‘What I’m saying is that, during the periods when I am volcanic, in eruption, what is really happening is that I am present in past situations; I’ve just told you that once I’ve created a situation I have no further control over it. Events occur that are associated with other events that happened a long time ago, a past which is continually repeated and forms a pattern in itself; the result is that although I think I know who I am, and go on being that person, one day I meet someone new who triggers me, and then I’m confronted with what I call a certain type of situation. And then I find I have become another person with objectives altogether different from my own; it’s as if the person I think I am had left the room.
‘That old person, the absent one, is almost quite at rest. He is like a householder who welcomes a burglar, who simply hands over to him everything he has. He is shocked by the intrusion, of course, yet is curiously content to be replaced by this new person. So the stranger ousts the old occupant easily, giving him orders and achieving his wishes for him, enabling him to gratify all his secret and forbidden desires; all the old person has to do in return is to consent to being absent, a fragmented ghost somewhere on the outskirts of the new one for a while. The old person does not protest about this arrangement at all, has agreed to it, so that the new person is not in the least distracted by him. To the new person, for as long as he is present, the old person is nothing now really but a dead man upright.
‘Only, when the old person has been allowed home again, back into himself to find the stranger gone, what has been done in the meantime, during his absence? He is left with what has been done by the new person, who is now a mere visitor dropping in from time to time to sample and savour the harvest of his actions. But what the new person perceived as an orgasm of pain and pleasure, the old person perceives as a scene of devastation – a dismembered, decapitated corpse, irrelevant, disgusting heaps, clumps of dirt, blood and matter scattered on a bare floor; in fact the results are seen by the old person, who was “dead” or “absent” while the action was occurring, to be as negative as the motives that prompted them, so that all the “old”, or usual person inherits from the ongoing action is a horrible, bottomless sense of failure and futility, a blank despair where there should have been utter triumph.
‘For what has been going on is the death of someone who has not only been subjected to terrible pain but also raped, and then forced to perform unwilled, unnatural and obscene actions against their deepest nature, and then, afterwards, even more urgently acted upon; meanwhile the old person has been watching, at first indifferently and unaroused (since he is uninvited, and so not officially present during the action) by the taking of life; the new person, the visitor, is taking care of that. But what both persons are thinking, of course, the whole time the new person is intent on his work and while the old person, though absent, is peering over his shoulder with a certain abstract feeling of pleasure, is that each in his way has affirmed and justified himself by virtue of their unusual mutual contract, that each is witnessing or performing the going into the general flesh of indifference, making an objective matter of proof, scientific and detached from revenge, of what can’t be seized by the average man by singling out elements, particular red threads or pieces of human matter, isolating these physically and preserving them in tins, on film, or otherwise, in order to contemplate them in various ritual ways, thus working towards an eventual firm new order of universal togetherness.
‘The new person, by temporarily banishing the presence of the old person, has fulfilled the wishes of both, through an act of destruction, by availing himself of the old person’s loan of his strength and sexuality. But the new person was merely the executioner, a butcher hired for the event who, now that he has played his role, departs or else in turn stands aside so that the intricate activity, the psychic and intellectual processes of both persons, opposite yet complementary, can occur.
‘I watch judges, psychiatrists and the like making their usual prolonged meal of the obvious. What is obvious is that I am myself a victim. People confuse what is compulsory with what is pleasant. To be obsessively locked into a single form of activity, as I am, is the hard, precise struggle of a scientist or painter. Like other masters, I take leave of my immensely difficult operations with the sensation that I have breathed history into the air – I abandon my work in a trance-like state, fulfilled, exhausted, as if I had created a masterpiece.
‘Remorse? A priest who came the other day asked me if I felt any; I took one look at him and told him he had no conception of God. I got them to take him away.
‘ “The audience is over,” I said, and burst out laughing.’
‘History is an eternal newspaper; that is the definition of history. It is a linked series of stories, all of which appeared on page one of their times. What happened on the other pages is relegated to footnotes, or isn’t mentioned at all.
‘By that definition, detective, I am without question a historical figure. I have appeared on page one. For someone seeking affirmation I have gone far; I have obliterated seventeen individual human psychic maps across whose frontiers I stride in memory as an undisputed tyrant and conqueror. Striking actions in life are the result of having refined life into what can be consecrated in a single gesture. To succeed, it is necessary to become a god and then, on achieving that status, to prevent the violation of the godhead by the criminal and irresponsible elements of society that surround us all.
‘People are so stupid to be disgusted at the pubic hairs I put in the tins, for instance, when all that meant was that I was at last near the meaning of love.
‘We are both beyond the condescension of the educated ignoramus, Detective – far removed from the simpering propositions of psychologists whose only true search is into the possibility of a university chair. These happy hypocrites have converted their patients’ terror of the void into a six-figure income and a seven-bedroomed house. I knew that you understood all that by looking at you the night you arrested me; that is why I do not hate you and why I am writing to you. I am also told that you have enemies in the police. We are both alike to this extent – that, although our unease has different sources, when each of us sees his prey he corners and entices out its violence as a means of releasing his own; whether you arrest a killer, or I trick, rape and throttle a woman, we are each of us yielding to murderous instincts, as if the past which humiliated us was still the present.
‘I have forced time to offer itself up to me as a sacrifice with an ever-renewing supply of pascal lambs; as for the past, all I have ever wanted to do to it was slit its throat.’
‘Hell is absolute, and as such unlivable. You are not meant to live in it; you have to be dead to live there. The only way out of hell is to become it; the only cure for the absolute is to become absolute, a god. But even then, when you are absolute, you are still not safe, for even when you have become a god you are still in a world that is not absolute, a world which has laws (the proposition, for instance, that all men are created equal) that no god can possibly recognise, laws that threaten him precisely because he has not made them – laws that forbid the making of the very sacrifices that are due to a god.
‘I am whirled round on the fiery wheel of the impossible; I am in a dead end that just farts in the face of normal human life. Didn’t you know that evil is banal? To fuck the same prostitute who wears the same grubby bra every night at the same price in the same room with the same damp wallpaper in the same corner, prick washed under the same cold tap with its irregular all-night drip, same screaming-match over the price for the second go, same spring squeaking as you turn over, same yawn, same snore, same police siren in the street below at the same time, the same pink neon flashing on the same square of blanket – why, if she’s an idle pick-up it’s easier to kill, abolishing the situation, having had nothing from it, and leave with your puritanical hand intact, the blood on it the proof that your image is intact. So I pass her the devil’s kiss, the kni
fe, and leave without paying, silently, my lips knotted with passion, purple, my knuckles contorted.
‘Evil is dull and dangerous, like the army. It is for ever and ever; only its first fake beauty is seductive. I wore a hat at one time; my absurd idea, meant in all seriousness, was that my hat would cover my horns and I used to walk about the streets, thinking that.’
‘What I have done, detective, is what we all most desire to do, each in his own way – to be beyond time, nature, people, years, women. I am a hero – and yet what’s heroic about fighting your way out of a heap of shit?
‘I slipped into a Soho club one night silently like a mad dog and stood alone and unseen in a corner listening to the piano there, watching the businessmen dance with night women in red who had stepped down from the microphone where they sang with the last of their voices, retrieving their old excitement, the time of pleasure before the time of doubts. But I could not join even their tired clan; I was apart; for no one, not even they, could tell me that what I had lived was just a dream, insubstantial; no one could put a hand on my shoulder and say: “Wake up – you never yielded to any murderous desire.”’
‘Relationships would undergo negative changes. Whichever woman it was, a time would come when I’d feel I’d got everything I could out of her alive; I’d get impatient with her as soon as that feeling started, until she irritated me each time she came into a room. I’d notice that I couldn’t stand some little detail – her odour, perhaps, or her speech mannerisms; towards the end the mere sight of her would be like pouring petrol on an open wound. I’m really very aloof – an outwardly easy-going man on a short fuse. I’d describe myself as having a fixed standard of irritation with a low flashpoint. So once we’d get to that stage I’d want to speed matters up. I’d start drying up on an intellectual basis with her as well. You know, all her ideas that I’d thought fascinating to begin with – well, coming out of that same mouth now, hearing the same old rigmarole over and over again, it’d just make me want to start screaming – Flora offended very badly in that way – and it would be the same in the sex department.
‘One of the features that stays on in my mind about the Reg Christie case was the way Ethel stayed married to him all those years before he killed her at the end – it was his last murder and the one he knew he couldn’t get away with. Even as a specialist I find it amazing that whatever she may have suspected about the deaths of the other women and the Evans baby she couldn’t bring herself to believe that her Reg was involved; how could she have believed it of him, when she spent the last night of her life sleeping next to him in the same bed?
‘Killers are like mushrooms; the deadly ones look like the ones you have for breakfast, unless you happen to have the sense to turn them over and look at the funny underneath.
‘I think we might close the museum now, ladies and gentlemen, walk softly away from the barred door. I wake, and it’s the night screw here on the maximum security block, slamming a door and double-locking it with a jangle of keys – a metallic noise like memory itself, the sound of his keys, not mine.’
22
After I had sent this material upstairs I heard nothing from the Voice for three or four days; then there was a ’phone call just as I came in from the scene of a shooting in a South London disco. The Voice said: ‘You’re going to take part in an exercise that I think you’ll probably find interesting. I referred what you sent me from Jidney onwards, and it’s been decided that the relevant police officers, under the guidance of a psychiatrist, are going to study Jidney’s mentality for profiling purposes. Since you were the arresting officers, I have therefore nominated you and Stevenson to attend; Detective-Inspector Crowdie will sit in. Dr Argyle Jones will be the psychiatrist in charge; you’ll be notified of the details in due course.’
He asked if there were any questions and then rang off before I had a chance to put them, the way he usually did.
‘I don’t know how they think they can take us off what we’re doing,’ said Stevenson, ‘still, that’s their look-out.’
‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘some poor bastard must be setting up the scream for more men the way we usually do.’
By the time I saw Jones I had had another letter from Jidney. I said: ‘You’d better read it.’
The letter read: ‘It’s a bad day. I’m terribly depressed by this news that I’m to go in front of this psychiatrist. Why do they dredge me out of hell now, covered in my blood and slime? Why don’t you just let me be? You’ll never understand what it’s like to be me. That’s the only reason I write, because writing is the only way I can explain the truth.’
‘He may think that what he’s writing is the truth,’ said Jones at this point, ‘he probably does, but it’s nearly all lies. He’s totally self-obsessed – still, what else would you expect? He can’t see himself from outside at all. He can’t do what I call getting out of his car and walking round it. Wait till we examine him – you’ll see what I mean.’
The letter continued: ‘They say his name is Jones, and that he’s a psychiatrist – I don’t care what he is, he’s never looked down at his hands and found blood on them; he’s never lived in a flat world with flat people in it. I don’t want to be bothered by questions of love and hate . . . ’
‘He does actually,’ said Jones, ‘he’s dying for the treat, he’s an exhibitionist, they all are.’
‘ . . . In fact I fall in love repeatedly. It’s an obsession with me – only instead of blooming with love, I bloom as murder; it’s called squaring the circle.’
‘What a load of crap,’ said Stevenson.
‘Hell’s full of that,’ I said.
‘Twenty years ago there was a whore at Borrowdale Road; I can’t remember her name now, but you say she was the third. I had had my eye on her for a long time; we used the same pub over in Camden. I dreamed of killing her day and night for four months; I rehearsed it over and over. Finally we went back to her place; we got on fine till I did something to her in the night and she started screaming, and then when I came to I found I had raped her and hacked her to pieces the way I’d dreamed.
‘Afterwards I looked down at her and felt very distant; I was sick and sweating with a great void inside me as if I were coming back from a faint. I remember thinking I couldn’t go on like that; yet at the same time I knew it wasn’t my decision. It’s like when I used to wet the bed at the orphanage. I used to keep telling myself it wasn’t me that had wet the bed, but it didn’t help because it was always me in the bed. So to get away from the punishment I just went absent, until it wasn’t me in the bed or anywhere else.
‘Killing was the same. I cleaned up my approach; I copied people a lot for that; I’m a born mimic. After a disappearance I’d say to myself Christ, whoever can have done something sick like that, just like a normal person would; often it was a long time before I could accept it was me. That would be the early ones, as I say, where I only slowly realised that it was me who had taken these women’s nipples off and placed them over their eyes and bitten into their stomachs and scrawled messages on their legs in blood while in the ritual trance.
‘I killed to affirm myself and keep feelings of futility at bay; then often I repudiated the whole thing even while I was still clearing it up. I’d make sure I did it in a sensible place, I’m never random, I always got the person to the killing-place alive, by car usually. Once I’d got the vault going, of course, I did them all by car. But the first one I ever did by car I took to a condemned house – that was Brattiloe Mews, the piano-tuner woman I took up to Finsbury; that was the time I nearly got caught when some squatters broke in downstairs. Luckily they were drunk and I got rid of her under the floor without them hearing, and the next time I came by to see what had happened, to check if any police inquiry was going on, they’d bulldozed the house and cleared her away with the slurry.’
‘He makes it all sound so simple, doesn’t he?’ Stevenson said.
The letter went on: ‘I very nearly went to the doctor after her with these pains in my head. In fact I made an appointment, but at the last moment I was afraid it might lead to inquiries, so I dropped that idea.
‘When I’m not trolling or courting I feel very disjointed inside myself; I’m aware there are things that don’t add up. The only time I add up is when I’m on the hunt, when I’m essentially not there, as I’ve tried to explain. I’m lucid afterwards, but by that time there’s the blood and the bits and pieces lying about that don’t seem to fit in – for instance, I remember looking at an arm on the floor with a cheap ring on one finger and thinking, what’s that doing there?
‘That blood-drenched floor at Brattiloe Mews still comes back to me sometimes. That, and of course the clearing up; I always remember that part because you have to think clearly and do everything in a very methodical way. Sometimes I get a feeling like vertigo, I’m tempted to leave clues, but then you take a pull on yourself and say sod that. Only the true crime books and the newspapers, most of them aren’t interested in the killer’s state of mind – they don’t see any further than Woman Slain In House Of Horror, The Victim’s Bedroom As Police Found It and all that.’
‘He doesn’t half ramble on,’ I said, ‘he’s worse than a weather report.’
Dead Man Upright Page 16