That's Another Story: The Autobiography (26 page)

My days with Van Load were invaluable, lessons in pure survival on stage. We simply had to entertain or go under, or, in some places, fear for our lives. I recall one occasion when, after the show, things got a little out of hand and as we were trying to pack things into the van, I looked up to see Matthew Kelly being carried off round the back of the car park by several very drunk blokes. Luckily there was little malice in it and a lot of drink. Alcohol played a large part in these pub shows. In fact, I don’t know how we functioned. A great deal of beer, in my case bottled Guinness, was swilled and I don’t think I ever did one of those shows properly sober. I can remember standing outside pubs as we were about to go in and taking in a particular establishment, knowing that it would probably be the last time that I would see it with any clarity. My slight, eight-stone frame probably absorbed a good three pints on most nights. First I had to keep up with the lads, and second the audience insisted on buying us drinks, so who was I to argue? I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, contemplate the thought of even one drink before a show nowadays.

My first production on the main stage of the Everyman was Shakespeare’s
The Taming of the Shrew
. It was directed by Jonathan Pryce with Kate Fahy as Kate and Del Henny as Petruchio, making a spectacular first entrance on a motorbike to Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’, the strains of which caused the old theatre to vibrate like a boom box. Anarchy was never very far below the surface of an Everyman production and irreverence was
de rigueur
. One night whilst making his entrance, Nicholas Le Provost tripped over an awkwardly placed stage weight and, careering on to the stage, let rip with, ‘Shit! . . . I’ faith!’

I played the part of Bianca, Kate’s sister, and hated every second of it. I thought the character a wimp and longed to play the Shrew. I loved the unfeminine, mouthy, angry nature of the part and felt that I understood her, whereas Bianca was the opposite. I had no time for her girly, spoilt, petulant nature and this was reflected in a series of night terrors that started in rehearsals and went on nightly, throughout the three-and-a-half-week run. I awoke to find myself ransacking the drawers of my dressing table, in search of the little pink cotton dress, decorated with white hearts, that I wore in the play. Not finding it there, I would turn my mattress on to the floor, thinking it might be underneath. Finally I would fall back down on to the mattress, feeling panicked, distressed and at a loss as to what to do. Then every night the same thing happened: the sliver of light between the top of the curtain and the window frame would catch my eye, and somehow it would draw me back down to reality so that I would realise I was dreaming. I never understood Bianca and I didn’t want to be her; she represented at that time the kind of woman that my generation felt they had left behind. I was constantly trying to find some means of making her palatable to me, looking for a way to make her mine. I guess the search for the dress was an echo of that search for the character.

In November 1974 we started rehearsals for the new Everyman Christmas extravaganza,
The Cantrill Tales
by Chris Bond, and a new actor was to join our ranks. He walked into rehearsal on the first morning, wearing an old, faded, window cleaner’s jacket and a pair of flared denim jeans, its large skirt-like flares, from knee to ankle, in pale-pink cotton giving the impression that he had been wading up to his knees in blancmange. I was in love! Or possibly, lust: it remained to be decided. Even with the slightly theatrical spotted neckerchief knotted cheekily around his neck, he would have looked more in keeping if he’d come to mend the boiler than to start rehearsals for a play, but his charisma was all too evident. He had extraordinary, mad, impish eyes either side of a big, battered nose and high wide cheekbones. Later in his career a critic described him as looking as if he had swallowed a pelvis.

It was Peter Postlethwaite, later losing the R and becoming a matey Pete; he moved into my little bedsit almost immediately and we slipped into a roller coaster of a relationship that lasted five years. He was the most daring, stunning and intelligent of actors, brought up a Catholic, with a rough, working-class edge that I understood and felt at home with. He took everything to the limit and I loved his startling unpredictability. His performance in Brecht’s
Coriolanus
is one of the most terrifyingly riveting performances I have ever seen. His mother came one night and during this particular performance a couple of girls started to giggle. They were seated in the circle and the stage itself was built up over the stalls. Pete, on hearing this giggling going on throughout an important and impassioned speech of his, leapt from the stage on to the edge of the circle, causing a collective gasp from the audience. He then jumped down in amongst them, all while remaining in character, and aimed a good portion of his monologue directly - and weirdly appropriately - at these poor girls, as if they were part of the crowd in the play. They screamed as he approached them and then sat there in petrified silence, unable to move, as did the rest of the audience, probably fearing that they might be next in line. Afterwards, his mother said, ‘Oh Peter! You’ll go round the bend if you carry on like that!’

One Friday night after the show, in the packed little bistro underneath the theatre, I was up at the bar, getting a drink, and had got chatting to a guy and his friends who were often in there in the evenings and who had befriended a lot of the actors. I was about to go back to my table when the guy grabbed hold of my hand.

‘How would you like to go on a magical mystery tour?’

He then handed me what looked like a tiny bit of lead from a propelling pencil, stuck between two pieces of Sellotape.

‘Here y’are, Queen. Want to come on an adventure?’

‘What is it?’

‘A tiny piece of heaven . . . It’s a tab of acid.’

‘What do you do with it?’

‘Just stick it in your mouth and swallow. It’s totally harmless, just a bit of fun; while the others are getting pissed, you’ll be having a party. Go on, what are you scared of?’

‘I don’t know. What will it do?’

‘Jesus! You are a scaredy cat, aren’t you? It’ll just make everything bright and fun for a couple of hours.’

I unstuck the two pieces of Sellotape and, dropping the little black speck into the palm of my hand, I stared at it.

‘Go on! You can come with us, we’re only going for a few drinks, it’s just a bit of Friday-night malarkey. I dare you to enjoy yourself!’

Before another thought could possibly have time to enter my head, I slapped my palm across my open mouth, propelling the thing to the back of my throat; one swallow and it was gone.

Some twenty minutes later, unaware of what I had done and unprepared for the consequences, I collected my coat and bag and joined the group as they bundled out of the theatre and into the street. We had walked no more than a few yards when I had to stop to do up my shoe. I had begun to suspect that this drug would have no effect on me but, as I bent my head, everywhere around me was flooded a bright crimson, staining the whole of my field of vision, like blood through water. When I stood upright again it disappeared, as if it was being sucked back up into my head; and so the trip began. We went into a darkly lit drinking den that I had never visited before, just a few doors along from the theatre, and I was plunged into something that looked like a Hogarth painting, its characters lolling around, toothless and scruffy, in what went from eighteenth-century to modern garb and back again with bewildering speed. I made my way to the lavatory and passed a woman who laughed directly into my face, a big, fag-stained laugh that stopped me dead in my tracks. I looked back at her and watched her laugh melt away, her face becoming plain and neutral, as if she were waiting for something, and then I got it.

‘You are just a figment of my imagination, I have just made you up!’

She laughed again but with less gusto. ‘Yeah, that’s right, love.’

We then went on what was probably, for the others, a normal night out down the Dock Road and into town, in and out of pubs, but for me was a succession of bizarre and alarming freak shows; the whole world was an out-of-control circus. It was as if parts of people’s make-up became exaggerated. One landlord, who was usually a jolly red-cheeked man, when viewed on acid became an impish Toby jug of a figure, his cheeks cartoon red, his eyes ablaze, his humour insanely heightened. At some point during the night - I had no sense of time by this point - I said goodbye to the others on the corner of Canning Street and headed back to my little bedsit where I began to wonder when the nightmare would end. I had become increasingly uncomfortable in the company of the people I was with, seeing in every glance and every half-heard sentence a sneer or a slight or something much more threatening, the nature of which I could not pin down. Once back in my room I tried to make tea in the little kitchen but became utterly distracted by a sweater that I had washed earlier and left scrunched up on the draining board; like a scene from a horror film, it appeared to be seething with worms, but I then realised that what I was experiencing was what I had heard the others refer to as a ‘retinal circus’, an hallucination, and that the worms were simply fibres sticking out of the wool.

I lay on my mattress on the floor, knowing somewhere that I was exhausted and desperate for sleep, but in my jangled state there was little chance of that. My whole body was vibrating with a ferocious, uncomfortable energy, my muscles jumping and restless, and I had the feeling that I could, and possibly needed to, run a couple of miles and then some.

My attention was suddenly grabbed by a poster of Marilyn Monroe that I had stuck up on the wall a few days previously; it was in colour and her face filled the frame, her big, scarlet lips kissing out at the camera, like the end of an elephant’s trunk. Abruptly, with an unpleasant, wet snap, her tongue whipped out of her mouth. It was long, black and forked, like a snake’s, slithering maniacally around her face, and just as abruptly it was sucked back in again. Although I knew that this wasn’t real, it was nevertheless very disturbing. I jumped up and ripped the poster from the wall, screwing it up and throwing it into the corner of the room. I stood over it and watched, my heart crashing against my ribs, as it began to slowly unfurl, and I screamed as the tongue exploded through the crushed folds of paper to lash again around Marilyn’s by now distorted face. I stamped on it repeatedly to no avail as the tongue still managed to emerge, unscathed and with vigour, from the now-flattened poster. Gingerly I picked it up, holding it by a corner between my thumb and forefinger, keeping it at arm’s length, lest the tongue lash out and entangle me in its vicious toils like some exotic lizard, drawing me back into the moist hungry mouth. I dropped it in the waste-paper bin and placed a dinner plate on top.

I lay back down on the bed. Desperate to occupy my fizzing mind, I stared up at the ceiling and began creating my own cartoons upon it, anything I wanted appearing instantly in beautiful Technicolor: clouds and forests, waterfalls, Tom and Jerry, Sylvester the cat, Sister Augustine as a seaside-postcard bathing belle: ‘Have you seen my little Fanny?’

Then crashing into my mind came the thought that my small bedsit was in fact the universe in its entirety and that there was nothing else beyond it. Outside the door there were no other bedsits, there was no staircase, no front door with Canning Street on the other side, no Geoff, no Mikie: all these things were superb creations of my own imagination, necessary for my emotional and mental survival. Outside was a void, a vacuum, and what we saw from the window was an illusion. I lay there frozen by this thought. I could see myself in the tiny little box of a room, lit by a dull yellow light, floating free in space, and all around me was a lifeless, black nothingness.

I jumped up from the bed; please, God, this could not be true! I had to get out to disprove it and so, sweating and shaking, I tentatively opened the door. Everything looked as it always did, except for a strange crackling, pink glow from the electric light bulb, suspended, shadeless, in the gloom. I tiptoed down the stairs, every creak underfoot threatening to burst my eardrums, and at the bottom, half lit by the morning sun flooding through the small window above the door, lay Mikie in his usual heap, but now he was a big snoring, throbbing walrus, complete with whiskers, and not frightening at all.

I began to laugh, the sort of laughter I long for in my life, doubled over, painful, liberating and cathartic, and off I went into a beautiful, bright Liverpool morning, a sharp wind coming up off the Mersey and blowing away the thought that the world stopped at my door, blowing it away into the ether. About eight hours after it began, the trip finally started to come to an end by my being drawn, heavy and drained, into the Catholic cathedral, where, in the great, echoing calm, my throat tightened and I felt I might cry. It was still early morning; I sat shivering in one of the back pews, the sun streaming down in bright, laser-like rays upon the altar, occasionally going in and coming out like a stage light being tested in a rehearsal. Then an altar boy, a young man, entered like an actor on a stage and walked about the altar, the sun making a halo of his hair, his rubber soles squeaking on the polished floor. He was laying out, with great delicacy, the props that were necessary for the celebration of the mass. Just a few short hours later I was laying out my own props, backstage at the Everyman, dressed in a full elephant costume, plus substantial headdress for the Saturday matin’e performance of Brian Patten’s children’s play,
The Pig and the Junkle
. I felt fuzzy and detached, whilst knowing with a cast-iron certainty that this would never happen again and noticing that every time I bent forward the world went ever so slightly pink.

I stayed at the Everyman Theatre for eighteen months, with a summer season in Aberystwyth in the middle, to which almost the entire company decamped and during which almost the entire company were banned from every pub in the vicinity. It was one day during that summer that Pete came home and produced a tiny black-and-white Jack Russell puppy from his pocket, like an unwanted child, claiming that, if he hadn’t taken her off the farmer there and then, the farmer would have shot her. My heart sank; what could I do? So she was christened Babs.