The Devil Rides Out by Paul O'Grady

explained, Angela went to the Unity Youth Theatre with him.
    ‘They’re always looking for new people who are interested in acting,’ Angela told me. ‘Why don’t you come down? We’re reading a new play next week.’
    ‘Do you get to perform in public?’ I asked, the not-so-dormant showbiz bug rearing its head again.
    ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, skipping around the kitchen, ‘we put on shows at the Everyman. Shame you weren’t here for the Marat / Sade . I played a lunatic, it was wonderful.’
    I wanted to play a lunatic and be in a show with Angela Walsh, but first I had to get a job. The next day I took the bus into town and perused the vacancies on the board in the Job Centre. Even without being too particular I could see that jobs I was suitable for were thin on the ground, besides which the take-home pay was, as usual, laughable. One caught my eye: clerk in a meat business, a position that I had no interest in whatsoever but seeing as it was based in Birkenhead and the money wasn’t bad I presented myself at the desk with the job number. It turned out to be FMC Meats, the abattoir on the old Chester Road, and reluctantly I made the trip over the water for an interview, praying that I didn’t bump into anyone or, in particular, my ma. The job came with perks, my prospective boss informed me. Half-price meat, you finished for the day at three thirty and it was only a ten-minute walk from Holly Grove. Besides the mind-numbing banality of the work (adding up figures all day, great choice of career for a numerical dyslexic) and the fact that I was surrounded by animals being slaughtered, the only major fly in the ointment as far as I could see was the start time. I had to be in for 6.45am. I chose to ignore these drawbacks and gratefully accepted the job, promising to be in first thing Monday morning.
‘An abattoir? You mean that dirty, filthy lairage down the hill?’ My mother was incredulous. ‘You’re telling me that you came back from your precious London to work in a bloody abattoir? An abattoir? Well, I’ve heard it all now.’
    ‘I get half-price meat each week, think of that,’ I added feebly, throwing this nugget of information in as compensation.
    ‘I don’t give a shite if they send you home with a live cow each night,’ she squawked. ‘I’d like to know the real reason you’ve come back here with your tail between your legs. You’d better not be in trouble with the police again, my lad.’ She ranted on as she stomped from kitchen to front room. ‘And you needn’t think I’m getting you up every morning at half six. I should be taking it easy, not running around after you, cleaning and cooking all day. Jesus, wait till I tell our Annie that you’re back.’
All things considered, the return of the prodigal went down better than I’d anticipated. I was a veritable paragon of virtue for the next few days, getting home at a reasonable hour, keeping the house clean, doing the shopping without complaint, all of which did nothing to allay my ma’s suspicious nature. Meanwhile, life at the abattoir was everything I’d predicted and more. I shared a tiny office with three other people. Dora, a rotund little woman who was in the Salvation Army, went around humming snippets of hymns under her breath all day. She’d been with FMC Meats since the Stone Age when it had been based at Woodside Ferry, as had the elderly man who sat facing a wall and hardly ever spoke a word. The final member of the team was Tony, only a couple of years older than me, who took his job very seriously, which was just as well since I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. The ever-patient Tony was forever correcting the piles of figures that I’d totted up on the antiquated adding machine even though he had enough of his own work to do.
    Our depressing little time warp of an office overlooked the slaughterhouse. I very rarely went down there unless I had some meat to condemn, a process that involved filling in a