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  THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

  Paul O’Grady

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  Epub ISBN 9781409094043

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  First published in Great Britain

  in 2010 by Bantam Press

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Paul O’Grady 2010

  Paul O’Grady has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of Paul O’Grady. In some limited cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBNs 9780593064245 (cased) 9780593064252 (tpb)

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  CONTENTS

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Paul O’Grady

  Prologue

  1 The Ghosts of Holly Grove

  2 Wine Lodges and Babies

  3 In Which I’m Introduced to the Finer Art of Drag Artistry …

  4 Formosa Street

  5 The Abattoir

  6 The Conny Home

  7 London Calling

  8 Littlehampton

  9 Crouch End

  10 Wedding Bells

  11 On the Bash

  12 A Savage Debut

  13 Invading Poland

  14 Manila

  15 The Glamazons

  A Short Glossary of Polari Terms

  In memory of

  Buster Elvis Savage.

  The greatest canine star since Lassie.

  Also by Paul O’Grady

  AT MY MOTHER’S KNEE …

  AND OTHER LOW JOINTS

  PROLOGUE

  SATURDAY NIGHT. THE BIG NIGHT OUT, THE ONE YOU STARTED preparing for the moment you opened your eyes on a Saturday morning, asking yourself, as you contemplated the pattern of cracks across the bedroom ceiling that looked like Barbara Castle in profile, ‘What am I going to wear tonight?’ This question would later prompt a trip into town to buy a new top, a garment that would invariably turn out to be a skin-tight, Omo-white, cap-sleeved T-shirt, exactly the same as all the others that lay in my wardrobe drawer. Didn’t matter, there was something about a brand new T-shirt that made you feel ‘dressed up’ and dazzling.

  There was a hysterical queen on the club scene known as ‘Suicide Lee’, so-called for the many wrist-slashing escapades and overdoses of paracetamol he put his body through each time he was dumped by the latest boyfriend. Since this happened every other weekend, the sight of a comatose Lee being carried out of a club by a posse of agitated queens became quite a regular feature on the late night streets of Liverpool. These futile suicide attempts never took place in the privacy of his own home. They were always carried out in public, usually in the toilets of a pub or club where he knew that he would be quickly discovered by his long-suffering friends and saved yet again from the jaws of death. He probably got off on the adrenalin rush of all this high drama and the subsequent attention, which he mistook for sympathy when in reality it was ridicule and piss-taking on a grand scale.

  One Saturday teatime he awoke on a friend’s bed from a drug-induced coma, the result of another attempt at self-harm the previous night, and asked his anxious pal wanly, in his best Camille voice, what the time was.

  ‘Half six,’ came the gentle reply.

  ‘Oh my Christ,’ Suicide Lee screeched, sitting bolt upright in the bed and springing into action. ‘What am I going to wear tonight?’

  I never socialized with Suicide Lee – I couldn’t stand him, to be honest, and thought he should abandon any further botched attempts on his life and instead entrust the task of dispatching him to one of the many people, myself included, who would be only too happy to volunteer for the job – but in a way I sort of empathized with him when I heard the ‘what am I going to wear’ story. Even the debilitating aftereffects of an attempted suicide couldn’t stop this queen’s primeval urge to find the all-important something to wear and get out there clubbing. Every self-respecting young person went out on a Saturday night regardless of circumstances. To stay in was unthinkable; it meant you were a social outcast, a disgrace, a complete loser forced to sit in his bedroom listening to records and fretting while the rest of the town was out clubbing and having a ball.

  I was going out tonight though and looked friggin’ gorgeous, or so I believed. My skin-tight jeans had been freshly washed in the bath that afternoon and then spun and tumble-dried in the launderette on Church Road, where sometimes, in my haste to get ready, I forgot to ask or rather to grovel pathetically before the unpredictable pit bull who ran the launderette for her kind dispensation to use the drying machines. This faux pas would result in my being shown the door with a sharp reminder that the ‘use of dryers was strictly for those who had done a full load in the shop previous’. Like a mantra she read this out from a handwritten sign sellotaped to the wall over the spin dryer, as if it gave her declaration some sort of official authority. It was just one of the many rules and regulations written out on the inside of empty soap-powder boxes and then stuck on machines, walls and even windows of the launderette that either she or the other fifteen-stone piece of officialdom – similarly encased in a uniform of polyester overall and battered slippers – who ran the show when she wasn’t there had conjured up between the service washes in their little cubby hole that they grandly referred to as ‘the Office’. A refusal to be allowed to use the dryer meant running home to perform the laborious ritual known as ‘ironing your jeans dry’, a process that was never 100 per cent successful and meant enduring a damp crotch, arse and pockets all evening.

  No damp jeans tonight though: a brand new pair of brushed denim Sea Dogs were about to make their debut, as was the ubiquitous cap-sleeved T-shirt bought that afternoon in Birkenhead Market. Hair blow-dried viciously until the top resembled a guardsman’s busby with back and sides nicely curled under by torturing my naturally wavy hair with a round hairbrush. Any imperfections such as a pimple, spot or love bite would be amateurishly disguised with a generous daub of Rimmel’s Hide and Heal that was the colour of magnolia emulsion and glowed unnaturally under the fluorescent lights of a club. After checking mysel
f in my ma’s dressing-table mirror I descended the stairs, leaving an eye-watering smog of Aqua Manda for Men in my wake. My mother, sat on the bottom step talking to my aunty on the phone, scrunched up her face and fanned it frantically with her hand like a panto dame who’s just found out that the slipper fits Cinderella.

  ‘What in God’s name have you covered yourself in?’ she moaned. ‘It smells like a gas attack, and I hope you’re going to wear a coat, you’ll catch your death going out like that.’

  A coat? She had to be kidding. Only nesh old people wore coats. I had my brown leather bomber jacket – trendy enough to be considered acceptable outdoor wear. It had an elasticated waist that rode up at the back and I wore the sleeves pushed up to the elbow. It was also a size too small for me and therefore could never possibly be mistaken for anything as enveloping and shameful as a coat.

  ‘I won’t be late,’ I lied, ‘and if I’m not home it means that I’ve stayed at one of me mates.’

  ‘Mates? Which mates?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘Ooh, I’d like to be behind you to see what you’re up to with these mates, my lad.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ I thought.

  ‘He’s off out tomcatting it again, Annie,’ my mother sighed resignedly down the phone to my aunty. ‘I don’t know what he’s up to, but I can tell you one thing,’ she added, giving me the once-over as she spoke, ‘the devil rides out. Oh, the devil rides out tonight, Annie.’

  CHAPTER 1

  The Ghosts of Holly Grove

  ‘I WONDER WHAT I DID IN A PAST LIFE THAT WAS SO EVIL TO BE cursed with a lunatic like you for a son,’ my mother sighed. ‘I must’ve been the one who said to the Gestapo, “Anne Frank? Oh, she’s behind the wardrobe.” Why else would I have to suffer a big soft ciss who at eighteen years of age has to sleep with his mother because he’s scared of ghosts?’

  Personally I saw her more as a Madame Defarge than an informer but whatever sins she fancied she’d committed in a past life, she was right. I was scared of ghosts. Bloody well petrified.

  I’d been to see The Exorcist at the Futurist Cinema in Liverpool and had wound myself up on the journey home to such an extent that when I got in and scuttled up the stairs to bed I lay ‘like a big soft ciss’ unable to sleep, fully convinced that an abomination similar to what I’d seen earlier on the screen was lurking somewhere in the room waiting to pounce the moment I dared to close my eyes. Pulling the blankets over my head, I tried to blot out the image of that possessed child with the obscene black tongue and nice line in projectile vomiting.

  My heart was thumping. I knew it was infantile to allow my imagination to conjure up these nightmares but I’m afraid common sense had been left behind at the Futurist and nothing could dissuade me from the idea that something unholy was in the room. I just knew it. I could feel it. An unspeakably evil entity from the very bowels of hell was hunched at the bottom of my bed, watching me silently through malevolent red eyes, biding its time before the inevitable attack. There was nothing else for it but to abandon ship, summon up the courage to brave the dark open space of the landing and make a mad dash for the safe harbour of my mother’s bed. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and charged, leaping into the bed beside her. Not a wise move.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ she screamed, waking up most of Tranmere, ‘do you want to give me another heart attack?’

  Quite rightly outraged at this unwelcome intrusion, she began belting me with her library book and lashing out with her feet as she tried to kick me out of bed. Dodging the blows from a large-print Jean Plaidy I attempted to explain my peculiar behaviour, hoping that she’d show a bit of mercy. She was having none of it.

  ‘Well, serves you right,’ she crowed, suddenly remembering to keep her voice down to a respectable level in case Dot-Next-Door heard her, ‘going to see such rubbish when you know full well that the Pope himself has condemned it. You reap what you sow, my lad. You can’t expect to get a good night’s sleep when you mess around with the devil, you know.’

  She was chuckling to herself as she leaned out of the bed to drop her library book on to the floor, pausing to squint at the travel alarm clock on the cabinet beside her.

  ‘It’s gone midnight, you big fool,’ she yawned, attempting another jab at me with her foot. ‘And if you think you’re lying in my bed stinking the place out with the smell of fags and that pappy-poo you’ve squirted yourself with then you’ve another think coming, mate.’

  ‘It’s Musk.’ I’d given up on the Aqua Manda after Aunty Chrissie had sniffed the fruit bowl, complaining that she could smell a rotten orange.

  ‘More like Muck, you mean. Go on, sling your hook, you’re making the place smell like a whore’s garret.’

  I lay on my back resignedly folding my arms across my chest as I listened to her prattle on. I was at her mercy: it was either stay here with my ma or face Linda Blair hiding under the bed with a host of incubi and succubi next door. Linda Blair was beginning to look like the hot favourite.

  ‘People have become possessed by demons after sitting through that filth, you know,’ she went on, warming to her theme. ‘Mind you, not that there’s much room left inside your soul for any more of Lucifer’s henchmen, the place must be chock-a-block by now.’

  She was enjoying herself, wringing every last drop that she could get out of the situation.

  ‘You want to get yourself down to church instead of sitting in picture houses that show films that are not only blasphemous but downright pornographic.’

  ‘It wasn’t pornographic.’

  ‘Not pornogra …’ she spluttered, raising her voice a couple of octaves. ‘Well then, kindly tell me what you’d call the sight of a young girl effing and blinding and shoving a holy crucifix up her you-know-what?’

  Her outraged face was shiny from the use of one of Avon’s night-time preparations and her hair was wrapped carelessly in a chiffon headscarf, with a blue plastic roller that had been randomly attached to a strand of hair poking out in front. She never slept with the curtains drawn or the door closed. Both were always left wide open, not that the curtains would have been of much use to block out the light if she’d bothered; they were made of thin fibreglass and failed to meet in the middle by a good six inches. She’d bought them off the peg in Birkenhead Market to replace the heavier ones that kept the sun out when my dad was on nights and trying to sleep during the day, but she’d got the measurements wrong. However, since she quite liked the ‘mod’ design (black squares and oblongs on a turquoise background) she’d kept them.

  ‘I’ll have to take another Valium now,’ she snapped. ‘Me other one’s worn off thanks to you waking me up, you know I haven’t slept well since your father died.’

  My father had been dead six months. My mother had been rushed to hospital after suffering a near-fatal heart attack and my father, on being told by the doctor that there wasn’t much chance that she’d survive, had had one himself and died that night. On the day of his funeral my mother, still seriously ill and forbidden by the doctors to make the journey to Landican Cemetery to bury her husband, lay numb with shock in her hospital bed, her sister Chrissie tight-lipped and grim-faced in a chair beside her. His funeral had been quite an affair. St Werburgh’s church was packed to the rafters, the Knights of St Columba had turned out in force as had half of Ireland, or so it seemed, and it was touching to see so many of the elderly people he’d visited regularly over the years as a Knight present as well.

  After the funeral I’d gone to live with the aunties, Annie and Chrissie, in Prenton, not being trusted to live on my own in 23 Holly Grove. I didn’t object as I no longer cared, going about my daily business like an automaton. My clubbing days were behind me, my mood too bleak to even begin to contemplate a night out at Sadie’s or the Bear’s Paw. I had a peculiar yet, to my mind, satisfactory sensation that I was fading, all colour and light slowly bleeding away from me until I was nothing more than a grey shadow, a monochrome ghost that would very soon evaporate into thin air.

>   My boss, Joe Black at the Magistrates’ Courts, must have noticed that something was wrong, judging by the number of times he called me into his office to ask if everything was OK. He’d been particularly solicitous since my father’s death and was aware of rumours that I’d got a woman in the Court Collecting Office pregnant.

  ‘You’re going around with the weight of the world on your shoulders, lad,’ he said, ‘and I find it unsettling that these days I always know where you are. I no longer have to tell you to stop chattering and get on with your work. It’s so not like you, Paul, you seem to have lost your spark, so if there’s anything at all, anything that you want to get off your chest, you know you can always talk to me. I’m pretty unshockable, you know.’

  I contemplated this invitation to look upon Joe’s office as the confessional for a moment before uncharacteristically deciding to spill the beans, so to speak.

  ‘Well …’ I started slow, ‘I know my mum, who’s still in hospital, blames me for my dad’s heart attack and subsequent death, as does my aunty Chrissie, other members of the family and indeed myself. The rumours doing the rounds are all true. Diane from the Court Collecting Office is pregnant and I’m the father.’

  ‘Yes, I was aware of the situation,’ he said, sitting back in his chair and taking his glasses off while he had a think. ‘Have you two any intention of getting married?’

  ‘No, Mr Black, there’s no chance of that happening. You see, I’m … erm … well, I’m gay.’

  You know that noise that Catherine Tate’s Nan character makes? A sort of Huuup! Well, that perfectly describes the sound that Joe made on hearing that piece of information. He sat forward smartly in his chair and suddenly became totally preoccupied with the task of polishing his glasses with the end of his tie.

  ‘I’ll get back to work then, thanks for the chat.’