Читать книгу Pete: My Story - Pete Bennett - Страница 12
ОглавлениеEven though Mum had lots of men friends, not all of them were raving poofs; they were mostly colleagues, street performers and fellow musicians. She didn’t get another actual boyfriend though until Dave came along. She met him in the Peckham Tenants’ Hall where he was part of a party. She had gone into the hall to get a coke for me and my friend, Zoe. She only had a pound on her and so she couldn’t afford anything for herself, or even any crisps for us. The party was in full swing and no one seemed to mind us crashing it. Everyone was very friendly and welcoming. There was a big fat strip-o-gram doing her thing, which was really funny and not even remotely sexy, so Mum didn’t mind us watching. Mum got chatting to this tall guy at the bar who had all this long dark hair. He was dressed up as a woman, with a pair of plastic tits.
‘Got your true colours on tonight then, have you, love?’ Mum teased.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’
They both burst out laughing and got chatting while Mum bought our cokes.
‘I’ve never asked a bloke to buy me a drink before in my life,’ Mum said, ‘but would you buy me a half of lager and I’ll pay you back one day? I can give you a song I’ve recorded if you like.’
He obviously liked her style because he bought her the drink and accepted the tape she had in her bag as payment. He seemed really excited about the transaction, saying he couldn’t wait to listen to it. It seemed he had an interest in music too. What Mum hadn’t realized was that she had written her telephone number on the cassette box – probably in case it fell into the hands of a record producer and he wanted to offer her millions of pounds to sign to his label. She had started to feel better about her life by then and had gone back to playing and writing a bit of music. Anyway, this bloke with the plastic tits, Dave, got in touch a few days later, having listened to the tape and decided he liked what he heard. He then went to see Mum in a concert at Covent Garden, and he started coming round to the flat once a week on his motorbike, just to hang out with us.
He was wicked, really into his music. He had a studio in the garage where he lived and let me use it without ever making a fuss or worrying I might break anything. Totally cool. I called him Dad from the first day he came to visit, which made Mum a bit nervous, but he didn’t seem to care. He actually seemed to quite like it; nothing much seemed to bother Dave.
As well as getting her music together again, Mum was also trying to do something with her art, which she felt she had been neglecting for too long. She had been making some enquiries and had been accepted as a mature student on an art course at Brighton University. She was really keen to go down there to study. Her dad had insisted she give up art so she could concentrate on her music when she was at school and she had always regretted it. She was so happy to be accepted and we moved out of Peckham and down to Brighton for a year – living by the seaside! Brilliant!
Mum enjoyed the course, but it was hard for her to hang out with the other students, most of whom were just out of school, when she had already lived a colourful life, travelling the world with famous pop groups, having me, and all those experiences that change you and make it hard to go back to thinking the same way you thought when you first set out on adult life. I would go to school during the day and then would often go round to the university to wait for her to finish her classes. I liked it there because the people Mum knew in the music department used to let me play around in the sound studios and would show me how everything worked. I was never afraid to ask questions or to show an interest, and adults always responded well to that. It would have been difficult to have been shy in the life we led, with so many different people coming and going all the time.
Dave used to ride down from London at weekends on his bike to visit. When he asked Mum to marry him, and told her his mother had offered to lend him some money for a deposit on a house, Mum decided it was time to give up the student life and get on with being a grown-up. So she accepted his proposal and we headed back to South London. Married! Dave was going to be my actual dad, it was perfect, couldn’t have been better.
Taking on a new dad meant I also got to take on a whole new family, including a new set of grandparents. Dave’s mum and dad, my new grandparents-to-be, were a bit of an entertainment all on their own. I had never seen anything like them before. Richard, his dad, hadn’t spoken for six years, apart from muttering ‘Bootsie, Bootsie’ at the cat all day long. He used to clomp back and forth through the house, nailing open the back door and then the front door to get a gale blowing through the rooms. Alice, Dave’s mum, was the maddest Irish woman ever, always talking in sayings.
‘Bad company’ll lead yer to the gallows,’ she’d announce out of the blue, leaving us all struggling for a suitable response and trying to suppress our giggles.
She found out Mum had some Romany blood in her and from then on referred to her as ‘the filthy feckin’ tinker’. I always liked the idea of being descended from gypsies; it seemed glamorous and romantic. I pictured them in painted caravans, living on the open road, breaking in wild horses, wearing gold earrings and brightly coloured headscarves, sitting round the camp fires recounting folk tales into the small hours of the night. It conjured up a hundred different images. It was my great granddad, Nan’s dad, who had been the real Romany, working as a rag-and-bone man and living on a campsite somewhere in Mitcham. Mum used to be able to speak a bit of their language when she was young and Nan still remembers a lot of the folklore of her youth. But none of these romantic images were coming to Alice’s mind when she thought of ‘filthy feckin’ tinkers’.
Richard would plod out into the garden occasionally with a large pair of scissors and snip all the buds off the rose bushes, just as they were about to open, like a character from Alice in Wonderland. There was a big vine covered in grapes growing up the wall, until he just took an axe to it for no reason one day. It was all mad, but endlessly funny to a small boy hungry for eccentricity. Alice used to buy potatoes by the ton and be boiling up urns of soup all the time, but it always used to have things like chicken’s feet floating in it and I would get uncontrollable giggles whenever I was confronted by a bowl of the stuff.
All the time she was preparing a meal she would be muttering to herself as she gathered up the ingredients: ‘We’ll boil the hell out o’ that! And we’ll boil the feck out o’ that!’
I would spend hours drawing cartoons of her because she fascinated me so much, with a cigarette permanently glued to her lips, always spitting and sneezing into the food and then, when accused, swearing blind she hadn’t, filled with indignation at the very suggestion. I eventually managed to animate the cartoons on Photoshop, turning the adventures of Alice into a little home movie.
At Christmas she would find an old plastic toy, discarded from a McDonald’s Happy Meal in the distant past, which had been gathering grime in the corner of a cupboard somewhere ever since, and would wrap it up as my Christmas present. She would take her teeth out at the end of a meal, swish them clean in her teacup, put them back in and then drink down the contents of the cup. I would watch every move with fascinated, open-mouthed horror.
‘What the feck are you laffing at?’ she would demand whenever she caught me laughing and, when I couldn’t answer with a straight face, she would push her finger into my face. ‘Laff at that!’
Alice, however, for all her madness, was the first person to see I had developed some funny little twitches. They had crept up so slowly and gradually that Mum and I hadn’t even noticed them. They were just what I did, part of who I was.
‘Look at yer!’ Alice would snap. ‘What’s all this?’
She would do an imitation of me and Mum would become indignant, thinking she was picking on me, particularly when she described me as ‘the Divil’s child’. I didn’t like that suggestion at all, but the Devil played a large part in Alice’s life. She had all these statues of Jesus and Mary on the walls and every so often she would get them down on the floor and start wailing about how she wasn’t a prostitute, even though nobody had ever suggested that she was – it was wild, like visiting the set of Father Ted for real.
I felt that having Dave as a dad was going to bring all sorts of extra entertainment my way.
