The Devil Rides Out (5 page)
Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
Annie, with her frizzy ginger hair stuffed under a hand-knitted tartan tam-o’-shanter, probably wouldn’t see seventy again and put me in mind of Super Gran, while Pat, with her greasy black locks, straight as a yard of pump water, pulled back severely from her waxen face and held in place by two hair clips, had a look all of her own that said ‘I’ve just come back from a funeral’. Indeed, she could’ve easily passed for the corpse. Her usual ensemble consisted of a strangely perverse 1950s black gaberdine mac, shiny with age, which she wore buttoned up to the neck with a little black beret gripped to the back of her head. Ed D. Wood, the director/writer responsible for gems such as
Plan 9 from Outer Space
, would’ve loved Pat. They certainly fascinated me, these two old brasses. Women like that always have and the little snippets of their conversations that I’d catch I’d relate back to Molly, perched on a stool at the end of the bar with a mug of tea and a fag, studying the racing page.
I enjoyed my time at Yates’s. It might have had a reputation for being dog rough but in my six months working there I only ever witnessed one fight. Even so, on slow days I’d lean across the bar and gaze out of the open door at people passing by on the street outside and couldn’t help thinking that maybe I really had missed the boat.
I still worked the occasional night at the Bear’s Paw. I’d
given up my job behind the bar after my father died, but strapped for cash as always I’d asked Gordon, the owner, to take me back on. He let me have a few weekends, even allowing me to start late as I didn’t get out of Yates’s till gone eleven. I was grateful for the work but secretly not happy to be back pulling pints behind the bar; as usual, I wanted to be out front drinking them with my mates.
One of my favourites was a student from Plymouth, where he had been known as David but had been rechristened Nina la Roche since his arrival in Liverpool. He was as tall and gangly as a beanstalk, rapier thin. Trailing scarves and waving arms covered in bangles, he would stand on his toes in his wooden clogs like a giant praying mantis and frighten the ‘straight’ queens off the dance floor. He rented one large room in an eccentric old household on Canning Street and you never knew which one of his many personas would answer the door. Sometimes he was a member of the Russian aristocracy and, answering the door first as the maid, he would tell you to wait in the hall, and then rush into his room to prepare himself for the role of a Romanov princess.
‘Come in,’ he would shout imperiously after what he considered a respectable passage of time and I’d enter to find him draped across his chaise longue, engulfed in shawls and with a papier-mâché sculpture belonging to his landlady, Helen, on his head that we’d nicknamed the Conch. ‘What makes you think you are suitable for the position of personal maid? Do you speak Russian and Japanese?’ And the game would begin. Most of the time when he wasn’t being Russian or a ballet mistress we’d eat his homemade spaghetti bolognese, drink cider and dance like maniacs to his collection of 78 LPs.
*
‘Where’ve you been till three in the morning? Out tomcatting it?’
‘No, I’ve been working, Mam. Go back to sleep.’
‘I’d like to know what kind of work keeps you out till this hour of the morning, nothing respectable that’s for sure. I wish you’d go and find yourself digs instead of creepin’ in here like Marley’s Ghost at all hours. There’s a nice slice of beef in the fridge if your hungry.’
After Diane’s phone call, that hateful morning after my father died, to announce the unwelcome news that I was going to be a father, I sat on the stairs unable to comprehend the enormity of what was happening to me. I had no idea what to do but an increasing sense of panic told me that I had to get out of
the house. It was still fairly early and I had no idea where I was going. I headed off across the park, stunned by the way my life had been turned upside down in a matter of hours, walking around in a daze asking myself a thousand questions.
Top of the list was ‘How the bloody hell am I going to explain this one to my mother?’ I felt sick at the mess I was in, and dry retched on what was probably the twentieth fag I’d smoked that morning. This was it. Life over. The end of my world as I knew it. Sitting on what was left of a bench I weighed up my situation. Dad dead, mother seriously ill in hospital, and to cap it all I’m about to be saddled with a baby – a piece of news that I really could’ve done without, especially on today of all days.
For a moment I contemplated ‘doing a runner’, following a white rabbit who would lead me down a hole, vanishing forever from my increasingly complicated life, or curling up in a ball somewhere and going to sleep, pretending none of this had ever happened.
I thought about my father and my devastated mother and the tears came again.
Oh, the sheer hopelessness of it all. And yet I knew deep down, no matter what my fears, that I’d never be able to run away as, apart from a genuine affection for Diane, good old guilt would step in the way and prevent me from doing so. No, I’d stay and face the music. It was the first sensible solution to my problems that had entered my head that morning and I felt instantly more relaxed for it.
Lighting up yet another cigarette, I watched as a man crossed by the children’s swings, a canvas bag swinging from his shoulder that almost certainly contained his ‘carry out’ – a lunchtime meal of cheese or egg sandwiches and a flask
of tea – no doubt lovingly prepared by his wife this morning.
An alarming thought sent me panicking again as I watched him vanish down the hill and in the direction of Cammel Laird.
Jesus tonight! What if I was expected to do the decent thing and marry Diane? No, that was definitely out of the question. I could see us, unhappily married and living in her flat in Bootle, pushing a pram around Stanley Park, skint and miserable and hating each other as we played Mummy and Daddy for the baby’s sake, a baby I’d bitterly resent.
The notion that I would be a father in nine months’ time did nothing to awaken any paternal urges that might be lying dormant. I loved kids, I’d been ecstatic when I first became an uncle and was never away from my sister’s house. I’d spend a good part of my wages each week on books and toys for my nephews and nieces and had happily babysat nearly every weekend. I was crazy for them, yet the idea of having one of my own did not appeal in the slightest. Maybe I’d change my mind when I saw it, I thought. I might just fall instantly in love with it, but then again I just might not. As for a full-time relationship, should I give it a go? Millions of others do it, I thought, so why not me and Diane? Probably something to do with the fact that I was gay and saw Diane more as a friend than a lover. No, it just wouldn’t work and I was determined to ‘have it out’ when we met up the next day in Liverpool, sitting at an out-of-the-way table in the Lisbon pub to discuss what we were going do.
Diane was as shell-shocked as me at the news she was going to have a baby as she’d foolishly believed that it was impossible for her to conceive. I was too naive to believe otherwise. Ha. If only I’d listened to my aunty Chrissie’s warning to make sure that I always put a rubber on it. Having sowed
my wild oats I’d prayed for crop failure, as some old drag queen once said, but my prayers had obviously fallen on deaf ears as the bloody crops had gone and flourished this year.
‘Are you absolutely sure the baby’s mine?’ I blurted out.
‘Of course it’s yours. There’s been nobody else. Cheeky sod.’
A lad came down the steps carrying a wicker basket on his head and began moving amongst the tables, shouting, ‘Prawns, cockles, whelks.’
‘You don’t want to get married or anything, do you?’ I asked her hesitantly after the seafood seller had passed by.
‘No, I don’t,’ she replied, a little too quickly for my liking. ‘What do you think I am? Mad?’
‘That’s all right then. In that case are you having …’
‘No, I’m not having an abortion!’
‘Who mentioned abortions? I was only going to ask if you where having another drink.’
And so on 16 May 1974 I became a father.
I rang the hospital as soon as I got into work.
‘Can I ask who’s calling?’
I hesitated before replying, ‘I’m the … er … father.’
It sounded strange admitting to a complete stranger that I was the father as so far I’d kept the news of impending fatherhood to myself. My mother had no idea. Ignorance is bliss was my maxim as far as she was concerned. My sister Sheila was about to drop her fifth child and thankfully her constant visits with the children had kept my ma preoccupied and her suspicious mind off me. If there was one thing my mother worshipped above all else it was her grandchildren.
There was a woman at the Citizens Advice Bureau I’d spent an hour with, pouring my confused heart out to her in her
little office in Hamilton Square. She was sympathetic and very kind but in the end she was unable to tell me anything that I didn’t already know. I was grateful to her though, then and now, but failed to keep my promise to stay in touch and let her know what the sex of the baby was. She knows now if she’s reading this.
‘Mother and baby are doing well.’
‘Great. Can you tell me what she had?’
‘A little girl.’
Well, it would hardly be a six-footer, would it, I wanted to say but chose not to. Instead I answered flatly, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ my tone of voice lacking any conviction or enthusiasm whatsoever.
‘You can visit any time after lunch … and oh, congratulations,’ she said somewhat doubtfully as I thanked her and placed the phone slowly back on the receiver, returning to the bar unsure of just how I should be reacting to this news. Worried and scared were the top notes, but surprisingly there was also a slight whiff of pride lurking in the background. Maybe I’d enjoy being a daddy after all? Unable to resist the urge to break the news to someone, I told Jean.
‘I’m a father, Jean.’
‘You’re a what?’ she asked, slightly irritated at being bothered by what she considered nonsense. I tried to explain the saga as she poured wine from a tap in the barrel into a dock.
‘You mean you’ve got a girl into trouble.’ She shook her head as she tried to make sense of it, and after serving her customer went off to tell Molly, who was sat as usual at the end of the bar perusing the
Echo
.
‘Bloody fool’ was Molly’s only comment, and she didn’t even bother to look up from her paper. She let me go early
though to visit mother and child. ‘Here,’ she said as I was leaving, pushing a tenner into my hand, ‘a bit of luck for the baby. You’re going to need it, lad.’
A smiling nurse showed me into a shiny ward where Diane lay in the middle bed of a row of three, beside which the tiny newborn babies lay in their cots. Nervously approaching the cot next to Diane’s bed, I felt the blood rush to my cheeks as I became conscious that the eyes of all the new mothers and nurses in the ward were on me. All of them were waiting to get a kick out of seeing a young father’s reaction to the first sight of his newborn child.
Diane, sitting on the bed, her face flushing a bright red to equal mine, was just as embarrassed by the situation as I was. She quickly said, ‘Why don’t you have a look at her?’ I noticed she avoided my eyes as she spoke.
Leaning over the crib I tried to adopt the
Little House on the Prairie
approach as was obviously expected of me by the mums. Look at baby, look up and around at the eager faces, my own face a mask of incredulous joy, pick baby up and examine it closely, cradling it gently and making suitable cooing noises to convey a first greeting to the child, then kiss mother tenderly on the forehead to an audience of blissed-out women. Tears optional.
‘You’re looking at the wrong baby, mate. That one’s mine, yours is over there.’ The kid’s mother was pointing to a cot on the other side of Di’s bed. This went down a treat with the mums and nurses, setting them off screaming with laughter and me scuttling over to take a peep at my own child, feeling more like Carabosse than a loving father.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Diane asked, still unable to look at me.
I wasn’t sure what to think. Amazed? Confused? Or just
nothing? Could this minuscule object with the scrunched-up face and the tight little fists really be my own flesh and blood? I kept waiting, hoping for a rush of fatherly love as I lifted her nervously out of the cot. She was a sweet little thing, yet I felt distant. I was ashamed of myself. What was wrong with me? Didn’t I come from a loving, stable family? My father had been an excellent role model and yet here I was, a false grin fixed firmly on my face, hoping that it would mask my true inner feelings as I stared with blank eyes down at this cuckoo in my nest. The answer is clear to me now. I was a very immature and scared teenager who didn’t want the responsibility of a child – simple, but back then I thought myself to be unnatural, an abomination against the laws of nature, a freak who was incapable of bonding with his own daughter, heaping more shovelfuls of guilt into that already overloaded sack that I seemed to be permanently carrying around. I remember tentatively sniffing her scalp. She smelled nice although it has to be said that all babies smell the same really, a mixture of milk, sick and Johnson’s Baby Powder – providing the heart-stopping stench of a full nappy doesn’t assault your nostrils first.
