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which she wore buttoned up to the neck with a little black beret gripped to the back of her head. Ed D. Wood, the director/writer responsible for gems such as Plan 9 from Outer Space , would’ve loved Pat. They certainly fascinated me, these two old brasses. Women like that always have and the little snippets of their conversations that I’d catch I’d relate back to Molly, perched on a stool at the end of the bar with a mug of tea and a fag, studying the racing page.
    I enjoyed my time at Yates’s. It might have had a reputation for being dog rough but in my six months working there I only ever witnessed one fight. Even so, on slow days I’d lean across the bar and gaze out of the open door at people passing by on the street outside and couldn’t help thinking that maybe I really had missed the boat.
    I still worked the occasional night at the Bear’s Paw. I’d given up my job behind the bar after my father died, but strapped for cash as always I’d asked Gordon, the owner, to take me back on. He let me have a few weekends, even allowing me to start late as I didn’t get out of Yates’s till gone eleven. I was grateful for the work but secretly not happy to be back pulling pints behind the bar; as usual, I wanted to be out front drinking them with my mates.
One of my favourites was a student from Plymouth, where he had been known as David but had been rechristened Nina la Roche since his arrival in Liverpool. He was as tall and gangly as a beanstalk, rapier thin. Trailing scarves and waving arms covered in bangles, he would stand on his toes in his wooden clogs like a giant praying mantis and frighten the ‘straight’ queens off the dance floor. He rented one large room in an eccentric old household on Canning Street and you never knew which one of his many personas would answer the door. Sometimes he was a member of the Russian aristocracy and, answering the door first as the maid, he would tell you to wait in the hall, and then rush into his room to prepare himself for the role of a Romanov princess.
    ‘Come in,’ he would shout imperiously after what he considered a respectable passage of time and I’d enter to find him draped across his chaise longue, engulfed in shawls and with a papier-mâché sculpture belonging to his landlady, Helen, on his head that we’d nicknamed the Conch. ‘What makes you think you are suitable for the position of personal maid? Do you speak Russian and Japanese?’ And the game would begin. Most of the time when he wasn’t being Russian or a ballet mistress we’d eat his homemade spaghetti bolognese, drink cider and dance like maniacs to his collection of 78 LPs.
    *
    It’s not true that pulling pints gives you the advantage of pulling customers. Most of the customers hardly even notice you; they just want to get their drinks in and return to their mates. Well, that was more or less the case for me anyway. Choices of romance were limited to the dregs and drunks who were left hanging around at closing time as I went round the tables collecting the empties. Needless to say I preferred the long wait for the bus that went through the Mersey Tunnel to a tail home with any of that lot even though it meant not getting home till the early hours of the morning. I’d gingerly slide my key into the front-door lock and slowly, ever so slowly, open it, taking care that it didn’t stick and make the knocker rattle so as not to disturb my ma. Like Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon every move was done in slow motion, barely hovering over the stairs, taking infinite care to avoid the bottom two that creaked and hardly daring to breathe all the while in case I should wake the Kraken, which I invariably did.
‘Where’ve you been till three in the morning? Out tomcatting it?’
    ‘No, I’ve been working, Mam. Go back to sleep.’
    ‘I’d like to know what kind of work keeps you out till this hour of the morning, nothing respectable that’s for sure. I wish you’d go and find yourself