by David Waine
*
Marie and Joe lived in a leafy suburban street in the London Borough of Finchley, the Prime Minister’s very own constituency. They had done their homework together for as long as either of them had been set it. On arriving home from school, she had exchanged the rigid restrictions of school garb for a comfortable salmon pink tee shirt and loose blue jeans. He had also changed when he turned up just before seven. His tee shirt was scarlet and bore a tasteful silhouette of a rotting corpse hanging from a gibbet.
As the hour wore on towards nine pm, he lounged on her bed, looking thoroughly out of place among the cornucopia of pastel-coloured, fluffy girlish things with which she cocooned herself in her little upstairs retreat. He thumbed idly through the small mountain of books that Miss Earl had pressed upon them as ‘required reading’, while she did the real work at her desk.
“Research poverty in Victorian London,” she murmured wearily, looking up from the computer that her parents had bought her as a reward for passing her exams. Already her tightly typed text reached almost to the bottom of the screen and she had barely begun to wrap up the introduction.
“Her very words,” replied Joe idly.
“And produce a major essay by Monday. There goes the weekend.” Her voice bore an undeniable hint of exasperation. She wished that her teacher and mentor had kicked the course off with something a bit more stimulating. And shorter.
Joe had persuaded his parents to buy him the same machine as a similar reward. They had done so willingly, thinking he was seeking to improve his mind rather than zap coloured alien blobs, like other teenage boys. They had not realised that he had chosen that particular model so that Marie could provide him with her work on disc to redraft and present as his own.
“I can think of better things to do on a weekend,” he remarked casually.
Marie’s hand hit the desktop with a slap as she turned to face him. She knew where this was leading. The look of disapproval was feigned, for she was really quite flattered, not least because he had turned out to be reasonably good looking now that the pimples were under control. It was unthinkable though. It would be like snogging her brother, not that she had one. She had been deftly avoiding his advances ever since he discovered that girls possessed qualities that distinguished them absolutely from boys. Whenever he brought the subject up a familiar memory floated through her mind.
“You can’t blame a man for sticking to what he knows in his heart is his destiny,” he maintained stubbornly.
“I wouldn’t blame a man for any such thing,” she responded, “but you’re just a boy, who hasn’t got the gumption to get off his backside and find a real girlfriend, so you keep hounding me. I’ve known you too long.”
He sat up, not yet resigned to failure. “Forget you met me when we were four, then.”
Her eyes raked the ceiling. “Forget that day in your back garden? Me hanging onto my knickers because the elastic had snapped, and you running around, stark naked, fleeing from the hosepipe your cousin was turning on you.”
Joe was not to be deterred. “And you let go of your knickers to grab the hosepipe.” He spread his arms wide. “Come on, Marie, we were on intimate terms before most kids had graduated to Teeny Tears and train sets.”
An involuntary smile swept across her face. “Having seen what you had to offer when you were four, I have no desire to discover what developments, if any, there have been since.” With a curt nod, she turned back to her work. “And the knickers I use now have stronger elastic.”
Joe settled back and picked up a large book. “Better do the homework, then. It can be a meeting of minds.”
“You can meet my mind any time you like” she muttered. “I’ve been searching for yours for years.”
“Skilful redrafting is an accomplishment in its own right,” he protested mildly. “Her Earlship never suspected before, so why should she start now?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” countered Marie, “she knows. I don’t know why she doesn’t clobber us both, you for copying and me for letting you. Yes, I do. She fancies you.”
Joe groaned. “I don’t go for older women,” he admitted.
Marie was typing again, one segment of her mind concentrating on her work while another multitasked to keep him occupied. “She’s getting to the age when a toy boy might prop up her flagging ego,” she remarked coolly.
Ignoring the jibe, Joe examined the weighty tome in his hand. Opening at the first chapter, he attempted to read a paragraph and quickly changed his mind. “London Poverty,” he mused. “Looks like a good read. For you.”
The staccato clicking of the keyboard became just a fraction louder. “It probably is if there’s anything longer than four letters in it.”
Discarding the intimidating tome, Joe picked up another book, which had a more intriguing cover, depicting an engraving of a horrible shrouded figure stalking its way through a grimy underworld and brandishing a large knife. Above it was the nickname of the world’s most notorious unknown serial killer. “This is more my style,” he said with relish, “Jack the Ripper.”
The clicking stopped. Marie turned a disapproving look on him. “Great. I’ll do the serious research while you concentrate on the gutter press.”
Slightly stung, he swung his feet to the floor and sat up, holding it out for her to see. “Look, it’s one of the books the Earl recommended. It’s all relevant.”
“Relevant to what?” she replied. “Tomorrow’s headline? Another one topped. Gotcha!”
“No, look,” Joe took it back and pointed out the blurb on the back cover, “extreme poverty, rocketing crime wave, and government panicking over fears of revolution…”
“And a line of tarts chopped to bits by a mad axe man,” she snapped, turning her back again.
“Well, yes, that as well,” he conceded with a slightly guilty smile. “But it’s all here. And he wasn’t a mad axe man, he used a knife.”
“Oh, well that’s all right then!” She rounded on him hotly. The feeling of indignation that had risen, unbidden, in her breast was accompanied by another inexplicable, and disturbing, emotion. “For a moment I thought he’d been doing something antisocial, like sneezing in church. If he used a knife, he was probably quite a jolly sort at heart. Did he buy cakes to take home to his mum after ripping the latest one up, or haven’t you got that far yet?”
“I’ve only read the dust jacket,” he answered meekly.
Joe left shortly after. She saw him to the door and felt a twinge of guilt as he turned a reproachful look on her on his way through the garden gate.
She had not meant to snap at him. Only now that he had gone could she identify the raw emotion that surged through her when he looked at that book. It was alarm. A flood of vague anxieties had suddenly been triggered within her and she had turned them all on him instinctively. Now conscience oppressed her. Slowly, she climbed the stairs to her room, resolving to make it up to him in the morning.
Lying on her bed, she could still feel the fading warmth of his body and that brought her a crumb of comfort, as if a part of him were still present. Joe had always been there for her and she loved him in her way, which was her main reason for refusing to go out with him. Teenage courtships were notoriously brief affairs and they often ended acrimoniously. She could not bear the thought of that happening to Joe and her.
With a sigh, she rolled across her bed to switch on her portable television. A moment later, an elegant newscaster came into view, her face solemn.
There was a soft tap on the door and her father’s bespectacled head appeared. “Getting late, love. Best leave it for tonight.”
She smiled tiredly at him. “Okay, Dad.”
Reaching over again, she turned the volume up a little.
“Police announced today that the body of a young woman discovered in Whitechapel has been positively identified as that of the missing schoolgirl, Mary Anne Nichols.”
Suddenly an icy shudder ran throug
h her and she began to shake. She stared, aghast, at her own trembling hands. They had turned white. What was happening to her? She was not ill. Was she?
She had heard stories like this before. It happened every year or two with tragic regularity. A poor young girl would go missing and would be national news until her brutalised corpse was discovered and some despicable monster stood trial for her murder. These things had never affected her unduly before, other than a feeling of sympathy for the victim and her grieving family, contrasted with one of revulsion at the culprit. It wasn’t as if she knew Mary Anne Nichols. As far as she could remember, she had never even visited Whitechapel.
Jack the Ripper lay where Joe had left it. With her unease mounting, she opened it at the contents page. She knew that he was a notorious murderer, but everybody knew that much. She found herself staring at a list of the vile man’s victims: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.
Another freezing shudder ran down her back as she read the final name. It was the similarity to her own, Marie Jeanette Kelly, that alarmed her.
A dark streak in the middle of the book showed where some illustrations lurked. Trembling, but unable to contain her curiosity, she examined them. The first few pages were engravings taken from Victorian newspapers. They showed scenes of old London: ladies with bustles and parasols, men with top hats and frock coats, and the occasional casual policeman idly swinging his truncheon. After that there were pictures of poverty: barefoot, ragged children begging in crumbling, filthy streets. There were criminals: thuggish, brutal faces with leering grins and vicious clubs. Next came a chilling reproduction of the illustration on the cover. Then her heart skipped a beat.
There they were. The official mortuary photographs of the first four victims, three of them in their simple boxwood coffins, the fourth, Catherine Eddowes, propped up against a wall. Four worn-out, wretched drabs whose miserable lives had just been terminated in the most appalling manner imaginable.
Revolted, she almost slapped the book shut, but her innate curiosity made her turn just one more page.
A dark shadow passed over her soul. All that was left of Mary Jane Kelly lay on her bed in her squalid lodgings. Her left forearm, the only part of her still clearly identifiable as human, lay across her trunk. A thigh bone was revealed, white against the slashed flesh of her leg. Although her head was turned towards the camera and her hair visible, she had no face.
Marie dropped the book in horror and rushed, gagging, to the bathroom. Propped up against the washbasin, she glared into the mirror. A shrunken, white, terrified image stared back at her, the eyes alight with dread. It took a moment of churning revulsion before she realised that it was her own reflection. A sudden spasm twisted her stomach and she only just had time to hang her head over the toilet bowl before vomiting most of her evening meal into it.
An ashen Marie sagged against her bedroom door. She could not begin to understand why the book had affected her so deeply. Those murders, horrible though they were, had been committed a century before. What possible significance could they have for her?
The book lay on the floor where she had dropped it. Stumbling to her bed, she picked it up. It had fallen open at Chapter Two, which dealt with the first murder.
On the television, the newscaster was summing up the main headlines and she heard the name of the young girl who had been murdered repeated.
“Mary Anne Nichols,” she murmured to herself, starting to read. “No, don’t be silly. It’s just a coincidence.” Fighting down her nerves, she thumbed through the first couple of pages. “Friday, August 31st 1888, in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel, the body of the Ripper’s first victim, a forty-two year old prostitute, Polly Nichols, was discovered.” Throwing her head back, she breathed a heavy sigh. “Polly!” Reading on, she mouthed the words silently. “It has long been known for prostitutes to use assumed names, a practice that has continued into the more organised modern sex industry. Some believe that a glamorous name will make them more attractive to a client. So it was with Polly Nichols. In her wretched, ignorant way, she reasoned that using the name 'Polly' would bring her greater success than her real name, Mary — Anne — Nichols.”