by Gordon Burn
On their return to Bingley, his father got in touch with the police to ask for somebody to be sent around to Anne’s house in Morecambe, and Peter pressed on to Shipley where Jane had been living since the break-up of her marriage earlier in the year. Mick didn’t find out that his mother was dead until nearly midnight, and a rift developed between him and the rest of the family for some weeks as a result.
He had gone straight into the Granby after finishing work at 5.30 and stayed there until the pub closed, when he had taken a taxi home. Maureen and Robin had been the ones to break the news, and then Peter had knocked at the door just after they’d gone. Mick’s grief took the form of anger at being the last to be told, but then a curious thing happened which made them realise how upset they all really were. Mick was eating the dinner that Susan had been keeping warm for him for hours when Peter arrived. The dinner was on a low table in front of the settee and, as he leaned forward to load his fork during an uneasy silence, the plate appeared to move: all three present in the room that night would later swear that it rose of its own volition and hovered five or six inches in the air.
*
The next day, Thursday, Peter went off on an overnight run to the North. As he passed Airedale General he turned to Carl, who was travelling with him, and said: ‘It’s funny to think of her lying dead in there, isn’t it?’
On the return journey, they made a detour to visit Anne and her family in Morecambe, but Anne had already travelled to Bingley to be with her sisters, and so the two of them went for a walk along the seafront. The walk eventually took them to the west end of the promenade where Tussaud’s was situated, but, being a week past the switching off of the illuminations, marking the official end of the season, they found the turnstile to the waxworks locked.
It was only recently, however, that they had visited the exhibition together. On that occasion, Peter had seemed particularly drawn to the central tableau in Hall Three, at the entrance to the Museum of Anatomy. As his contribution to the campaign alerting drivers to the danger of drink, Mr Nicholson, the waxworks proprietor, had staged a car crash in the room’s biggest showcase, and in appropriately horrific detail: two figures were slumped over the bonnet of a Mini, disfigured in a way that suggested they had just been hurled through the windscreen, while other bodies, dramatically mutilated and bloodied, authenticated the scene.
Carl hadn’t been able to understand what Peter found so fascinating, or amusing, and at one point had thought he would never be able to drag him away.
*
Kathleen’s body was received into the Church of the Sacred Heart in Bingley at 7.30 p.m. on Sunday, 12 November 1978. A Requiem Mass was said for her at ten o’clock on Monday morning, and her remains were then taken to Nab Wood cemetery to be cremated.
25
Reading the ‘Deaths’ and ‘In Memoriams’ and attending funerals was a popular pastime among the older generation in Bingley. But even so, Kathleen’s popularity among her friends and neighbours was accurately reflected in the numbers who turned out for her funeral. Afterwards, Peter made it his business to go round and thank some of those known to him personally.
It was many years since he had ‘gone best mates’ with Eric Robinson, but Eric’s mother and his had remained friendly, and Mrs Robinson was gratified to open the door and find Peter standing there on the evening of the funeral. Peter had always struck her as being ‘of a nervous disposition’ – when called on to speak, his temperature would go up, his eyes would blink and he’d stammer the words. And so, although it was a mature adult and not a youth she saw standing on her doorstep, it didn’t surprise her to see large tears rolling down his cheeks and into his beard.
Unlike Peter, Eric had never married. He was a window-cleaner and still living at home, but that night, as most nights, he was out at the Working Men’s Club. She told Peter that if he wanted to see Eric, this is where he would certainly find him, but he preferred to leave his telephone number and, it seemed to her, the rather forlorn message, ‘He could come and see me.’
The last time the two former friends had met was by chance in the Star in Bingley, when Eric’s reminiscences of the good times they had known in their ‘Gravediggers’ Corner’ days at the Royal Standard hadn’t gone down too well with Sonia.
To see Peter and Sonia together in one of the local pubs at all after they were married was considered something of an event. It wasn’t unknown for her to sit outside in the car while he had a drink with one or other of his family, or for Sonia to come and get him if she felt she had been kept waiting too long. ‘A boring woman’ was her brother-in-law Robin Holland’s conclusion, after an hour or two spent in her company one night at the Fisherman. Robin and Maureen had gone out with Peter and Sonia as a foursome shortly after his demob from the army in 1978. Robin, however, had soon ‘called it a draw’ because it was ‘dead’. ‘She’s got no conversation,’ he complained later, ‘and she whispers all the time when she does speak. She talks to you like you were a kid.’
But if Peter’s relations had increasingly little in common with Sonia, they found they had even less in common with her friends. Mick enjoyed going to the Hare and Hounds, the large, mixed pub near the house in Garden Lane, but hated it if Sonia was with them and she fell into conversation with other teachers, as she inevitably did. ‘All friends I’ve known that they’ve known have been bloody teachers an’ stuff an’ she’s yappin’ away to ’em, an’ he’d be yappin’ away to ’em an’ all. Well that isn’t my bloody idea of a good night. I’d just look at Susan as if to say, Sup off, and get up to bar for another one; just keep suppin’.
‘Our lad’d say, “This is …” and I’d say, “Oh aye, I heard you say his name first time. I’m not interested at all. I’m just not fuckin’ bothered.” Long-haired bastards all talkin’ down to us as if we know nowt.’
As a result of their obvious incompatibility, Sonia made no secret of the fact after a while that she had decided to see family and friends independently. Tackled by Mick on why it was only ever his family at Garden Lane ‘do’s’, Sonia was unabashed in telling him in front of everybody that they entertained their ‘professional’ friends separately.
For Peter, though, the conflict was not so simply resolved. His attitude towards Sonia’s pots was a typical example of the ways in which he found his loyalties divided. Enthusiastic, almost boastful, about them to her friends, he was apologetic, almost scoffing, when Sonia wasn’t there. Under the pretext of taking him to look at something else, he would say to Carl, ‘Come here, I’ll show you. She’s done another one,’ and they’d both have to stifle their giggles. ‘Me wife does these things,’ he’d say almost immediately, looking embarrassed, if either of his brothers brought a stranger round to Garden Lane.
The amount of time Sonia spent on her own with her paints and clay in the attic room at the top of the house, furnished with just an old mattress and ‘not even listening to radio or records or owt’, amazed Carl as much as his presence irritated her. Looking up from working on a car with Peter, he would sometimes see her standing at the landing window, ‘just watching, quiet as a little mouse’.
It often seemed to Jane that Sonia would have liked Peter to have been an only child so he didn’t have to see any of his family, and she could have had him all to herself.
There were occasions, such as the time Carl roared up the newly-cemented drive at Garden Lane on a motorbike, creating a twenty-foot-long gully, when Sonia’s resentment burst into the open. But most of the time it just hung like freshly sprayed deodoriser on the air.
In his late teens Carl regularly went over to Heaton to pull on a pair of overalls and strip down engines under the expert eye of his older brother, and it was a rare weekend when he didn’t sense an ‘atmosphere’. ‘When you’re working on an engine, you don’t want disturbing, but she were always on at him. “Pete, Pete …” “What you want?” “Come and help me wash up.” I mean, he’s covered in oil up arms an’ elbows and she’s going, “Help me was
h up.” So then she’d be off in a huff.
‘Same as if I ever went with ’im to scrapyard to pick up bits. He’d be watching his watch all the time – “I’ve got to get back by so-and-so.” I’d say, “Why? Let’s go for a pint.” But it was, “Oh no, I’ve got to get back. She gets worried.” So I’d tell him, “What the fuck should she get worried for? You’ve only gone for some parts for a car for fuck sake, and you’re over thirty year old!”’
Those who only knew Sonia as the shy, softly-spoken schoolteacher – and they included Peter’s father – found it difficult to imagine her in this other, dominant role for a long time. Listening to his complaints about her nagging, John once found himself saying as much to Peter, only to be assured that, at home, she was ‘all mouth’. If that was the case, John later found himself thinking, then perhaps it was to do with her Eastern European background, ‘where the men make all the show but the women rule inside the house’.
Being from a ‘foreign family’ is what Carl traced Sonia’s frugality back to as well. He assumed that was the reason they sat on hard chairs in the kitchen most of the time, ignoring the bigger, more comfortable rooms in the rest of the house. ‘You’d go up, say, in the morning, and you’d sit in there all through until 6.00. Then Peter might suggest having a look at what was on telly, but they would never ever put fire on an’ it were freezing. Really cold. An’ they’d have the telly on really quiet as well. You couldn’t even hear it. You had to strain your ears.’
When there was only the two of them at home, Sonia frequently took exception to Peter having the television on at all and would snatch the plug from the wall. She would also ‘tease’ him by refusing to let him read a newspaper, swiping at his head and kicking him, and screaming at him so hard sometimes that he was sure the neighbours must be able to hear. But he would remain quite impassive, holding her arms at her side until she calmed down, but never hitting her. He would leave the house rather than raise his voice.
There was always ‘hell to pay’ if Peter ever entered the house with his boots on or put any of his clothes in the washing machine: he had remained sensitive about the smell his socks made anyway, and was happy to wash all his own clothes by hand in the kitchen sink. Sonia’s obsession with cleanliness stretched to cleaning the carpets inch-by-inch with a brush and pan and working on the house at all hours of the day and night.
‘I’d have buried her in back garden by now, if it were me,’ was a thought that Carl shared only with Mick. Mick, on the other hand, never hesitated to tell Sonia herself exactly what he thought. ‘Our Pete used to say to me, he’d say, “Bloody hell, just be a bit, you know, watch what you’re saying.” He wouldn’t say owt at all to her, you see, but I just said, “Well, that up to you, but I’m just going to tell her what I think, and you should do bloody same.”
‘If owt wanted doin’, he’d do it for ’er, but then she’d have something else for ’im straight away. I’d say, “C’mon, we’re going out for a bloody pint; we’re goin’ for a drink,” which would get her goin’ straight away. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s doing this, and when he’s finished he’s doing that and that …”
‘Like, he might be out three nights wi’ wagon around country somewhere an’ he’d come back bloody jiggered about four in the afternoon, after driving all of the night and most of the day as well. Obviously he wanted to go to bed, have a few hours sleep, like, but, no, he had to come in an’ start on bloody decorating. She used to start first thing in the morning and go right through day practically non-stop and all through night till mebbe five in the morning. Then she’d expect him to get straight on it, soon as he came in. She were cleaning fanatic. There were always summat.’
*
It had relieved Mrs Bowman and the other neighbours on Garden Lane that the new people were so houseproud. They had had No. 6 re-pebble-dashed and had repainted the doors and windows themselves a smart black and white; Mrs Sutcliffe was always out weeding the garden, polishing the windows and even clearing the guttering around the roof. She had undertaken most of the painting singlehandedly in her first summer holidays from school, in 1978, and had caused a small sensation locally by shinning up a long ladder several days running in a bikini and bare feet: it occurred to Barbara Bowman that she had never seen the council workmen take so long to trim the verges, but Sonia hadn’t appeared to mind.
Being of similar ages, Mrs Bowman and Sonia had struck up a casual acquaintance, based largely on teatime encounters in the street after school. Mrs Bowman had been able to deduce that Sonia was probably a teacher, largely on account of her ‘arty’ clothes and, having established that, had thought how useful it would be if she could give her youngest some extra tuition two or three nights a week. She had mentioned to Sonia that she was looking for somebody prepared to devote some time to their Robert – paid, of course – but Sonia, who Mrs Bowman had thought would have been glad of the cash, refused to bite. Robert was never invited into No. 6, and neither, despite repeated suggestions that she must come over and look at her pottery, was his mother.
Sonia herself was only in the Bowman’s house once. She went across one evening to ask to borrow the ladder which she eventually used to paint the upper windows from, and four hours later was still sitting chatting in the back lounge. Peter had come across around midnight to fetch Sonia and, when they were finished with the ladder, it was Peter who had brought it back. He had given Robert 50p, which made Robert decide he was ‘a nice man’, but it did nothing to alter Barbara Bowman’s opinion that, as far as the locality went, Peter still didn’t really ‘fit in’.
From how she had talked, however, Sonia seemed to genuinely love him, and there must have been some strength in the relationship to survive the amount of time they spent together in the house alone. Visitors at Garden Lane were few after the initial settling-in period, and became fewer as the years went on. His family still went on special occasions if they were invited, but Mick and Carl in the end usually only ever saw Peter on his own.
*
Even after his mother died, Peter liked to keep in touch with developments in Bingley. He dropped in regularly on his brothers and sisters and, whenever Mick had nothing better to do, which was often, he’d climb up into the cab and go off with Peter, occasionally staying away from home for two or three days.
They would sometimes pick girl hitchhikers up on the road. ‘Look at these,’ Peter would say. ‘We’ll get these in.’ And he assured Mick that he often had sex in the cab. Mick thought it was strange though that, every time he was with him, the bunk-beds behind the driver’s seat were only ever used for sleeping in. Peter would invariably blame it on ‘this fuckin’ silly spot we’re at’ – usually a lay-by outside a quiet village.
Mick’s favourites were the short runs to Nelson in Lancashire because they could be turned around and in Burnley by 2.00, and there was a pub in Burnley that stayed open all afternoon. They used to stay there, drinking steadily and playing dominoes, until about 4.30, which got them back to Clark’s yard in Shipley just in time for Peter to clock off. Wherever they were, though, Mick noticed that his brother always tried to eat plenty of ‘proper’ food, before going home to whatever Sonia might have ready for him.
‘She used to mek him little bowls of spicy stuff an’ that that weren’t fillin’ or owt. I’ve known him have his dinner there then shoot out an’ have fish and chips twice an’ guzzle ’em, like, in motor. Sometimes he used to come to me mother’s in wagon starving. If he hadn’t picked owt up at chip shop, he’d come in, grab owt that were in fridge and be straight off.
‘I told him, I said, if it was me, I’d say to ’er, “Never mind all that that you foreigners are used to eating. I want right dinners.” That’s what he should’ve said. But that weren’t him. He never said owt to ’er, you see.’
*
The winter that Kathleen died was one of the worst in living memory in Yorkshire; in the week in which she would have celebrated her sixtieth birthday, Bradford had its heaviest
snowfall for thirty years. The weather, followed by a national lorry-drivers’ strike at the beginning of 1979, meant that Peter spent more lunchtimes than usual in the Belle Vue on Manningham Lane.
Working flat out the way he did meant that he often got his week’s hours in in three days, and when this happened he would sometimes call on Mick and take him out for a lunchtime ‘session’. He would then drop him off at home at the end of the afternoon with a few pounds shoved into his pocket so that he could go out again at night. Mick never ceased to marvel at the way money just seemed to ‘build up on’ Peter.
The Old Crown in the centre of Bradford, Yates’ Wine Lodge opposite, and the Harp of Errin were some of their usual haunts, but the Belle Vue was the place where they invariably ended up. With their brother-in-law, Robin Holland, who was also a lorry-driver, and sometimes Trevor Birdsall, they were lunchtime regulars there while the bad weather and the drivers’ strike lasted.
The Belle Vue in its day had been a rather stately public house, as uncompromising in its dourness as Drummond’s mill in whose shadow it stood. In the mid-1970s, the new tenant, a Punjabi, had introduced a programme of ‘Female Strippers’ twice a day, seven days a week, and the Belle Vue had quickly become a favourite of lorry-drivers from all over the country as well as the Continent. With a smattering of local businessmen, students, Asians, West Indians and Chinese they made up the regular afternoon audience for ‘Miss Abby Lane’, ‘Miss Ricci Lee’ and the rest.
Yvonne Pearson, the Ripper’s eighth victim, used to assist her husband who was the Belle Vue’s disc-jockey in the days before the disc-jockey went ‘topless’; and Tina Atkinson and Maureen Long also both used to be regulars.
In the winter and spring of 1979, however, all Bradford’s prostitutes worked at the top end of Lumb Lane, near the park, where the police – although they publicly denied it – had granted them an ‘amnesty’ on the understanding that they only worked in a small, mutually agreed area during mutually agreed hours. In this way it was hoped that the ‘Ripper’, whose car number would have been noted by detectives covertly monitoring all traffic, would eventually be lured into the net. In other words, the prostitutes had tacitly agreed to act as live ‘bait’ in return for being allowed to earn their living without fear of prosecution.