The Devil Rides Out Read Online Free PDF Page A

everything as I slowly eased myself into the day, idly blowing plumes of smoke into the broad shaft of sunlight cutting across the room from the window. Listening to my mother chatting away cheerfully on the phone made me hope optimistically that she was learning at last to come to terms with her grief and allow the anger that she still felt deep inside to subside.
It was an anger that she directed full blast at me, a rage that spurted furiously and unexpectedly when the frustration, born out of the panic that came from the overwhelming realization that her loved one really was gone for good and would not be coming through the front door looking for his tea ever again, rose to the surface. She felt that my past skirmishes with the police and general tomcatting (as she put it) of late had contributed to the stress that had brought on the fatal coronary. I was inclined to agree with her. The burden of guilt that I was carrying on my back was growing heavier by the day as I quietly mourned the loss of my dad’s reassuring presence.
    For my mother his absence was still a raw gaping wound, and sometimes in the night I’d hear her sobbing in bed and calling out my father’s name. I’d bury my head in the pillow to try and drown out her cries. It was the loneliest sound in the world.
    I was slow and lazy that morning as I mooched sleepily out of the house and made my way down to Green Lane Station to catch a train to work. I’d eventually gone back to my own bed but hadn’t slept very well and felt that a nice lie-in of, say, another ten hours wouldn’t come amiss.
    Walking slowly past what had been Henshaw’s shop, I saw the windows were now empty, like an East German grocer’s, the shelves bare apart from a few tins of soup dotted about here and there, reminding me of a mouth full of missing teeth. Normally I was used to moving swiftly past the shop in case the sight of me reminded Eileen of unpaid paper bills. But there was no Eileen in her white overall marking up papers, no George with a pencil behind his ear cutting a neat wedge out of a round of Cheshire cheese with a wire. They’d moved on and out of my life, as had their son, who had sat in the back room and was now, to quote my mother, ‘doing well’ and most likely holding down a fabulous job while I was off to do another day in Yates’s Wine Lodge.
Everyone seemed to have moved on. Tony, my bosom pal from the Bear’s Paw who had opened my eyes to the gay scene and introduced me to a slice of life that I had previously thought only existed in films, had been promoted by HM Customs and Excise and transferred to Southend. Friends from school were training to be nurses or learning a trade, some had married and settled down, others had simply vanished. And where was I? Eighteen years of age, living at home with my grieving mother, going nowhere fast and working in a wine lodge that was one of the roughest drinking holes in Liverpool for lousy pay and to cap it all, the cherry on top of the steaming, stinking mound of dog doo-doo that currently represented my life, there was A Baby on The Way. Great, just what I wanted. In short, I was up shit creek without a paddle. But even though my prospects didn’t look that good there was still a trace of optimism lurking in the background leading me hopefully to believe that opportunity was waiting somewhere in the wings.
    I’d resigned from the Magistrates’ Courts. I wasn’t really cut out to be a trainee court clerk, and like every other job I’d had so far the wage wasn’t up to much and besides, I was bored with it all and it showed. A few of the magistrates had complained about my appearance, in front of a packed courtroom. The stipendiary magistrate had leaned over the bench to stare in disbelief at my red corduroy jacket and pink tie and enquired sarcastically if my job description had read court clerk or court jester. It was a case of jump now or wait to be pushed, so I did the decent thing and handed in my