The Love of a Bad Man

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

  They tell me that I’m here for life, but no one knows how long a life is. Some are short like Betty Jean’s. Some are long like Old Man Meyer’s. If I’m good, they tell me, I might get out sooner, but I shouldn’t expect to see the sun while I’m still young and pretty. I shouldn’t expect to see the same world when I get out; times are changing and people are getting meaner. Keep your head down, they tell me. Read your books like you’ve been told. Don’t look for freedom on the open road.

  Myra

  I never doubted how powerful the darkness was, even as a child, lying awake under my tartan quilts and praying for it to end. Those were years when the air raids were still fresh in our minds — stories of the London Blitz and towns turned to rubble overnight. I daresay those stories were what kept me up, listening to the winds rushing from the moor and picturing all of Gorton in ruins come morning. Though the war was over long before my first communion, those early years were enough to convince me that the darkness was not only a real thing, but greater than prayer. Greater than God.

  I was a child afraid of the dark. Yet I was also a believer, and what I saw in the night hours of my belief was too powerful to look away from. Rows and rows of identical red-brick houses razed to the ground. Taverns, factories, churches — all razed. On the air, a thickness of dust and smoke that seemed almost magical, like a fairytale.

  And us, the children. Led by white hands into that unknown waste.

  It took Ian one date to convince me that there was no God. In a dark corner of the Thatched House tavern, he drove his words into me like nails.

  ‘It’s all shite. Religion, God, Good, Evil — superstitious shite. Ordinary people are weak, mindless bloody bovines. Most of them would sooner sleepwalk through life than confront their natural inclinations.’

  Weak and ordinary. It was as if he had looked into my heart and made out the two things I least wanted to be. Weak and ordinary meant a life of steaming peas and watching Coronation Street. It meant marrying some chap who worked in a factory and waiting around in a housecoat for a screaming match and a black eye. It meant church and children and losing all one’s money in the pools.

  I thrust my chin forward and looked Ian square in the eye. I felt I knew what he meant by ‘natural inclinations’, but I wanted it from his own lips.

  ‘Nature is primarily sexual,’ he said, without a trace of embarrassment. ‘In the sense that all creation and destruction is sexual, a violent release of energy.’

  ‘And how do you know so much about nature?’ I pouted and smoothed my hair, newly dyed a blitzkrieg blonde. I had not yet read the books that Ian had read. I had never heard anyone speak so frankly about such things. The weapons I had at my disposal were few and inferior.

  ‘I spent a year at Strangeways. Another year at borstal. Where there is Crime, there is Nature.’

  Ian had a way of pronouncing certain words as if they had a capital letter. To me, this seemed utterly learned and original. There he was, sat right in front of me, this man who I worked with and had loved for a year; a man in white shirtsleeves and braces, with clean fingernails and a low Glaswegian accent; the most unique man I had ever met. Though he wasn’t the only chap in Gorton with a criminal record, I doubted any of the others could have spoken about it so intelligently.

  ‘Why were you at borstal?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Ian sneered. ‘My real crime was being born working class and choosing not to work.’

  ‘But you work now.’

  ‘I choose to.’ A rare smile crossed his handsome features. Dark lashes, dark-blue eyes, pale skin, clean shave. How did a man get so clean? ‘And I may choose to stop at any time.’

  I would have liked to take his face in my hands and kiss him roughly, right then. I chose not to. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to avoid looking weak. With the others, this had meant resisting advances; with Ian, this meant not making any. Until he walked me back to Gran’s house on Bannock Street, at least.

  Though he did not take my hand, I became aware of a change in him after we left the tavern. He seemed somehow smaller, walking beside me, his jaw set firmly as if against nerves. He is weak, I told myself. He is not a man. I listened to the scuff of our shoes against the wet cobbles. I felt the same blend of attraction and repulsion that sometimes came over me at the office when he acted particularly uncouth — insulting me, deliberately walking in front of me, rowing and swearing if he lost in the pools. A man would not be so cowardly.

  In the shadows of the porch, I saw his pale Adam’s apple twitching. He was not looking at me, simply staring across the street and fidgeting with something in the pocket of his dark overcoat — his lock-back knife, I later learned; he carried it everywhere. I wanted him and hated him so intensely it almost blinded me. Taking a step closer, I breathed a stream of vapour. Then I sank my teeth into his ripe lower lip. Hard.

  We became lovers that night on the old green settee in Gran’s front room. For all his earlier talk, I sensed from his movements that he was as inexperienced as I was — with women, at any rate. More than once, he brushed against my backside and had to be guided forward. I kept on my girdle and my cardigan. He kept on everything save his shoes and his coat. At the end of it, he looked as clean as ever, though rather wan.

  Ian hated all religion, but particularly Catholicism, which was the most superstitious in his eyes. I was baptised at St. Francis Monastery and had loved reading about the woman saints as a lass: Joan of Arc, Catherine of Alexandria, Agnes of Rome. On Christmas Eve, Ian and I walked out past the lighted monastery as the bells were tolling for midnight service. I grabbed onto his sleeve without meaning to. The sound, the light, being there with him — that was all.

  ‘Christ is born,’ he said. ‘Should we kill him in the cradle and get it over with?’

  The bells stopped. A deep, low hum of organ music started up from within, visceral.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ I said. ‘Just for a while.’

  His face took on that look of disgust that was so already familiar to me — and yet, not quite so familiar that I understood how earnest it was. ‘I refuse to go into a Catholic church,’ he said.

  ‘Come on.’ I pulled his sleeve. ‘I know you don’t believe in it, but it’s beautiful on Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Little Myra wants to smell the frankincense, how sweet,’ Ian jeered. I was not ‘little’, and that made it worse; the contemptuous way he scanned my breasts and hips as he said it. ‘Does she want to lie in a stinking barn, too? Give birth to the Immaculate Conception?’

  At that, he pulled his sleeve from my grip and stalked to the plot of graves at edge of the churchyard. I heard him unzip. I saw, rather than heard, the stream of urine he released onto one of the gravestones. He zipped up and looked over his shoulder.

  ‘That’s what I think of your church.’

  As I went downhill to meet him, I could hear the opening prayer: Through the night hours of the darkened earth, we the people watch for the coming of your promised son. Perhaps I ought to have turned back then, but the people seemed so easily profaned next to the two of us.

  I am a tender person, more tender than most. Those who know what I’ve done may argue otherwise, but the fact remains: none of it could have happened if it wasn’t for tenderness, Ian’s and mine.

  He was tender. I saw this from the beginning, along with everything else — the arrogance, the cruelty, the untouchable cleanness. It drove me to distraction how tender he was. Looking at his soft lips and fresh complexion seemed to turn on something predatory in me, a desire for possession that had always existed, below the fear and the piety and the deadly routine. He was the quarry, I the hunter. I wanted his tenderness, by any means and at any cost.

  Through that first winter together, I was little more than Ian’s Saturday-night stand. During the week, he was content to sit away from me, eating his egg-and-cheese butties and reading
his foreign books. If I approached him and asked something about his reading, he was always polite, but never prolonged our conversations. Many times, I fantasised about ripping the book from his hands and telling him what a right arrogant prick he was. Instead, I asked him to lend me things.

  He started me on the Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley. After that was Crime and Punishment. The dirty books — de Sade, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis — didn’t come until later, when he was certain that I would be receptive. There was an order to everything Ian did.

  Like the way he would wait until the last minute on Friday afternoon to ask me out. Or the strict pattern our dates followed: a film, the tavern, and Gran’s house to make love. If Gran was still up, Ian would stay and take tea with us until she retired, politely talking about the wartime and how there were too many immigrants.

  After the first few weeks of shagging the normal way, I let him put it back there. He was so frantic and insistent about it that I just gave in, thinking it would only be that once. The whole act made me feel about as sensuous as a piece of plumbing, but the alcohol helped. Ian and I always had to drink a lot, to do the things we did together.

  Things changed in the spring when Ian bought his motorcycle. It was a Triumph Tiger Cub, all black and chrome and hardly bigger than a scooter. He called around at Bannock Street the day that he got it, with a crash helmet tucked under his arm. It was the first time he had ever called on a weeknight.

  ‘Come for a ride,’ he said. A statement, not a question.

  Though I was already in my rollers and headscarf, I stepped into the humid evening and let him lead me to the bike. He sat down and fitted on his helmet, smirking, ‘I don’t have one for you.’ I had a brief image of the bike going down, my blonde head rolling along the roadside. Yet I was completely calm as I settled behind him and clutched his trim waist. If I was going down, I could be certain that he was going with me.

  We puttered out of Bannock Street, slow and low to the ground. I could see Gran peering out of the top window, some neighbourhood lasses watching from the corner — friends of my sister, who dated the same gits she did and squealed over the same Beatles records. As we gained speed, I clenched Ian’s waist tighter, bracing against the vibrations, rejoicing as those familiar red bricks blurred before my eyes.

  Although we did not stop at the moor that day, the sound of it, the smell of it, the sprawl of it, loomed within us both. It was too dark to see the heather that was beginning to bloom, yet I clung to the sweetness of it on the air, the heavy odour of the peat beneath. I felt my scarf slipping in the wind and pressed my chin against Ian’s shoulder, thanking our non-existent God that he couldn’t see my eyes watering. He had made my world so large, I couldn’t help mourning the loss of the smaller one I knew I was leaving behind.

  Later, much later, Ian told me his theory about the moor, why it owned both of our souls the way it did. Before we brought any children there, even before we talked about it, we were one with the place, as if our own true forms resided in the peat, the rocks, the soughing wind. I told Ian about the nights I’d lain awake, believing in the darkness more than I believed in God. He told me he had felt something similar as a lad. Then he explained:

  ‘We are demon folk. We don’t belong in the mundane world of ordinary people. There’s a chasm that separates us from the rest of society. That’s why we’re drawn to darkness.’

  It was a beautiful summer’s day, everything blooming and lit up like a fairground: broom, gorse, heather, harebells, sweet smells of honey, pollen, and the German wine we were drinking. Yet, when he gestured at the scenery, I knew exactly what he meant. The ghostly moths floating up from the earth, the clouds strobing above us — a brooding quality, as if it could all switch from light to dark in an instant.

  ‘This is our domain,’ he said. ‘Everything is permitted here.’

  Another might have looked at the sublime landscape and seen proof of God’s existence. For Ian, it was the opposite. Standing among the rocks in his tailored grey suit, not a single strand of his dark quiff out of place, he was right in his element. Because of that, I believed him. Also, because I loved him.

  The first three murders — Pauline, John, and Keith — happened so smoothly, I believe, because they happened in our domain. Killing on one’s own territory is different to killing on common ground. Ancient people knew that. Wild animals know it. Ian did, too. He chose to bring the last two back to the red-brick house, and that was his mistake.

  In our quest for new sensations, we become ever more reckless, he wrote to me, sometime after our arrest. It’s years now since he and I stopped writing to one another.

  From the beginning, there was a tension between how much I knew about Ian and how much I didn’t. I knew that he lived with his mother, that he liked German marching music and thought Hitler a genius, that his favourite program was The Goon Show and his favourite cigarettes were French. He enjoyed oriental restaurants but hated the people that ran them. He despised Jews but had his suits tailored by a man called Menken. He railed against the proles and the aristocracy in equal measure. He admired the spontaneity and innocence of children but could read passages about their torture and murder with a gentle smile on his lips.

  I knew so much, yet in the middle of it all was a centre as cloudy and tumultuous as the moor itself. If he didn’t want to see me, he wouldn’t, and that was that, no matter what plans we had. If he didn’t want to tell me where he’d been, he wouldn’t, regardless of the explanations I felt he owed me.

  There were nights, pacing around in wait for him, when I was torn between fearing for his life and wishing him dead. Stubbing out fag after fag, I conjured violent scenarios: Ian’s bike mangled in a ditch, Ian walking into the path of a speeding bus, Ian getting clobbered by some brute with dirt under his nails and lager on his breath. The satisfaction I gained from these scenarios was almost equal to a tender word from him.

  ‘There’s a pub on Canal Street. I like to go there to people-watch,’ he said one day, in response to my latest grilling. I knew exactly what kind of place Canal Street was: only men, and only of a particular kind, frequented the pubs there. I gave him a look of disgust and he smiled feebly. Yet that was the last I asked about his activities for some time.

  When I first fell in love with Ian, I used to fantasise about having all the ordinary things with him: marriage, children, a nice home. They were bland fantasies, born of wallpaper and furniture catalogues, and I abandoned them soon after we came together. At one point, perhaps a month after we killed Lesley Ann, I believed myself pregnant, and was ill at the thought. The blood that came a few days later seemed to me to be an act of will more than an act of nature.

  Though we spoke to no one about our relationship, people saw us together and made their assumptions. He was never publicly affectionate toward me, yet he accepted my presence; in some ways he seemed to depend on it. It was I who purchased tickets, ordered drinks, and placed bets when we were out together. I took care of practicalities, while he sat by with his arms crossed and a right surly look, waiting for his change.

  People saw us together and made their assumptions, but they could not have guessed the half of it. My skirts became shorter, my boots taller, my stride broader, my vocabulary rich. I was strong and posh and sexy, in no way ordinary. That was the woman I became with him.

  We talked about it so much — the perfect murder. At first, it was in purely theoretical terms: what Raskolnikov sought when he brought down the axe on his landlady’s head; where Leopold and Loeb went wrong. Ian loved the story of Leopold and Loeb; so wealthy and dapper and freethinking, yet daft enough to leave a pair of custom-made glasses at the crime scene. He was certain he’d never make such a mistake, that he would be able to account for every button and stitch. After all, his official title at work was ‘stock clerk’.

  That it should be a child was something he had no trouble justifying. Not only
was the act of killing a child more reprehensible to the ordinary human conscience — and thus more thrilling to him — but a child would put up less of a fight.

  We talked so much, Ian and I, and suddenly it was our second summer together. I was twenty-one years old and had assimilated the ideas in his filthy books, as I had assimilated everything else about him. I had a driver’s license and a van, which I took out to the moor alone some nights, reliving in my mind the times we had spent there together. I didn’t fear the night or the winds. I didn’t fear anything.

  Pauline was a friend of my sister. She was an ordinary girl, only five years my junior, quiet and pretty and trusting; I used to babysit for the family when I was in school, and they never gave me any trouble. I had nothing against her, but I had nothing for her either, as I had nothing for any of the people who lived their small lives a world apart from Ian’s and mine. Besides, I thought it better a lass of sixteen than a wee babyish thing like he wanted.

  I drove the van and he tailed on his motorcycle, shining his headlights when she came into view. She wore pale clothes and looked hardly real against the dusty amber sky, more ghost than flesh and blood. A clockwork ghost of a girl, on her way to a disco to dance with other girls and boys just like her. That made it easier: pulling over, asking if she wanted a lift, all of it.

  Less easy was seeing what Ian had done to her. I was not there during the doing, though he might argue otherwise. With my own eyes, I watched the sky through the windshield darkening like a stain. I heard the wind, I smelled the peat, I smoked the last of my Embassy Tipped, and I regret that no one was there to see my hands trembling. Then he rapped on the window and brought me out to look at the pale body on the cotton grass, the pale bunched clothes and dark gurgling wound where her throat had been. He told me she had fought too hard. I asked if he had raped her. ‘Of course I did,’ he sneered. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’