Still Standing: The Savage Years (11 page)

‘… Shot in the back, right outside the front door,’ he was telling me as he gave a glass tankard a good rub with a dishcloth.

‘Who?’ I asked, now seriously confused. Surely there hadn’t been a shootout in the Green Hammerton? It was hardly the Wild West after all. ‘Hush?’

‘No, you daft cow,’ Sid snapped, looking at me as if I was developing early-onset dementia. ‘John Lennon.’

We did the Vernons Girls’ version of ‘We Love The Beatles’ that night as a tribute. Dennis, standing in his usual position at the end of the bar as acting MC, said it was very fitting.

The thought of spending a Christmas in that flat without any electricity was untenable and even though the majority of the bill had nothing to do with either Hush or me we capitulated and went into Huddersfield grudgingly to pay it.

Hush was livid at our having to fork out such a substantial amount of money on a bill that was not of our making and vowed revenge on Phil, even though it really wasn’t his fault.

‘Think of something, Savage,’ he said, in his best Machiavellian tones. ‘You’ve got an evil mind.’

I resented the slight on my good name but even so the
retribution Hush was seeking came to me in an old-fashioned chemist one afternoon. In among the jars of dried liquorice root and cinnamon quills I spied a jar of what looked like dried leaves and marked ‘senna pods’. Now, I’d learned enough from my mother and aunties over the years, a trio unequalled in their knowledge of bowel movements, or rather the lack of any, to know that senna pods were a powerful laxative.

Buying a large bag of these, I mixed them in a jar of boiling water and left them to steep undisturbed in the back of the cupboard for a week. During this period we waited for the electricity to be turned back on. Christmas was four days away and despite endless phone calls from Phil there was still no sign of any juice. In the end I rang the Yorkshire Electricity Board pretending to be a social worker to ask them if they were aware that there was a seriously ill pensioner and her special needs son who, despite having paid their bill, were living in a state of near hypothermia without electricity in a snow-covered Slaithwaite over Christmas.

The electricity was turned on that afternoon and to celebrate Hush made a magnificent spaghetti bolognaise, with some of the lethal potion hiding under the sink stirred into Phil’s portion. Nothing happened at first, much to our disappointment. The following morning the potion took effect, resulting in poor Phil spending the best part of the day sat on the throne and emerging hours later exhausted by the strain of it all.

‘Do you think you’ve overdone the dosage?’ Hush asked anxiously as we listened to Phil’s moans outside the bathroom door. ‘You might’ve killed him.’

‘What d’ya mean “I”?’ I said, turning gangster. ‘You’re as much involved in this as I am. It was you wanted to get your own back in the first place.’

‘Yes, but it was your idea to use the senna pods. What if you’ve poisoned him?’

We listened fearfully at the door for any sounds of a death rattle but all we could hear were a succession of low grunts and wails, until eventually he surfaced from the bathroom three stone lighter and, to coin a crude but apt phrase, the colour of boiled shite.

‘Revenge is sweet,’ Hush muttered darkly, watching Phil stagger bow-legged into the kitchen. ‘But if I ever cross you, remind me never to eat anything you cook.’

Phil went to stay with his parents on Christmas Day, leaving me, Hush and Henry to our own festive devices. We woke late as we’d been working the previous night and after a late breakfast of tea and fags we phoned our respective friends and families to wish them ‘all the best’. This brought on a lump in the throat and a melancholia in both of us that required a quick nip of our respective tipples to help banish the blues and restore a sense of festive good cheer, no matter how forced and artificial.

Hush, determined to have a traditional Christmas lunch, pulled out all the stops and produced a meal that could’ve sustained the entire village during a ten-day siege, should one have occurred. Following this indigestion-inducing blowout we exchanged gifts, a Ben Sherman shirt for me and a red and black lumberjack jacket I’d bought in Huddersfield Market for Hush. Wearing paper hats from the crackers we’d pulled, we sat, bored out of our minds, watching Morecambe and Wise on the black and white telly.

After a while we decided to go for a walk to try and stir ourselves. The village was deserted and covered in a thin layer of frost and ice, Christmas trees twinkled in front-room
windows and from somewhere I heard a child imploring her mother to ‘Tell him, Mam, I haven’t had a turn yet.’ A real sense of displacement slowly crept over the pair of us. Everyone in this village belonged here apart from us, they had reasons to be gathered in their front rooms on this Christmas night; Slaithwaite was their home as it had been for generations of families, whereas it certainly wasn’t ours. For us it was only transient, before we packed up and moved on to somewhere else.

But to where, I wondered silently, and when?

I was seriously beginning to question this rootless existence with very few responsibilities and if, for once, I was truly honest with myself I knew that we couldn’t go on living like this indefinitely. The piper, to quote my ma, would very soon have to be paid.

We wandered over to the canal path. It was eerily silent now by the water and the pang of loneliness in the pit of the stomach we’d experienced earlier in the day started to gnaw again.

‘What the hell are we doing here?’ Hush suddenly said, breaking the silence, his icy breath mingling with the smoke of his cigarette in the cold night air.

‘We were going for a walk,’ I said numbly, staring absently into the canal at a shopping trolley that was not fully submerged and had a length of emerald-green tinsel wrapped around the handle.

‘No, I mean in bloody Slaithwaite. I miss London, oooh how I miss it so,’ Hush literally mooed, the sad and lonely low of a homesick cow who’d suddenly realized it was in the wrong field.

‘Well, I don’t,’ I lied. ‘There’s a lot more work up here and it’s better paid and besides we’ve got nowhere to live in
London. Best hold out here till we’ve saved a few bob and can afford to go back.’

‘I can’t stop panicking about the future,’ he suddenly blurted out, panicking me in the process. We normally didn’t disclose our more personal feelings to each other so I was quite surprised at this unexpected admission, having arrogantly assumed that he had come to accept this strange lifestyle of ours, adapting to it extremely well. On the surface he was quietly confident, even-tempered and sensible, dealing with the pitfalls of life with a philosophical shrug of the shoulder. Hush was Old Reliable, always there to create magic by turning a cheap nylon wig into a towering con fection of curls and waves that defied all laws of gravity. He was someone who thought nothing of whipping out his machine and running you up a magnificent creation out of two and a half yards of lurex in under an hour. He was also someone who in all probability was taken for granted.

Still waters run deep, unplumbed, unfathomable depths in Hush’s case, so deep there were fish with massive teeth and luminous antennae hanging off their heads swimming about down there.

‘I’ve had enough,’ Hush said, finishing the last of his fag. He didn’t like smoking in the street, considering it to be ‘common’, but as it was Christmas and there was no one about to witness this breach of etiquette, it didn’t matter.

‘I’m going home,’ he said, taking one final drag before throwing the butt into the canal. I thought he meant back to the flat.

CHAPTER 4

‘WHAT DO YOU
mean he’s gone?’ I shouted down the phone, not caring that there was a woman standing outside the phone box hanging on to every word I was saying. It was a pain having to use the public phone outside the block of flats on Kelvin Road but my mother’s telephone had a lock on it to prevent anyone (i.e., me) from making any unauthorized calls. She was obsessed with what she described as the ‘crippling prices’ British Telecom charged and the use of the phone before six o’clock was strictly prohibited.

‘Even if I’m having a heart attack and you have to call an ambulance,’ she said, making sure the lock preventing the dial going round was good and secure, ‘you can get yourself round to that phone box and ring one from there.’

Eventually I learned how to make a call by tapping out the numbers on the little black buttons the handset rested on but as this could be quite a noisy process I only dared do it when she wasn’t in residence. It was wiser to make my more private phone calls from the public phone box as my mother possessed an unnatural hearing range that could pick up the sound of a mouse farting across the park, let alone my foghorn voice. The less she knew, the less there was for her to worry and get into a state about. Ignorance was bliss as far as
my ma was concerned, although blissful was certainly not how you’d describe my current status quo.

‘He went soon as you left. I drove him down. Only got back yesterday,’ Phil said casually.

‘You mean he’s buggered off? Gone back to London?’ I couldn’t believe that Hush would do such a thing, run off and leave me stranded in Slaithwaite. ‘What about the act?’ I shouted, making the woman outside forget for the moment that she was pretending not to listen.

‘Well, all your drag’s here, wigs and everything, but he’s taken all his records and all the tapes, so you’ve got no show.’ Phil sounded not in the least bit bothered. ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do for an act.’

‘Did you know about this?’ I had every intention of killing him for his duplicity.

‘No, I knew nowt about it, till ten minutes after you’d left to see your mother,’ he whined.

‘Then how come you drove him down to London so bloody smartish?’ He was going to be found dead after I got hold of him, drowned face down in a plastic bucket of mushy peas.

‘Well, I fancied a few days in London and Hush offered to pay me for taking him so I just went. Anyway, you weren’t here to stop him.’ He sounded like he was eating, which only infuriated me all the more.

‘I was at me mother’s!’ I protested, causing her outside to light a fag and move even closer to the box. At this rate she’d be inside with me if the conversation continued in this heated vein.

‘I’m coming back tonight,’ I said, more than a little worried at what the hell I was going to do now.

‘Suit yourself, I’m going down t’ Gemini Club, but you’ve got your key.’ Phil could be maddening at times. Didn’t he
realize I had a major disaster on my hands? Abandoned, stranded and with me career in tatters? I mentally dramatized everything then, even real dramas that didn’t require further embroidery.

‘Everything all right?’ the woman asked eagerly as I held the door open for her.

‘Did you get a good earful then, missus?’ I snarled in reply.

‘Couldn’t help overhearing, love,’ she smiled. ‘You’ve got one of those voices that you can’t help hearing. Cheer up, there’s many a disaster at sea.’

I walked around for a bit to calm down and gather my thoughts as I didn’t want to appear agitated in front of my mother. When I got in she was knitting and watching an old black and white film on the telly.

‘What’s up with you?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘You look a bit shifty McCoy to me.’

I muttered something in reply, throwing her a look that I hoped she’d interpret as ‘Don’t be ridiculous’ and sat down.

There was no pulling the wool over the eyes of the Madame Defarge of Tranmere, that’s for sure. Her response after one glance at me only confirmed that she was more than capable of reading me like a ‘tuppenny novel’, a fact she frequently reminded me of.

‘What’s this you’re watching?’ I asked, too distracted by the myriad worries whirling around in my head to show any interest in the film but anxious to change the subject.

‘
All About Eve
, an old Bette Davis film,’ she said, pronouncing ‘film’ deliberately as ‘fillum’ to resurrect the ghost of our old neighbour Mary, an avid fan of fillum, particularly those that starred her beloved Bette Davis. Following an afternoon session with the curtains drawn, matching her
chain-smoking heroine fag for fag as she sat glued to her telly, Mary would hold forth from her perch on the back kitchen step.

‘I’ve just watched a marvellous Bette Davis fillum, Molly,’ she’d swoon, rolling her ill-fitting top denture in her mouth as my mother brought the washing in. ‘
A Stolen Life
. Bette played twins. It was marvellous, Molly, marvellous. Ooh, they don’t make fillums like that any more.’

I’d always admired Ms Davis’s ability to retain smoke. She seemed capable of taking an enormous drag from her cigarette then delivering a lengthy speech without so much as a whiff of smoke escaping from whatever recess deep in her lungs it was lurking in, until just as you wondered where the smoke could have possibly gone she released it, timing it beautifully to coincide with the denouement of her speech. It was Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich and Dave Allen’s fault that I ever took up smoking in the first place: they managed to make it look so … interesting.