The Devil Rides Out (40 page)

I liked Elsie, he was a real character and very funny, and it was he who encouraged Joyce and me to join him and the rest of the gang at the Escort Club in Pimlico. On admittance you were given a paper plate with a solitary lettuce leaf and a slice of luncheon meat to get round the licensing laws’ requirement that the club serve each patron a meal.

It’s commonplace now to see a troupe of drag queens parading through the streets but back in’79 it was quite brave to walk around brazenly in drag on a Wednesday night, particularly if you were dressed as a moth. We stopped the traffic as we sashayed across the road and into the club. I ended up getting hammered and falling off my bar stool, as you do when you’ve drunk your body weight in cider. I managed to kick Joyce in the back, sending him rolling down a couple of steps and sliding across the dance floor like a large sequined stone in a game of curling.

‘I’m going to knack you,’ he roared from his position on the floor, picking his wig up and slamming it hastily on his head back to front. ‘And just look at me good purple, it’s destroyed,’ he bellowed with dismay on discovering the large tear in his brand new purple sequined frock.

The owner of the house we’d rented a flat in for nearly three years suddenly decided that his tenants were responsible for the rates – not just the current ones but also for the two years that he was in arrears. This left us with a rent that was unaffordable. We fought him with the help of the Citizens Advice Bureau but, as so frequently happens, the little guys lost and as we couldn’t and wouldn’t pay the astronomical rent increase our landlord served us with eviction papers. I’d hoped to get a few months’ grace before he slung us out by the devious means of taking him to a gay club and getting him drunk. Then I’d chat him up and get him to change his mind. That was the plan. However, pissed as a fart and overcome with passion (and who would blame him?), he made a clumsy lunge at me, sticking his tongue in my ear in a gesture of wanton lust. When guilt overcame him and he thankfully retracted it, he would slump to his knees, dragging Vera and me with him for a bout of prayer and self-flagellation, right there in the middle of the Rainbow Rooms, Manor House.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and I went in search of a key I still had somewhere that belonged to the flat of an elderly client who had died over a year earlier. She was very old and sick and the hospital, realizing that they could do no more for her, sent her home to die in her own bed. As she had no living relatives and no one to care for her, the job of looking after her in those final days was left to me and a home help.

It was a small flat, just one room with a tiny kitchen and bathroom, and each time you turned the gas on for the oven or ran a bath the walls and windows ran with rivers of condensation.

Edna, the lady in question, had been an orphan. She went straight from the orphanage into domestic service as a nanny and a life sentence of caring for a succession of rich people’s progeny. Dotted around on top of the mantelpiece in cheap gilt frames were old black and white photographs of these children to whom she’d given so much of herself, and yet here she was at the end of her long life, alone apart from a total stranger in a damp little bedsit in Camden, waiting to die. It was sobering stuff sitting with her in the wee small hours of the morning, listening to her shallow breathing growing weaker and the constant tick of her bedside clock counting down the hours.

Edna died peacefully at three in the morning. She’d woken up and asked me if I’d warm her some milk and when I returned from the kitchen she was dead.

There’d been a spate of deaths since the nights had drawn in. A few weeks prior to Edna’s death, I’d let myself into the home of an elderly gent and found him lying dead on the hall floor, with his arm outstretched, grinning obscenely. But that was small fry compared to the morbidly fascinating tale of the old lady who was discovered burned alive in her kitchen in King’s Cross. She had just lit the gas and was about to put the kettle on for a cup of tea when she’d had a stroke. That was bad enough, but unfortunately for this poor woman the plate rack over the stove combined with the recess wall had held her upright, positioning her over the stove in such a way that the flames from the gas ring slowly roasted her alive, burning through her chest. Rivers of fat had bubbled out of the charred hole in the back of her cardigan to cover the kitchen floor. The smell was disturbingly similar to that of frying bacon and for a very long time afterwards quite a number of Peripatetics couldn’t even consider a bacon butty without retching.

As I smoked my fag I noticed that the sheet over her was covered in stains. Resignedly I went in search of a clean sheet, not wanting the police and ambulance services to think she’d been neglected and allowed to lie in a dirty bed. As I was getting a clean sheet out of the wardrobe drawer I had a look to see if there really was any money hidden. I was sceptical but underneath the bedding I felt something very much like a wad of notes. Pulling the bundle out, wrapped in a towel just as Edna had said, I sat back on my heels with the blood pounding in my ears. How much was here? It could be thousands, millions even, although I doubted it as the wad really wasn’t that big.

A thought suddenly occurred to me. What would it look like if the police turned up right this very moment and found me on my knees with a stash of greenbacks in my hand and an old lady dead in the bed behind me? They’d think I’d murdered her. Quickly I undid the elastic bands and unwrapped the tea towel with trembling hands. There was a wad of notes all right, a decent-sized one at that; it was just a shame that they happened to be pre-decimalization ten-shilling notes.

And now here I was, almost a year later to the day knocking on Edna’s door to see if anyone had moved in. I had a story worked out in case someone answered the door – about how I was one of Edna’s great-grandchildren – but there was no need for me to go into my patter as no one seemed to be home. I tried the key and, as I’d hoped it still worked. Quickly I let myself in before any of the neighbours saw me, and found the place exactly as I’d left it a year earlier. The note I’d written for the home help was still propped up against the ashtray with a crumpled packet of Winstons in it and the indentation of Edna’s body still visible in the mattress.

Time had stood still for the last twelve months and it seemed that the council had completely forgotten about this place. Time to change lodgings!

Before we abandoned ship, Chrissie and I drew a series of obscene and highly graphic cartoons depicting Vera and the landlord in compromising sexual positions on the living-room wall. Vera wasn’t amused in the least and went round the room closely examining them, sniffing with disgust while Chrissie and I rolled around on the floor, beside ourselves with laughter.

We’d made frequent trips to Edna’s, washing down walls and floors and packing her personal items away in binliners, squashing them into the only storage cupboard in the hall. Vera didn’t fancy sleeping in Edna’s bed and nor did I but Chrissie had no such reservations.

‘That’s a good-quality horsehair mattress, that is,’ he remarked, dismantling the iron bed frame to make more room. ‘I don’t care who died in it. You don’t think you sleep on Crown bedding in the nick, do ya?’

The living conditions were cramped for one person, let alone three, added to which we had mountains of drag hanging from the picture rail and lining the walls and the enormous blond bouffant wig that Hush had created was perched on top of the telly. Things had changed since we’d met Miss Hush. He’d sold us old costumes that he no longer had any use for, including a pair of crinolines complete with hoops that were now wedged behind the bathroom door. Hush pointed me in the direction of Hairaisers, a wig shop on Lisson Grove that sold wigs in every colour and size including the white-blond that I’d searched in vain for. It was one of the major requirements for the look I had in mind, that of a big blonde hard-bitten slapper. He also made us new costumes quickly and cheaply, much to Chrissie’s annoyance who had been made redundant since Anne had reclaimed her Singer sewing machine.

I didn’t go home for Christmas. We had a booking at the Black Cap on Christmas Eve and another in an East End pub on Boxing Day and, believing you should never turn work down, I spent a jolly Christmas Day with Joyce and his flatmate instead of my family.

I was growing increasingly unhappy living at Edna’s. Not being one of nature’s squatters, I was tired of lying to the persistently inquisitive neighbours and living in constant fear of a knock at the door. My new year resolution was to find a flat, but although bookings had increased we still weren’t earning a lot of money from the act and I certainly couldn’t afford to give up the day job yet. Still, there were some good offers of work for the coming year: a three-week tour of the north and a month in a club in Denmark plus the bookings we had in town. Maybe things were starting to look up after all.