Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Garden gates were a perk that a lot of the men did; a lot of the men at the wagon works had made house signs in that style. Things that could be put together and taken apart again. The brackets for hanging baskets, the fireguards, the filigree shelf supports, the just a little bit elevated house signs – elevated above the neighbours’. But neither Colin Price, Derek Clayton, Roger Kelly nor any of them could have guessed to what uses the pieces of bent and straight metal that they helped Fred with were going to be put. They watched the flame-cutting machine follow the dark path of the pencil and they didn’t know.

  The circumstances he found himself working in at the wagon works would allow him to refine the contraptions to which Anna-Marie was going to be subjected. But a few months earlier, while he was still employed at Permali’s, he had come in with a metal object that instantly made Anna-Marie, who was eight, feel unnerved. She didn’t know why because he said he’d made it as a toy for the children. And Heather and May would sit in the middle of this curved bar and sort of rock on it. It was a metal bar shaped like a U with two protruding handles. Two wings. And for reasons that were unknown to her, while the younger children played with it and rocked on it, Anna-Marie tried not to pay too much attention to this contraption or device. In time it found its way down to the front part of the cellar which was becoming a children’s play area. And that was where Anna-Marie next saw it. The first time she saw it was when he brought it in and she had seen it in the living room rocking and she had thought it might be some kind of rocking-horse toy with other bits still to come. The second time was when she saw it in the cellar and even more so seeing it in that dimly lit place she suspected it had a sinister purpose straightaway.

  She was told they wanted her in the cellar. There had been some whispering between them and some quiet laughing and then they came to her and ordered her down there. She was very apprehensive but she did as she was told. And when she was halfway down she saw this object against the wall. She wanted to go back up but Rose was behind her on the stairs. They were leading her one behind and one in front into the cellar playroom which they usually got to by using the old coal hatch at the back. They had been in the house only a few weeks. It was late 1972. Perhaps they had been in the house as little as a month. And in those weeks the door leading down to the cellar from the front of the house had been kept locked. Anna had been in the playroom section before but she had never actually played there. She was kept too busy doing the housework for that. The playroom section was at the front. The section that her father kept his tools in was at the back. And when they were through the door that was generally kept bolted in the hall, Rose turned and bolted it at their backs.

  On the floor there was a Pyrex bowl and a cloth, a vibrator and tape. A smooth white vibrator – of course being still a child then she didn’t know what it was – and a roll of strong black tape. Anna was very frightened. She didn’t know what was happening. There was a thin single mattress and the bent metal device or contraption or whatever you could call it standing against the wall. She was asking what are these things for and there was nothing coming back. There was no answer. As the three of them stood at the bottom of the stairs she suddenly began to get nervous. All of a sudden there was an atmosphere she couldn’t fathom or work out. There was something between them and she wasn’t quite in on this. Then she had her clothes removed. She was crying. Asking what’s going on? What’s happening? And she was told that she should be very grateful and lucky that she had such caring parents. That when she got married she would be able to satisfy her husband. What they were doing would mean that she would be able to keep her husband. Struggling. She had her legs crossed. Screaming and crying. Her dad said, ‘Just do as you’re told. Take your clothes off and put them on the floor. Go on. Get on with it.’ She didn’t understand but she started to do it anyway. But she obviously wasn’t quick enough for Rose. Almost in one movement Rose ripped her thin summer dress right off. And all the time they were laughing and threatening her and telling her to just shut up and things would be all right. Stop being silly. They were doing it to her because they loved her. It was for her own good. Ripped her dress as she tore it off her and threw it on the floor. Then they pinned her to the thin foam mattress and tied her hands and ankles to the metal frame. The ugly U-shaped metal frame. She was eight years old and had no understanding of what was about to happen to her but she knew it was something awful and that it was going to hurt. Her father used the strong black tape to secure her ankles and her feet. Rose used thin strips of torn sheeting to tie her hands and arms to the wings of the metal contraption either side of her head. Above and to the side. Rose sat on her face. She had started panicking. She was making noise and shouting and panicking. And so Rose sat on her head and face. She had a gag put over her mouth by Rose who was laughing and then Rose squatted on her face. It was something that had to be done and other families were doing exactly the same sort of thing. Her father forcing her legs open. And because she was struggling so much she had her hands bound and she was gagged. Trussed up. She couldn’t see what was happening with Rose sat across her. Her private parts exposed in the centre of the frame. And she felt excruciating pain. She screamed out very loud and Rose sat on her head again because she was screaming. Gagged by Rose with some material. Like a ‘bit’, isn’t it? Like a horse’s mouth. Like a bridle on a horse. A white smooth vibrator and redness in a bowl. Red things had been taken out from inside her. She was terrified. It frightened her. But she also felt she shouldn’t be so ungrateful. She was led to believe that all loving parents were acting the same. There was a buzzing noise that she didn’t understand. Her stepmother grabbing her breasts and scratching and making them bleed. It seemed to go on for a long time. ‘If you don’t lose your virginity young, then the older you get the more it will send you mental.’ This was her father who was now on top of her. Raping her while her stepmother watched. Rose smirking and joining in and telling her to stop being silly. And then it stopped and they went away leaving her crying and cold. And then they came back and it started again. She waited for their shadows to show on the wall and finally she saw them and all of it started over again.

  Fred West was desperate to stay the owner of 25 Cromwell Street. He had worked a lot on the house in the weeks they had been there and he was fiercely committed to it becoming their home. The abuse of Caroline Raine was the first exercise of the new freedoms it had brought him. Or maybe, as seems likely, the first exercise of these new freedoms was the abuse of Anna-Marie. The binding and raping of Anna-Marie. One day when she was living with them he had told Caroline Raine that Anna-Marie wasn’t a virgin. He had told her in September that Anna-Marie, who was eight, had already lost her virginity. Caroline had been aware of him watching her carefully while he was telling her this, and when he observed how she reacted – she was upset and angry; repulsed by what she was having to hear – he said, ‘She fell off her pushbike and hurt herself.’ The saddle had come off Anna-Marie’s Chopper bike and she had gone to sit on it without realizing and damaged herself. He was a story-telling cowboy. He was a bastard liar. Bullshitter Fred.

  He had murdered Anna-Marie’s mother and her sister a year earlier. It was almost exactly a year. He had got away with that. He stood at the centre of a magic circle swathed in a cloak of immunity. He had got away with that and he would get away with this. Making themselves familiar with the freedoms the house was bringing them. Shoring up Fred West’s idea of himself as being invulnerable. Confirming his faith in his powers.

  Afterwards Rose was really nice to her. When she had completed her ordeal and there was no more fun to be had from her, Anna-Marie was allowed upstairs to wash and Rose was really nice then. Rose used to run a bath and put salt in it, say it would sting but it would make it feel better and heal it. She was so kind to her. Got her a sanitary towel and helped her clean herself up. ‘Our family were aware of our bodies because my stepmother and my father would touch each other and would kiss and cuddle in front of us childre
n,’ Anna-Marie said. Rose would be standing up at the sink wearing no knickers and Fred would walk in and put his hand straight up her skirt. He would smell his fingers and then put his fingers under the children’s noses for them to smell. He would always grope Rose in front of them. She only minded if his hands were dirty. It was just their way. ‘Smell that, that’s your mother.’ In the summer she would just wear an apron. They were told at a young age what sanitary towels were for.

  The second device Fred was able to make with the help of his workmates during his break periods at the wagon works, although they were unaware that they were helping to make them, was a more sophisticated device altogether. It was a metal cup object. Anna-Marie, who had to wear it, described it as ‘a bit like an egg cup with two handles’. An egg cup constructed from ribs of soldered metal so it looked more like a cage. A battery-operated vibrator fitted loosely inside it and Anna-Marie was made to wear both of these objects under her clothes. It used to pinch. It used to hurt. The vibrator inside her; the metal object which was fixed to her by a belt around her waist holding the vibrator in place. She had to walk around the house with it held inside her and the buzzing noise. For some years she was forced to walk around the house doing the dusting and other jobs while wearing this. This hurting cage contraption barely covered by a little miniskirt. They were doing it to her because they loved her. It was for her own good. It was a normal situation in families. Everybody does it to every girl. It’s something everybody does but nobody talks about. It’s a father’s job. Rose would get a real kick out of it and if Fred came home from work and found Anna in it he would just laugh along. The two of them laughing. Anna was warned not to tell anybody what happened. Rose couldn’t wait for Fred to come home and see the humiliation of his daughter so she could have a good gloat.

  Fred saw himself as being experimental; an experimenter. He cast himself in the role of scientist, investigator and sociological note-taker. And in this and many other ways he was closer to the Victorians than to the ‘permissive’ times going on in his house all around him and which he would so like to have felt himself a part of.

  The sexual torture of women, masquerading as social or moral hygiene, was a practice advanced by many Victorian social reformers and investigators. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the late-nineteenth century, for example, were meant as sanitary measures to control the spread of venereal disease. What they meant in practice was that any prostitute or ‘fallen’ woman could be made to submit to a gynaecological inspection which involved her being forcibly strapped down and ‘speculumed’.

  The black market for virgins in Victorian times – a market that Fred West claimed to Liz Agius and others that he was supplying in the West Country in the seventies – stimulated a medical sideline in the certification of virgins by midwives and doctors. The ritualized degradation that this involved, the voyeurism and the violation of women’s bodies, was something Fred West would inflict on his own daughters and other young women and girls. His lifelong obsession with the insides of bodies, with the ‘dark centre’ and the mysterious organs of sexuality and reproduction, was something that Heather and May and Fred’s and Rose’s younger daughters would come to know at first hand.

  He wanted to know every detail of their periods and at what time of the month they occurred. He would call it rag week. ‘I see Harry Wragg’s riding in the two thirty.’ That was his way of saying you had your period. They always wondered how he knew, but he did. He kept the details in a little black book. When it was their ‘time’ they weren’t allowed to ride their bikes, play games, run or go to the fairground. If any of the girls were irritable around that time, he would say, ‘You need a man to knock that out of you.’ He taunted them and told the other children not to go near them. He was fascinated with ‘women’s problems’. May had thrush once and he made her tell him all about it – the symptoms and everything. Anything May said to her mother would get back to him and he would want to talk her through it and show her pictures. May was reading a pamphlet on cystitis and he completely took it over and went through it all with her because there was a diagram of a woman’s insides.

  The ‘instrumental rape’ that nineteenth-century doctors inflicted on prostitutes and the virgins who were being supplied to Victorian brothels is something Fred West also inflicted on women with a metal speculum which he claimed had been left behind by a midwife after a visit to the house. ‘We put it in her, look in with a torch and things like that, and try to film inside as well,’ he told the police. ‘It shows the womb, like, inside.’ The anatomist’s cruel disinterest. Anatomy: a science of seeing, and therefore of knowing and controlling the body. Penetrating through the skin surface down to tendons, veins, arteries, and bones. Bending back the joints until they break and separate. A voyeuristic fantasy of peering and prying.

  Fred West’s fascination with the possibilities of the speculum eerily echo those of the speculum’s inventors in the mid-nineteenth century. The American gynaecologist Marion Sims, for instance, experienced himself as a ‘colonizing and conquering hero’. ‘I saw everything as no man had ever seen before … I felt like an explorer in medicine who first views a new and important territory.’ And the metal contraptions Fred dreamed up at the wagon works for his children bear a striking resemblance to the inventions of another Victorian doctor, the German child-rearing zealot Daniel Schreber. Inventions like the Geradehalter, a portable, T-shaped metal contraption that could be screwed on to any desk at school or at home, and was for preventing slumping while doing homework. By pressing hard against the child’s crotch, the vertical bar of the Ger adehalter discouraged leg-crossing and thigh-pressing and other acts of moral degeneracy. The Kopfhalter, or head holder, prevented the child’s head from falling forwards or sideways. The ‘abominal’ head-pressing machine did what its name suggested. Both resembled the head cage that Stephen West would be forced to wear as he grew older. Made of ribs of metal, it was closed around Stephen’s head and hooked over the back of the settee and he would be made to watch filmed pornography in it without any sign of blinking. If he blinked or attempted to move his mother would hit him in the face with a shoe or an ashtray or whatever was closest. Smash him in the face. Stare him out. The West children, like the Schreber children, were chained or strapped or handcuffed to their beds at night so that all body movement was rendered impossible. During the day under the Schreber regime the lower part of the child’s body could be locked into metal contraptions that served as underwear. It was not uncommon for children to be sexually stimulated by their governesses and then bound up in leather straps or chains or metal underwear to ensure that they would not masturbate.

  It is probable – virtually certain – that Fred West had never heard of Dr Schreber. He couldn’t read. But the central library and reference library are only yards from Cromwell Street and he might have seen illustrations. The central library and reference library are only one street over and he might have gone in there and looked at pictures. Looked at drawings and illustrations of the hundred-year-old Schreber devices; the Geradehalter and the Kopfhalter and the literature of social purity and anti-vice groups, and misinterpreted them. Inverted them. Let his imagination run riot. In any case it would have tickled him to take contraptions that were intended to purge children of ‘unnatural’ passions and use them to incite aberrant sexual feelings in children. Pervert and corrupt them and make them compliant to his own wishes. Growing up in a world where wrong was right and up was down. An upside-down universe with little in it that was straight and plumb, square and level, right and true, only warpedness and deviation. Inversion and deviation. What was confusing was that Mum was a really nice mum if she wasn’t being nasty. And if Fred hadn’t been abusing them he would have been a really good dad. But he used to grab their hands and put them up their mother’s skirt and then push them in their faces. ‘Smell that, that’s your mother.’ He would get nasty and really aggressive if they told him to leave them alone and pushed him away. ‘What sort of girl is
it that won’t let their dad touch them?’ he’d say. ‘Every girl should let their dad touch them.’

  He would take tapes and narrow strips of blanket and turn them into the noose with which he was going to hang himself. And he took belts and turned them into a cat-o’-nine-tails and restraining harnesses. His scavenging eye. A large number of sexual harnesses of varying sizes and strengths would be recovered from Cromwell Street. He made the cat-o’-nine-tails for their messing about. His and Rose’s. Leather belts and plastic belts. He had an eye for spotting use in something that had been discarded by everybody else as useless. It was something he made for their life.

  At one time Rose wore a weightlifter’s belt. It made her look butch and powerful. It was broad at the back, narrow and buckled in front. It was broad, cinched. At all times she liked to wear a belt under her clothes and so was like Fred’s mother in that habit. Big, thick, black, leather, powerful. She liked to use the belt to give you a thrashing. And she used to like to wet it first. Wet leather stings. Still not yet twenty and still not fat. In fact she was a nice slim girl. She was a smart girl. Ronnie Cooper and other men from the wagon works found her that way. Ronnie often wondered what she saw in Fred at the time. When he was dolled up, mind, Fred was smart. But few and far you saw Fred dolled up. Fred just stayed dirt black.