by Gordon Burn
MAN (Unreadable) … some photographs, that’s all.
MAN Put it in.
CHILD Don’t undress me, will you?
And then he smiled at me pa-ruppa-pum-pum …
MAN Put it in your mouth. (Pause.) Right in.
CHILD I’m not going to do owt.
MAN Put it in. If you don’t keep your hand down I’ll slit your neck.
(Pause. Woman speaking, unreadable.) Put it in.
CHILD Won’t you let me go? Please.
MAN No, no. Put it in. Stop talking.
The ox and lamb kept time pa-ruppa-pum-pum …
CHILD I have to get home before eight o’clock. I got to get – (Laboured breathing.) Or I’ll get killed if I don’t. Honest to God.
MAN Yes.
I played my drum for him pa-ruppa-pum-pum …
(Oh yes I did)
(Quick footsteps of woman leaving room and going downstairs; then a click; then sound of door closing; then woman’s footsteps coming upstairs; then eight longer strides)
WOMAN I’ve left the light on.
MAN You have?
I played my best for him pa-ruppa-pum-pum …
CHILD It hurts me neck.
MAN Hush, put it in your mouth and you’ll be all right.
WOMAN Now listen, shurrup crying.
CHILD (Crying) It hurts me on me –
WOMAN (Interrupting) Hush. Shut up. Now put it in. Pull that hand away and don’t dally and just keep your mouth shut, please.
I played my drum for him …
I played my best for him …
WOMAN Wait a bit, I’ll put this on again. D’you get me?
CHILD (Whining) No I –
WOMAN Sh. Hush. Put that in your mouth. And again – packed more solid.
CHILD I want to go home. Honest to God. I’ll – (Further speech muffled) – before eight o’clock.
WOMAN No, it’s all right.
MAN Eh!
… and my drum
Rat-a-tat-ta … Rat-a-tat-ta …
Say it! – Me and my drum …
You’ll never get lonely … With me and my drum …
(Three loud cracks, systematic, even-timed)
(Music goes fainter)
(Footsteps)
(Sounds on tape cease)
Francis McLaren puts the cassette back in its Ray Conniff: For Sentimental Reasons box and returns it to the anonymity of the rack. (So many secrets!)
The cord of his dressing-gown ends in tassels with heavy silken domes. The backs of his slippers have been broken under his heels.
‘I don’t see what the fuss is about,’ he says, although this is contradicted by a vein in his temple. ‘A few years ago anybody could buy a copy in Manchester. If you went to the right pub. You could buy pictures of the girl if you knew the right channels. The people into this area. Distributors. Dealers. Collectors. One of the police from the case was done for selling pictures, for Godsake.
‘My only interest was you. The unavailability of those tracks anywhere else. The rarity value. It was a big job getting it up to even the quality it is now.’
What am I going to say?
I read somewhere that no musical vibrations are ever lost: that even though they are dispersed, they will go on vibrating through the cosmos for eternity.
I imagine I hear screams coming from cars when I am standing waiting to cross at the kerb sometimes, but it’s only Orfeo ed Euridice, Madonna, Β. Β. King and Lucille or some other electric ghost trapped in the tape shell, the transport mechanism, the spatial dynamics in which two solitudes promiscuously approach one another.
Ten
Laura Ashley in the bedroom. Crabtree and Evelyn in the bathroom (horn-chestnut and hop bath gel; calendula and evening primrose soap; vetiver talcum powder).
And no sign – or just one sign: a used tray of Nurofen caplets at the bottom of the wastebin – of the bodies who have tumbled in the bed, streaked the towels, called down for the special ‘Eye-Opener breakfast’ of bacon and egg muffin and chilled orange juice, steadied themselves to face the world with a ten-pound spend at the mini-bar.
The paper seal across the toilet reminded me of the tape markers the police wind between lamp-posts and parking meters in bomb-scare areas. The corners of the first sheet of toilet paper had been turned in, the top tissue in the Kleenex dispenser fluffed up. The extractor roars like a DC-10 when the light goes on, with the result that everything is done in the half-dark.
There’s blow-drier, mini-safe, electric trouser-press, electric kettle, sachets of hot chocolate, Maxwell House, Sweetex, a caramel wafer, ‘everything’, according to the wallet of room-service menus and brochures, ‘to enable the renaissance businessman or woman to temper effort with relaxation’.
The television has Teletext, a picture-in-picture digital effects system, subscriber porno-channel. At the minute a Welsh collie bitch called Josie is snuffling up and down a row of handkerchiefs trying to find the right one to bring to her owner in a rerun of the obedience trials at this year’s Crufts. There’s a number ‘3’ in a fluttering green box in the top right-hand corner of the picture whose significance I don’t understand.
‘This is a non-smoking bedroom in support of the British Lung Foundation’ it says beside the symbol of a small red balloon on a string on the door. And yet it smelled of stale smoke when I arrived, which suggests somebody trying to kid themselves that they’ve kicked the habit, or a heavy smoker in the next room.
There’s an adjoining door. The television was on late, and again first thing this morning. When I got up to let some air in around two, there was a line of light running across the carpet and a news report about a Cambridge woman becoming the world’s first triple heart, lungs and liver transplant patient.
There was steady traffic on the ring-roads and service roads around the six-lane flyover that curves past the hotel. Turning a map of the local area around in my hands until it becomes aligned with it, I can now identify it as the A627M.
‘15 mins Manchester City Centre’ it says next to an arrow pointing in one direction. Other arrows point towards Ashton-under-Lyne, Macclesfield, Leeds and the Acorn, West Point and Star industrial estates. Numbered blobs on the map, prepared by the hotel, indicate all-night petrol stations, chemists, cash machines and other essential back-up services for pistol-packing eighties lives lived on the run.
Number twelve is Butterflys Nightclub; thirteen, Mario’s Trattoria. Fourteen is the Light of Bengal Indian Restaurant in Waterloo Street, which had disappeared when I tried to find it last night. Waterloo Street was still there, but the Light of Bengal was a water-filled hole in the ground.
I ended up eating the three-nuggets-and-fries special from a box in a Tennessee Chicken where I was the only customer, but it wasn’t as desolate as that makes it sound. It was wet outside, which is always a good feeling; and there was a row of shops opposite with interesting sodium-washed displays and fronts, and I could see the boy who had served me reflected in the window reading what looked like a worthwhile book.
*
Although it’s midday there’s a queue snaking from the ballroom entrance right across the car park in front of the hotel. The names of the surrounding streets – Union, Foundry, Corporation, Albion – and their still-to-be-developed façades, suggest dole queues, soup kitchens, bread lines.
But the people queueing don’t look poor. They have padded shoulders, big hair, stacked heels, tight bright patent surfaces of viscose, polycotton, elastane-enriched nylon, glazed rubber compounds.
‘Car radio. Compact disc hi-fi. Deep freeze,’ the taxi driver says. ‘Walkman. Video recorder. Portable telephone. Answer machine. Household goods. They buy.’ He passes me back a flyer. ‘Auction sale. Comprehensive stock and assorted merchandise of manufacturers, distributors and others. All items to clear!!’
He’s wearing a turban, which makes him a Sikh. A tight strap of grey beard.
Sikhs. Fighting men. Sabres. The Golden Temple at Amritsar. A tabo
o on cutting hair. I know nothing about their history or what they believe. If I did would I find anything, some ritual or rite or piece of arcana, to rationalise what I’m doing, or at least help throw some light on what it exactly is that has brought me here?
We pass the open market, combining drabness with cheerful displays on vivid plastic grass; then the football ground. Then the close black streets quickly give way to moorland and oppressive black hills.
We are climbing into what I have learned is known locally as ‘moor grime’ – fog that rolls off the moors and along the terraces of cottage houses, casting a smutty grey-turning light.
The village of Greenfield has a newsagent, a chapel, a baker, a shop specialising in model railways, a hairdresser called ‘P’Zazz’, and a pub, the Clarence, where Myra Hindley waited in her scarf and black wig on the night Brady killed John Kilbride on the Moor.
A left turn at the Clarence begins the ascent on to Saddleworth Moor. There are terraced gardens on the left for a while, with people pottering; and then fog-coloured sheep with their coats hanging off them in ice-ball clumps; and then – nothing.
The Moor rises like a wall on the left and falls away steeply to the right for several hundred yards, and then this is reversed; it breaks up into ravines and chines and blood-blisters in the middle-distance and is marbled all over with brooks and streams like stewing meat.
It suggests the overview of a city – earthworks and mounds muffling the monumental architecture of a Glasgow or a Leeds. Victorian town halls, public libraries, banks, swimming baths, corn exchanges, railway stations and squares cladded in hoar grass, heather, bracken, gorse and rich dark peaty earth.
Occasional police vehicles pass us travelling in the opposite direction, but that is the only clue that people are out there, excavating, digging, covering the ground.
I get the driver to pull in to a lay-by close to what I estimate is Hollin Brow Knoll, where they found the body of Lesley Ann Downey in 1965. Brady had practised carrying bodies with Hindley at this spot, telling her to make herself as limp as possible and then putting her over his shoulder and walking with her on the Moor.
Lesley Ann Downey’s is the only body he had to carry: the others all walked to their deaths, lured there by Myra Hindley, who asked them to help her find a glove she had lost.
The earth looks scorched, not loamy and wet. Pauline Reade stepped on it wearing the white shoes she had bought a few hours earlier for the dance she was on her way to when she was waylaid. Brady cut her throat with a knife then buried her in her pink dress, her blue coat and her new shoes with the chafing heels and the manufacturer’s gold writing still on the curve of the sole.
Half a mile further on we come across a tea wagon with an old man in a white coat at the window and a single customer in the nothingness leaning in. ‘Snoopys’, a big sign on pink card says. ‘As seen on TV. LWT. TVAM. NewsNorthWest. World In Action. BBC Breakfast Time.’
I pay off the driver and arrange for him to collect me near the pub in the village in two hours.
‘Reporter?’ the old man calls. ‘You a reporter? You could be a reporter. What paper?’
It’s only the living you have to be scared of, not the dead. Somebody said that to me once. Who, I can’t remember. But it’s as good a thought as any to hang on to now as I start back on the road to Greenfield through the skirts of rubbing mist and grime.
It’s no longer possible to step off the road directly on to the Moor: irrigation ditches have been dug, barbed wire fences have gone up fringed with scraps of wool which give the direction of the wind.
But a gap will open up soon, an opportunity will present itself. And when it does I will slip through it and, with the knife which has grown warm under my hand – a satisfyingly heavy piece of flatware with the name of the hotel stamped in the blade – will cut a small grave for the door plaque with the words ‘Alma’s Room’ and the crinoline lady that I am carrying in my pocket.
I will pack the peat around it with my fingers and close the lid of turf and make certain before I leave it that the Moor has been put back to its original state.
About the Author
Gordon Burn was the author of four novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove, The North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday. He was also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers, On The Way to Work (with Damien Hirst) and Best and Edwards. His last book, Sex & Violence, Death and Silence, was a collection of his essays on art.
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2010
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Gordon Burn, 1991
The right of Gordon Burn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
‘The Way You Do the Things You Do’, words and music by William ‘Smokey’ Robinson and Bobby Rogers © 1964 Jobete Music (UK) Ltd, 35 Gresse Street, London W1P 1PN
‘The Deadwood Stage’ (Fain/Webster), ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ (Fields/Kern), ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ © Warner Chappell Music Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Warner Chappell Music Ltd
‘Off the Peg’ by Louis MacNeice from Collected Poems, Ed. E. R. Dodds (Faber, 1966)
The quotation from Alan Bennett’s diary reproduced by permission of the London Review of Books
The painting of Alma Cogan is by Peter Blake
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26700–2