Still Standing: The Savage Years (9 page)

Esbjerg was unremarkable, all I can recall is the dock and the station where we snuck aboard the boat train to Copenhagen and ensconced ourselves in an empty compartment with a sticker bearing the name of a tour group plastered across the window. The entire carriage was occupied by the party travelling with this tour group and all the other compartments were full, yet strangely ours remained empty for the entire journey. We put the luggage on the overhead racks and empty seats and settled in. Since we didn’t have a ticket Hush had a nervous breakdown each time the guard walked past our compartment. If he did come in I’d planned to feign ignorance and then attempt to buy two, though just how I was going to achieve this with the few kroner we had between us I had no idea. Looking out of the window at the un familiar Jutland landscape, I didn’t relish being thrown off bag and
baggage at somewhere as alien as a place called Vejle, whatever that might be like.

Miraculously, the guard never once asked to see our tickets. Maybe the tour guide had produced a bunch of them and he’d assumed that ours were among them. Even so, by the time we got to Copenhagen station Hush was a gibbering wreck, having panicked himself to death for the entire journey. We spent the last of our money on a cab, and cramming the luggage into the back and pointedly ignoring the driver’s protests at just how much we had we headed to the club, which was on the Lavendelstræde just off the main square and near Copenhagen City Hall.

The club was deserted – not surprising since it was only late afternoon – so we stacked everything up on the step and sat and waited. After about an hour a red-haired woman staggered out of a bar on the other side of the road called The Why Not. She must have taken the question literally as from the way she lurched across the street towards us, attempting to put on a pair of dark glasses and light a cigarette at the same time, she’d obviously been hitting the bottle.

‘You must be the cabaret,’ she said sleepily in a voice ten octaves deeper than Jeanne Moreau’s, swaying back and forth alarmingly as she beckoned us to follow her through the arch at the side of the club. ‘Dis vay,’ she croaked, weaving across the courtyard towards a door on the opposite side, coughing like a donkey with TB as she carefully negotiated her way around a pile of bins.

Hush opted to stay with the luggage, leaving me to deal with the redhead who was now attempting to climb the many stairs, laughing and coughing and occasionally falling into a heap as she went. Eventually we got to the top of the building and, pointing me towards a room that she muttered was
the office, she ricocheted down the corridor to vanish noisily behind a metal door at the end.

Inside, the agent briefly explained the terms of employment and working hours in excellent English, saying that the club would provide a meal each evening from the kitchens that supplied both it and the Prince Arthur restaurant next door. Payday was on a Friday, and as today was Saturday we had six days to exist on absolutely no cash whatsoever. I asked if it might be possible to get a sub on our wages but a curt response informed me that subs were not possible in the first week of employment. Indicating that all business matters were now closed, the agent led me to the door and marched briskly down the hall to our living quarters.

There were two rooms. The larger one had a double bed, a wardrobe minus a door and a small table with a dirty mirror resting on it and a bare bulb hanging above. The other room was much smaller and very narrow with a tiny window set deep in the wall that looked down on to the street. The floor of this room lurched drunkenly one way while the ceiling and walls went the other, as if it had been modelled on the Crazy Cottage at Southport Funfair. There wasn’t a right angle or a level surface in the place. In the corner, dominating the room, sat an enormous ornate safe circa 1910 that could’ve easily held the Crown Jewels. The agent proudly told us we could leave our valuables in it. (What valuables?) Along the sloping wall there was a beaten-up old leather sofa bed, a small table and a sink.

I opted for this second room as I knew that Hush would only sulk if he didn’t get the bigger one, and once the agent had left I sat on the sofa and took a good look at this grim little garret that was to be home for a month. I tried to convince myself that the sloping roof and roughly plastered walls, yellow with age and nicotine, were actually quite
charming and very Hans Christian Andersen and the creaky old sofa bed was at least a step up from a lilo. There were added advantages: it was warm, vermin-free and had electricity, which was more than we had in Slaithwaite.

I went back down to the street to collect Hush and together we made numerous trips lugging our very heavy belongings up the seemingly endless flights of stairs. Hush was philosophical about the accommodation.

‘It’s a shithole,’ he declared, looking around in disbelief. ‘But at least we’ve got leccy.’ Since the absence of electricity from our lives we’d become obsessed with it and stood gazing like a latter-day pair of Catweazles at the bare sixty-watt bulb hanging over the mirror, filled with awe and admiration.

We did two shows a night five nights a week, one at midnight, the second at 1 a.m. Very acceptable working hours as far as we were concerned.

In the back of the wardrobe we found an electric kettle and an ironing board with an iron so ancient it would’ve been right at home in the Danish Museum of Domestic Appliances if there had been such a place. I pressed the costumes that we would be wearing that night while Hush teased the battered wigs into shape, weaving his magic with a tailcomb and a couple of cans of super-strength lacquer, sculpting waves with a geriatric hairdryer, which as a death trap was right up there with the iron.

We discovered that if we wanted a shower we had to ask the redhead in the flat at the end of the hall if we could use her bathroom. Hush hammered on the door repeatedly, trying to gain access, but gave up in the end as the redhead had obviously passed out and wasn’t receiving visitors. It looked like for tonight at least we’d have to make do with what my
aunty Chrissie called a ‘prostitute’s wash’, a quick swill in the sink with a flannel.

The club itself was a typical eighties gay disco, all red plush with mirrored pillars on a postage-stamp-sized dance floor overlooked by a shiny chrome DJ console from which the English DJ, a giant of a man with the incongruous moniker of Tiny, surveyed his kingdom. Beside the DJ console was a small space with a curtain in front of it which I recognized from experience as the changing room.

My initial impression of the Danes wasn’t favourable. I thought they were a dour lot, lacking in emotion and devoid of any sense of humour whatsoever. I changed my tune after we’d done our two shows as they turned out to be one of the most appreciative and generous audiences that we’d had for a while. They went mad, particularly for the Salvation Army routine, and generously plied us with bottles of the appro priately named Elephant Beer as it was so strong it was probably capable of stunning your average beer-swilling pachyderm.

The redhead turned out to be called Lisa. She worked in the Prince Arthur next door and was the original good-time girl, making Keith Moon look like Ann Widdecombe. Lisa was in her late thirties, an inveterate smoker and drinker and the possessor of a bronchial laugh that seemed to emanate from the very bowels of the earth, shaking the building and making you laugh along with her. It was impossible not to like her. She was a good-natured optimist who on discovery that we had no money lent us some without being asked until payday. She was well travelled and had been around the block so many times she had a season ticket. Naturally I was drawn to her like a moth to a flame. At the moment she was having an on/off casual relationship with a Tom of Finland lookalike she called Horse, due to the
generous proportions of a certain part of his anatomy.

‘Be careful around Lisa,’ one of the barmen whom I didn’t much like warned me. ‘She’ll get you into trouble.’

I thought he was being snide until I found myself one morning after an all-night session with her in various bars sitting on top of a Carlsberg lorry that was making a delivery to the club and trying to crack open a bottle of lager on the side of a crate. Getting up there had been surprisingly easy but making the descent was a little trickier, resulting in Lisa falling and dragging a couple of stacks of crates of lager with her on to the street below. There was a lot of trouble over that one.

On another occasion after a bit of all-night revelry we arrived home to find the gates to the courtyard locked. Lisa, in a dress and high heels, decided that the only option available to us was to climb over it, inevitably getting stuck. The woman who ran the dairy on the corner rang both the police and the fire brigade, who eventually managed, after a lot of fuss, to get her down. She was threatened with the sack over that little contretemps and for the next few days was as contrite as a penitent nun.

Every Sunday morning after the club and restaurant had closed Lisa would make breakfast and a group of us night owls would gather around her big pine table in the dining room. I loved the Danish breakfast with the big bowls of milky coffee served with rye bread and soft white rolls and a selection of cold meats and cheeses. It was a very civilized, leisurely affair after which we’d retire to our respective beds and sleep the day away while Copenhagen went about its business.

Copenhagen in November was very cold and we were unsuitably dressed for temperatures way below freezing, so this vampiric lifestyle suited us. And if we slept all day it
meant that we didn’t spend money. There didn’t seem to be a lot to do anyway. The Tivoli Gardens were closed and we’d made the obligatory visit to the Little Mermaid in the harbour and seen the Louis Tussaud Wax Museum, witnessing the star turn, a somewhat disturbing effigy of Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure-skating star, spinning around for all eternity on a sheet of fake ice wearing a maniacal grin on her waxen face.

On the nights when we didn’t go out after the show and got to bed fairly early, I always found that I woke up the next day at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. The few people I knew in Copenhagen were nocturnal and therefore asleep, so to pass the boredom of the long solitary days I’d buy milk, bread and cheese from the dairy over the road and spend my time reading. There was a bookshop nearby that carried a few books in English and in the month I spent in Copenhagen I read the entire collection of Miss Read and a dozen Agatha Christies.

Normally our day began around 3 p.m. We’d get up, shower in Lisa’s flat and, if she was up and about, she would make breakfast for the three of us. Breakfast for Lisa consisted of very strong coffee, a pack of cigarettes and a large cognac and, if I was in the mood, which I normally was, I’d join her. Hush stuck to his cup of tea, frowning at what he considered to be my ‘continental ways’.

When we walked down the Strøget (the high street) in the early hours of a Saturday morning on our way back from a sleazy little hostelry known as the Cosy Bar, it was not unusual to come across a quantity of drunks passed out on the pavement.

‘Swedes,’ Lisa would sniff disdainfully, trying to maintain her balance as she stepped over them. ‘They come over from
Malmö to get pissed as the booze is so expensive over there. It’s shocking, absolutely appalling.’

She wasn’t referring to the sight of so many comatose drunks littering the street, she meant the outrageous price of the Swedish booze.

‘You wouldn’t catch me over there, oh, no, no, no.’ She went into another of her prolonged coughing fits that echoed down the street. ‘C’mon, we’ll have a quick drink in the Why Not before we call it a day.’

As it happened, we were asked by the agent if we’d like to work in Malmö on our night off. The money was good and we were curious to see what Sweden had to offer, although after what Lisa had told us we took the precautionary measure of taking our own booze. As the Øresund Bridge had yet to be built we took the ferry over, arriving in Malmö fifty minutes later with Hush as green as a leprechaun’s breeches from seasickness.

The Twilight Club we quickly renamed the Twilight Zone, as it had all the good cheer of a Siberian gulag and we had to go on at the curious time of 6.45 to an audience of sullen, sober and predominantly middle-aged couples unimpressed with our efforts. Afterwards we grabbed our fee and got back on that ferry to Copenhagen as quick as we could.

‘Well, we won’t be going back there again in a hurry, wench,’ Hush said as the ferry sailed out of Malmö. ‘Never mind, we’ll be back in England next week eating decent English jarry food and sleeping in our own beds.’

‘On our own lilos you mean,’ I corrected him, going in search of a cup of tea.

CHAPTER 3

WE ARRIVED BACK
in Slaithwaite at two o’clock on a freezing December morning.

Phil had picked us up from Harwich in the van, which predictably broke down on the motorway. By the time we got the damn thing started again and eventually crawled into the village, tired, hungry and as narky as a trio of mardy children, I just wanted to jump on to my lilo and leave our stuff in the van until we got up again, but Hush insisted that we unload everything and take it up to the flat. Much to our annoyance, the electricity was still disconnected and we had quite a row in the street with Phil over it, causing a few bedroom lights to go on and curtains to twitch in the vicinity. We carted the costume sacks up to the attic bedroom and piled them against the wall, dumping the bin-liners full of wigs on top of them.