So Me (14 page)

I was playing Rollo. Surely you remember Rollo? He is one of the evil brothers who inherit the mill and the donkey while the good brother just gets the cat who turns out to have a slight Imelda Marcos complex. Puss was played by James Dreyfuss, who went on to have great success with
The Thin Blue Line, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme
and various films. He was very funny and charming in the part, despite having to wear a very odd costume that made him look like a giant toilet-roll holder.

Yet again the excitement of getting the part soon faded as the reality of living in Harrogate and dragging two members of the local youth theatre dressed as a donkey around the stage every night slowly sank in. I discovered that a comedy henchman with a Yorkshire accent was outside my range – I was awful in the show, but extreme boredom meant I didn’t care. One night I was under the stage killing time before my next entrance when high above me I could hear one of the actors going, ‘Oh Neddy!’ I thought this was odd because I couldn’t remember a single scene that Neddy appeared in that I wasn’t in as well. Hmm.

Fuck!! I rushed on to the stage from the wrong side to find my evil brother staring at me with all too convincing menace. I helped drag the members of the youth theatre draped in grey furry car-seat covers into the wings, and as I apologised profusely to my brother, they shuffled away like a couple of fur balls sicked up by a giant cat, saying, ‘And he’s supposed to be the professional.’ What made it worse was that they were right.

Catering seemed to be the only profession that would have me, and that I was moderately good at. However, when I got back to London after panto hell ready to pick up my apron, I discovered that even that wasn’t going well.

Melange was in trouble. As is the case now, the London eating scene was very fickle and our trendy crowd had simply grown tired of expensive anarchy and moved on. Fewer shifts meant less money and the very real possibility of no job or money at all. I thought about finding a job in a different restaurant, but that seemed like I would be making a proper career move and finally admitting to myself that I was a professional waiter rather than an actor.

Luckily I was still living in Brixton with sweet Henry and paying very little rent, but even this stability in my life was rocked by one Stephan Deraucroix.

To meet Stephan is to have strong feelings about him. Many, myself included, adore him, others have an almost allergic reaction to him. He is originally from Strasbourg, but when I first met him he was living in Paris with his boyfriend Jean-Jean. The two of them had decided to come to London to have some fun and make some money. Jean-Jean ended up washing dishes somewhere and Stephan found himself scampering around Smiths, which is where I’d first met him. We got on immediately because I could speak a little French and he liked talking about sex as much as I did. He is handsome in a sort of French cartoon way, with big dark eyes and permanently puckered lips.

Stephan makes me laugh like no one else I know. Sometimes this is because he is being consciously funny, but mostly it is his Stephancentric view of the world that is hilarious. The way he communicates is very hard to describe. He does speak English, but with what must have taken supreme effort on his part, he has managed not to improve at all over the last twenty years despite living for long stretches in London.

One night at Melange, a table asked Stephan for broccoli. I can only assume Stephan fancied the guy because normally if something wasn’t on the menu we would take great delight in substituting ‘fuck off’ for a string of ‘sorries’ and ‘only the freshest blah blah blah’. On this occasion Stephan abandoned the rest of his section, went to the kitchen, found some broccoli, chopped it up, whisked it into the microwave and finally, several minutes later, appeared breathless at the
table proudly brandishing a small dish of the green vegetable. The customer looked at him blankly.

‘You asked for some broccoli?’

‘No. I asked for a bottle of beer!’

Merci et bonne nuit
.

Stephan expects the world to take care of him, and so it does. He had decided to come back to London and needed a job and somewhere to live. Mike gave him some shifts at Melange and I was in charge of accommodation. Beside me on the top floor of the house in Brixton was a much smaller room that looked out on the back. This was empty and Henry needed another lodger, so Stephan moved into it. Unfortunately, Henry turned out to be one of the aforementioned people who have an allergic reaction to Stephan. They did not get on. Although I still liked living in the house, weeks after moving in Stephan began to plot our departure.

With an obsessive determination he began to talk to everyone about his quest for a flat for us. I let him get on with it because it’s very hard to take Stephan seriously. Then one day he announced that he had found us a place to live. A friend of another waiter in Melange was leaving his council flat, but he would sublet it to us if we paid off his back rent. At least, I think that was how it was supposed to work – all I really remember was that it all sounded quite dodgy, but to all our friends at the time getting a council flat was like finding the holy grail. I think this excitement blinded us to the fact that some council flats aren’t worth having.

We headed off to Hackney to see our prospective new home. At the time I didn’t know East London at all, so as the bus pulled away from Old Street, the nearest underground station, it was the start of a great adventure. Past Shoreditch
town hall and then north towards Dalston to Queensbridge Road. It was a tree-lined avenue stretching for a couple of miles through north-east London, and it contained that fairly standard mix of rundown Victorian villas and council estates within the bombed-out gaps. About two-thirds of the way along on the left-hand side it suddenly opened up into a long stretch of balding grass, and there stood the four tower blocks of the Holly Street estate. The third grey lump of unwashed concrete was Grange Court, and on the eighteenth floor was our new home. On one side of the building there must have been great views back towards the river and the city itself, but the view from our windows was of the featureless vastness of Hackney, Stratford and beyond into Essex.

Our very own council flat! We took it. I know I was sad to say goodbye to Henry and Brixton, but I was genuinely incredibly excited to be moving into the eighteenth floor of a Hackney tower block. Perhaps Stephan had put me under some sort of French spell.

Actually, the flat itself was lovely. With two bedrooms, a lounge and a kitchen, it was spacious and bright. We painted walls and borrowed, begged and bought pieces of furniture. We loved it. As far as we were concerned, people who gasped in horror when we told them where we lived or refused to visit us were simply mad or jealous. Of course, as Stephan and I sat up late at night watching the first Gulf war unfolding on television, we couldn’t help noticing that the Baghdad landscape the scud missiles were lighting up bore an uncanny resemblance to the view we had over East London.

One Sunday I was lying on the sofa idly watching police
search helicopters hovering outside the window and flicking through the pages of the
Sunday Times
magazine. A photograph caught my attention. It looked like a picture of our beloved tower block. It was. Why was it in the news? I read the caption. ‘This building has more cockroaches in it than any other in Europe.’ I froze. We had been there about a month and I hadn’t seen a single cockroach, but in that moment I expected to hear the sound of a tiny marching army of them coming down the hall to carry our fridge and cooker away. People in the article talked about finding them crawling over their babies’ faces and up their own legs. I decided that if I ever saw one, I would have no choice but to move out. Then, as I read on, almost in passing the journalist casually mentioned that parts of four different human bodies had been found in the bathroom of one of the flats by police investigating some gang war. I stared down the hall at the front door that only moments before had seemed solid and secure.

To make matters worse, a fire in an empty flat on our floor meant our landing was all blackened by smoke and none of the communal lights worked. Night and day we came and went through Stygian gloom. To see another human being was to scream. Mysterious water started to run down the walls of the living room. Light switches and plugs sizzled and popped and then died.

It really was a dump. On the ground floor, an archaeologist could have just about pieced together what the entrance must have looked like twenty years earlier. Broken hinges hanging withered on the wall were all that remained of the security doors. A large, gouged-out hole to the side of the entrance had become the empty grave of what had been the
intercom system. Anyone could come and go and have access to the lifts and the flats beyond. I was waiting for the lift one day with an elderly lady, and I felt for her as she stared around her at the empty beer cans, graffiti, and suspect puddles. She shook her head and said sadly, ‘When we’s moved in, it were like an hotel . . . an hotel.’

Every night, coming home was like running the gauntlet, creeping around corners, freezing at the sound of a voice or a footstep, praying for the lift to come with a little extra prayer that there would be nobody in it. There were two lifts. One served the even floors, the other the uneven numbers. In all the time we lived there, I think both lifts worked at the same time about three times. Depressingly often neither of them worked, and then the long climb up began. I often thought about the old lady and her hotel.

Once, late at night, I came home to find only one lift working again. I waited for it to come to the ground floor. Finally it arrived, the door creaked open, and there stood a very large white German shepherd dog. It looked at me. I stood back to let it out, but it just stayed where it was, breathing and staring. I weighed up my options: get into a small confined space with a large, potentially dangerous dog I didn’t know, or climb eighteen flights of stairs. I stepped into the lift. The dog looked at me, the doors closed and up we went. I pushed every button, and each time the lift stopped and the doors opened, I looked at the dog and he looked at me. Finally, on the eleventh floor, the dog looked up, nodded his thanks, and wandered off down the corridor like a pale, hairy ghost.

Another night, the one working lift arrived. Nobody in it, not even a dog, just a small fire burning cheerily. Again I
weighed up the options. This time, however, I had some slight concerns about suffocating. I decided I couldn’t get into a lift with a fire. For the first and only time in my life, I proceeded to piss in a council lift. Sadly, my bladder was not a big enough reservoir to extinguish the flames. Eighteen flights of stairs, but at least I wasn’t bursting to go to the toilet.

Mostly the people who lived in the block were all as scared as and of each other. As the lift doors closed I always felt like a kitten thrown on to a busy motorway. Who might get in on another floor? One day, Stephan and I were going down in the lift and a bunch of real East End lads got in. We started to speak in voices several octaves lower and stood in as butch a way as we could. As we walked from the lift with the lads following behind, we really felt we had got away with it – they hadn’t detected for a second our extreme level of nelliness. Suddenly a whole cooked chicken landed with a steaming fleshy thud at our feet – a row over Sunday lunch must have reached a crescendo several floors up. Stephan and I jumped out of our skins and screamed like two fat virgins seeing the Chippendales for the first time. Game over.

The most important survival rule I knew about living in the tower block was not to draw attention to oneself. When I bought myself a smart new outfit, I was very worried about wearing it in the lift because it made me look like such a rich person. One day I couldn’t resist: I put on my black trousers with a grey jacket and waistcoat made of a blanket material that was very trendy at the time, and finished the outfit off with a white shirt and a black satchel. The whole outfit screamed media millionaire. I crept out of the flat and scuttled into the lift. As it slowly descended I repeated my
silent prayer for it not to stop until it reached the ground floor. My heart sank as the lift stopped at the tenth floor and a woman got in.

‘Hello,’ I said.

She didn’t say anything. I could feel her staring me up and down. Doubtless she was wondering to herself, ‘What is this rich bastard doing in here?’ We reached the ground floor, and just as the doors opened she could resist it no more – she turned to me and spoke.

‘Excuse me, are you the postman?’

Going down.

Pretty soon the cockroaches heard that we had moved in, and after the initial skin-crawling horror of seeing them around, we got used to them. I stalked them around the flat armed with sprays and rubber gloves as I had done on my fly safaris during my student days. I was forbidden from squashing them because Stephan, a cockroach expert (he had lived in Paris after all), explained that in their death throes the last thing they did was lay all their eggs. It seemed that cockroaches were the Cilla Blacks of the insect world – they knew how to survive. Occasionally men from the council would knock on the door. They stood there dressed like astronauts and wheezing through huge face masks and explained that although the stuff they were about to spray all over your home was lethal to cockroaches it was completely safe for human beings. Once they called at lunchtime, and as they left one of them noticed me pouring out a bowl of soup that I had been heating up. ‘Are you going to eat that?’ he asked through several layers of charcoal filter. I looked at the bowl of what had been delicious tomato soup before their intervention and then back at my visiting
spaceman. ‘Yes.’ He blinked through his mask. ‘I wouldn’t,’ and with that he was off on his mission to stamp out all the multilegged Cillas on planet Hackney.

The rather obvious question surrounding all of these stories is why didn’t we leave? Why did I live there for nearly five years? Why did I live there longer than I have lived anywhere else? I suppose the answer is to be found in a variation on Rose’s wise words about people getting over things: people also get used to things. The other main reason was, of course, that financially it was impossible to move.