The Devil Rides Out (36 page)

F
IVE DAYS AFTER LEAVING THE
T
ROPICANA
A
PARTMENTS AND
still wearing the same clothes, I’d finally made it home. It was Friday afternoon, Vera was out and there was someone sleeping in my bed.

‘Hiya, queen,’ he screeched as if we were long-lost friends. ‘We didn’t know when you were coming back. Vera’s at work.’

‘Vera? Work?’

‘Yeah, she’s working behind the bar of the Black Cat.’

‘It’s Cap.’

‘Whatever, she’s’avin’ a ball anyway, pissed every night. You haven’t got a vogue going spare, have yer? I’m crawling up the wall here in desperation for a little whiff.’

I threw a packet of duty-free at him and asked if he’d like a cup of tea.

‘Ooh, I’d love one – no milk please,’ he said, slithering out of bed in his vest and underpants to get a light from the gas fire, ‘an’ I wouldn’t mind a little bit of toast with that if you’re making any, queen.’ There was more than a hint of Uriah Heap about Chrissie when he was attempting to ingratiate himself.

‘What are you doing here, Chrissie, if it’s not a daft question?’ I asked as I waited for the kettle to boil.

‘Well, you see, Lil,’ he said, taking a deep drag on his fag, pulling the strap of his vest over his bony shoulder as delicately as if it belonged to an elegant satin chemise, ‘I had to get out of town. It was closing in on me, y’know? Well, I had the promise of a job down here so I rang Vera and asked if yous’d mind if I crashed here for a couple of days.’ He took another pull on his fag, idly flicking the ash in the general direction of the fireplace and missing. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Lil? I’ve tidied up.’

‘I’ve done all the washin’ and hung up every scrap of clothing. I’ve also scrubbed this dump from top to bottom. You two are a dirty pair of bastards, I thought you’d been broken into when I first got here, the state of the place.’

I left him to get dressed and made the tea, unable to believe that for once the kitchen sink was devoid of dirty dishes and our motley collection of mugs were now hanging from cup-hooks on the end of the shelf. Chrissie had been very busy in my absence: an army of spring-cleaning fairies couldn’t have done a better job. I took a look in the front room and saw the turquoise lino shone like a lake and the net curtains that had previously been a smoky grey were now a gleaming white.

‘How was the Far East then? You’ve got a smashing tan,’ he shouted from the bedroom. ‘Did you have a good time? We thought you were never coming back. Work’s been on the phone looking for yer, you’d better give’em a ring.’

‘Thank God you’re back,’ Maura was saying on the other end of the phone. ‘Now I realize you still have a month to go before you’re due to come back but a job’s come up that really only a man can do.’

This sounded ominous. It was obviously an unsafe house with a drunken father who’d kick the door down in the wee small hours, hell-bent on killing me. Why did I leave Manila? Why didn’t that bastard Ryan say, ‘Come with me to Jakarta’?

‘He’s an elderly gentleman suffering from dementia. His wife, who is also his full-time carer, badly needs a break so we’re going to provide a bit of respite care while she goes off and has a holiday.’

‘How long is the assignment?’ I asked, crossing my fingers and hoping to God that it would be a short one.

My heart sank. Three weeks looking after a demented old man 24/7. I’d go out of my mind along with him.

‘Now he’s a big fellah,’ Maura went on. ‘Very strong despite his age and prone to violent outbursts towards strangers, but apart from that he’s a nice owld boy. His name is Mr Pantucci and he loves his classical music.’

Great, dodging blows to Mahler.

‘When do you want me to start?’

‘Monday morning. Now write the address down and I’ll meet you there.’

I went off to get a pen.

‘Everything all right, Lil?’ Chrissie was munching on a piece of toast and smoking at the same time as I rooted around for a pen. It was always the same, you could never find one when you wanted one. I swear to God we had Borrowers living behind the wainscot who specialized in biros.

‘If you wanna pen, they’re all in the kitchen drawer. It’ll probably take you a while to get used to a bit of order.’ He yawned. ‘Oh well, I better have a wash. I want to do a bit of shopping, I promised Vera I’d get something in for later. Watcha fancy?’

I took the address down off Maura and hung up the phone with a heavy heart. It was going to be hard to adjust after Manila. I felt displaced, unsettled and the prospect of three weeks’ solitude with a crazy old man did nothing to cheer me up.

‘Anyway, Lil, welcome home,’ Chrissie shouted, heading for the bathroom. ‘It’s nice to have you back.’

Yeah, welcome home, Lil, wherever home was.

*

Strangely none of this was carried back from the shops by the orthodox means of a carrier bag. Instead he produced this seemingly endless stream of merchandise from deep inside the recesses of his overcoat, a garment that Fagin had obviously left him in his will. ‘I’ve gorra bit of cheese somewhere,’ he said, rooting around an inside pocket, ‘and a couple of jars of sandwich spread as well.’

‘I thought you had no money, Chrissie?’ Vera asked, examining the bottle of wine.

‘I haven’t.’

‘So where did this little lot come from then?’

‘Where d’ya think, soft shite?’

Vera gasped. ‘Are you mental? Shoplifting when you’re on the run from the pol—’ He tried to swallow his words as they came tumbling out but it was too late. The cat was out of the bag.

‘Are you on the run from the police then?’ I asked, trying my best to sound casual, as if I was used to harbouring queens on the run every day of the week. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothin’ much, just a bit of shoplifting.’

‘And she’s at it again now. You’re gonna get your collar felt, Chrissie, if you don’t watch out – and where did you nick this little lot from? I hope it wasn’t out of Mrs Bhakta’s.’ Vera was referring to the lady who ran the corner shop, who we both loved because she allowed us to get things on tick.

‘No, it wasn’t Mrs Bhakta’s, it was the Co-op if you must know.’

That evening we went to the Black Cap to witness Vera in action behind the bar. The feisty Irish landlady, Babs, had given him the moniker ‘McGoo’ after the short-sighted cartoon character. At closing time she would hammer a shillelagh forcefully on the wood panelling in the front bar in an attempt to coerce the stragglers to drink up and go home. ‘McGoo! Are you pissed again?’ she would cry as an inebriated Vera staggered ever so slightly while supposedly collecting glasses.

There was a group of queens from Leeds who lived in a big flat over a shop on the Holloway Road. They were notorious for throwing wild parties that invariably culminated in a mass orgy in the front bedroom and I recall one of them, Regina, drunkenly lurching around the landing, naked apart from a vest, screaming, ‘Have any of you bar-stards seen my jeans and a leather thong?’ I’d become friendly with Paul, known to the residents of the flat as ‘Joyce’, a nurse who worked in the special clinic at my old stomping ground, the Royal Northern Hospital. ‘You wouldn’t believe the amount of male genitalia that slips through my hands on a daily basis, luv,’ he’d say. He was easy-going and a lot of fun and, like the rest of us, no slouch when it came to having a good time.

He was in the Cap that night and we stood together watching a particularly appalling mime act with a critical eye.

‘I could do better than that any day,’ I said for the umpteenth time as one of them launched into the ubiquitous knicker routine. Among other items, the artiste produced a dead plant from inside a pair of voluminous bloomers, to the strains of ‘I Never Promised You A Rose Garden’.

‘Really?’ The seed that had been planted long ago began to stir.

‘We should get an act together, we’d be brilliant. I love nursing but I fancy a change – and you should see me in drag.’

I looked at Joyce doubtfully. He was broad-shouldered and what my ma would call big-boned and in no way feminine to look at. I tried to visualize him in drag.

‘Here, I’ll have you know that I look fabulous in a frock, luv. Better than half of this lot,’ Joyce boasted, indicating towards the stage. ‘I’ve always wanted to get an act together and go professional. So what d’ya reckon?’

The seed was germinating at an alarming rate and was about to burst into full bloom.

‘Bugger it, why don’t we then,’ I said, suddenly getting very carried away with the idea. ‘What’s stopping us?’

‘Well, first we’ll have to find someone to make costumes.’

‘And cheaply,’ I butted in.

‘Because there’s no way I’m going on stage in public wearing charity-shop tat.’

‘I can do that,’ Chrissie piped up casually. ‘I can make costumes.’

‘You?’ Joyce and I sang out in unison.

‘For your information I served a five-year apprenticeship with a master tailor in Birkenhead,’ he said, adding grandly, ‘
I
am a couturier. One of the finest.’

‘What do you charge?’ I asked, hoping it wasn’t some astronomical figure that we couldn’t afford.

Chrissie was indeed a genius on a sewing machine. He was totally unique, a jack of all trades. Not only could he design, cut out and sew remarkable costumes, he was also a dab hand at covering a three-piece suite, painting and decorating, and could nick a packet of bacon from under the store detective’s nose in the Co-op before she had time to blink. In addition, as I was to find out over the years ahead, he was a highly complex character, as unpredictable as the weather, with quicksilver mood swings and the possessor of a viperous tongue that could cut you to the quick. Life with Chrissie around was certainly never dull and I knew within the first few days of our meeting that we would end up friends for life. He was funny, daring, loyal and capable of extreme kindness and bore with enormous courage the stinking, rotten illness that eventually carried him off. Remembering him now, vigorously slapping Oil of Ulay on his face in the mirror over the mantelpiece while getting ready to hit the Vauxhall Tavern for the night out, I really wish he was still around.

‘What are we going to call ourselves then?’ an excited Joyce asked.

‘How about “the Sisters” something?’

‘How about the Sisters Shite? Is anyone going to the bar then?’

‘How about the Glamazons?’ I suggested, recalling the name of a troupe of extremely tall Ziegfeld Follies showgirls I’d seen in a book.

‘The Glamazons?’ I could see Joyce mulling the name over in his mind. ‘The Glamazons? Ooh, I’m not sure, luv.’

‘Well we’re both tall, hence the Amazon bit.’

‘Aye, but who’s to say we’ll be glamorous?’

‘All right then, Glamazons it is, luv. Now what we having?’

The next day was Lesbian and Gay Pride, or just plain Gay Pride as it was known back then, and Vera, Joyce and I were on the float that belonged to Zipper, the gay bookshop that Kate and I had wandered into many moons ago. It had rapidly expanded and metamorphosed into a successful enterprise.

Also on the Zipper float was Reg, who had broken his leg at the Alexandra Palace Drag Ball. Having had more than a few large brandies, he’d fallen off one of his stilettos as he was leaving and consequently was in a hip-to-ankle plaster cast. It was a bit of a performance getting him on the back of the lorry and even trickier getting him off it at the other end after he’d consumed the best part of a bottle of vodka en route.

In those days Gay Pride wasn’t the big corporate affair that it is today. Even so, there was still a big turnout for the march through London to the rally in Hyde Park. There was a lot of abuse from Christian groups and gangs of yobs as we passed by. I remember a bus driver, his face contorted with hate-fuelled rage, shouting from his cabin, ‘You all want gassing, you dirty bastards.’

‘God bless the queens, darling,’ Reg calmly replied, toasting him with a can of warm Budweiser. ‘And fuck you!’