The Life of Lee (35 page)

The flat gave the impression that everything was held together with sticky tape, glue and dental fixative, and had been steadily bodged up over the years with various bits of debris from perhaps a nearby canal. It had been fashioned into serving this elderly gentleman and his even older wife’s physical needs. She, by the way, couldn’t make it out of the chair to greet us – it appeared it was a struggle for her even to lift her white head, hunched over as she was to such a degree that she just stared down permanently at her knees.

Her husband was no less frail. At first, we’d thought there was nobody in as we waited so long for the poor old codger to answer the door. But then we felt very guilty, as the long journey back up the stairs was so obviously a struggle for him. He looked to the heavens and made a face so pained, you’d have thought he’d just been told he would be spending another twenty years in a Siberian prison camp cracking rocks. It wasn’t only torture for him, though; we had to follow up behind, silently urging his slippered feet agonizingly up and on to the next step, each seemingly more painful than the last.

But Heather was adamant that we should take the flat, even though it didn’t exactly match up to the property’s description we’d received. Let me put it into layman’s terms: ‘It was an absolute shithole.’

We never had any heating, apart from an old rusting gas cooker that sat like a keen suicide bomber waiting to go off. It was not situated in the kitchen, as you might imagine. Why not? Because there was no kitchen! No, the
cooker was for some strange reason placed in the bathroom next to the lounge. But, and this is what made me do a double take, there wasn’t really a bathroom, either. Yeah, good, eh? That’s how it was put to us by the old fella. Oh, he was very proud of his ‘all-purpose room’, as he liked to call it.

‘It’s a bathroom-kitchen,’ he beamed. ‘I designed and built it myself.’

‘Blimey, that’s really ingenious,’ I told him, my tongue firmly in my cheek. So there was the cooker sat next to a flimsy, low, rectangular wooden box. He showed us how it worked with the panache of Debbie McGee showing off one of Paul Daniels’s big illusions.

‘And you just lift this lid, and inside is the bath tub,’ he proudly announced.

‘Why has it got a lid on it?’ Heather asked.

‘Because, my dear, when it’s closed, you have a kitchen unit to work on, but when it’s open, it’s a bath, see.’ He demonstrated by flapping the thin plywood lid up and down.

I didn’t even want to ask where the toilet was, as I couldn’t see it anywhere in the room. It made me shudder to think that one day Heather might happen to stroll in to cook our tea and catch me having a quiet Marley Magoo. Or, worse still, a chieftain.

Despite all the extra fun-packed design that made the flat seem like the crooked house at a cheap fairground – roll up, roll up, for all the tedium of the fair! – we took it. In a way, we had to, as we couldn’t afford anything else.

Regardless, we moved in with only a second-hand, balding couch to sit on and an even more second-hand balding
TV set. It was so old, we could only receive pictures of John Logie Baird. It was given to us by one of Heather’s friends, just to get us started. Some food might have been nice, but at least we could, if we got really hungry, watch Rusty Lee doing her cooking show.

Eventually I managed to find the toilet; it was in fact hiding outside along a wooden and worryingly rotten fire escape at the back of the flat. A trip to the toilet was like negotiating some ancient, flimsy footbridge.

The old Victorian houses that are the mainstay right across Southend had, over the years, gradually been bought up by builders who would turn them into flats. In order to make a profit, sometimes they might squeeze twelve dwellings into just one small Victorian house. Our building, though, only contained two, as it was so small. Ours was the first-floor flat.

When building houses for the masses, the Victorians would mostly place the toilet outside. Now you would have thought the modern-day builder might have brought the bog in from the cold and into the twentieth century when he converted it. But, alas, it remained an outsider.

If you had to go, you had to go, and that was a pretty daunting prospect in mid-winter. Southend is on the coast and can get really cold. So after risking your life going down the old balsa-wood fire escape, you would freeze your extremities off in the toilet, or the fridge as I liked to call it. I advised Heather to put on a thick coat, as I didn’t want to have to come out and snap her off the bog.

The toilet was so cold – I mean, it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say if you farted it froze the instant it left your arse, and then you would hear the clink, clink as the ice pop hit
the solid ice at the bottom of the frozen toilet. Everything froze. After finishing, if you looked back down the toilet, it was just a bunch of brown ice. I always thought it looked like something you’d get down the ice-cream shop – don’t worry, I won’t go any further with this line!

Toilet roll was a luxury, so newspaper was the preferred alternative, even though it left the old hairy, rusty, fifty-pence piece a little scratched and scraped. You would always know when your partner had been for a number two because after taking their clothes off to get into bed, they would display a black inky bottom. It’s not a good look, I can tell you.

The toilet was cold, but it was a sauna compared to the Arctic environment in the bedroom. In mid-winter, ice would build up on the window, but on the inside. Whipping out of bed in the morning was always a forbidding prospect. You had to try to keep moving or risk suffering exposure and certain death from the bone-chilling temperatures.

I would lie there in the morning next to the soft, warm body of Heather, who is like a radiator in bed – blimey, she’s hot. We’d take it in turns to get up and make a cup of tea. Whenever it was my turn, I would shout loudly, as a way of psyching myself up: ‘I’m going out for a while. I may be some time.’

The kitchen cum bathroom in our Westcliff flat!

Then I would throw back the covers and show Heather my black, skid-marked news-printed backside.

It was not the way she wanted to read the morning papers.

32. Getting on My Bike

Each day after attending the Job Centre, I would try to increase my chances of employment by yomping the length of the London Road, one of the main drags that leads out of Southend. I would walk into each and every shop and small business in the five-mile stretch of road, asking for work.

It became a little more difficult after suffering rejection after rejection. But then you might get the odd shop owner who would inform you that if anything came up, he’d get in touch.

Normally Heather was back from work before I got home, but on this occasion the flat was cold, dark and empty – it always was without her. After deciding to perch myself on top of the bath-cum-kitchen-unit to await her return, I began to get a little concerned as it was now getting very late. Just then, I heard the front door and Heather creeping up the stairs. I went out to meet her on the landing and immediately knew there was something wrong.

It was obvious she’d been crying. She’d been acting strangely for a couple of weeks, and I put it down to her decision to work extra hours to help pay for things. I never said anything, mostly out of my selfish guilt about not finding a job. However, after a cup of tea and a chat,
it gradually emerged that she was doing the extra hours not by choice. In fact, she was being paid no more money.

She couldn’t hold it back any longer, and it just spilled from her as she told me she worked for a tyrannical boss who knew of her dire need to keep her job and so played upon it, keeping her working late into the night. She had undergone weeks of abuse and humiliation. She said she didn’t want to worry me with it, as it would just have made me feel worse about not having a job. We needed the small amount of money she brought in, otherwise we would go under.

I listened patiently as it became obvious Heather needed to get off her chest all the pressure that had built up over weeks of working for that monster. As her words came tumbling out, I was secretly burning with rage. We went off to bed but, while Heather slept, I was unable even to close my eyes for a second. I lay there, staring at the ceiling. I felt such shame that I’d been unable to help her.

She had endured great pain in secret. No one should have to suffer such belittlement and torment – and yet she’d never mentioned a word of it because we needed what little money she was being paid. We knew that if Heather should lose her job it would just about tip us over the edge.

But I couldn’t help the nagging feeling inside that I should do something about it. That sense was embedded in my psyche, and I knew it would only burn and fester away at me until I acted upon it. I was brought up to stand up and fight, not just for me, but for the ones I love. I could imagine Granddad Evans turning in his grave if he thought for one
moment I had in any way allowed my family to be humiliated. My philosophy has always been: if you’re going down, go down fighting, and back out the door with your fists flying. I looked over at Heather sleeping. We needed that job, I thought, but how could I let her suffer so?

The next day Heather was first out of bed. She made cups of tea for us, as it was her turn, got ready and went off to work. I went off to the Job Centre and then did a tour around the local industrial estates to see if there were any vacancies at any of the small factories. It was on one of these estates that I bumped into an old friend from school called Gary.

He was loading up his van with double-glazing units from a factory. He was taking them to fit into a house. He told me he was doing very well for himself now, working for his father’s business, undertaking general building work, painting and decorating, that sort of thing. I said I was out of work and asked if perhaps he might be able to fit me in somewhere in his dad’s firm. I explained to him I would do absolutely anything.

Gary was about to drive away when he stopped his van, rolled down his window and asked if I knew how to paint. Of course, I said, but in a way that indicated he had just insulted me by even asking me such a disparaging question. I clasped my heart: ‘That hurt, that did, Gary. I’m wounded ’ere, mate!’

Of course, I knew what he meant: could I paint a room or a door? I told him in no uncertain terms that I was a brilliant painter. Obviously, I didn’t tell him that I meant on canvas. Well, I was sort of lying, but what would you do in that situation? I was desperate!

With that, we shook hands, and he told me I could start tomorrow. Gary gave me a piece of paper and explained I had to be at that address and report to his father, who would then tell me what he wanted me to do. ‘Don’t let me down now, mate, will you?’ he said. He went on to warn me not to go if I wasn’t serious and not to slack as his father was pretty strict. But then he added encouragingly, ‘If you work hard, Dad will pay you well.’ So I took a lot of positives from that. I may not be the world’s greatest painter and decorator, but I’ve never been afraid of hard work.

I felt that my chance meeting with Gary had been a kind of divine intervention. I was feeling a little more confident about the future, owing to the fact that I was now a painter and decorator. Not as yet, obviously, but in my head I thought it would only be a matter of time before I was striding around busy building sites in yellow boots and a suit with Gary’s dad pointing out various painting jobs he would like my men to do. Who knows? I imagined even Buckingham Palace needed a lick of the old magnolia satin finish to make it shine in the sun.

That newly confident note helped me make up my mind: I was going to pay a visit to Heather’s work to have a chat with her boss. I didn’t hang around – oh yeah, there are no flies on me, mate, when I get going. So I barrelled through the gates and up to the glass entrance doors of the offices of this import–export company. The red mist had well and truly descended, and someone was going to get it.

I didn’t spot any security, so I just burst through into the office where I knew Heather worked. As soon as I
stepped through the door, everyone in the long, cluttered, rectangular room fell silent. No one moved a muscle – it was like a photograph. Just the whirr of computer noise could be heard in the large, messy, open-plan room.

Piles of paper standing on filing cabinets nearly reached up to the polystyrene-tiled ceiling. Four middle-aged women who had been beavering away at their desks stopped mid-type to see what I was going to do. Towards the end of the room, I spotted Heather, head down, working away, almost hidden behind a mound of documents. She looked up and saw me. Her face dropped, her eyes widened with terror – she could tell I was raging mad. She began to turn a funny grey colour.

I noticed her eyes quickly dart towards a solid wooden door at the end of the room and then back at me. I knew what that meant – it was a giveaway. There was his name on the door: Chris Davis. That’s him, the bastard! I’m having you Chris wank-features-bully-boy-bollocks Davis … Chris Davis! That was his name – the other stuff was just because I was angry, they weren’t his middle names or anything. Just so you know.