At My Mother's Knee (37 page)

Breakfast was cornflakes and toast except for Sundays, when
there was bacon and egg – providing the Irish Ghost was in the
mood. The Irish Ghost only cooked for the staff. He didn't
touch any of that fancy muck, as he called it, that went into the
restaurants. He'd worked in hospital kitchens for years before
ending up at the Wheatsheaf, which explained his lumpy
mashed spuds and boiled-to-death cabbage. He was a terrible
cook. His steak and kidney pie had a crust thicker and tougher
than a paving stone, and the handful of grey gristle that called
itself steak and kidney sat in a puddle of thin, watery gravy. He
deeply resented the restaurant chefs' invading what he saw as
'his' kitchen, and there were frequent spats that provided a
welcome diversion as I washed plates.

'Call yourself a professional chef ?' he'd roar across the
kitchen at the man who came in each night from Egham to
prepare the prawn cocktails and steak and chips for the
Wheatsheaf's discerning diners. The pro word again. 'You've been using one of my knives, haven't you? A real chef wouldn't
touch another chef's knives. They're sacred, the tools of his
trade. Touch them again and I'll have your bloody hand off.'

Occasionally the man from Egham would rise to the
challenge and argue back, and once or twice they even came to
blows, but usually, disappointingly for me, he ignored the Irish
Ghost, preferring to get on with his job.

Each morning I had to clear out an endless number of skips,
full to the brim with empty bottles which had to be put in their
appropriate crates. It was a hanging offence if you put a Britvic
orange bottle into a Schweppes bitter lemon crate. The skips
stank of stale booze and fruit juice. The tomato juice was the
worst – the smell of it and the feel of it would make me retch.
This was cold, filthy work, and since gloves weren't provided
I frequently cut my frozen hands on broken bottles, my
lifeblood merging with the pool of stagnant tomato juice in the
bottom of the skip.

'Haven't you finished yet?' the hated Finch would shout
down to the yard from the staff-room window. 'You've got the
Sports Bar to clean and open up yet, and don't forget to give
those skips a really good hose down. They were a bit smelly
last night,' he would add, waving a piece of toast under his
nose as if it were a fan. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill
every single member of staff in the Wheatsheaf Hotel and go
home. Hatred kept me going. I'd lie in bed listening to Chris
farting and scratching his psoriasis in the dark and invent
enterprising ways to dispose of him. Remembering my ma's
botany lessons, I'd drift off on a mephitic cloud dreaming of
foxgloves and death cap toadstools. He revolted me. Sometimes
I'd hear him crying in the night and would ask him, not out of
sympathy but to shut him up, what was the matter.

'I miss my girlfriend,' he'd sob. 'I really love her, really, really
love her.'

Stupid big fruit, I'd think to myself, but instead of saying
so I'd look at the photograph he carried in his wallet of a
particularly ugly troll and make soothing noises of appreciation
and tell him how lucky he was to have such a beauty
waiting for him back home.

His feet stank and he wore his socks in bed, and as well as
the weeping psoriasis he confided in me that he was being
treated for syphilis. I was surprised the troll had it in her, but
it appeared that he'd caught the dose not from the troll but
from a girl in Grimsby he'd met when he was on a course. I'd
never come across anyone with a venereal disease before and
was suitably shocked and fascinated at the same time. I told
my mother when I rang her from the phone box across the
road.

'Don't let him touch your towel,' she warned me. 'I remember
when I was auxiliary nursing at Clatterbridge the syphilis
patients had ulcers eating into their backs. They were so big
you could put your fist in them. Better go –
Corrie
's on in a
minute. God knows what Miss Nugent sees in that Ernie
Bishop, but still, every pan has a lid.'

Christmas drew nearer. The hollow ache of homesickness in
the pit of my stomach refused to go away. I'd been well
taught by
Mrs Mack
at the RAFA club and after a week was
entrusted by Finch with the running of one of the smaller
bars
,
the Jockey Bar. 'You still have to do all your other duties as
well,' he warned me, mincing off upstairs for a quick slug of
vodka in the office. He was a drunk and a mean one at that.

I met him once coming up the stairs after his afternoon off,
which was usually spent
drinking
in a nearby pub. 'D'ya know
what you need?' he slurred, wrapping his arm round my waist
and pulling me close to him. 'You need a nice cock up your
arse.'

I was completely stunned. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. I laughed, not wanting to rile him but
at the same time firmly removing his wandering hand from my
backside. 'Don't worry, you'll keep,' he giggled as he watched
me stomp down the stairs, my face burning. I went out into the
garden for a smoke. Finch had scared me, and I was annoyed
to see that my hands were shaking as I lit my cig. Were all
homos like Finch and the one in the Gents at Victoria Coach
Station? Were they all predatory, effeminate freaks? If so, then
I was sticking to girls.

In the Jockey Bar you wore a waistcoat in racing colours. Mine
hung on me like a sack on a cadaver. Its previous owner must
have been ten stone heavier than me but as it was the only one
available I had to wear it. On my first night behind the bar of
my new domain,
Diana Dors
came in with her husband. I
recognized her by her bouffant of unnatural white hair. She
was starring in a sitcom called
Queenie's Castle
at the time, a
popular comedy about a hard-boiled matriarch who lived with
her family in a council high-rise. She didn't look that far
removed from Queenie in real life, poured into a white
miniskirt and sweater which might have looked reasonably OK
if she'd been twenty years younger and three stone lighter. She
leaned across the bar and beckoned to me with a podgy hand
that made me think of a pound of Irish sausages.

'Could I have a glass of water, please?' she groaned. 'And
then let me find a chair to collapse in and take the weight off
my feet. They're fucking killing me.'

It was easy to see why. She'd forced them into a pair of white
knee-length boots so tight that her bunions were clearly visible
through the cracked patent leather, and to make matters worse
they had elasticated tops that bit cruelly into the flesh of her
swollen legs. Her husband,
Alan Lake
, joined her at the bar. He
was your typical medallion man to look at: paisley-patterned
shirt undone to the belt buckle of his hipster flares, revealing an expanse of hairy chest criss-crossed with gold chains. He
had those mutton-chop sideburns down the side of his face, a
single gypsy earring and a diamond ring on every finger.
Common, I thought to myself, sniffing disapprovingly, just like
my mother.

'Champagne, the best,' he shouted drunkenly at me across
the bar, a crazy leer on his face. 'And give us a large Scotch for
the wife.' He then proceeded, with the help of a group of
hangers-on who seemed to appear from nowhere, to drink
the Wheatsheaf dry.

Diana Dors distanced herself from the group. She didn't
seem to be enjoying the whisky that she was putting back, and
looked tired and unwell. 'How old are you?' she asked wearily,
catching me staring at her and pulling herself up to the bar
from her armchair. I told her that I was eighteen, although I
was really only seventeen.

'Have you seen my film
The Amazing Mr Blundell
?' she
asked, turning to look at her husband who was rolling on the
floor of the bar with a cushion between his legs pretending to
be a jockey. 'I play an old bag with a lunatic husband. Not
much change there then, is there?'

I liked Diana Dors. She asked me if I missed Birkenhead and
what I was doing for Christmas and if I had a girlfriend,
and was the only person who'd shown any interest in me, apart
from Finch's unwelcome advances, since I'd arrived. Her husband
eventually passed out and was impossible to move. Miss
Dors, more from exhaustion than drink, lay on one of the sofas
and quietly went to sleep. I couldn't rouse them, so I locked the
bar up and left them to it. Finch went ballistic when he found
out and there was the usual inquisition in his office until I was
eventually allowed, at around 2 a.m., to go to bed. He took a
sadistic pleasure in waking me at five, telling me to go down
and see if my 'guests' were awake yet.

It was cold in the bar and a grumpy Diana Dors sat hunched
on the sofa with her fox-fur coat pulled tightly around her
shoulders. 'Who was the bright spark who locked the fuckin'
door then?' she shot accusingly at me. 'What do you think
you're doing locking me in a bar, you bloody idiot?'

I'd had enough. I was also, like the rest of my kinfolk,
dangerous if roused early and unexpectedly from a nice warm
bed. Consequently, I told Diana Dors in no uncertain terms what
I thought of her and her husband, who lay unconscious, face
down on the floor of the bar, throughout my unfaltering rant.

'You're right,' she sighed after a while, slowly standing up
and looking at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar, 'but
whilst I may be an ignorant fat cow and my husband a dirty
flash bastard I'll forgive all for a cup of coffee and the loan of
a hairbrush.'

I went to the kitchen and put the coffee machine on and then
went up to Carol's room. She wasn't amused at being woken
up and even less so when I asked her if she had a hairbrush that
Diana Dors could borrow.

'Diana Dors wants what?' she asked, confused and only
barely awake.

'A hairbrush.'

'Diana Dors? THE Diana Dors? Wants to borrow my brush?
Why?'

'To brush her hair, of course.'

She thought she'd dreamed the incident until she discovered
her brush matted with platinum blonde hair and the best part
of a can of lacquer missing.

The rodent called homesickness had taken up permanent
residence in my guts and was gnawing away at me. The
Wheatsheaf was busy with office parties and pre-Christmas
dinners and so far I'd only had one afternoon off in the fortnight
I'd been there. I'd spent that roaming around Staines in the rain looking for something interesting to do, in the end
settling for a Wimpy before catching the train back to Virginia
Water. As I walked down the road from the station, with its
beautiful houses and fabulous cars parked in the drives, I
wondered which one
Elton John
lived in. Chris had said that he
lived round here and that he had a reputation for throwing 'wild
gay orgies'. Maybe he's throwing one now, I half hoped as I
waded through the piles of leaves on the pavement. And maybe
someone will see me and invite me in and before you know it I'll
be set up by some millionaire in a Carnaby Street penthouse . . .

There's nothing to do in Virginia Water on a rainy December
night, especially when funds are non-existent and you don't
know a soul. I should've packed my bag there and then and
gone home, but I hadn't been paid and couldn't afford the fare.
I was damned if I was going home skint to face my mother's 'I
knew you wouldn't last five minutes, I knew you'd be back on
the bones of your arse' routine. No, it would be better if I stuck
it out for a while.

Back at the Wheatsheaf I weighed up my options: sitting in
my garret freezing or going downstairs to the Cellar Bar to
blow the last of my money on a half of cider. I chose the latter.
Apart from the fact that the Cellar Bar was the only one Finch
allowed the staff to drink in when they were off duty, it also
happened to be the only bar in the hotel that was in any way
lively. The bar staff down here didn't live in. They all lived
locally and were young and sexy and thought themselves 'cool'.
Standing at the end of the bar in a tank top nursing my half of
cider I felt like a dull brown weed in a hothouse of orchids.
Then Finch came down and insisted, since I had 'nothing else to
do', that I helped out behind the bar. It was getting very busy.
Tomorrow was Christmas Eve and people were out celebrating.

I weaved in and out among the happy revellers, collecting the
empty glasses and beer bottles, like the spectre at the feast, bleak
with homesickness, consoling myself with the odd half of Woodpecker cider. At the end of the night, as I was helping to
clear the bar, confident and chatty after half a dozen ciders, a girl
asked if I'd like to go to a party up the road. Maybe this was my
chance to sample one of Virginia Water's 'wild gay orgies',
although I was less keen on the gay after Finch's advances.

The girl's name was
Laura
. She was small and pretty and
very eager to go to the party. 'We have to take a bottle if we
want to get in,' she said. 'Can't you find one somewhere?'
Flushed with cider and thrilled with the opportunity that had
come my way, I helped myself to an unopened bottle of
Campari from behind the bar, knowing that I'd have to replace
it with a bottle from the off-licence in the village before the
daily stock check in the morning. 'There you go,' I bragged,
pulling back my coat and showing my new paramour the
booty. 'One entrance fee.'

The party turned out to be dreary. Laura dumped me as soon
as we arrived and there was not a sign of anyone wild or gay,
let alone a whiff of anything orgiastic, just a few Virginia
Water greasers pretending to be Hell's Angels, hunched over a
bottle of cider and listening intently to Led Zeppelin. I took a
couple of slugs of the Campari, which tasted like cough
medicine, and went and sat on the stairs to have a fag.

'Got a light?' a girl said, sitting down next to me, offering
her cigarette. I watched her sit back and take a long drag, holding
the smoke in her lungs, her face slowly reddening, before
she let it go, exhaling a plume of smoke into the air. 'Want
some?' she asked, coughing.