At My Mother's Knee (45 page)

The subject was never mentioned again.

I told Diane. She refused to believe me, insisting that my
'gayness' was just a stage that I was going through and, with
the help of the right woman, it was something I would eventually
grow out of. Maybe she didn't really want to acknowledge
that I might actually be gay, our relationship had come too far
for that. I felt she was becoming too possessive, making me feel
uneasy in her company in case I said the wrong thing. I was
constantly skating on thin ice in a situation that suddenly felt
claustrophobic. We were really close friends who occasionally
slept together – at least that was how I saw it – but for her it
was a little more than that. I was too insensitive, or just didn't
want to acknowledge what was happening, and buried my
head in the sand and carried on, business as usual, treating her
like one of the boys. She was also blinkered to the truth, kidding
herself that I really was 100 per cent heterosexual and that I
would eventually come round. Consequently our relationship
deteriorated into a series of bitter recriminations and jealous
accusations that eventually drove us apart. I was immature,
irresponsible and needed to grow up, and not surprisingly my
behaviour infuriated her. I didn't want to settle down with
anyone, male or female, and tried to make that clear without
hurting her feelings, but it fell on deaf ears. Sailors were a lot
easier to deal with: women were far more complex creatures
who required careful handling. A word to the wise: ladies, try not to fall in love with gay men. You're not only barking up
the wrong tree, you're in the wrong bloody forest. Mark my
words, as the old crone said, it will always end in tears.

Diane
pestered me to take her to the gay bars. I didn't want
her going to the Bear's Paw as the less she knew about my
activities in there, the better. Instead I took her to the Lisbon
and
Sadie's Bar Royale
, to give it its full title.

'A
RE YOU A MEMBER?'
SADIE
, THE FEARSOME CHATELAINE OF
the Bar Royale, shouted down to us from a second-floor
window. The name Bar Royale was a bit of a misnomer for the
two rooms that awaited us upstairs, and nobody called it that
anyway; it was known all over Liverpool simply as Sadie's.
'Who the fuck's she?' Sadie said, opening the door and glaring
at Diane; Sadie was a total misogynist and panicked if he
thought that there was a chance of the club's becoming 'overrun
with women'. He'd rather have had a plague of rats.

'She's a friend of mine, Sadie,' I mumbled, handing over the
forty-pence admission fee for both of us.

'Bloody fish,' Sadie hissed, letting us pass and following us
up the long flight of stairs. 'I hope you know that this is a gay
bar, so don't be causing any bloody trouble or you'll be out.
Bloody straights. Don't be bringing any more in here or you'll
be banned.' Sadie was a foul-tempered old queen with the profile
of Mr Punch and, on a good day, the demeanour of an
anaconda with toothache. He ran the club along the lines of a
Singapore Borstal, terrorizing his patrons if they dared to put
a foot wrong, yet despite the Draconian rules and the abuse,
back we went for more.

Sadie's was very popular. It was nothing fancy, in fact it
would be fair to say that it was commonly known as a bit of a low joint, a dump, attracting a 'rougher' clientele than the
Bear's Paw did. However, it had a great atmosphere, and unlike
the Bear's Paw it had the bonus of being open until 2 a.m.
Diane had persecuted me, as I had Steve the Copper, to take
her to a gay bar. Apart from tearing her hair out with curiosity
she still refused to accept that I was in any way gay, and
wanted to see how I reacted on my own territory, so to speak.

She was disappointed with Sadie's at first. She imagined all
gay clubs would be sleazy Sodom and Gomorrahs, as I had
done before actually setting foot in one. I sat her down at one
of the tables and went to get the drinks. 'Don't be leaving me
sitting on my own all night,' she said.

'Is that Nana Mouskouri over there?' Bunny the barman
asked. 'If it is, I want her autograph for my ma.'

I glanced over to Diane, who was hunched with a martyred
air on the end of her seat, staring morosely at the two elderly
queens jiving energetically to 'Knock Three Times' on the tiny
dance floor. With her re-entry-shield specs and streaked brown
hair, parted in the middle and as straight as a yard of pump
water, she just might have stood a chance of romping home
with first prize at a Nana Mouskouri lookalike competition. I
gave her a wave to show I hadn't forgotten her; she gave me a
thin, watery smile in return. This was going to be a good night.

Sadie, standing at the end of the bar talking to his best friend Della
, gave me a sour little nod. 'Thanks for letting my
friend in,' I said, mainly for something to say. 'Would you like
a drink?'

'No thanks, love,' Sadie said, slightly mollified, and bestowing
upon me an expression that could easily be mistaken for
the grimace of a gargoyle with crippling indigestion but was in
fact a rare smile. 'Don't make a habit of it, that's all. They take
over if you're not careful and before you know it the place is
teeming with them, like a fuckin' aquarium.'

Della raised his eyes to heaven and drained his pint. He was the ugliest man in Liverpool, his battered face beneath the most
unnatural-looking, shiny nylon wig in a shade of washed-out
ginger a testimony to the many fights he'd had over the years.
As
Quentin Crisp
once said, 'Some Roughs are really queer
and some Queers are really rough.' Della would actually go out
'straight-bashing'. Any unfortunate who had been the victim of
a gay-bashing could rely on Della to rally to the cause, root out
the offenders and give them a taste of their own medicine. He
was as hard as nails, a ferocious, whisky-drinking streetfighter
who stood for no nonsense from the jeering homophobes he
encountered, and consequently spent a lot of time shuttling in
and out of prison for his trouble. He had a heart of gold and I
liked him, as well as admiring his bravery.

When I got back from the bar with the drinks Diane was
talking to Penny.

'Oh, hello, girl,' Penny drawled, raising his glass to me. 'Not
on the ships tonight?'

Diane spluttered into her warm Bacardi and Coke. I knew it
had been a mistake to bring her.

'I was asking Di here if she could guess who that picture was
hanging on the wall,' Penny went on, pointing lovingly to an
enlarged black and white photograph of a strange-looking
woman with a Dusty Springfield hairdo framing a hard, ferretlike
face. 'She had no idea that it was me, did ya, queen?' he
squealed proudly, delighted with himself. 'That was taken
when I won Miss Bar Royale, in the . . . er . . . late sixties.
Everybody said I should've been a model.'

We made appreciative noises, and oohed and aahed in
amazement that Sadie's very own Mona Lisa was actually our
Penny.

'D'ya wanna gerrup for a dance?' Penny asked Diane.
He lifted his empty glass from the table and turned to me.
'Get us a half of lager, will ya? I'm gagging for a bevvy here.'

'Yes, get Penny a drink,' Diane said smugly, heading for the dance floor, thrilled with her new best friend. 'And I'll have
one as well.' I bought another round and went back to our
table, where I lit a ciggy and sulkily drank my cider, watching
them mooch around the dance floor. A clammy hand grabbed
my arm.

'You couldn't give us the loan of your Hide and Heal, could
ya? I wanna cover me lovebite up.'

Two Quid Trish
, so christened because of his reputation for
going in toilets with older men and attending to their physical
needs for the princely sum of two pounds, was pointing to a
purple welt on his neck.

Rimmel's Hide and Heal was supposedly wonderful at
covering up spots, dark circles under the eyes and the odd lovebite.
At least that was the theory – in practice it sort of worked,
if you didn't mind going round with what looked like a dollop
of magnolia emulsion daubed on your defects.

'I went back to the Holiday Inn with this feller last night,'
Trish was saying, sitting down and helping himself to one of
my cigs. 'He had the biggest dick I've ever seen, like a baby's
arm holding an orange.' He swung his own arm back and forth
by his side, clenching his fist to demonstrate the mammoth
proportions of Mr Holiday Inn's genitalia. Diane, returning to
the table, gave us both a frosty smile.

'Not disturbing anything, am I?' She simpered sarcastically.
'Who's your boyfriend?'

I hated these jealous swipes, and even though I wouldn't
have touched Trish with a two-foot bargepole, the feeling no
doubt being mutual, I was tempted to throw my arms round
him and stick my tongue down his throat just to wind her
up.

'Anyway, as I was saying,' Trish carried on, oblivious to
Diane, 'I lay there and told him straight, I said, "If you think
you're throwing that thing up me, mate, then you've got
another bloody think coming."'

'So what did you do?' I asked distractedly, desperate for this
torrid tale to end. Out of the corner of my eye I could see
Diane enjoying herself watching me squirm.

'Well, he offered me a tenner,' Trish said with the resigned
air of a queen who knew what hard times were. The wolf was
no stranger to Trish's door; in fact it had moved in with him
years ago. 'So what was a girl to do when she's offered that
kind of fortune?'

Diane was fascinated. 'What did you do?'

'Opened my lallies, of course, and bit the pillow. Now for
Christ's sake, have you got that Hide and Heal or what?'

We didn't stay very long. When Diane started asking Penny
what happened on the ships I thought it was time to get our
coats. I put Di in a taxi. She'd got on my nerves with her
jealous accusations. For someone who, up to a few hours ago,
had refused to accept that I was gay, she was now giving a very
good imitation of being convinced that I'd slept with the entire
gay scene and most of the navy. 'A slight exaggeration on your
part,' I told her, 'it's only half the navy,' closing the cab door
behind her and taking myself off to get the tunnel bus back to
Birkenhead.

My dad was still up when I got in. The atmosphere between
us was still tense. He disapproved of my 'nocturnal rambling'
as he called it, objecting, quite rightly, to my using the house as
a hotel. The previous week we'd had a particularly nasty row
which had culminated with his throwing a chair at me and
slamming out of the house. I can see him now, striding across
the park in his shirtsleeves, with no idea where he was going as
long as it was far away from me. He ended up getting blind
drunk, which was almost unheard-of for him, and was
barely able to stand when he returned home in the small hours
of the morning. 'You've broke your poor dad's heart,' my
mother said sadly when I came in the next day. 'And to think
you were the apple of his eye when you were a little boy.'

The row had been over an all-nighter at the
Wigan Casino
.
The soon-to-be-legendary club had only been open for a few
weeks but its reputation was already spreading fast, and I
wanted to go with a couple of my workmates from the courts.
Previously an old theatre, it had been turned into a dance hall,
the seating in the stalls ripped out to provide an extensive
dance floor. The club opened at half past midnight and went
through till eight in the morning. It was two quid to get in;
there was no booze on sale and, in the early days, very few
drugs. It really did have an amazing atmosphere. People came
from all over the country to dance all night to the sounds of
northern soul.
Pete
and
Dave, my mates from work
, told me to
bring a change of clothes in a bag as dancing all night in the
heat of the packed Casino made you very sweaty. I knew full
well that I'd leave the dance floor the same way I left the football
pitch at school – not a bead of perspiration on me – but I
dutifully packed a few clothes in a bag to show willing and
took myself off to Liverpool to meet them as arranged in
Yates's Wine Lodge before hitting Wigan.

'How the hell are we going to stay awake all night?' I asked
Dave. I liked my kip and was worried that I wouldn't last the
course, and would shame us all by falling asleep on our bags
and coats under the table.

'Aha, I've got these,' Dave said, taking a tube of pills out of
his pocket. 'A couple each and we'll go all night.'

'Drugs?' I squeaked.

'Don't be daft,' Dave scoffed, popping a couple of pills in his
mouth and washing them down with wine. 'You can buy these
over the counter in the chemist. They're hardly tabs of acid.
Here, take a couple,' he said, casually putting the tube in my
shirt pocket.

I was rigid with fright. Dave was a drug addict. He
unashamedly takes pills in front of everyone and has just
dropped a tube of God knows what in my pocket, in full view of a packed pub. What if someone calls the police? What if
Dave overdoses and dies? What am I going to do? I was so
green I must have been breastfed chlorophyll.

'Hurry up,' Pete said, elbowing me in the side, 'I want a
couple. I could do with a little lift.'

Oh my Lord, Pete was at it as well. I bent down, pretending
to tie my shoelace, and slipped the tube out of my pocket so I
could take a look.

'Oh, for pity's sake,' Pete said, exasperated. 'Just take them.'

I read the label. It said
ProPlus
and it promised to relieve
tiredness and make you feel wide awake. I'd never heard of
them, but as they didn't look as if they'd been bought in a
Dock Road opium den I braced myself and took two, waiting
apprehensively for them to kick in.

'D'ya think anyone can tell that I'm out of my mind?' I asked
Dave after a couple of minutes, nervously licking my lips, my
eyes darting manically round the room in the manner of one of
the cast from the film
Reefer Madness
.