The Devil Rides Out Read Online Free PDF Page B

the women screaming out into the street, leaving Pete the barman unsure if he should stay with the grinning Wally and his inebriated vermin or risk a dent to his masculine pride and leg it after the women. It was no contest for me. I was the first one out of the building.
    Every morning the floor was religiously swept out and mopped, the toilets scoured with bleach until the air made your eyes sting and the bar tops, with what little brass there was, polished. Not that there was much varnish left on the bar top as it had supposedly been eaten away over the years by the spillage of Yates’s fine Australian white. By the time Jean was satisfied that the place was up to her high standards, the air was 95 per cent Jeyes Fluid and 5 per cent oxygen. Yates’s Wine Lodge, Moorfields, might have looked bleak but its startling cleanliness was a testimony to the powers of industrial-strength detergents and a lot of elbow grease, and had the occasion arisen we could have performed open-heart surgery on the bar top without any risk of infection to the patient.
    Before the doors were opened to the public I was sent out to a tiny café on Dale Street to buy the crusty cobs filled with chips for our mid-morning break. These were washed down with mugs of Peggy’s super-strength tea and after a quick fag the doors would be opened and the first of our punters would trickle in for their mid-morning livener. Yates’s customers were a real mixed bag. As in any pub there were a few lairy arseholes, but on the whole the majority of the punters were agreeable. I had my favourite alcoholics. An extremely pleasant and highly intelligent middle-aged woman who had the misfortune to teach in a school with a notorious reputation, would arrive promptly each evening at five thirty and proceed to drink her way through one of the barrels of white until by closing time, when her lips had turned blue, she would be having a heated argument with herself. A smart city type, who although he was a regular rarely spoke to anyone except to furtively order his wine, would become extremely agitated at the approach of closing time, knocking back large docks of white wine with a whisky chaser as if Prohibition was about to be enforced. I worried about him and the teacher and used to wonder what sort of home life they went back to each night, if any at all, until Jean would tell me not to be so bloody soft and get them docks washed.
    The Irish workmen who were building the new metro station over the road spent their wages across the bar each night, skilfully avoiding the clutches of Tattoo Pat and Taxi Annie, two geriatric working girls so named because the former’s body was rumoured to be a mass of tattoos, ranging from crude Indian ink lettering to elaborate professional jobs, and the latter as she allegedly took care of her punters in the back of a cab. Not that either of them had witnessed that many eager customers beating a path to their red-lit doors in recent years, but like the troupers they were they carried on regardless, prowling the pubs and the streets for prospective and hopefully none too picky clients. Leaning on the bar half pissed, they’d mourn the good old days when pickings were rich, concluding that business was slack for professionals like themselves because ‘too many friggin’ scrubbers were giving it away free’. I’d nod sympathetically, politely ignoring their advancing years and grubby appearance.
Annie, with her frizzy ginger hair stuffed under a hand-knitted tartan tam-o’-shanter, probably wouldn’t see seventy again and put me in mind of Super Gran, while Pat, with her greasy black locks, straight as a yard of pump water, pulled back severely from her waxen face and held in place by two hair clips, had a look all of her own that said ‘I’ve just come back from a funeral’. Indeed, she could’ve easily passed for the corpse. Her usual ensemble consisted of a strangely perverse 1950s black gaberdine mac, shiny with age,