The Devil Rides Out (11 page)

‘I know, I know,’ I chipped in to save him any embarrassment. ‘I didn’t expect to stay any longer than a couple of days. You’ve been a real mate for putting me up in the first place. I’ll ring Nina, maybe I can stay there for a while.’

‘I’ve got an idea,’ Ron said, clearing the plates away. ‘Why don’t you go down to the employment agencies in town, see if there’s anything going, get a job, any job for the time being. You can then tell your mum the weason you came home was because you were offered a job. Pwoblem solved.’ He was right. ‘Now get yourself changed, I’ve got a friend coming wound from my theatre gwoup who I’m absolutely dying for you to meet. She’s divine. She wants to be an actwess.’

He was making her sound like Sally Bowles. The friend in question turned out to be a well-spoken young girl named Angela Walsh. She was a year younger than me and startlingly pretty with soft reddish-brown hair and pale translucent skin. She was wearing a 1920s black velvet evening coat with a matching beret and reminded me of a picture I’d seen in a film book of a young Greta Garbo. We hit it off right away. As Ron had explained, Angela went to the Unity Youth Theatre with him.

‘They’re always looking for new people who are interested in acting,’ Angela told me. ‘Why don’t you come down? We’re reading a new play next week.’

‘Do you get to perform in public?’ I asked, the not-so-dormant showbiz bug rearing its head again.

‘Oh yes,’ she replied, skipping around the kitchen, ‘we put on shows at the Everyman. Shame you weren’t here for the
Marat
/
Sade
. I played a lunatic, it was wonderful.’

‘An abattoir? You mean that dirty, filthy lairage down the hill?’ My mother was incredulous. ‘You’re telling me that you came back from your precious London to work in a bloody abattoir? An abattoir? Well, I’ve heard it all now.’

‘I get half-price meat each week, think of that,’ I added feebly, throwing this nugget of information in as compensation.

All things considered, the return of the prodigal went down better than I’d anticipated. I was a veritable paragon of virtue for the next few days, getting home at a reasonable hour, keeping the house clean, doing the shopping without complaint, all of which did nothing to allay my ma’s suspicious nature. Meanwhile, life at the abattoir was everything I’d predicted and more. I shared a tiny office with three other people. Dora, a rotund little woman who was in the Salvation Army, went around humming snippets of hymns under her breath all day. She’d been with FMC Meats since the Stone Age when it had been based at Woodside Ferry, as had the elderly man who sat facing a wall and hardly ever spoke a word. The final member of the team was Tony, only a couple of years older than me, who took his job very seriously, which was just as well since I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. The ever-patient Tony was forever correcting the piles of figures that I’d totted up on the antiquated adding machine even though he had enough of his own work to do.

Occasionally a sheep or cow would escape, briefly enlivening the boredom, and make a bid for freedom up the old Chester Road with everyone in hot pursuit. Once a pig ran out of the gates and jumped on to a Crossville bus that had conveniently just pulled up at the bus stop outside. Somehow it managed to climb the stairs and get up on to the top deck, knocking an old woman over. Poor things must’ve been terrified, the pig and the pensioner.

A story that sickens me to this day was told to me by one of the slaughtermen. He was a big beefy bullet-headed hunk of a man, stripped to the waist, his magnificent chest and thighs covered by a blood-splattered black leather apron, a massive turn-on, I suppose, for some gay men and heterosexual women but one that did nothing for me. He had huge hands and swollen fingers with blood ingrained dark red and deep around each fingernail. Standing outside one afternoon having a fag and absently watching a small bonfire at the end of the yard, I wondered what it was they were burning. It certainly stank. ‘Spontaneous abortion,’ a slaughterman told me. ‘If a cow comes in pregnant then we abort it and burn it along with the condemned meat. If the abortion comes out a decent size then we sell it on as veal.’ I’m not sure if that story was true but it was enough to put me off meat for over a year, and even today I’m still slightly nauseous at the sight of a well-stocked butcher’s window.

‘Not much of a part really,’ she said airily, in the manner of a seasoned actress who had done the rounds, over a half of cider in the pub after rehearsals. ‘Couple of lines and then I get hit over the head with a stick. I think I’m going to play her Irish, she sounds Irish with a name like Judy, don’t you think?’ I could only bring to mind the Judys Garland, Holliday and Carne (this last Judy from
Rowan & Martin’s Laughin)
and none of those seemed remotely Irish to me but I caught Angela’s drift and nodded in agreement like an old pro. In addition to Judy she was also playing Lola, Joey the Clown’s assistant. I was never off the stage, playing the roles of both Joey and the Hangman as well as appearing as chorus in a couple of numbers. I was in seventh heaven and if Ron, who’d introduced me to Unity in the first place, was a little put out that he had only been given the part of the Illustrious Gentleman, which he wasn’t very keen on, then he was big enough not to show it.

Christine was an excellent ballroom dancer who completely transformed herself when she entered the doors of Vernon Johnson’s. With her sensible little hairdo teased into a coif of mightier dimensions and her shimmering ballgown with yards and yards of peach tulle underskirt to make it stick out, Christine was a knockout. She had a fabulous figure and was a real marvel when it came to dealing with her shy and clumsy protégés, who looked upon her as a goddess. She encouraged me and Angela to join up. We did, and for ten bob a lesson we learned how to samba, tango and do the American jive.

Our director at the Unity was an excitable and slightly hysterical fellow with a bright orange tongue that flicked in and out of the side of his mouth like a nervous lizard with a tic. However, he allowed us to improvise and include songs and sketches in this otherwise dreary production. Christine and Flom wrote a song called ‘Did Somebody Call For A Doctor’ and, surprise, surprise, I managed to get something from
Gypsy
in – ‘May We Entertain You’ as an opening number for Joey the Clown and Lola. We were in our element.

Most of the costumes for
Punch and Judy!
were borrowed from Unity’s wardrobe store. Angela and I wore tatty old Pierrot and Pierrette costumes for the clowns, which she tarted up with a bit of sequin trim she’d bought in Blackler’s, but for the Hangman I had other ideas. A guy I was having a fling with made leather trousers for a shop in Church Street and he gave me a brown leather pair with matching waistcoat. They were a bit on the large size and what with me not having much in the way of a bum they hung in folds behind me like a pair of Odeon curtains, but I didn’t care. I thought I was the dog’s bollocks up there on that stage, head to toe in saggy brown leather, my chin smeared with black greasepaint to represent stubble, a veritable testosterone-fuelled killing machine.

‘It wasn’t what we wehearsed,’ Ron sniffed, purse-lipped when I fell into the dressing room after the number had finished. ‘It’s not vewy pwofessional behaviour, y’know.’ I didn’t care, I was high as a kite on the laughter from what few punters were out front.

Despite all the hard work and effort we’d put into this ill-fated production – Angela and I had nearly been arrested illegally fly-posting homemade posters all over the city centre –
Punch and Judy!
wasn’t a hit. The odds were against us from the start as we didn’t go on until 10pm, after a play called
Female Transport
, about a gang of women who were being transported to Australia. This was a time when most sensible theatre-goers were on the bus home or in the pub, and hardly anybody came to see it. Of course it could have been a crap show but in our youthful optimism we could see nothing wrong with it, preferring to view
Punch and Judy!
through heavily rose-tinted spectacles.

‘That’s showbiz, kid,’ Ron said philosophically in his best Liza Minnelli manner as we retired to Sadie’s for a cider and the after-show post-mortem.