by S. E. Lynes
‘You look worried, man,’ said Adam, appearing now at the door of the kitchen, one red-socked foot on the step that led up to the living room.
‘I’ve been thinking. I’m not going to stay in Leeds over the summer this time,’ Christopher said.
Adam frowned, bit into his toast. A blob of strawberry jam landed on his chin. He pushed it off with his middle finger and sucked it clean. ‘That’s a shame. How come?’
‘I think I’m going to move in with Phyllis. With my family.’
‘But we’ll have a much better time here, you know that, don’t you? God knows, you might even get laid for a legendary second time.’
Adam – always thinking of sex. He was predatory all right, but enough to follow a woman late at night? Enough to take what he wanted then kill her – or kill her if she didn’t give him what he wanted?
‘Late shift?’ Christopher managed to ask.
‘Finished at two. Had a pint after with the others.’
It was a little after three. If he’d caught a bus or walked up the back way, the timings worked.
‘So. Did you hear the tape?’
Adam’s eyes widened. ‘The Ripper? Yeah. Fucking hell, we listened to it on the radio.’ He shook his head. ‘Here’s us all thinking he’s a Yorkshireman and he’s from my neck of the woods. He sounds like my Uncle Pete. Tell you what, I’m glad that tape hadn’t come out before poor Sophie was taken. What with me a bloody Geordie. Enough to send shivers down your spine, isn’t it?’ His eyes were still wide. He slurped his tea and took another bite of toast. ‘Sorry, did you want a brew?’
Christopher sighed. His head was spinning. He pressed his hands to his knees.
‘Are you all right, man? You gone dizzy or something?’
‘I’m all right. Light-headed. Must’ve got up too quickly or something.’
‘Can I get you some tea?’
Adam wasn’t the Ripper. Of course he wasn’t. Christopher had been ridiculous even to think it. The murders had started before any of them had come to Leeds. Adam wouldn’t even have passed his driving test back then. Adam was funny and kind and loved women. He loved them. It was impossible.
The last fraught hours disintegrated in his mind. There was nothing left now but a shaky residue of shock.
‘Please, yeah,’ he said, drawing himself up straight again. ‘Tea would be great. I might have some sugar in it actually. I seem to have gone back to having sugar in my tea today.’ He reached over and took Adam’s toast, bit it, gave it back. Relief cut through him. He felt easy, light, as if the world were after all a place where he could be, as if this problem that had existed in him so urgently had in vanishing washed away all others with it. If Adam was his friend, and was not the Ripper, if the Ripper could be caught and locked away, if Phyllis loved him, then everything else would fall into place. He would finish his degree, move in with Phyllis and start the rest of his life.
* * *
But on 1 September, just before Christopher began his third year, the Yorkshire Ripper struck again: Barbara Leach, not a prostitute but another student, this time from Bradford University. Christopher documented her death in the usual way, felt its sordid details run over his skin like sweat. He waited and watched for news of more attacks. At night, he looked out for anyone who fitted the description, stared at couples walking arm in arm, became alive to the rare sound of females on the street. But there were no more murders reported that academic year, which in the end went much as the second year had.
Christopher studied hard, worked his shifts, went out sometimes with Adam and the boys. He listened to Adam’s tales of his romantic conquests with a mixture of amusement and confusion and spent his nights alone with his right hand and his dreams of Stevie Nicks. He did not see Angie – at the thought of her, guilt flooded into him like coffee too hot, too bitter, and so he tried not to think of her at all. Phyllis he did think of, all the time, even when he was studying. He visited her as often as he could, and when he went to her his lungs filled with air, though it felt like something more than oxygen that swelled his chest and made him run the last yards to her front door. Whatever it was, it was enough to fray the rope that for so long had tied itself too tightly around his heart. Without that rope, he could breathe.
One evening a week or two before the final exams, Adam burst through the front door, which gave directly onto the kitchen of the two-bedroom back-to-back terrace they had rented in Autumn Avenue, and said: ‘Christopher. Mate. I’m in love.’
He mock-staggered across the thin scratchy carpet and collapsed onto the sofa, where Christopher had been reading Progress and Poverty The Industrial Revolution. Adam threw his feet over the edge of the sofa and laid his head on Christopher’s lap. He blew at the pages of Christopher’s book, tried to put his nose in the gap between the spine and the cover.
‘Christopher,’ he sang. ‘Chri-i-i-istophe-e-er.’
With a shake of his head, Christopher put his book aside.
‘Mate,’ said Adam, the smell of ale on his breath.
‘Well?’
Adam closed his eyes and knotted his hands over his chest, the pose like the stone lid of a knight’s tomb.
‘She is heaven, man,’ he said.
‘What’s her name, then, this heavenly creature?’
‘Stephanie.’
‘Stephanie, I see.’
‘I am going to marry her.’
‘I say, she must be an angel,’ said Christopher.
‘She is.’
‘So how did this meeting come about?’
But Adam was asleep. Christopher had to slide from under him, holding his head and laying it on a cushion as he stood. He made for his bedroom to fetch a blanket but had only got as far as the living-room door when his friend called to him.
‘Where are you going, man? Don’t you want to know the details?’
Adam had met Stephanie at the Headingley Arms and had fallen into conversation after she had dropped her earring, which had wedged itself between two floorboards.
‘I dug it out with a paper clip,’ he said, smiling toothlessly like an idiot. ‘She said I was her knight in shining stationery.’ He laughed. ‘That’s not her best joke. She’s funny and clever and sexy as hell.’
‘She sounds marvellous.’
‘She is, man. Bloody marvellous with a capital M. And beautiful. I love her. I’m in love with her. I’m going to marry her. She is the one, I’m telling you. She is. The one.’
* * *
Despite Adam’s relative indolence until the eleventh hour compared with Christopher’s relentless diligence, both graduated with a 2:1. Christopher applied for and was accepted onto a teacher-training course in Aigburth, which he had chosen for its proximity to Runcorn – he would live with Phyllis and the family and look for work nearby once he qualified. Adam got a job as a junior electronic engineer with British Aerospace and planned to move down to the outskirts of Stevenage.
‘Stephanie’s agreed to come and live with me,’ he said when they came to say goodbye to each other and to the tiny house they had shared. ‘Give me six months to work on her. You’ll be my best man when the time comes.’
‘I’ll hold you to it.’
Adam had already loaded his cases, his record player, his guitar and his mirror into the Mini. Wiping his hands on his jeans, he stepped up onto the pavement, where Christopher was waiting to wave him off. The moment of parting had arrived and it silenced them. They stood in the grey Leeds light and said nothing. They had felt this moment coming these last weeks, and now here it was. The memories of all they had shared flashed through Christopher’s mind: Adam’s silly entrance into their shared room in halls that very first day, the first time Christopher had witnessed his room-mate’s virtuoso skills as he smooth-talked Alison, his pep talks – chutzpah, mate, that’s what you need – their conversations late at night before the hissing gas fire, both tired but neither willing to go to bed. Most of all, he would miss Adam’s kindness, how like a light it was
. This was what it meant to be loved: to feel the light of another person shine on you, a light under which you could grow. Adam had this light. Phyllis had this light. But he could never tell Adam all that he meant to him, could never put it into words. If he did, Adam would tell him to fuck off.
Instead, he met his friend’s eye and smiled. ‘So this is it.’
‘Come here, you lanky bugger,’ said Adam.
The two men held each other, slapped each other’s backs.
‘You’re my best friend,’ Christopher said, his voice choked, his mouth close against Adam’s left ear.
‘And you mine, mate,’ said Adam. ‘And you mine.’
* * *
Once Adam had gone, Christopher found himself alone in the house. He had been alone in the house before, of course, but now without Adam, without the promise of his return, it felt emptier, lonelier. He went upstairs to pack the rest of his things. His clothes were already in the grotty suitcase where he had found the blanket and the note three years earlier. The thought took him back to the dark attic space behind his loft room. What had he felt? Nothing. Nothing at all. Not then. Everything he had felt about that note had come later, over years. In those first moments there had been only numbness, then in the weeks that followed action, action almost without thought.
In his chest of drawers was the Ripper scrapbook he had made. The thing bulged with articles he had cut out over the years, and yet they still hadn’t caught him. The north of England was in a state of paranoia. Someone knew who it was. Or did they? He was a Geordie. Or was he? What if he had put on an accent on that tape? What if he was not from Wearside but from Barnsley or Lancaster or even Scotland? What if he was from Morecambe? Did his wife, his sister, his mother know it was him? Did the Ripper himself even know it was him? What if even he, the monster, didn’t realise he had murdered those women? He might have killed them in some blind and frenzied act, only to black it out from his mind.
Was that possible – to do something so heinous you buried it deep, deep, deep until you didn’t believe you’d done it at all?
Christopher flipped through his scrapbook and found the police-issue picture of the Ripper.
Do you know this man?
With the scrapbook still in his hands, he went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. His black hair, his black beard. He removed his glasses and leant into his reflection. He looked like, could pass for that picture. Yes, he looked like him. Craig - or was it Darren? – had said so when they were in Anglesey – out of the mouths of babes… A memory: himself, washing his hands, weeping over a sink, the water trailing brown into the plughole. Brown: not red, not blood. But even so, when was this? It was something he had not remembered before – only now when he had trained his mind to it had it come up. Were there other memories, down, down with that one, memories yet to surface? Was it possible that he, Christopher, was him? Was he the Yorkshire Ripper?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Christopher shaved his beard off that day, I think. Certainly, by the time he was living in Runcorn more permanently, he was clean-shaven as he had been when he first met Phyllis. A clean shave was not enough to stop the monster though, I think now as I flick through Christopher’s scrapbook. Here, near the back: August 1980, forty-seven-year-old Marguerite Walls, the latest victim. There are articles from The Guardian, The Telegraph and the Daily Mail. I picture him cutting them out, gluing them into place. I picture him and wonder what on earth he was thinking about.
I picture him. That’s the problem. I can’t stop the images from forming. I see the Ripper, I see him, the two of them coalescing in my mind’s eye as they did in his. No matter how I try and shake off these visions, they are beyond my control.
I picture him now, returning to Morecambe for what remained of his things. In the loft room he had grown to loathe, he must have packed his clothes, which Margaret had laundered during his short stay; his tapes; his writing set; two old pairs of shoes. He remembered the letter he had written to Phyllis that first Christmas. He had put it in his old school trousers but had neglected to post it. Of his school trousers there was no sign.
Behind him came the clatter of feet on the metal steps and he turned to see Margaret, her shoulders and head at the hatch like a scrawny plaster-cast bust.
‘All ready?’ she said, her face set in the expression of angst he had known all his life.
‘Yes. Almost done.’
She threw a Safeway carrier bag onto the floor of the room, then climbed in after it. She had not, he realised, been up here before – at least not while he was there.
‘I wondered if you had room for these.’ She brought the carrier bag over to the bed and sat down. The hunched set of her spine had a beaten air about it. She looked withered. From the bag she lifted a block covered in thick foil. ‘It’s only a fruit cake,’ she said. ‘Keeps you going, does fruit cake.’
‘Thank you.’ What was it with mothers and fruit cake?
‘Aye, and there’s some pickled red cabbage your father made, and some damson jam. We had a lot this year.’ She looked down into her lap, as if disappointed, or sorry. For what, he did not ask.
‘Thank you,’ he said instead. ‘I’ll write once I get there.’
‘So your digs, is it other student teachers, did you say?’
‘It’s a room in a house,’ he said – a lie of omission, nothing more. ‘It’s near the college. I’ll write my address in the book in the phone table.’ A more deliberate lie; he had no intention of doing so. ‘I can’t find my old school trousers, by the way.’
‘Our Jack’s got them, love. Why, did you need them?’
‘No. No, of course not.’ His brother must have found the letter. Christopher wondered what the chances of him not having read it were. He would catch him before he left this place for good.
‘And you start in September?’ Margaret said, her implication clear.
‘Yes, but I was hoping to find a job in the run-up. A bar job or something. I’ve paid the rent up front so it makes sense to live there.’ He forced himself to stop talking – the deeper into justification he got, the more lies he would weave, and he had already woven so many.
She nodded. ‘Happen you’ve got your car now anyroad.’
‘A car, yes. Such as it is.’ He bit his lip. Why he had said that was anyone’s guess. With his pub savings and a little help from Phyllis, he had paid for driving lessons and bought a third-hand Escort. Starting it was a challenge, but once he got it going, it ran well enough. The words had come out wrong. They sounded like reproach, but he hadn’t meant that. He just didn’t want anything about his new life to appear flash – that was it. Or threatening. Or better.
‘Your brother’ll be pleased anyway,’ she said, looking about her. ‘He’s got his eye on this room.’
Jack Junior, stealer of Scalextric, robber of bedrooms, of graves. ‘I’m sure he’ll love it. Tell him to watch the steps going down.’
‘Aye.’ His mother allowed herself a brief chuckle. ‘I hadn’t realised how tricky they were, them steps. We should have put in a proper staircase.’ She frowned. ‘We should have made you some blinds for the skylight.’
‘It’s fine, Mum, honestly. It’s fine.’
‘Well…’ she began but said nothing more. Her eyes were wet.
He stood, and seeing him stand, his mother stood too. He could not straighten to full height so remained a little stooped under the beams, and it seemed to him that his mother stooped too, though she was smaller today than ever. She dug in the sleeve of her cardigan and pulled out the shrivelled tissue that lived there, in the darkness, like a shrew. She blew her nose, her head bowed, and he was filled with a terrible sadness.
‘Mum,’ he said, and tried to take her stiff and tiny frame in his arms. Her body was rigid under his hands, her arms tucked up in front of her.
‘I prefer you without your beard,’ she said into his chest. ‘I can see your face. You will look after yourself, won’t you?’
�
�You needn’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’m all grown up now.’
‘You’ll be in Jack’s old room when you come to visit. You won’t have to go up them steps.’
Ah yes, Margaret, you were right. He would never again go up those steps. He left his family there at the door of his childhood home. If he looked back, it was only once, only enough to see the four of them lined up with stiff formality, arms by their sides, small and muted and distant as an old photograph faded in the sun.
* * *
Did he drive to Phyllis without a thought for the family he had left, this week’s Top 40 in the cassette player? ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’, ‘Woman in Love’, ‘Geno’… did he sing all the way?
I don’t know. There are, after all, things I don’t know.
At the sight of the greenish spire of St Edward’s Church, his stomach flipped. He turned left into Langdale Road and pulled up to the house. Phyllis was at the front window. She waved and jumped up and down, had run out onto the driveway in her stockinged feet before he’d got out of the car.
‘You’re here for good,’ she cried. ‘I can’t believe it.’ She bent her knees and her hands flew to her face.
‘The first day of the rest of my life!’ He threw his arms around her and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I love you, Phyllis Curtiss.’
She burst into tears but she was laughing too, and she hugged him. ‘And I love you, Christopher who was Martin. My lost boy. My darling, darling boy.’
And like that, his life as Martin Curtiss, known to his friends and family simply as Christopher or Chris or even sometimes Chrissy, the life he had travelled steadfastly towards since that October day in 1977 when Margaret and Jack had sat him down in the front parlour, began.
Christopher started his teacher-training course in the October of that year, 1980. In November, another Leeds student, Jacqueline Hill, was killed, her body found in the ground of Lupton Residences. Christopher cut out the relevant articles for his scrapbook and studied his old map of Leeds, curious as to where Lupton Residences were in relation to Oxley Hall, the only female halls he had visited in his time at university.