggy old roll-up that had been passed around a group of people revolted me. Now here I was in a drug dealer’s den with Chrissie drinking tea while trying to hold a polite conversation over the top of Mahler blaring out of a sound system so vast and complicated it could’ve accommodated the Stones at Wembley.

Mine host was called Blake, an ex-public schoolboy who was more than a little eccentric, sitting cross-legged on a mound of Indian cushions surrounded by a flock of chattering budgies that he allowed to fly free around the flat.

‘Now, what can I get for you?’ he asked Chrissie once the formalities of the tea ceremony were over. ‘Got a nice bit of black in,’ he said, as affable as a Kensington butcher recommending a choice piece of bacon he had round the back of the shop.

‘Give us a quarter of that then,’ Chrissie said, all smiles, in his genteel voice.

Blake leaned over and turned a dial on a little black box that sat on the floor. It was the controls to a train set, the track of which I noticed ran all around the room and out of the door.

‘Toot, toot,’ he smiled, ‘stand back please, one quarter of finest Lebanese coming up on the eight forty-five.’

From around the door frame a model train appeared with a budgie sitting as proud as punch on the back of the locomotive, pulling a line of trucks that carried a slab of what looked like dark chocolate.

Blake cut a tiny piece of the slab and, after weighing it carefully on a little pair of scales, wrapped it in a piece of clingfilm and handed it over, putting the money Chrissie had given him in a little cash box. Apart from our bizarre surroundings and the nature of the goods purchased, we really could have been at our friendly neighbourhood shop.

Once the deal was done, the little train, complete with budgie, backed out of the door and vanished out of sight.

‘If you fancy some acid, I’m getting some on Thursday,’ Blake said as he undid the many locks on his front door to let us out.

‘No thanks,’ Chrissie replied. ‘I’m teetering on the brink of insanity as it is without acid tipping me over the edge, thank you very much.’

I experimented with LSD once or twice and despite what Aldous Huxley has to say about it I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I was seeing a guy called Luke, not his real name I found out later on but a name given to him after Luke Skywalker, who, just like my Luke, was frequently on another planet. One night in a club called the Cellar Bar, a haunt of leather queens that used to be at the back of Heaven nightclub, Luke and I were having a drink with Derek Jarman when Luke suggested that we ‘drop a tab of acid’. Mr Jarman sensibly declined, having more important fish to fry, while I, anxious not to look like a killjoy in the eyes of Luke (with whom I was besotted, bloody fool that I was), took one.