The Devil Rides Out (37 page)

A rather worthy journalist ran up to our float with his tape recorder.

‘I’m with BBC Radio Four,’ he said, holding his mike up to Joyce. ‘What do you think of Jeremy Thorpe?’

The former leader of the Liberal Party had recently been on trial at the Old Bailey, charged with the attempted murder of a former male lover. (The jury later acquitted him.) The press had had a field day and it was still a much-discussed topic.

‘As a gay man,’ the journalist panted as he ran alongside our float, ‘how do you feel about Mr Thorpe?’

‘She’s all right, luv,’ Joyce replied deadpan, ‘but I wouldn’t turn me back on her.’

That night at the Cap, Joyce, who by now was also working part-time behind the bar, told Babs that we were getting an act together. Her immediate response was to offer us a booking, act unseen, on the forthcoming Bank Holiday Monday afternoon.

‘Thirty quid,’ she said. ‘Two twenty-minute spots, that’s if you can get it together in time.’

Maura had lied when she described Mr Pantucci as ‘big’. He was a Goliath and, despite a pronounced stoop, he towered over me.

‘This is Paul. He’s going to look after you for a little while,’ his wife was telling him, rubbing his arm encouragingly and trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘Say hello to him then, dear.’

Mr Pantucci, glowering angrily, lunged towards me and grabbed me by the throat, shaking me like a rag doll.

‘No, dear.’ His wife gently rebuked him as if talking to a small child, prising his fingers from around my neck. ‘That’s not how we behave towards guests, is it?’

Three weeks of this. Jesus, I’d be lucky to survive.

‘He’s really very gentle once he gets to know you,’ Mrs Pantucci tried unconvincingly to reassure me. ‘He’s a big pussycat, honestly.’

Yeah, a sabre-toothed tiger.

‘The district nurse comes every morning to help wash and dress him and then again in the evening to help you put him to bed. Oh, and speaking of bed, my husband is inclined to get up and wander during the night so I’m afraid you’ll have to sleep in the same room as him. You’ll find a cot bed next to his. You don’t mind, do you?’

Maura suddenly became very preoccupied with a print of Mozart hanging on the wall. I did mind but given the circumstances I had no choice but to agree.

‘You will take good care of him, won’t you?’ she pleaded anxiously. ‘He really is a dear, we’ve never been apart for this long since the day we got married and I’m loath to leave him. I wouldn’t dream of it ordinarily, it’s just that I’m a bit tired. You do understand, don’t you?’

A bit tired? That was an understatement. She was exhausted and deserved a medal, let alone a temporary break. Her frail exterior belied the fact that underneath lay a woman of steel, determined to continue to provide the best care she could manage for her husband, despite herself being on the verge of collapse from nervous exhaustion. I tried to put her mind at ease by giving the impression that she was leaving her spouse in the hands of a seasoned professional, and with a sinking heart waved her off for a well-deserved rest at her sister’s in Bournemouth.

‘OK then, Mr Pantucci,’ I said, returning to the front room and trying to sound cheery. ‘What would you like for your lunch?’

‘GET OUT!’ he shouted, hurling a telephone directly at me but thankfully missing.

‘Good luck,’ Maura said, smartly stepping into the hall out of harm’s way and making for the front door. ‘If you need anything, just call the office.’

I wondered what were the chances of ‘the office’ supplying me with a straitjacket and some horse tranquillizer as I watched her close the door behind her, leaving me alone to face a furious Mr Pantucci.

‘Would you like a nice cup of tea?’ I announced in my phoney cheery voice.

‘OK,’ I said, beating a hasty retreat to the kitchen. ‘I’ll just put him in the back yard.’

This was going to be fun.

The worst aspect of being a carer is the solitude. Apart from visits from the district nurses and the home help, who tidied up and did the shopping, I saw no one. For three weeks I never left the flat and at times the loneliness was crippling, particularly in the early hours of the morning when I sat listening to the shipping forecast on the radio after I’d finally managed to get Mr Pantucci off to sleep. There was a framed photograph on the mantelpiece of a handsome young army officer astride a horse, smiling proudly at the camera, and it was hard to connect this vital young man with the decaying old ruin fighting the demons that had invaded his mind alone in the dark next door. In those gloomy moments I wondered what would become of me, and the unstoppable tide of advancing years and the inevitable afflictions that came with it made me question my own mortality.

While I bent over to feed Mr Pantucci his dinner one evening he took me unawares, catching me in a powerful headlock, pulling me down and submerging my face in a bowl of tomato soup on the tray on his lap. I really thought my time was up and that I would drown or at the least end up with a broken nose. ‘What an ignominious end to a life not yet fulfilled,’ I could hear Maura telling the police as she identified my body the next day. ‘Drowned in a bowl of soup.’

The cot bed that I slept on was pushed close to Mr Pantucci’s bed because of the limited space in the cramped little bedroom, and a good night’s sleep became nothing but a distant memory. During the spasmodic moments when he actually slept he snored like a bear, breaking off to have a rant every now and then. Once I was woken by the sensation of warm water running across my face. Happily dreaming that I was having my hair washed, I was content to lie there until it suddenly dawned on me that my dream was in fact reality.

I opened my eyes and there in the half-light was Mr Pantucci standing over me, his striped pyjama bottoms around his ankles, his ageing testicles swinging like two golf balls in an old sock, peeing all over me.

Occasionally, as we sat listening to one of his favourite concertos on the coffin-sized radiogram in the living room, there would be moments of lucidity when he would regain control over his mind. ‘Please forgive me,’ he’d beg, appealing to me with sad eyes, ‘I can’t help myself.’ It was heartbreaking.

Mrs Pantucci rang me nearly every night to see how we were getting on, concerned about the husband she obviously sorely missed. Desperate as I was to get home myself, I’d nevertheless convince her that everything was running smoothly and that she should stop worrying and enjoy her rest, otherwise what was the point of the exercise?

When the three weeks were finally up and Mrs Pantucci came home, I ran down Abbey Road with the sheer exuberance of any creature that has been freed from captivity and released into the wild. But the experience of caring for Mr Pantucci left me with a profound respect for all full-time carers. All too frequently they are conveniently neglected by the system and left to ‘get on with it’, regardless of age or capability. I went straight from this job to a week in a caravan park in Great Yarmouth with a group of Peripatetics and an assortment of underprivileged kids. I had seven little Asian boys in my care and I recall that we all had a whale of a time. However, I was also starting to panic that our act would never be ready for Bank Holiday Monday.

‘You can’t beat a good shite first thing of a morning,’ Chrissie declared, waltzing out of the bathroom and into the kitchen. ‘I feel like I’ve shed ten pounds.’

Vera, who was in the process of taking a bite out of a slice of toast that he’d just dipped into the runny yolk of his fried egg, started to retch violently.

‘I’d leave it for half an hour before you go in there,’ Chrissie said wickedly as Vera ran past him and into the toilet to vomit. ‘That kebab I had last night must’ve been off.’

‘Oh well,’ Chrissie said, helping himself to Vera’s breakfast, ‘I suppose I’d better get on that sewing machine and run up another incredible creation. You better get yourself into town. I need lining material, some more of that white fringing and fabric for those flapper outfits.’

‘How many yards shall I get?’ I asked.

‘Depending on the width, I’d say you’ll need about three,’ Chrissie said, running an experienced eye over me.

‘What about Joyce?’

‘Oh, at least ten. She’s bigger than you, particularly around the back.’

‘Ten? She’s not that big.’

‘She’s getting there though.’ Chrissie loved to tease Joyce about his weight. ‘No, get four yards for Joyce, that should do it. Oh and don’t forget the zips. Metal ones only please, not those useless plastic things. My costumes are couture and when that Regina Fong gets a load of them she’s going to have a thromby. Vera, get out of that lav, your cup of tea’s getting cold.’

My first port of call was 58 Dean Street, W1, a record shop that specialized in the more obscure soundtracks to films and shows – at a price. It was managed by a wily old queen called Derek, who had the uncanny knack of parting you from substantial amounts of money by screaming, ‘Have
I
got something for
you?
’ and disappearing through the beaded curtain into the back of the shop, to emerge with an LP which he’d clutch to his chest as if it were a sacred relic.

He played me a raucous bump-and-grind number sung by Dorothy Loudon called ‘I’ve Got To Get Hot’, the very funny lament of an aspiring opera singer forced to support her ‘grey-haired mother’ by stripping.

‘How much?’

‘Twenty-five quid.’

‘Twenty-five quid!’

‘Well, it’s the only copy in London after all, and you have to admit that the number is guaranteed to bring the house down! So what do you think? Do we have a deal?’

Recklessly I’d hand over twenty-five pounds that I could ill afford, desperate to secure the number that was going to be the talk of the drag circuit at any price, unaware that Derek gave every drag-queen the same persuasive spiel.

‘Oh, before you go I’d like you to hear something else that you may be interested in. A truly fabulous album by Sandra Church – she played Gypsy in the original Broadway production, but then you know that. There’s some wonderful strip numbers on it, very you. Would you like to hear it?’