Still Standing: The Savage Years (38 page)

‘Thanks,’ I said, shoving the Blessed Virgin unceremoniously into my coat pocket and trying to find room for the chip pan, saved from the jaws of death, in one of the carrier bags, which were already filled to capacity.

‘Where are you off to then with all your bags in such a hurry?’ she enquired.

‘I’m going back to London,’ I said, giving up on ever finding a space for the chip pan.

‘And what are you going to do when you get there?’ she asked.

And what was I going to do apart from wallow in this self-dug well of misery?

‘I’m going on the telly,’ I said, suddenly feeling brighter if not even a touch optimistic despite my determination to stay
with my head buried in a cloud of perpetual gloom. ‘Yes,’ I went on, as if I were being interviewed on the red carpet about my forthcoming movie instead of standing at the bottom of Sidney Road with a chip pan in my hand, a plastic Our Lady peeping over the top of my coat pocket and talking to an old woman in a mac and slippers.

‘I’m on
The Bill
next month, and then I’m going back in to shoot another ep in December.’

Shoot another ep, delicious words that rolled casually off the tongue as if I were accustomed to shooting eps every day of my life.

‘Really?’ she replied, obviously not quite clear as to what an ep was and why I was shooting the poor thing, but fascinated nonetheless by this unexpected encounter with someone off the telly on her way to the Crooked Billet for a bottle of Mackie’s.

‘You don’t look like an actor,’ she added doubtfully, eyeing up my carrier bags and my unshaven, unwashed and all-over general air of neglect. ‘What would an actor be doing around here? There’s a fellah in our block who was on
Granada Reports
but that’s only because the police found thousands of pounds’ worth of heroin in his flat. He got sent down at Chester Assizes last week. Good enough for him, the bloody swine, they should’ve hung him.

‘Anyway,’ she concluded, changing the subject, ‘I’ll watch you in the … erm …’

‘
The Bill
,’ I prompted.

‘
The Bill
then,’ she said none too convincingly, suddenly seizing her chance to dash across the road during a break in the traffic flow. ‘What’s your name then so I can look out for you?’

‘Lily Savage,’ I shouted after her.

‘Who?’ she shouted back with a puzzled frown.

‘Lily Savage.’

But she never heard me as a passing bus drowned me out and anyway she’d vanished into the pub by then.

I wasn’t sure why I’d said Lily Savage and not Paul. It just felt right. It was after all the name that I was building a reputation on and subconsciously I’d felt it was about time I acknowledged that fact. No one knew who Paul O’Grady was, even my professional name was Savage. Everyone called me either Lily, Lil or, as in Murphy’s case, Savage. I was Paul to very few any more and a notion dawned on me, a fanciful if not slightly melodramatic one perhaps, that I’d left him behind in Holly Grove.

Lilian Maeve Veronica Savage, international sex kitten and riot consultant among other things, devoted mother to Bunty and Jason, sister to Vera and proud owner of a whippet called Queenie. Born to a lady wrestler and an unknown father – although her mother recalls him asking ‘How much?’ in an Irish accent – she was a woman of the streets, mined from the quarries of Lowther Street and Holly Grove and fired in the kilns of Birkenhead. At the moment she might be relatively unknown in her home town but she had fast become notorious in London and around the country’s gay pubs and clubs.

Could there possibly be any mileage in such an act? Could it lead to anything bigger or would I continue doing the rounds until eventually I found myself aged seventy-five in a miniskirt and thigh-high boots, an anachronism, unloved and ignored, desperately hanging on in there out of financial necessity? Would I be grasping for something to say that would grab the attention of an audience old enough to be my great-grandchildren and far more interested in pursuing sex
and drugs than listening to the pathetic geriatric in a tatty white wig rambling on to herself about her sister – even though once, according to those decrepit old queens still alive to tell the tale, she used to be something in her day?

At the moment I was glad to be making a living, content that I’d finally found a niche, no matter how temporary and precarious it felt. For the time being I’d hang on until something else came along.

As I walked down Green Lane towards the station for the very last time, the carrier bags hampering my progress made me stop for a moment to get my breath and redistribute the weight. For a brief moment I considered getting a portion of prawn curry and chips from the chippy by the monkey steps and going straight back to Holly Grove but the ‘Uncle Arthur’ soundtrack began playing in my head again exactly where it had left off, only this time it was final, as if it were playing out the last episode of a long-running series, my series, and there was no going back.

‘Come on, you, chop, chop,’ I could hear my mother saying as she always did when I was setting off on another venture or to one of my many job interviews. ‘Opportunity doesn’t come knocking regardless of what that Hughie Green says, and if you don’t go looking for it then it’ll never happen.’

I picked up my carrier bags, picture and chip pan and clanked my way to the train.

CHAPTER 11

2012

WHOA! I HEAR
you say. What happened after you turned into Green Lane Station? What happened to the years between then and now? Well, as I explained at the top of the show, there simply isn’t enough space in one book to jot it all down and do it justice. I could go the celeb/ghostwritten memoirs route and give you a quick rundown on my life and career, but that doesn’t interest me. For the time being, unless otherwise invited, I’ll stop at three volumes. There are a lot of deaths in this book, I know, but that’s how it was I’m afraid and of all the people mentioned in these pages the majority are sadly now dead.

I’ve called this book
Still Standing
as I’m amazed that I still am. I’ve survived two heart attacks and a lifestyle that hasn’t exactly been the healthiest but thankfully I’m still cooking with gas, even if it is on a slightly lower burner. I’ve grown more saturnine with age. The tongue is still sharp, unlike the memory, as I find I’m often questioning myself why I’ve just run up the stairs. What have I come up here for?

Ask me what I did last Tuesday and I would be unable to tell you without giving it a lot of thought, and yet I can
remember the streets of the Birkenhead of my youth as clearly as if I had been there only yesterday. I can switch on the Google map in my mind and go travelling, recalling place-names, dates, people, conversations and even bus routes that bear little resemblance to the Birkenhead of today.

The realization that I was old finally hit me in Waitrose when I found myself buying Steradent tablets and a packet of corn plasters. The latter were inconveniently placed on a bottom shelf near to the ground, forcing me to squat to examine the varieties of high-tech packaging that I hoped would contain something to give me temporary relief from the thing on the sole of my foot. I’m assuming it’s a corn. It feels like I have a rosary bead trapped inside my sock when I walk, although when I sit on the loo and lift my leg up, nearly dislocating my knee in the process, to examine the sole of my foot I can’t seem to see anything that could cause such discomfort.

I’m a virgin when it comes to buying the likes of corn plasters although they are extremely familiar to me. I grew up with packets of Carnation Corn Plasters dotted around the house as my mother was a ‘martyr’ to corns and bunions.

‘Look at that poor thing,’ she’d say, pointing to her little toe, misshapen and throbbing an angry shade of red thanks to a corn hanging on in there with the determination of a limpet on a rock. ‘Chinese women who’d had their feet bound didn’t have a toe like that,’ she’d add proudly, admiring the corn with something bordering on affection before attacking it with one of my dad’s Number 7 razor blades, her face a mask of concentration as she shaved this carbuncle with the skill and dexterity of a master barber.

Unfortunately Waitrose don’t seem to stock Carnation Corn Plasters so I settled for a packet of Scholl pads instead.
(And when did they drop the ‘doctor’?) As I attempted to stand up from my ambitious squatting position I heard myself let out a long, low involuntary moan.

‘Gets you like that,’ the woman standing next to me said as she examined a pot of fish oils. ‘I’ve got it in my knees as well.’

I smiled at her, mumbling something non-committal as I didn’t feel qualified to enter into a lengthy discussion of ailments.

As I moved on to the cold meats and dairy, a little old man asked me if I’d mind passing him down a carton of fruity yoghurt as he couldn’t reach it.

‘Full of sugar, this, you know,’ I said, turning into Jamie Oliver and handing him the yoghurt. ‘You’d be better off buying a pot of the plain live stuff and mixing it with some fresh strawberries.’

‘Do you work here then?’ the little old man asked.

‘No,’ I replied, suddenly feeling foolish. ‘It’s just that I read somewhere that those fruit yoghurts have loads of sugar in them …’ I heard my voice trailing off as I realized I was now sounding like the nerd off
The Big Bang Theory
.

‘I think I’ll stick to what I’m familiar with if you don’t mind,’ he said politely after giving it some thought. ‘I can’t be messing about mashing up fruit at my age. I’m eighty-four, y’know.’

Those who have reached a remarkable age and are relatively hale and hearty with their faculties and mental agility still sharp as a pin feel a compulsion to tell every stranger that they encounter their age. And why not? Isn’t it something to celebrate after all? Survival?

‘Enjoy your yoghurt,’ I said, smiling and meaning it, admiring this sprightly little octogenarian.

‘I will,’ he replied. ‘I’m going to have it with my muesli for breakfast. Got to look after yourself, you know.’

At the grand old age of eighty-four here was a man determined to carry on living his life to the full, making sure that he remained independent by maintaining a healthy mind and body. He’d probably live for ever with that attitude.

How would I be at eighty-four, I wondered? Toothless without a doubt and poker-thin, gliding around the aisles hunched over the controls of a mobility scooter, mean of spirit and highly abusive. Not that you need worry, I told myself, you’ll never make it to eighty-four. And with that I headed to the checkout, banishing all further gloomy thoughts.

As I started loading the contents of my trolley on to the belt the woman in front of me struck up a conversation.

‘Fancy seeing you here,’ she said in a voice that could be heard by the people on the bread counter. ‘What are you doing in this neck of the woods then?’

I told her that I lived here and had done now for over thirteen years.

‘Really?’ she gasped as if I’d just admitted to living the life of a hermit deep in the woods. ‘We’ve got a caravan in Dymchurch, been coming here for years. Lovely isn’t it?’

I wholeheartedly agreed with her, adding that I had a traditional Romany caravan.

‘Oh no,’ she said, horrified, tucking a stray peroxide curl behind her ear. ‘Ours is a nice static one on a site with all mod cons and everything to hand. I wouldn’t fancy traipsing around the lanes in one of them things. I remember the gypsies when I used to come here hop-picking as a girl. I’m from the East End originally, the real East End.’

She was small and chubby with lots of gold jewellery, dressed in white slacks and a striped sun-top revealing flabby
suntanned arms and an expanse of wrinkled décolletage of an unnaturally deep mahogany. She exuded sunshine both in manner and appearance and would no doubt have been described in her youth as ‘a larky sort’.

‘We don’t stay here all the time though,’ she went on as she carefully packed away the toilet rolls and All-Bran. ‘The weather’s too unreliable. No, we do a lot of cruising, my husband and I.’

I’m ambivalent when it comes to cruises. I’ve heard some horror stories about life on board a cruise ship, but even so, having never been on one, I’m still curious to give it a go. It’s a dead cert that I’d enjoy a trip on the
Queen Mary
, arriving in New York from Southampton and sailing majestically into harbour under the nose of the Statue of Liberty as my uncle and cousins had done so many times in the past on the great Cunard liners (not as passengers, no such luxury – they were merchant seamen). My uncle Harold in his trilby and smart suit was more ‘New Yoik’ than the New Yorkers.

But on the other hand, I know I’d hate a trip round the Bahamas on one of those top-heavy behemoths that have a tendency to tip over if more than one person flushes the toilet on the starboard side. Within ten seconds of setting my flip-flop-shod feet on deck it would suddenly dawn on me that I’d made a terrible mistake. Unable to do anything about it as by then the ship would have sailed, I’d either be forced to join in with the ‘shipboard fun’ or remain holed up for the entire trip in my cabin wishing everyone would just die or the captain would show some mercy and cast me adrift in a lifeboat.