Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  May June. Cromwell Street came up in July a few weeks later. Across the tracks and across the park. A snug harbour. Home at last. This narrow aspect opening on to so much space.

  Chapter Eight

  Traces of the life that Mrs Green had led in the house were still visible. Mrs Green had lived there for thirty-six years, from 1935 to 1971, in the last years alone with her grandson Brian, son of Eddie, ‘Gloucester’s Midget Strongman’. And they inherited many of Mrs Green’s wallpapers and linos with their wear marks and dated patterns. Some of the wallpapers were buckling and not to their taste. They were not what Rose would have chosen. But they had to live with them. The wallpapers and linos and some of the other things Mrs Green had left, behind. They had no choice. For a period before they left Midland Road the gas and electricity had been cut off. They had all been living in the one room with a paraffin heater and candles. Huddled around the heater like a travelling family. Like travellers. Like gypsies. Candles in bottle-tops and on saucers. In that case, what were Mrs Green’s age patches and stains? A poor family existing on bread soaked in warm milk. Weak watery tea-coloured Bovril. Snouts. They were scratching about for money. Scraping and scratching. And yet mystifyingly, thanks to the intervention of Frank Zygmunt, they were miraculously about to become home-owners. Old Frank, their friend and a lonely sort of a man who had decided to look out for them. Real owners of a real house. Three storeys, not including attic and basement.

  Traces of the former life of the street were still in evidence. The red-brick buildings of Tommy Rich’s school were abandoned but still standing. The Seventh-day Adventists’ church in Cromwell Street in 1972 was still leaking noise. It was contested noise. It had to compete with the human and the electronic and mechanical and all the other noises of a scrappy central city street. Random, mobile noise. Always bad neighbourhoods were linked with noise. And this was one. It had gone down. But the church building was still more or less a shanty building standing on the piece of spare ground between 25 and 27 Cromwell Street. The church was still only really a hut constructed out of scrap and sheets of corrugated iron and tar pitch over simple tar paper. Built on to here and there as the need had arisen and pushed into an irregular casual shape. And the sounds of the piano and the almost 100-per-cent Jamaican congregation singing from The Seventh-day Adventists’ Hymnal still leaked out through the very many gaps and cracks over the building and the spaces where frames and joists didn’t meet.

  Behind the church, at the bottom of what was going to be Fred’s and Rose’s back garden, was another slightly leaning, knocked-together building. In it was a man who made his living dealing in cars and dogs. He ran a car-repair business and also sold pedigree Alsatians which turned out not to be pedigree and led to him being periodically sent away. Ducking in, ducking out.

  That piece of land between the back of Cromwell Street and St Michael’s Square had once been full of sheds and huts and makeshift buildings when the allotments were there. Now in 1972 there was only the car repairer and the church. The last examples of an unregulated way of building in which poor materials were put together in a resourceful way and given a new use. Basic shelter for poor people. A peasant tradition adapted to life in towns. It was a tradition in which Fred had grown up and one that he would keep going in his twenty-plus years at Cromwell Street.

  He hated anything official. He had a phobia about the police, the welfare, the planning people, teachers, even midwives and doctors. Anybody in authority. And he brought his children up to hate them. They were brought up believing they would only do them harm. Inside was safe and outside was full of dangers. People in uniform and briefcase-carrying nosey-parkers. He hated officialdom of any kind. Anybody in a pen-pushing capacity.

  And so he would go about adding on to his house without asking for or being given permission; with stealth and in a piecemeal, sly way. He would extend the house incrementally over a period of years, putting up what was really a series of interlinking lean-tos and sheds. One-storey outbuildings. Flimsy envelopes of space tacked on to the main walls of the house at the side and the back. Jerry-built and screened off from the street so as to draw no attention to themselves. And in this way he combined two of the things that gave him the most pleasure. Making and constructing. And making a monkey of. Pulling the wool over. Putting one over on. The chisel. The blag.

  His house would exist in a state of becoming which would last not just for two or three years but for nearly twenty years. All his life in this house. Constant digging, demolition, excavation. The house was a building site. Always Fred did the work. Fred alone or Fred working with somebody else. When he wasn’t at work he was working on the house. Rewiring, replumbing, roofing, digging up floors, pouring new footings. New roof. New windows. He painted the outside. Cladding. Skimming. Decorating inside. Always rubble and noise. Rose was always happy when she knew he had done things for her – a new bathroom suite, put swings up for the kids. He had a preference for trial and error over the following of directions. The casual approach and improvisation. He was learning from Mr Zygmunt and practising on the house. Alone or with somebody else. He just worked.

  Every penny they had for many years went into the house. And what they couldn’t afford to buy he stole. Almost everything in the house was stolen. The sand and cement that kept it standing and the beams that held the roof up were stolen. When he needed wood or sand or cement for the house he would go out at night and lift it. Electric cable. Water mains. Beds and lino. Copper pipes. The incredible thieving machine, his son Stephen would grow up calling him. If he got his hands on some jungle-green paint the whole house would be done up with it. The floor in the hall and in some of the bedrooms was covered in sample squares of carpet. Uneven textures, shaggy and clipped and clashing patterns. He stole tools from his workmates and often stole ladders and tools from his neighbours. He rewired the telephone and rerouted the electricity. He’d drive out to building sites at midnight and pinch things for the extension he was building.

  After Rose – perhaps even before Rose – the house was his most precious possession. He invested everything he was and had in it. He had an impoverished, perverted and murkily complex interior life. And whether he intended it or not 25 Cromwell Street would in time grow into the fullest expression of it. He loved the house. He was so proud of what he had achieved that he would strike up conversations with strangers in the street and invite them in for a guided tour of it. It didn’t matter to him what kind of people they were, whether they were drunks and down-and-outs. Mental patients from Coney Hill hospital. He would waylay them and give them the tour. He liked people to say what a nice home he had. He would even show them the children’s rooms. He would sit on the wall outside and wait and invite them in. Towards the end of his life, when he was in custody and being questioned about what the press had started calling the ‘House of Horror’, he would lose his composure only four or five times, and two of those times were when he was forced to face the facts of what was happening at his house. The police were digging and finding bodies in the cellar and in the garden. But that wasn’t what agitated him. He was given two diazepam to calm him on the second full day of questioning and that seemed to produce a hallucination. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said. ‘When I walked in here and sat down there, I could feel my head like lifting up, and I was going into space. And I could see diggers and everything all ploughing round and ripping the house up and tearing floorboards up and bulldozing the house down and it was all weird and … I could see it all in me mind and everything had gone wrong.’ With Stephen he cried when he talked about all the work he had done on the house, which was now all going to go to nothing. He seemed genuinely upset and agitated, but only about the house. Other murderers claim that they are being visited by the spirits of the people they have murdered. They see apparitions. They hear voices. Faces and voices. With him it was bricks and mortar. The changes in temperature and acoustics in remembered spaces. A building. He loved his house. Hallucinating hims
elf back to his house. Nobody was to touch it. It was in a constant state of becoming.

  The selling price had been £7000. Frank Zygmunt was letting them have it for that. He advanced them £500 as a loan and organized a local-authority mortgage with the council. Mortgages for poor people. One week’s money was your mortgage, one week’s money was your food and stuff, which they did then. Optional or summat. Looking out for them and for himself. Frank took it upon himself to do that. He had tried multi-occupation in the house for a year and it had been trouble. He had had students in and it hadn’t worked. With Fred and Rose in he had live-in caretakers and that was the arrangement for the first six months. They would take lodgers to guarantee his loan and then, when it was paid off, or mostly paid off, they would buy. The house would be theirs. In that way also he had a reason to remain a regular caller and the opportunities to continue having sex with Rose in place of the rent. Which was all right with Rose. The sex with Frank Zygmunt she didn’t mind. He was a nice old chap. It was the other part of the arrangement, which involved turning the top half of the house over to lodgers, that didn’t appeal. Rose could see it was going to be her responsibility to put her foot down and maintain order and she didn’t want it. Mr Zygmunt was Polish but in the Russian domrabotnitza: a woman you hire to keep your home in order. She didn’t want it.

  But Fred put the Baby Belling cookers on the landings and placed his two-line advertisement in the evening paper and word of mouth did the rest. He said they needed the money and it was the only way they could keep things turning over. Word soon got around among the Vampire motorcycle gang who used the Pop-Inn café on Southgate Street and the Scorpions who mostly used the Talbot pub next door and among the regulars at the Jamaican café/record shop in Barton Street and the chip bar plus restaurant in Clarence Street in the main shopping centre only a hundred yards or so away. All the first intake of lodgers were male; hippies or bikers, Hell’s Angels types. And when you had the bikers you had the runaways coming around. The hellers. The misfits who were of two different sorts: ones who caused trouble and ones who merely had trouble. That wild runaway element. Soon the house was what Fred called a bloody communial centre. He let it to bedsits. But it was drug addicts. An address that started getting handed around as a place where you could crash. Where the landlord was cool. No questions. There were many people around who wanted to belong to a house like that; to join an extended family.

  But it was all right for Fred. Fred never had to hear them. He was working at the Permali’s factory on Bristol Road as a fibreglass-presser on permanent nights and jobbing for Frank Zygmunt during the day. Out on an emergency for Frank or shut away down in the cellar well out of the druggy music and the drugs and the drop-outs looking for somewhere to use as a hang-out free of charge. They’d come very smoothly dressed, the first week’s rent money in their hand. Then once they moved in they moved all the furniture out of the room, put mattresses on the floors, stripped the wallpaper, painted it all black and purple and green and all psychedelic colours. Called each other ‘man’. ‘Man’ and things like that. ‘Hey, man, what you working so hard for, man?’ ‘Man’ if you were a man or a girl, it didn’t matter. When they turned up for the interviews, all dressed in nice suits, that was the last you ever seen of the suits and they were drug addicts. How could it work, Rose wanted to know from Fred. They were keeping them. But Fred didn’t want to know. Rose realized but Fred didn’t seem to realize how disruptive these boys were going to be. Dirty drop-outs. Didn’t care about looking after other people’s property. And soon there was the problem of the drug squad raiding the house regularly. The police came up to the house two or three times and smashed the doors off, arrested anybody who stood in the way and proceeded to rip the rooms apart. At one time they were raiding regularly and almost every day. If one policeman wanted to get in touch with another policeman, they radioed to Cromwell Street, because that’s where they usually were. There were a lot of parties. Endless parties. And a lot of drugs. There could be anything up to thirty people in the house at any one time. It was just a continuous flow going in and out all the time. Going and coming. People staying and then going. A bloody communial centre. They got raided solid for years by the police. Mr Castle and Mr Price. There was so many drug-pushers and drug-takers coming there. And Fred thought it was all great. A joke.

  Even the police coming was just a joke to him. He didn’t care whether they came or not. The fuzz. Rose wanted the lodgers out. She told him. She said she didn’t want them in the house. She wanted her part of the house kept separate but he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t hear of that. Fred seemed to revel in all the upheaval and misrule. Doors banging and constant digging, demolition, excavation. When he wasn’t working on the house he was always up with the lodgers, never downstairs with his family. He would spend a lot of time with the tenants. She would cook his dinner and she could never find him to come and eat it. He made them part of their life whether she liked it or not and it sparked rows. They started to fall out over it. Started to have violent arguments on the subject of the hippy drop-out lodgers. The dirty junkies upstairs. And he started to show his violent side. He was vicious when he got angry. His eyes would roll and he would be livid. He didn’t flip very often, but when he did go he was like a madman. He snapped very quickly. And when Rose got on at him about the lodgers he started punching and kicking. Coming after her with his fists and his feet. He held her tightly around the throat. He lost it. Wouldn’t stop twisting her clothes around her throat until she took the words back. He was saying, ‘Take them back or I’ll kill you.’ Snatched at a cup of hot tea and threw it over her. And one Sunday about two months after they moved into the house she got Heather and baby May together and packed them in the pram and went. He had sensed something brewing when she didn’t get her regular weekend shop in on the Friday. And on the Sunday morning she got up early and said, ‘I’m going out for the day.’ Which came as a great surprise to him who knew Sunday dinner was always something really special. Their one blow-out meal. When she didn’t come back by five o’clock, he decided to take Anna-Marie and go and find her. And he knew exactly where to start looking.

  One night quite soon before Heather was born, which made it one night in September or October 1970, five or six months after she had walked away from Bishop’s Cleeve, there had been a knock on the door at Midland Road. And when she had gone to answer it, there was her father. Her father with her mother, as it happened. The two of them. But it was coming to the door and finding her father on the doorstep – her father who had threatened to stab Fred or set his ’van on fire – that started the alarms ringing. They had found out where Rose was living from one of her sisters and here they were. Rose didn’t know what to do and so she asked them to wait and white as a sheet went and told Fred. ‘Mum and Dad’s at the door.’ Eight months pregnant and deathly pale. Fred went to the door himself and told them if they had come to make trouble then forget it. If they had come to make trouble he would give them more trouble than any they could bring him. Making a cigarette in his chipped working fingers, a prison habit. But they had said no – really no – and he had let them in. They saw terrible mess and the squalor in which Rose was living. Cigarette burns in the furniture and car jacks and chisels and unwashed plates. Rose saw Fred and Fred’s children and her own little family and went to bring the cups that she considered her best china and made them tea. Anyway they had a nice chat. It was really nice. And when they went they said they would call again.

  And they did. They had. But every time they had gone over there after that Rosie would be on her own. She always said Fred was working. But they never got any more out of her than that because she had always been crying. Rosie on her own with romantic radio music and dirty nappies and red-rimmed eyes.

  Fred wasn’t Dad’s company. Dad was quite particular and clean. Dad used to say: Keep that lot out of here, when Fred used to turn up at their kitchen door at Tobyfield Road. But after that first visit he had started to turn u
p regularly at Fred’s and Rose’s flat by the railway line in Gloucester. Once the ice had been broken he had become a regular visitor. It seems probable that the pattern of his visits became established while Fred was serving his sentence in Leyhill and continued with Fred’s encouragement and connivance after his release. Rose once again sleeping with her father as well as the men from the bus garage and whatever other men Fred brought home for her. ‘He was bloody everlasting there after that,’ Fred was to say of Bill Letts, Rose’s father. Bill on his own.

  In the period between Heather being born in October 1970 and the move to 25 Cromwell Street just under two years later Bill Letts and Rose and Fred had started to make up a regular threesome. Rose and her husband and her father driving around; driving out into the countryside for a drink. And sometimes Rose would go off for driving lessons with her father on her own. ‘Driving lessons’ with the nudge implied when this was said by Fred. A nudge and a cackle. He never knew that Rose was ever abused. Rose never told him that her father had ever abused her. ‘Whenever I seen her with him she was more than willing to get them off, and having a good time at it,’ he said, and it would have been surprising if he hadn’t said it: a man who believed it was every father’s right to ‘break in’ his daughters; that every woman was ‘begging for it’, especially from him. ‘He was fucking her regular … I actually caught them in bed. He was well in.’

  Caught them in bed. And joined them in bed on at least one occasion. Fred and Rose and her father in bed together. An incestuous triangle. A second triangle. Fred and Rose and Anna-Marie. Fred and Rose and Rose’s father. Two daughters and two fathers and an incestuous chain that would be completed when Rose started to force Anna-Marie to have sex with her and Bill Letts started to sleep with Anna-Marie at Cromwell Street when she was twelve. Bill Letts – ‘Grampy’ to Anna-Marie – would by then have moved into one of the lodgers’ rooms at 25 Cromwell Street at the invitation of Fred.