Still Standing: The Savage Years (31 page)

We were taken to a small hotel on the edge of an even smaller beach that seemed very pleasant at first glance, until I spotted the infestation – not of rats or cockroaches but of a group of jolly married couples and their progeny swapping suburbia for Greece for a fortnight. One of the men, fat and over forty and wearing a pair of swimming trunks that could
only have belonged to a six-year-old they were so pornographically tight, greeted Jo like a long-lost daughter and she in return giggled gratefully. Here was a satisfied customer she could present to the Grinch, now sitting on his suitcase unsuitably attired for the sunny Greek weather in jumper and jeans, and sulking like a brat at the prospect of being stuck for a bloody week with the Waltons.

‘Hi, I’m Mick,’ the man said, bounding over. ‘Welcome to our happy camp.’

‘Tenko,’ I muttered gloomily.

‘It’s a beautiful spot,’ Mick went on, ‘and there’s absolutely loads to do. We normally have a group barbecue every evening on the beach – we’re great believers in group activities here – and then the kids put on a show for us afterwards while us mummies and daddies sit back with a beer.’

He winked and mimed a nudge, nudge movement with his elbow in Murphy’s direction. Murphy remained impassive and silent throughout this declaration of fast living, while I just moaned from my perch on my case behind him.

‘Wait till you meet my lad,’ the man crowed, turning his attention to me. ‘He’s nine going on fifty, a regular Paul Daniels he is, always trying out card tricks on you. He’s got a miniature guillotine that he’ll make you put your finger in, very clever trick it is, although there’s no need to worry. I can promise you’ll have all your fingers still intact when you go home.’

‘Ohhh …’ I moaned again, only this time from deep despair.

‘And then there’s lovely Jo over there,’ he prattled on, drawing the life essence out of my body with his depressingly boundless enthusiasm. ‘She organizes some great, and I mean Really Great [here he did the wink and the nudge, nudge action again] theme nights. You’ve just missed the Abba party.’

‘What a shame,’ I said, suicidal by now.

‘There’s a Roman Orgy on Thursday night,’ he went on relentlessly. ‘And me and the wife are … oh, hang on a minute, don’t go away, there’s my lad. I’ll just go and fetch him—’

‘Murphy,’ I pleaded, seizing my chance as our tormentor took off in the direction of a boy waving an inflatable baseball bat, ‘I’m not staying here and that’s final. Not for a monkey up a stick. I am not spending a week with this bunch of naffs with their barbecues and community spirit and their rotten bloody kids with their card tricks and—’

‘Everything all right?’ Jo asked at what was probably the most inopportune moment in her career to date.

‘No, it’s bloody not,’ I barked, all self-control now lost.

‘We’re just getting the room sorted out,’ she stammered. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t have a balcony or a sea view though, we’re heavily overbooked you see …’

‘Here he is, here’s my lad,’ the man in the obscene trunks said proudly, bounding back with a woman and kid in tow. ‘And this is my wife June, better known as Loony June.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Cos I’m crazy, that’s why!’ June screeched, giving me a little push that nearly knocked me off my case. ‘I can’t help myself, can I, Terry?’

‘Murphy …’ I pleaded, adopting a voice actors use on
Casualty
just before they take their final breath.

‘Sorry, mate,’ Murphy said, thankfully springing into action at last. ‘We’re not stopping, we’re moving on,’ adding menacingly, ‘aren’t we, Jo?’

It was nightfall when we arrived at what Jo had described as a ‘beautiful villa that has only just been completed’.

‘Each of our villas has a housemother,’ Jo told us gleefully.
‘She organizes activities and bosses you about. You’ve got Freya, you’ll adore her.’

We didn’t. Freya wafted about in bare feet and a voluminous kaftan, a garment that could’ve easily accommodated a wedding party of sixty. Her hair was unkempt and unwashed to show that she was Bohemian, and she rattled a selection of metal bangles (‘a gift from an artist friend when I lived in Marrakech’) that would’ve drowned out Big Ben.

Our room was empty apart from two very narrow single beds with a little pine bedside cabinet between them and a child’s pine wardrobe. On the wall hung a cheap print of a Swiss mountain scene, a peculiar choice, I thought, for a Greek villa.

‘Is this where Heidi and her grandad normally sleep?’ I asked Freya. ‘I’d hate to turf them out of their room.’

‘It’s got a lovely balcony,’ Freya said, ignoring me. ‘You share it with next door, a lovely girl called Shelley. She’s a lot of fun and I’m sure you’ll get on, she’s extremely laid-back.’

Laid-back was an apt way to describe Shelley as she spent the entire holiday staring at her bedroom ceiling with the entire heterosexual male population of Lefkas banging away on top of her. Shelley was extremely vocal in her lovemaking and the paper-thin walls of the villa did little to drown out her pleas as she implored the latest hairy beast to go on doing whatever he was doing, only faster and harder. I’d lie in bed dreaming up fates worse than death for this slapper who, when she was actually vertical for a change, would clack noisily around on the marble floors of the villa in high heels, and when she was hit by a speedboat and temporarily concussed, rendering her blissfully silent for a day, I can’t say I was sorry.

Our villa was unfinished, the plumbing still not really up to
dealing with its residents’ needs plus those of the endless stream of Shelley’s gentlemen callers. Showers became a luxury, as did hot water, and the appalling Freya would shout, ‘Remember to put your soiled toilet paper in the wastepaper bin and not down the lavatory after a shit,’ each time one of us went into the communal bathroom.

The villa had been built on a thriving mosquito farm, or so it seemed from the number of the little swines that invaded our room each night, foiling Murphy’s efforts to keep them at bay. He’d seal all the windows and the balcony door despite our room having no air conditioning and turn all the lights off apart from the bedside light. It was OK, he said, to leave that one on as the two-watt bulb gave off a light so weak that a mozzy with binoculars wouldn’t be able to find it. After spraying the room heavily with some toxic chemical guaranteed not only to kill mozzies but all fauna, flora and human life within a ten-mile radius, he’d light a number of coils around the room in an attempt to smoke them out. Curls of acrid smoke rose eerily in the dim yellow light, making the room look as if we were in the process of conducting a black mass. Adding to the fumes from the spray, the smoke made it near impossible to breathe.

God help me if I left a window open and put the light on, for this was a hanging offence. Each night we had blazing rows over it with Murphy shouting, ‘Get that light out!’ like an ARP warden during the war.

Murphy could and would eat anything, unlike me. I was and still am (although nowadays not quite as bad) a picky eater and after I discovered that my steak was actually goat meat I existed on a diet of fruit, ice cream, crisps and ouzo.

I hated every minute of my stay on Lefkas. Even though I’ve been interested in Greek mythology since I was a boy and
in the burlesques of Aristophanes more recently, I’ve never set foot in Greece since, although I’m contemplating remedying that one day soon.

At the airport a different rep to Jo approached us.

‘Oh, there you are,’ she said, all smiles. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for you two, you naughty things, moving without telling us. Now which one of you is Brendan?’

‘I am,’ Murphy said. ‘Why?’

‘Well, you see, your brother has been ringing every day, desperate to get hold of you but as I’ve said we couldn’t locate you …’

‘That fool Jo knew where we were,’ Murphy pointed out. ‘Did my brother leave a message?’

‘No he didn’t, he just said it was very urgent that you called back. Jo is no longer with us, she’s been transferred to the mainland …’

Her words died on her lips as Murphy rushed off in search of a phone box. After ringing his parents and getting no reply he had no choice but to board the plane and spend the next few hours agonizing over what might have happened at home.

‘I bet something’s happened to Homil,’ he kept saying. Homil was his mother’s name. ‘I just know it’s Hom, she’s died, I just know it.’

It wasn’t his mother, it was his father who had died. Tearful members of the family were there to meet us at the airport, to break the news to Murphy and take him back to Portsmouth.

On the train back to London I reviewed the week’s events in my mind. I came to the conclusion that the reason we’d had such a lousy time, culminating in tragic news on our arrival home, was because we came about the damned holiday by dishonest means. I hadn’t heard about karma yet
but had I done so then it would’ve offered the perfect explanation for our disaster of a Greek holiday.

The death of Murphy’s father prompted me to pay a long-overdue visit to my parent.

‘You’re looking well,’ my mother said as I walked through the back door. ‘A tan suits you, although you’ll pay for it in later life. Look at my face, me cheeks look like an accordion, they’re that bloody wrinkled.’ She seemed smaller since the last time I’d seen her and her voice lacked its usual timbre.

‘How are you, Mam?’ I asked, giving her a kiss on the cheek, something I didn’t normally do as we were not a particularly demonstrative lot.

‘Well, apart from these rotten varicose veins throb, throb, throbbin’ and the bunion on me toe crippling me and those new tablets that the doctor’s put me on giving me dizzy spells and the blinding migraines that I’m getting, I’m all right thanks.’

It was nice to be home.

‘What d’ya fancy for your tea?’

I fancied making the pilgrimage across Mersey Park to pay homage to ‘the Duchess’, as Mrs Cunningham, the proprietor of the finest fish and chip shop in the world, was fondly known. I still fantasize about Mrs Cunny’s peppery fishcakes and her chips cooked to perfection in dripping as much as I did then, but unfortunately that good lady had long retired, taking her secret recipes with her.

‘Is the Chinese takeaway still open in Downham Road?’ I asked my mother.

‘Yes, that is, but the wool shop’s gone, the place is going to the dogs. Have you seen Borough Road? It’s like a war zone,
every shop boarded up and derelict, and as for Oxton Road, mother of God, it’s got a porn shop.’

‘There’s pawn shops everywhere, Mam, it’s a sign of the times. People are skint.’

‘Not pawn, porn,’ she corrected me, lowering her voice in case Dot-Next-Door heard her. ‘Filthy books and dill-dolls and in Oxton Road as well. Who’d have thought it? The place will be crawling with whores next.’

Ten minutes later, after recovering from the fit of uncontrollable laughter brought on by my mother mispronouncing ‘dildo’, I managed to compose myself sufficiently to enquire how she was so knowledgeable about the stock available in the Oxton Road sex shop.

‘Vera Lalley told me. She went in once for a nose – you know what Vera’s like, she doesn’t give a bugger. She was telling me about it in the casino the other night.’

‘The what?’

‘The casino at the top of Oxton Road, I was in there with Vera last week.’

‘You were gambling?’ What had been going on in my absence?

‘Only a couple of bob on the roulette table,’ she said casually in the manner of Omar Sharif. ‘And I won twenty quid.’

‘You didn’t go and lose it again, did you?’ I was fascinated by the notion of my mother at a roulette table.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I split it with Vera and we had chicken and chips and then these two fellahs bought us a drink.’

‘What two fellahs?’ So, as well as booze and gambling, she was now cavorting with men? What would the Union of Catholic Mothers have to say about this? She’d more than likely have her badge torn from her cardigan and be forced to hand in her statue of Our Lady.

‘I don’t know, just two fellahs, nice they were, bought us a couple of drinks. They were just lonely, you know, being friendly, they were down from Glasgow on business. I got a taxi home, four quid he charged me. I gave him fifty pee for a tip. Half one in the morning I got in, God knows what Dot’ll think next door.’

‘What were you doing in a casino in the first place?’ I asked, curious as to what had brought on this turnaround in my mother’s behaviour. Was Vera Lalley leading her astray?

Vera had been a neighbour of Aunty Annie and Chrissie’s in Lowther Street before those perfectly reasonable houses were demolished, victims of the development purge of the late sixties. She was a particular favourite of mine, famous for being able to play anything by ear on the piano as well if not better than Winifred Atwell. Vera was Aunty Chrissie’s best friend and fellow member of the Lord Exmouth public house ladies’ darts team. Her dark eyes sparkled with mischief and life was never dull when she was present, her corncrake laugh echoing around the room as she told us of her latest escapade with the skill and timing of a highly accomplished comedienne. Just writing about Vera and remembering her vivacity and optimistic outlook makes me smile.

‘Well, I’d been down to the market, you see, to get a nice leg of lamb from that butcher’s,’ my mother said, settling down in her chair to explain. ‘And I thought I’d walk up Grange Road to see if I could get myself a new leccy blanket from TJ’s before they closed. Mine’s had it, I’m just waiting for it to burst into flames, it’s that old. Anyway,’ she went on, picking absently at a run in her tights, ‘I bumped into Vera coming out of the pub.’

‘Who was coming out of the pub? You or her?’

‘Vera, silly, she dragged me into McDonald’s.’

‘McDonald’s?’

‘Oh yes, we’ve gone all mod, there’s a McDonald’s on Charing Cross now. I had a cheeseburger and some chips. No plate or anything, you had to eat them with your fingers off a bit of paper on a plastic tray. Seemed clean enough though, the lavs were spotless.’

‘Go on.’

‘Then she says to me in the pub—’

‘The pub?’ I interrupted.

‘That one on the corner of the Cross Uncle Al used to go in with Willy Fawcett. Vera dragged me in, I only had a port and lemon – so she says to me, do you fancy popping into the casino for a bit, Molly? And I said I’m hardly dressed for a casino, Vera, and what am I going to do with me two bags of shopping and me leg of lamb? And she said I could stick them in the cloakroom, which I did. It’s a very smart casino, better than the last one I was in.’