Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Rose was smart and slim but showing signs to those who knew her of the vocational humiliator and vindicatrix now. Rose made no attempt to hide her cruel streak. She didn’t try to hide the beatings she doled out to Anna-Marie. In those days Heather and May never got it and of course Stephen was only a baby. They were too young to get it. Only just under two and three. There was only Anna-Marie. Rose pulling her hair, dragging her by the hair, kicking, swearing, shouting. She would drag her into the bedroom and tape up her mouth. Tear a piece of tape off and tape it across her mouth. Strips of sheet or washing line. Straps. Tie her hands behind her back or sometimes tightly in front of her. She might be tied to the bed with her legs spreadeagled or bound together. Anything. She was unpredictable. Sometimes your legs were tied open, and sometimes your hands were tied behind your back. And once you were trussed up and unable to move the assault would begin. Apart from the belts she had canes and whips including the cat-o’-nine-tails Fred had made for their life. Rose in an ecstasy of anger like a performance. Once you realized you were in for it it was difficult to get away. Often she had stripped you naked in an instant and there was nowhere to run. Rose felt Anna-Marie was her father’s favourite and perhaps to some extent she was. And for that she was always going to pay.

  Rose would grab Anna-Marie’s hand and plunge it in boiling water. Or photograph her alone and naked against the bedroom wall. On one occasion she grabbed her and plunged her bodily into a boiling bath. You would see a coolness transforming Rose’s face. Then her eyes would disconnect. Internal and external doors were locked including the gates that led to the street to indicate the onset of a major rage. She never said why she did it and you knew never to ask. You never knew what brought on one of Rose’s moods. Rose just loved to be the boss.

  Of all the humiliations that happened to Anna-Marie – just one big joke to Rose – something that happened when she was aged about ten is the one she will never forget. Rose stripped her naked and got Heather and May to paint pictures on her with fingerpaints; they used pink ones, the kind of paints you can buy in Mothercare and children love making a mess with. Heather and May were having fun and although Anna didn’t like it she could cope. But then Rose joined in. She made Anna get on all fours and, using black paint, she wrote ‘black hole’ on her bottom and an arrow. She had to stay like that all afternoon until Fred came home. When he did Rose said to him, ‘I’ve been doing some painting, love’, and laughed. Fred laughed when he saw what she’d done. They both laughed and Heather and May laughed seeing Fred and Rose so happy although they were too young to know what for. When she was given permission to wash it off Anna sat on the floor of the bathroom where Lynda Gough had recently been buried on the concrete and cold lino and cried. All this was all on her body and she was shamed and humiliated and she cried.

  *

  Fred got on with the machine he was put to work on at the wagon works very well. He picked it up very quick. It was a partnership and they were going to be together for ten years. The job description was ‘driller’. And that was the job: drilling. He took to it within half an hour. Bringing the drill bit down and just drilling holes. Big holes. Small holes. It was an Asquith drill. A big radial drill with a capability of drilling up to six-inch holes. Small holes. Big holes. Minute after minute; hour after hour. And with an imagination like his. A mind like his. One track. Into the hole and out of the hole. Out and in. Poke, pole, pork, pump, prod. All day every day. Repetitive, terrible, boring work. All day drilling the same job. Boring. Drilling. The big drill going into the hole. Bringing it down and penetrating the plate. Plunging the drill through the metal and pulling out. Blinding worker. Always at work.

  He’d come home from work and she’d sit deliberately on the edge of the settee with her legs wide open and say, ‘Look at that … I bet you wish you had something that could fill that …’ It never stopped. It didn’t stop at all. There was no let up. Fuck me harder! and all this she had picked up from the porno films. Fill me up!

  Minute after minute. In and out. Day after day. Out and in. It was a noisy shop and it was dirty work. Heavy machines, big brake-presses, welders, drills, you name it, all running round you. Overhead cranes bombing over your head. Penetrating. Entering. Staying tight.

  Bringing things into holes. Pushing things down in holes. A small, deep, well-dug hole. Vertical rather than horizontal. A narrow shaft. Preparing shafts. Peering into holes. Peering and prying. Black holes. Fuck me harder! Tight fits. Narrow shafts.

  V.W.E. in the shorthand of the contact magazines. Very Well Endowed. Sexy housewife needs it deep and hard from V.W.E. male. Husband likes to watch.

  Fred would set up the camera and Rose would often perform alone in a room for him so that he could watch it in his own time later. Rose bringing bigger and bigger objects inside herself and holding herself open to his gaze. A pint glass. A large orange. A whisky tumbler. A lager can. They amassed more and more and bigger and bigger sexual accessories and vibrators. They kept them in drawers. Under the beds. In a big black trunk in Rose’s special room. The bigger the better. The bigger and the blacker the better for Rose, Fred decided.

  Rose knew what Fred wanted. Rose knew what Fred wanted to see. She knew what he wanted to hear.

  The following exchange tailored for Fred’s listening took place between Rose and one of her ‘Visitors’ and was videoed by Fred. He set up the camera, adjusted the lighting (it was daytime; sun was striping the bed through the Venetian blind, top floor back), and left the room to listen downstairs.

  ROSE Fuckin’ hell … It’s fucked me for the night. You have an’ all.

  MAN [laughing] I can’t help it, can I?

  ROSE It’s massive that … Is it classified as a dangerous weapon?

  MAN [laughing] Dunno. I wouldn’t have thought so.

  ROSE I should register it if I was you.

  Feeding Fred’s eyes. Feeding Fred’s ears. Rose then steered the conversation in a different but connected direction. Pillow talk intended for Fred. The kind of talk Rose knew Fred liked to hear.

  ROSE They tore our road to bits, mind. Putting a new sewer in … Bloody filth and mess off of that.

  MAN I bet it was. That’s deep as well, innit.

  ROSE I tell you what, they’ve gone so deep in places, ’cause they’ve put about three manholes in it …

  MAN … Fuckin’ manholes are deep, I know that. Ever so deep, aren’t they? They go down a long way.

  ROSE Well, this bugger must’ve gone down twelve foot … It was fuckin’ gigantic down in there … Why do they want the manholes so deep then? ’Cause the pipes don’t go down that fuckin’ deep. The pipe goes six or seven feet in.

  MAN That’s to shift all the shit, I suppose. All the rubbish … I ’spect the pipe they put in was about six inches or summat.

  ROSE What?! …They were great big ones. [She illustrates with a loop of her arms. Rose and the man are still lying naked on the bed.]

  MAN Oh. Two-footers, are they?

  ROSE Yeh. Sounds about right. They’re big buggers. Huge.

  MAN [examining himself in the convex mirror in the ceiling over the bed] And the manholes, are they fuckin’ as big again?

  ROSE Oh, fuck me, they’re massive. Gigantic. Fuckin’ hell.

  MAN They’d have to dig some big holes for them. They’re big.

  ROSE … There won’t be any water come up in our basement now, look. We used to have water come up in our basements this side of the road. Used to come up six foot one time. We got it right down to a dribble. Now it won’t come up at all.

  The name of Fred’s machine at the wagon works and his companion of ten years was Power Thrust. He took his break on his bench at the machine. His morning lunch. And then it was just drilling holes all day. The big drill forcing the hole and going into the hole. Bringing it down and penetrating the plate. Plunging the drill through the metal and pulling out. Minute after minute. In and out. Day after day. Out and in. POWER THRUST. It was written on the side in polished l
etters; polished steel on drill-hall green. And then in smaller letters: ‘Asquith–Archdale – Standard Machine Tools – 6PT – 1972 – Made in Birmingham.’

  Asked to choose between friendly human presences and the companionship of objects there was never any doubting which Fred was going to choose. He always preferred objects to people. The deadened and dehumanized over the alive and responding. That would be his choice every time.

  Ten years just drilling holes.

  It never stopped. It didn’t stop at all. There was no let-up.

  He was obsessed with sex. You could never get away from sex. He saw sex in everything. Entering. Penetrating. Fitting tight. The big thruster. The Exocet. The Eiffel Tower. Power Thrust. Massive piece of equipment, mind.

  If he couldn’t think about sex he couldn’t think at all.

  Chapter Ten

  Four months after they murdered Lynda Gough they had a holiday. Three weeks after they poured concrete and erected a bathroom over Lynda Gough’s remains they set off on holiday with Rose’s father.

  It was 1973 in the summer and it was hot and dusty. The scaffolding for the Sabbath Church was still on the garden and it was brick dust and cement dust and they decided to go off to Westward Ho! near Rose’s childhood home in Northam in north Devon with Rose’s father. Even Fred who hated holidays. He had no time for holidays. He was too busy working. Bill and Fred took turns with the driving and Anna-Marie, who worshipped her father, passed the time making roll-ups for her dad.

  It was a caravan holiday – one caravan for all of them. And since Rose’s mother did not want to live in such a close way with this man, she stayed at home. Daisy Letts had not undergone the same thaw in respect of her relationship with Fred West as her husband. She didn’t like him. Didn’t trust him. She had never been happy with the explanation given for the disappearance of Charmaine, who she had considered a lovely, happy little girl. On one visit up to see Rose, Charmaine had been there and the next visit she was gone. Mrs Letts used to sneak up to see Rose because she wouldn’t tell Rose’s father that she was going round. The odd times Fred was home when she called round there, Rosie would say, ‘Fred’ll give you a lift home, Mum’, but she always said no. She always got the bus. He stopped on the odd occasion and asked if she wanted a lift when he saw her waiting at a bus stop in Cleeve or in town, but she always said no.

  Rose had closed off to her family. When she had come to the decision to go with Fred she had shut that other part of her life down. She had had the bust-up with her sister Glenys over Glenys’s husband, Jim Tyler, when she had told Glenys she couldn’t keep a man. ‘You couldn’t keep a man. You don’t know how to keep a man satisfied.’ Made a fist and launched one right at Glen. Fisted up and hit her own sister. Then Pat, her ten-years-older sister, had come round to Midland Road and sat there among the dirty nappies and tut-tutted and she had told her where to get right off an’ all. Fucking cheek of it. High and fucking mighty. What right did she have? Fucking nerve. Joyce, the second oldest, was domineering and well out of order and she had found God. Andrew, the oldest of Rose’s brothers, was naïve. He thought so himself. ‘Daft Andrew’ the others always called him. His mother and the rest. Although he wasn’t unintelligent, just trusting and naïve. ‘That way I might be taking after our mum,’ Andrew says. He didn’t see Rose for a few years and when he did he had to remind himself that this was Rose. She let him in at Cromwell Street and it was hard for him to believe what he saw. ‘She came to the door in a see-through blouse, forty-inch bust, skirt round her arse, white socks, no decorum.’ When she came to the door you could see what she was. Andrew could see what she was but he wasn’t ready to believe what he was seeing. Even when there was a ring at the door and she went off for half an hour in mid-conversation leaving him sitting there to take a client, he couldn’t quite take it in. It was bloody queer. ‘I think she’s on the bloody game, Andrew,’ Glenys said the next time he saw her, and Andrew had to agree. She had her brains in her knickers, if you wanted to know what Andrew thought. It was a right show-up. He wrote Rose off after that.

  Graham and Gordon, her little brothers, had always been close to Rose. Rose would come in as their protector, protecting them against their father. They would huddle in bed together for comfort and protection, and the sexual activity among them had started there. So Graham and Gordon resented the rest of the family telling them that they weren’t supposed to see Rose; that they were cutting her off. And when he was fifteen and sixteen and drinking heavily and probably already an alcoholic Graham started sneaking round. He started turning up at Cromwell Street to see Rose but only after he had phoned to let Rose know he was coming first. You always had to phone and let her know and you always had to phone between certain times. If you phoned outside those times she went mad. ‘When I say before five I mean before five!’ And she did. It wasn’t an empty warning. With Rose she meant it. That’s the way Rose was. She hardened up. Oh did she.

  In 1972, the year they moved into Cromwell Street, Rose’s baby brother Gordon had asked to have himself put in a home. He was twelve years old and stealing women’s underthings from washing lines and wearing them and being ground down by the violence and constant sniping between his parents and he volunteered to go into a home in an attempt to right his life. He went into a home, and then after only a couple of months he started to reject it. ‘All I wanted was to be happy at home and see my parents happy at home. None of us got that,’ he says. ‘In the end, I gave up. That was me giving up when I was younger. It was that I personally couldn’t take it.’

  Gordon ran away from where he was and moved in with Rose and her family for a while. But he robbed them and took seventy pounds and so Rose never had him in the house again. It was your family this and your family that. Fred went up the wall and gave her hell for a week. From then on Gordon would be in borstals, and then prisons and mental hospitals, all his life. At one time he tried to settle down with a girl called Karen. They had a baby called Michael. But Karen had her problems and Gordon had his problems and when Michael was aged eight months they woke up one morning to find him dead. They were living in Drybrook at that time in the Forest of Dean and Gordon was arrested and kept in custody for several days on suspicion of murder. What had happened was that Michael suffered from eczema on his face and they had put cream on it to soothe it when they put him to bed and the cream had adhered to the sheet which was made of bri-nylon. Gordon kept telling the police this but they didn’t believe him and kept telling him that he had murdered Michael and they were going to prove it and they were going to charge him. After three nights and four days they released him without any charges being brought. But Karen didn’t want to see him again. Karen was in hospital and didn’t recognize him. Karen’s parents didn’t want to see him again and after the funeral Gordon sat on Michael’s grave like a grieving dog for a week. At the end of a week he walked into town and into a pet shop and bought himself a puppy complete with new collar and new lead. But the collar was too big and the puppy wriggled out of it as they came out of the shop and ran out into the road under the wheels of a lorry. ‘They broke me. They done me completely. They done me here,’ Gordon says, indicating his head. ‘It took more than three-quarters off my life. I still have blackouts and things.’ The next time Rose was to see her little brother was when he turned up handcuffed between two prison guards at their father’s funeral in 1978 and the policemen refused to take the handcuffs off him in spite of her mother’s pleading with them. Gordon was crying and they wouldn’t let Rose or her mother or anybody get near to comfort him. It’s as if they couldn’t cope with life. That’s how their mother sees them. Rosie and the boys didn’t seem to want to live how normal people live. She’s almost frightened to talk about them.

  Just as Gordon would be in borstals and other custodial institutions all his life, Rose’s other brother Graham was headed for a future of woman-beating and detoxification units and crack-ups and jail. The times Rose and Fred were going to be called on to haul
Graham out of the latest mess he’d got himself in, whether it was because of messing about with somebody else’s wife or being hounded out of the district where he was living for robbing his neighbours. Graham and his family would have to be kept moving on because he burgled so many of the neighbours the neighbours were out to get him. The times they would be called on to save his neck. They would have to take Graham’s wife in and give her protection when he was beating her up. For a period they were moving Barbara Letts from refuge to refuge to keep her away from Graham. They went over to where Graham and Barbara were living in Bishop’s Cleeve one time and found he had smashed the whole house up. He was only little; you wouldn’t think he was capable of such strength. It was the middle of the night. But he had ripped the kitchen units off the wall, turned the freezer over, even smashed the family photographs and the budgie cage. Barbara and the children weren’t there. They had gone; fled to friends. They made a cup of tea and tried to tell Graham where he was going wrong. But of course with Graham and Gordon as much as you might think they had listened, they hadn’t at all. Once Barbara was at Cromwell Street and Graham was outside shouting and shaking the gates and Fred went out to quieten him and he told Fred to fuck off. That did it then. Fred’s eyes started staring; his body went rigid and shaking. He opened the gates and unusually for him laid one on Graham who was a thin, emaciated-looking individual. An alcoholic and drug-user. Ferret-faced and thin. When he was younger he had this charming talk and people would fall for it at the time. Next thing you knew he’d done the dirty on you. What a sad bastard. Fred sent him in the gutter and started Graham crying.