by Gordon Burn
His tendency was always to domesticate his working vans, cutting in windows and putting up curtains and adding mattresses and tables. And he had an equal tendency to turn the places where he lived into work spaces, tool rooms, building sites. Building his tool room just off the living room meant that he could keep his tools and materials always close to him. Fred’s special room. Rose had her special room. And this was his. The place where Fred felt most completely at home in his home. Locked together with his room like the parts of a gun or a camera in the most easeful way. It acted like a decompression chamber between the public and private worlds; between outside and in. Open the new front door and you turned left and took two steps up into the old front entrance to the house. Into the hall with the now permanently locked entrance to the cellar straight in front. Rose’s special room still on the left. Fred’s and Rose’s mutual bedroom, which used to be the back living room, on the right. Into the bedroom and through a door in the left corner took you down into what was once the kitchen but had now become part of the expanded family area. That was one way into the new added-on part of the house, and the lodgers from upstairs like Liz Parry used it when they wanted to use the washroom at the back, always knocking at the door of the bedroom first before they went in. But the most direct route to what had become the heart of the house was straight in through the tool room, and this was the route Fred always used. Through his special room. His place of maximum refuge. There were two routes into the extension living room at Cromwell Street. One was through the bedroom he shared with Rose. The other was through Fred’s special room with its own array of lubricants, fetishes, aids, prostheses and tools he was confident he did know how to use. One of the most disturbing sequences of the many pornographic videotapes he made at Cromwell Street shows Rose lying bound on the floor of the tool room. At first it looks like the back of his van but it’s the tool room. She is immobile, lying on her side wearing tights and knickers and surrounded by equipment and materials and pots of paint. She is on a thin mattress lying in the foetal position and Fred steps briefly forward and with one hand rips off her knickers which he turns inside out and brings to the camera. He was not a big man, but he was brawny in the arms and shoulders. He keeps his face out of shot but his prison build is noticeable. Under the knickers Rose is wearing a sanitary towel which has become dark red and bloody. The black knickers that gradually fill the frame are seen to be patchily white with semen. Building his tool room just off the living room meant that he could keep his tools and materials always close to him. This was important. He was always going out to the van during the night to clean it and top up the oil and water. He was always getting up in the middle of the night and going out to the van and putting his tools in order; oiling and greasing his tools and ordering and arranging them. Keeping sand separate from cement. ‘Just going out to the van.’
His last act on what can be considered the last day of his life – the day he gave himself up to the police who were about to begin digging in the garden, searching for the remains of his daughter Heather – was to ask Stephen to go outside and bring his tools from his van. To bring his tools and put them in the tool room. To clear all the tools out of his van which was parked outside. To collect them and bring them in the house where they would be safe.
His house was his life. He just worshipped the place. He wanted his tools in the house where they belonged and where he was going he could picture them. He told May once, ‘My life begins when you are in bed.’
Chapter Thirteen
Rose made a lot of noise and Fred liked to hear it. Wails. Noises. Shrieks. If Rose was with a man and she wasn’t making enough noise – if she wasn’t being loud enough – Fred would go in and tell her and she would turn it on. Like touching a button. Just like that the volume would increase. Wailing, thumping, thrashing about. ‘I’m going to come … I’m coming!’ You could sometimes hear it in the street. She used to have all the windows open so everybody could hear it all down the road. Noises. Shrieks. These were the night-time sounds of the house once the pandemonium of the male lodgers had been got rid of. Once they went back to bedsits they only had girls and the girls were quiet. But Rose was noisy. The house was her house and she filled it with the sound of her voice. She had a mouth on her. Mrs West was the dominant character of the family. She always seemed to be telling everybody in the house what to do and when to do it. It seemed to be uninterrupted. She never seemed to leave the house.
She rode the children. She was always yelling and screaming at the children. Forever bawling and screaming at them and calling them fuckers. You fucking little this and you fucking little that. I’ll fucking have you. Fucking watch it, boy. Watch it, feller. Screaming and carrying on. Sometimes she could be pantomime-like in her red-faced fury, and almost funny. Screaming for them to find the tea towel, and the children all scurrying and looking, scuttling about and searching and expecting to feel the weight of her hand across their face any minute, and the tea towel is over her shoulder. But she would also use knives and rolling-pins and other everyday objects which in her hands would become weapons. She put a knife inside Anna-Marie’s mouth. She nicked May with a knife all up under her vest when she was little. She was a taskmaster. Of course it was still the case that in her father she had had the right man to train her. And every task had to be carried out to the letter according to her instructions. ‘If you’re going to live here …’ and then she’d give them a job to do. And if it wasn’t done properly – if it wasn’t done how she would do it – she would blow up. She would go ballistic. She’d hit one of them and then she’d want to hit them all because she was in the mood. She would just lose it.
From the age of seven, just like Charmaine and Anna-Marie before them, Heather and May and Stephen were expected to do the washing, do the ironing, scrub the kitchen, scour the toilet, change the babies’ nappies and feed them. There was always something to do around the house – a lamp to rewire, the bins to put out, a floor to wash, cement to shift. She would send them shopping around the corner in Limbars which was the cheapest most horrendous shop ever in the whole world, Stephen thought. Horrible cheap discount food from Limbars. They weren’t allowed to have friends around and they weren’t allowed to play outside the house. They didn’t have many friends for the simple reason Rose told them to fuck off when they came to the door. My children have got more to do than hang around the streets. None of my kids spend their life on the street. They never came again. She exploded on a daily basis. You could hear her from up the street, she was so loud.
Heather and May and Stephen had been sleeping in the cellar since the last body – Juanita Mott’s body – had been roughly concreted over in 1975. Stephen slept in the back room almost exactly at the spot where Carol Cooper was buried. The view from his bed wasn’t of the familiar and friendly things that are put in children’s rooms to make an atmosphere of security and well-being, but of tools. From his bed he looked at a stack of conventional tools spilling out from the cupboard under the cellar stairs, plus a lot of rusty agricultural implements whose claws and spikes and teeth as a child he found frightening. His first spell in the cellar was between the ages of two and six. And Stephen would be quite a bit older before he recognized some of the rusty things he had shared his room with as bolt-croppers for extracting cow and bull horns and other things from his uncle Doug’s farm which cast shadows that could be terrifying. At the end was just like a big jaw. These great steel jaws at the end. The handles were so long you could get some weight behind it and in the lamplight spiky frightening shadows.
Heather and May slept in the front part of the cellar closest to the street and directly under their mother’s special room with the noises coming from it that didn’t sound like anybody was having any pleasure. The most horrendous screaming noises you have ever heard. Before the building of the new extension there were two entrances to the cellar, one inside and one outside the house. And even in the coldest weather and when it was raining, the children would be made t
o go outside and make their way to bed by way of the concrete steps going down into the old coal hole around the back. Dressed in their pyjamas they would feel their way down the side of the house and around to the trapdoor lit up by the light from the living-room window that was their way to bed. In the mornings they would queue up and wait to be let in at the front door, rain, hail, sleet or snow. This had gone on for nearly three years when, three months after his fifth birthday, in November 1978, Stephen says he led a rebellion. He led a break-out which resulted in him and May and Heather nearly getting away from Cromwell Street one night. They would lie in bed and endlessly talk about the house in the country that they were going to run away to and live in for ever together. And they were halfway over the fence at the bottom of the garden when they were spotted and dragged back inside and beaten and put down in the cellar again. It may or may not have happened exactly like this: like his sisters and brothers Stephen has been damaged by his childhood experiences; like his father he has been known to tell what those close to him call ‘porkies’, and so some of what he says has to be treated with a degree of scepticism. But the consequences are not in dispute. For a period from the end of 1978 or the beginning of 1979, the children’s beds were moved upstairs into the part of the new living area formerly occupied by the scullery kitchen. Their beds were put behind a curtain and the door to their parents’ bedroom was left open at nights so they could hear what was going on. Right into Fred’s and Rose’s mutual bedroom off the hall and through a door in the left corner took you down into what was once the kitchen but had now become part of the expanded family area. That was one way into the new added-on part of the house. It was an arrangement that made the children available to be casually molested and groped by their uncle John and Rose’s visitors and other men calling at the house. Men on their way to work in the morning would come in and, while Rose was boiling a kettle, reach behind the curtain and grab and sexually abuse Heather and May. While they were having their tea they would sit them on their knee and touch them indecently.
*
After Rose had had Tara, her first mixed-race baby, her mother had made it clear she didn’t want Rose coming around to her house again. She had taken about as much from Rose. A lot. And it was all she was prepared to take from her. Mrs Letts came from a time when you wouldn’t talk about sexual things when you were growing up. It was just something you never spoke about. Her father was a Cambridgeshire man. And once Rose started having half-caste children her mother asked Rose not to come around any more. Which Rose had taken as a rejection by her mother. The second time she had been rejected by her. She had never allowed Rose to love her. When she got too close she pushed her away. She didn’t need Rose, like Rose needed her. She didn’t think her mother really wanted her any more.
When the Green Lantern café had folded, in spite of Daisy Letts taking over in the kitchen in the last months, Rose’s mother and father had gone back to living together, this time in a council block in Lydney in the Forest of Dean: after his early retirement they had had to give up the house that had been their home for fourteen years on the Smith’s estate. But they had been living in Lydney for less than a year in May 1979 when Bill Letts died. He was fifty-eight. Rose didn’t even know her father was ill. He was rushed to hospital in Bristol and given an emergency operation for what was thought at first to be a chest complaint but turned out to be cancer of the lung. He died after three days.
The funeral was held at the council cemetery in Cheltenham and the family were all together for the first time for a long time. Fred didn’t go with Rose and she couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to pay his last respects to her father, after all they had become close. She was angry with him for not going to the funeral and supporting her. She attended on tottering heels and in clothes that the staider members of the family regarded as the uniform of her profession. It was a right show-up. She was still only twenty-five, but she had had five children, two of them in the past two years, and her body was assuming a slack look as a result of one pregnancy following another. In May 1979 Louise was only four months old but Rose was just weeks away from falling pregnant with her and Fred’s second son, Barry. When Rose went to comfort her eldest sister who she hardly knew, Pat threw her over on to the gravel in the churchyard. Across the gravel and into the dirt as if this was the right place for her. And Gordon was handcuffed between two prison officers or CID looking tranquillized and zombie-like with ‘K-a-r-e-n’ tattooed across the fingers of his left hand. He would disappear from their lives for many years after this, virtually for the whole of the eighties. Her baby brother Gordon was there, dead-eyed between two policemen. And Andrew and Jacquie and Joyce, who had found religion and was overbearing, and Graham and Barbara White, who were recently married. ‘The only reason any of us went was to make sure he was going down in that hole in the ground,’ Andrew says. ‘Everybody seemed so glad when he died. Gone and out of the way. My mother hated my father intensely,’ Gordon would say many years later. Graham and Barbara had moved into the same council block in Lydney as Rose’s parents. The week after his father died, Graham would break into his mother’s flat, strip it, sell the furniture, rifle the gas meter, etcetera. This was Rose’s father’s funeral.
*
Fred had patience. He liked a set routine – he was rigid in his routines – and he knew how to be patient. In 1979 he was working on a house near Jordan’s Brook, the home for abused and off-the-rails adolescent girls in Hucclecote in Gloucester. And one of the live-in care assistants at the home started to notice his transit van parked by the gates in the late afternoons and evenings and some of the girls hanging around it until they were called back into the home around bedtime. Alison Chambers, known as ‘Al’ or ‘Ali’, was one of the girls and she was thought of as a girl who was particularly insecure. The staff at the home thought of her as very clinging. She came from a broken home and she had come to Jordan’s Brook from a children’s home in Pontypridd in South Wales after running away and threatening to ‘go on the game’ in London. She wasn’t popular with the other girls at Jordan’s Brook and had become a target for bullying. They were aggressive and punky – one of them was nicknamed ‘Punky’, others were Uta and Lil – and Alison wasn’t that way at all. One of the tenants who saw her at Cromwell Street would describe her as wearing a suit and carrying a handbag and being almost a professional-looking person. Very slim, dressed smartly. She looked almost official the way she was dressed, with a handbag. Compared to Rose who stared a lot and dressed like a child. The same tenant, Gill Britt, would remember that Alison Chambers ‘had lesbian tendencies’. Alison absconded from Jordan’s Brook on a number of occasions because of the bullying and inevitably found her way to the house of the man in the transit van who, in the months she had been at the home, had become more or less a permanent presence just along from the gates in the evenings. Jokes and banter. Roll-ups and offers of rides. Lightly, lightly. If it takes a year, it takes a year. He could be tirelessly patient.
He was always scouting. Waiting and recruiting. Watching; scouting. It was like an ever-increasing hunger that supplemented itself, fed itself, on hunger, and could never be content. The Lustmord. They were lust murderers. Lustful pleasures are fleeting; they are forgotten almost as they happen. The memory of what happened – the intensity of pleasure, the ache of desire – can’t be recorded or stored. It has to be re-lived in order to be remembered. There is a craving for repetition because the intensity is evanescent, it has no life span; it exists only in the moments that it is happening, in the present. You’re in this aura of sexual feeling together and everybody else is excluded. The nagging insupportable erotic excitement that would be the hallmark of their years together. Exciting to them both. The secret realm of thrills and concealment. The force that wants more and more. Lust can’t know itself; it doesn’t know what it is or what it is looking for. It does not discover, but immerses itself. The Lust mord. The scandalous perversion of erotic urges in which sexual satisfaction
is achieved through the violence of murder. The erotic drunkenness that can’t be remembered or stored but only re-lived and re-enacted. The yearning for intensity. The final investment of everything in sex.
*
Their own daughter Heather would grow up with a longing to live in the country. It was fierce in her. She liked the outdoors and the feeling of freedom. She wanted to be on her own and do things on her own. She wanted to live like a hermit. She never wore shoes; she used to go everywhere in her bare feet. Forest of Dean I Will Live. FODIWL. They told Alison Chambers they had a farm in the country. It was their farm. They owned it and one day – it wouldn’t be long – she could leave the children’s home and ride horses there and walk in the fields. She could live on their farm when she turned seventeen, which was quite soon. And like Ann McFall who sent pictures back to her mother in Glasgow of the beautiful big house she was living in – the lovely children and the beautiful big house and the successful man; the tremendous man – Alison made a photocopy of the picture of the beautiful big house they showed her and took it back to Jordan’s Brook House and drew ivy all up the walls. When she was seventeen. September 1979. So three months.