Still Standing: The Savage Years (27 page)

Attempting to stand up to admire my handiwork was more difficult than I expected and I realized as I tried to focus that I was out of my mind from the fumes of the paint stripper. Sitting on the floor propped up against the sofa, a recent acquisition from Habitat that I was having a lot of trouble keeping clean as I’d stupidly bought it in cream, I closed one eye and took a long cyclopean look at the fireplace. Unfortunately, despite my hard work and consequent possible addiction to a certain brand of paint stripper, the bloody thing was still an eyesore. I sat there and contemplated this anachronistic grate, so out of place among my gleaming magnolia and Habitat acquisitions, and after a while it started to grow on me. There was something familiar about it that I found comforting. It was the kind of fireplace that someone had once sat down in front of to a nice boiled ham tea, or relaxed next to in an armchair listening to the Light Programme on the wireless, or stood in front of and rubbed their hands or quite possibly in Mum’s case turned her back on and lifted her skirt, letting her freezing bum feel the benefit of a nice coal fire. As I allowed my fume-fugged mind to wander I felt a real sense of what the room must have looked like during the war years. What this fireplace needed was a mirror above it with a Bakelite clock in the middle of the mantelpiece with a pools coupon and a rent book wedged behind it. There should also be a packet of Players Weights, a
couple of bits of something made from brass and maybe an ornament or two, one of which should be religious, and, perched on the far end, a separate shilling for the meter. Instead of fighting this fireplace I was going to make it the focal point of the room and decorate around it. Paint stripper doesn’t half make your mind wander.

I found a chimney sweep who came round and proclaimed that I had a lovely clear flue and a strong draw, and after carting a bag of coke back from the garage on Nine Elms Lane I sat down with Chrissie in front of a roaring fire and had a nice boiled ham tea listening to the Light Programme on my newly acquired Bakelite wireless, which remarkably still worked even if it did take five minutes to warm up after being turned on.

Swept up in this wave of wartime nostalgia, Chrissie got me a beautiful shawl from somewhere in the bowels of C. & W. May to drape across the table and a gas mask that reeked of mould which he hung on the headboard of my bed, giving gentlemen callers the wrong idea. I gave it to the drug dealer upstairs who stuffed it with amyl nitrite-soaked wadding and had a ball sitting on his cushions blissfully happy listening to Mahler with a budgie on his head.

David Dale had started up a company called the Kopy Katz and under his direction they performed shows every night for a week at the Union Tavern. Welsh Chris, known to all as Maggie, and his partner John from New Zealand were now running it and living over the shop. The Union was a large pub that had the advantage of a big stage and the unheard of luxury of a custom-built dressing room with lots of mirrors and lights and a sink for us to wee in. It was a great pub to work in and Chris and John became good friends. I helped
them move to their new pub, the Aquarium in Brighton, when the Union sadly closed down, carrying a fridge freezer on my own down three flights of stairs after taking one of Maggie’s slimming tablets, which must’ve possessed the same strength-enhancing properties as Popeye’s spinach. David’s next big production was going to be
Annie
and he asked me if I fancied playing Lily St Regis.

‘Go on,’ Chrissie said. ‘I’d love to make that outfit, all those flounces cut on the bias.’ Chrissie and I were on speaking terms of late and he’d been making me a lot of outfits. He really was a skilled tailor but was growing tired ‘wasting a five-year apprenticeship and all my fuckin’ talents’ on rubberized miniskirts and all things leopard print. He was longing to be let loose on a project that would get his creative juices flowing with the force of Niagara.

‘Pink chiffon,’ he said dreamily, running his fingers through an imaginary fabric. ‘Tons of it, weighted and wired so it hangs beautifully and flows when you walk. Shame it’s going to waste on your skinny back. Still, I dare say I’ll pull the rabbit out of the ’at as always.’

Buying fabric for costumes was, and still is, a pastime that I very much enjoy. Thanks to Chrissie and the lads at Borovicks in Berwick Street Market I’d learned what worked and what didn’t, how much fabric was needed and what sort of lining went with it, and how to appreciate the important factors like durability, practicality and value for money over highly expensive, poor quality fabrics that might look fabulous but wouldn’t last the course.

Chrissie never got his yards and yards of chiffon as I went for a more practical floral cotton lined with pink satin, out of which Chrissie created a magnificent period costume complete with pill box hat and veil that was worthy of any West End stage.

As the dressing room was packed with twelve queens and a couple of dressers roped in to help I got made up in the bathroom upstairs, in the rooms David shared with two other people I vaguely knew to say hello to around the pubs. As I stood larding on the slap the next door along opened and a man wearing only a towel walked out. He didn’t notice me at first and came straight into the bathroom.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded angrily, startled by the sight of a shirtless drag queen leaning over the sink.

‘What’s it look like?’ I replied. ‘I’m from the department of sanitation. I’ve come to see if there’s any vermin lurking around and from where I’m standing I can see there is.’

‘Look, you,’ he said, waving a toothbrush at me, ‘when I walk into my bathroom—’

‘Your bathroom?’ I interrupted.

‘That’s right, my bathroom, I don’t expect to find a gobby Scouser giving me lip, so shift your bony arse and piss off back downstairs before you get my boot up it.’

Who would’ve thought that with those eloquent words of endearment we would embark on a relationship that would last over twenty years.

‘I’ve had a run-in with the most ignorant, arrogant ’ard-faced bastard that God ever put in shoe leather in your bathroom,’ I said to David when I returned to the dressing room.

‘Oh, that’s Brendan Murphy,’ David laughed, ‘my flatmate. I’ve got a feeling you two are going to get on well.’

‘In your wildest dreams, Doris,’ I snorted. ‘From now on I’m getting made up down here.’

However, I continued to get made up in the bathroom over the following week as I was secretly interested in this
argumentative, moody, sarcastic, devastatingly handsome man who, I was happy to see, would neglect his waiting boyfriend in his bedroom next door to sit on the end of the bath and talk to me. He was reluctant to reveal much about himself, but I managed to eventually winkle out of him that he was originally from Portsmouth but had recently returned from Spain where he had been teaching English, and was currently running a gay sauna in the Oval. He also reluctantly admitted to being a fan of the Playgirls and of me in particular, which instantly won him more Brownie points, but getting any further information out of him wasn’t easy as he was a man of few words.

Our cosy little chats in that bathroom invariably ended up in a row. One such barney kicked off after he’d accused me of being schizophrenic and in need of medical help. He was serious, and when challenged claimed he could think of no other possible explanation for my strange behaviour when on some nights in the pubs I’d be affable and chatty and on others I’d glare at him as if he were shit and I were Ajax.

He had a twin brother, whom I remembered Chrissie saying he’d had a nasty run-in with one night in the Vauxhall.

‘Narky little bugger,’ he’d said at the time. ‘Got a right mouth on him.’

‘What’s he look like?’ I’d asked.

‘Like his twin only without the glasses.’

Poor Murphy. No wonder he was confused, for when he wasn’t wearing his glasses I’d mistaken him for his own twin, someone I was prepared to loathe on sight without having even met him, purely on the evidence supplied by Chrissie.

As it turned out Murphy’s brother Kevin looked nothing like him, although he did have, as Chrissie had remarked, ‘a right gob on him’. He dismissed me at first as a necessary evil,
although he couldn’t comprehend why his brother was having a relationship with someone who most definitely did not conform to type, being quite unlike the usual brand of cuties Murphy was attracted to. These beat a steady path to his door while Maggie and I would sit in the kitchen below, me making sarcastic remarks on the passing traffic that crept down the stairs, Maggie humouring me, rightly suspecting that my snide comments were born out of jealousy.

Our romance was a very slow starter. I started visiting David Dale and Maggie a lot more often than I usually did, Maggie greeting me in his Welsh lilt with ‘You here again, Lil? You’ll be moving in next.’ I’d also temporarily abandoned the Vauxhall as my regular haunt, instead drinking in the Union, engineering it so that Murphy and I would accidentally bump into each other, get chatting and end up spending the rest of the evening together, slowly getting to know each other until closing time.

Murphy’s other flatmate, Joan, who had made the move from Portsmouth with him, was baffled by our behaviour, as any physical attraction that we felt for each other was expressed by bouts of boisterous play fighting. I’d walk in a pub and attempt to drag him to the ground; he’d get me in a headlock and rub my scalp with his knuckles, resulting in a violent struggle that ended up with us rolling around on the floor of the bar.

‘What the hell is going on with those two?’ a bemused Joan would ask.

‘It’s more what’s not going on,’ Chrissie would reply, bored with these constant brawls that had everyone talking. ‘I wish they’d get it together.’

Eventually we did. I was on a date with a chap one night
and we were sitting in the Vauxhall having a drink before heading off to Vicky Mansions and hitting the sack when at around closing time Murphy appeared.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked, weighing up my date as if he were a freshly exhumed corpse. ‘Get rid of him. You’re with me tonight.’

I laughed, assuming it was just an attempt to embarrass me, but the date piped up, ‘You what, mate?’

‘Don’t you “You what, mate” me,’ Murphy said, hovering menacingly over him. ‘You heard me, sunshine. Take a hike.’

‘Now just hang on,’ I started to protest.

‘Shut it,’ Murphy said, and turning once again to the date asked him when he was leaving. The date thought for a moment before deciding that I obviously wasn’t worth the hassle and finishing his drink in a hurry. He threw me a pitying look as he skulked out of the door.

‘What did you do that for?’ I asked Murphy, trying to sound annoyed with him.

‘Cos he’s an idiot, that’s why. Now do you want a drink?’

We slept together for the first time that night. Up till then we hadn’t even kissed and on the bus to work the next morning I realized that I was smitten, content to sit gazing contentedly out of the window at a world that suddenly seemed brighter instead of burying my head in the
Daily Mirror
and tucking into my usual breakfast of salt and vinegar crisps, Coke and a couple of Benson and Hedges.

It was exhausting juggling two jobs and two fellahs, as when I wasn’t seeing Scott I was with Murphy. They were jealous of each other at first, giving me frequent ultimatums of the ‘either he goes or I do’ variety. I couldn’t make my mind up as I liked them both and was happy with our status quo even if they weren’t.

‘You know what you are, don’t you?’ Chrissie said one night in the pub.

‘Greedy?’ I offered.

‘No, a slag,’ he said, mooching off in search of someone to buy him half a lager.

In the end it was Scott who made the decision for me by moving to New York. He asked me to go with him and even though a new start in the USA sounded an exciting prospect I procrastinated as usual until Scott eventually gave up and went off to the States without me.

I felt the familiar hard lump in the back of the throat when the time came to say our goodbyes over a farewell drink in the Market Tavern. I stood outside the club at the top of the staircase watching him cross Nine Elms Lane until he was out of sight, wondering if I’d passed up a golden opportunity.

‘Have I made the right choice?’ I asked Russell, who was working temporarily at the Market as a doorman.

‘I’ll say,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘He’s an actor, i’n’t he? They’re only interested in one fing.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Themselves,’ he sniffed. ‘Murphy’s the one for you, not Scott, and anyway, what you gonna do in New York?’

‘I dunno. Get a job.’

‘You need a green card before you can get a job.’

‘I’ll go on the game.’

‘You!’ Russell cackled. ‘You’re too old.’

‘I’m only twenty-nine for chrissakes.’

‘You’ll be firty soon and that ain’t no chicken so get back in there to Murphy and stop mooning over the over one. You and Murphy are made for each other.’

For a while nobody else existed and we’d spend days on end holed up in the flat watching videos in bed and talking endlessly. Our favourite films were
Darby O’Gill and the Little People, The Roaring Twenties
starring Jimmy Cagney and Gladys George,
Love Me or Leave Me, The Unsinkable Molly Brown
, Bergman’s epic
Fanny and Alexander
and of course
Gypsy
.

That winter it snowed and one early morning after yet another all-night session sitting up drinking and talking we took a cab to Westminster Cathedral and re-enacted the final scene of
The Roaring Twenties
in which Jimmy Cagney, riddled with bullets from a shoot-out with Humphrey Bogart, staggers towards a church, collapsing on the snow-covered steps before dying in the arms of Gladys George while a policeman looks on.

Chrissie executed the part of the copper while I gave it my all in the Gladys George role, rushing across the concourse outside Westminster Cathedral to catch Murphy as he staggered up the steps.

Chrissie: ‘Who is this guy?’

Me: ‘This is Eddie Bartlett.’