Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  In 1976 when Heather was six or seven and May was five, a lodger at Cromwell Street, Jane Hamer, remembered hearing children’s voices in the cellar screaming and shouting, ‘Stop it, Daddy!’ It was either Heather or May and there were several screams and then just, ‘Stop it, Daddy!’ Three years later a boyfriend of Anna-Marie’s who stayed the night heard ‘some rustling around’ and then screams of some sort. The screaming went on for ten to twenty minutes, stopping for a while and then starting up again. Screams and then, ‘No, no, please …’ and he found he couldn’t sleep. The next morning Rose had told him Heather was having nightmares. Heather had regular nightmares and that’s what it was. He had noticed before Heather went to bed that she seemed a bit down; a bit shy. Her mother said she was backward and didn’t talk very much.

  The three of them slept in the cellar from 1975 to 1982, when Heather was twelve, May was ten and Stephen was nine. And after 1978 when the living-room extension was completed they would lie in bed some nights and hear noisy parties and what they speculated could be orgies going on up there. Whoops and screams. Most nights though they would lie awake waiting to hear the creak of the stairs that meant that their father was sneaking down to force himself on either Heather or May who were lying helpless on their fronts, bound to the bed with rope. The key turning in the door; the creak of the stairs. Their subterranean bunker. A universe of total uncertainty; one in which submissiveness was no shield against even worse outcomes.

  The worst night happened when Stephen was six or seven. The lodgers all left finally in 1981 and it was before then. It was a party night. There were people in doing what would come to be known as ‘partying’. Noises. Shrieks. Shouts and screams. And they were downstairs trying to keep their heads down. Hoping to remain ignored. Trying not to attract attention. It was when they heard the trapdoor opening in Stephen’s part of the cellar and the noise from upstairs grow abruptly louder that they knew they were in trouble. He usually came in through the door from the hall. The noise grew louder and a slice of light lifted the gloom of their bunker and they knew that they were in for it now.

  People were wrecked. Their mother used to smoke dope sometimes when she was younger. She liked a hit of a joint and she drank vodka at these parties. And the children were untied from their beds and led up the stairs looking up to what would have recently been the sky but was now a ceiling of artex and railway-sleeper beams. All this noise and bright lights and swirling smoke and the smell of drugs and what Stephen regarded as all these wrecked and druggy bloody useless people. Some of them lodgers. Many of them black. In the noise and the smoke and some of them naked and having sex with each other in corners and under tables. They were untied and led up the stairs into this and then tied again around the base of the tree that stood in the middle of the room holding the extension roof up. Heather and May and Stephen held their hands out as they had been ordered and had rope looped around them and then sat at the base of the tree as they had been told to do. Sitting under the canopy of smoke, tied up together and tied to the tree and confused and frightened. People having sex together on the floor; under tables. They were staring at the floor. It went on for a long time. Heather nodded off until she was woken up by her mother. ‘Wake up, you stupid bitch.’ It seemed like days and days. ‘You’re a pretty little girl.’ Druggy bloody useless people. Heather was crying. Heather was being raped by a black friend of her mother’s. His mother was touching Stephen. The room seemed to get busier. Other women were touching him. The room was packed. Everybody laughing. There was another man. Stephen’s dad called him ‘Snooty’. He started urinating on Heather. ‘He started weeing all over Heather. Then he turned around and weed all over me … It never happened again and it never happened before. It seemed to be a one-off idea. The most degrading night.’

  Afterwards they made a pact to leave home, live in a big house and not ever tell anybody what happened with their mum and dad.

  *

  After being out of their lives for two years, Anna-Marie returned in 1982 with a new name – Anne Marie, to some people just ‘Anne’ – and a live-in boyfriend who was going to become her husband. They had met through Citizen’s Band radio – CB – which was going through a phase of popularity in the early eighties. It had come over from the United States where it was popular with truckers and there was a CB craze. Karen, Anne Marie’s friend in Gloucester who had taken her in when she first ran away from home, had got hold of a set. And Anne Marie got on the CB at nights to put it over that she was a girl on her own, sixteen in 1980 when she first left home, looking for a place to stay. Naturally she never went short of offers. And equally inevitably it brought her in touch with many people she decided she didn’t want to know and took her to many places she didn’t want to be. They would say something like, ‘Breaker, come on’, then you would identify yourself. Not by your real name but with a made-up CB name called a ‘handle’. Anne Marie’s handle was ‘Cover Girl’. Although her ‘wind-up handle’ was ‘Cream Cake, naughty but nice’ when she picked up somebody looking for a gas. She had been through some terrible times via this route and landed herself in some terrible messes, and her latest boyfriend had just turned violent on her when she picked Chris Davis up on the CB. Chris’s handle was ‘Contractor’, which sounded interesting. And he confirmed that, yes, the other side would come into it as well, ‘but not as far as snuffing somebody’. He was ‘loosely police connected’. They did an eyeball. Anne Marie came over for an eyeball. She wore a light-blue body-warmer covered in badges. One of herself naked made from a badge set, and one of a Page Three girl called Mitzi who Chris was able to tell Anne Marie he knew. He also knew Sam Fox and Linda Lusardi, then the stars of Page Three. He had met them when he was up in London doing business: ‘Not drugs – other business. It was within the boundaries of the law. I have a very clouded past, but always on the side of the law,’ Chris said.

  Just one snag. ‘Contractor’ wasn’t unattached. He was living with a woman who was nearly twice his age and several of her children. But then, as it happened, not such a snag. Chris’s girlfriend invited Anne Marie to join them and move in. Anne Marie was at a low ebb in those days. She was on 25 mg. of Valium every four hours. Had been on it for two years. Chris became her counsellor, and very quickly then her lover. The more people who wanted to have sex with her, the more Anne felt wanted. Chris realized this about her straight away. She had sex with people the way she would have a drink with them. He put it down to her needing a bit of extra loving. Obviously his girlfriend whose house they were in didn’t see it that way and asked Anne Marie to leave. Told her to get out like many other women in the previous eighteen months. Fred had gone in to the wagon works one day to be told by one of the men who worked there that his runaway daughter had caused a bit of trouble in New Street which wasn’t very far away the previous night. She had walked into a house with a man she had just met in a pub and chucked his wife and her small baby out. Physically thrown them on to the street. But when Anne Marie packed a carrier bag and walked out of the house where she had been living with Chris Davis and his girlfriend, Chris walked with her. He wanted to teach her there was a different side to life; help her revert back to the normal way of life and the proper way of things. He tried to show her this. He had a sense of mission. But friendship is like a lame dog you take in and bring back to health, only to have it turn around and bite your hand. He had Oriental interests in his life. He had Japanese and many other knives in his house. He has studied martial arts. There’s a bowie in the bedroom. He believes that in a previous existence he may have been Vietnamese. Show him any picture and he can tell you where in ’Nam it is. Maybe he was shot dead in 1959 and born at the same time. He is acquainted with Confucius. And the lame dog having the potential to turn into a biting dog would be one of the lessons Chris Davis would take away from his years with Anne Marie.

  They had been living in Stroud but they found accommodation above the Prince of Wales pub in Station Road in Gloucester. The rent wa
s paid by Social Security and they earned extra money working behind the bar and dogsbodying crates up from the cellar. Anne Marie was back living in the centre of Gloucester; an alley connected the Prince of Wales with Cromwell Street only half a mile away. But Chris knew nothing about her previous life and only gradually learned about some of the things that had gone on in it and which had driven her away. But only the physical abuse. He knew she had been beaten stupid. Snippets. But she didn’t go near the sexual humiliation and the brutality and the years of persistent rape by her father.

  They had been living at the Prince of Wales for nearly six months before Anne Marie lifted a phone to call her father. There was no way she would have turned up at Cromwell Street unannounced. The reception was friendly and she said she was living near by and with a man and the man she was with was keen to meet him. Meet them. Her dad and the children. Chris was keen to meet her family and felt she should make it up with them. He was pretty persistent. And so it was arranged.

  It was 1982. The last of the lodgers had been got rid of the previous year and the house which was in a constant state of becoming had undergone one of its regular remouldings in Anne Marie’s absence. It hadn’t been a voluntary decision: the council had come around sniffing and applying their rules and the lodgers had had to be got out. From now on they would take in lodgers only occasionally, and these for a time would include Chris Davis and Anne Marie.

  The older three had come out of the cellar and taken over the upstairs rooms. Stephen shared the top-floor front with his baby brother Barry, and Heather and May were underneath. Rosemary and Lucyanna were put in Shirley Robinson’s old room, the small room next to the bathroom on the first floor, with Tara and Louise sharing the back room directly overhead. The door to the right off the hall was Fred’s and Rose’s mutual bedroom (although Fred tended to doss on a sofa in the extension living room most nights). The back of the cellar was now the children’s playroom and Fred stored decorating stuff and junk in the overspill at the front. The painted plate and the core-screw were still part of the door leading to the front room on the ground floor, but this had undergone a change of use from Rose’s special room to a private bar/living room for Rose and Fred. He had put up a wall-sized forest mural of red leaves and the Rockies and installed a curved velour sofa and a curving cocktail bar with a dimpled plastic front. Fred’s and Rose’s private living room linked up with their mutual bedroom through a cupboard under the stairs. A cupboard full of porn. Packed with porn. It was the promise of the lace dress and the fur coat all those years ago – the promise of racy living and city sophistication – the high life – coming good, and it was quite smart.

  They took Chris Davis through to the eighteen-foot-by-eighteen-foot family room on his first visit and he was impressed. It was spacious. Fred had put in ranch-house arches either side of the timber support post by then, and this room opened on to a kitchen with a utility room beyond it and pink-and-white, chequerboard-pattern patio paving going out over the narrow garden to about the halfway point. Rose made no impression that first time – she spent all the time Chris and Anne Marie were there pottering in the kitchen, hovering around the sink. But Fred went on the brag straight away, reminiscing about how he had known the singer Lulu when he lived in Scotland – she had been a friend of his first wife, Rena – and how Charmaine’s father had been a Mister Big in the Gorbals underworld and so on in that vein. Bullshitter, Chris Davis thought. And not a good bullshitter, either. A bad bullshitter because he didn’t have a very good memory. Contradictions all the way through. But he said nothing to Anne Marie because he could tell there was a strong bond there. He could see Anne loved her father.

  When he heard that they were living in bed-and-breakfast accommodation which meant that they had to stay out walking the streets all day, Fred invited Anne Marie and her boyfriend to move in with them until they found somewhere more permanent to live. They had her old room on the first floor at the front of the house and Chris Davis moved in with two suitcases full of war books. Hundreds of them. It didn’t escape Fred that that’s all his luggage was. War books and the conviction that in a previous life he had grown up in the mountains and forests of Vietnam. He spent hours telling Fred the story of being shot dead in 1959 and being born at the same time and there’s Fred sitting there saying it must have been frightening for you, and all that. ‘The murmuring souls … The howls of the unburied … The souls condemned to wander unhappily until their mortal remains have been laid to rest.’ What a way-out bastard. Takes all sorts.

  Although there was a toilet and bathroom on the same landing, Chris and Anne Marie had to use the bathroom downstairs. The one on their floor was now Rose’s private bathroom and it was decorated with framed ten-by-eight black-and-white photographs of Rose in explicit poses with black men. There was no lock on the bathroom off the living room on the ground floor. And having a bath with Anne Marie around six o’clock on their first night, Chris Davis was surprised when some of the younger children started wandering in and out using the toilet, cleaning their teeth, not to mention Rose traipsing backwards and forwards while they lay there. ‘The next train standing at platform two will be bloody busy!’ Chris had grown up in an atmosphere of sex-is-a-word-you-don’t-mention. Whereas in the West house it was a go-with-the-flow natural thing. Sometimes the conversations. My God. Unbelievable. You got used to conversations about sex. Chris had also noticed of course that Anne Marie’s stepmother liked to sit around with no underwear on. T-shirt, no bra, no knickers. That was Rose. There was only six years between Chris Davis and Rose. She was twenty-nine in 1982; he was twenty-three. And Chris was aware with Rose that it was all set out in front of him but he didn’t want to know. But they used to have some fun-time moments as time went on. ‘For fucksake, close your legs, Mum, I can see what you had for dinner.’ They made it seem normal and natural and quite OK. The two lives Rose was leading, and the carefree attitude to sex that Fred portrayed.

  After six weeks Fred got Chris and Anne Marie a bedsit in Cromwell Street. They were on the other side of the church with Mrs Taylor. And on Saturday nights they started to make up a regular threesome with Rose to go around the Crown and Thistle, the New Inn, the Cross Keys in Cross Keys Lane, the Bierkeller in the Fleece Hotel and other Gloucester city-centre pubs, generally ending up at the Wellington where there was a band and dancing to traditional Irish tunes on Saturday nights. Sometimes Rose and Anne went on around the clubs. But Rose would always be up early the next morning whatever happened preparing a big Sunday lunch. Chris and Anne would go next door to number 25 for lunch on Sundays, and that would be the day they would see one of Rose’s Jamaican regulars. ‘Suncoo’ (from ‘Sunday cooking’) was one of Rose’s freebies. He was the father of Rosemary junior who had been born in April 1982 and he was one of the men Anne Marie had been forced to have sex with in the last four or five years she was living at home. Suncoo would go off in her room with Rose for an hour or so and do what Fred had told him to do. It was around this time that Rose had signed the document beginning, ‘I, Rosemary West, known as Fred’s cow, give my cunt to be fucked by any prick at any time he so desires without ever saying so’ and ending ‘I must always dress and try to act like a cow for Fred.’ And Suncoo was one of her regular partners in the van when they drove out to the disused airport at Stoke Orchard or to Painswick Hill. Sometimes Suncoo would turn up when she was still cooking the Sunday lunch and then the family would have to wait. They knew they didn’t dare complain. ‘There was a weight on their shoulders inside Cromwell Street,’ Chris Davis says. ‘Although it was a relaxed regime, there was a weight there. Outside the kids seemed to be lighter, but Fred and Rose seemed to be carrying a lot. Outside they would be quieter, whether the kids were present or not. So it was totally reversed.’

  *

  By the time May was twelve and Heather was fourteen their father had bored holes in the door of their room and punched holes in the walls so that he could watch them dress and undress. He would burst
in in the morning and pull the bedclothes off them while they were sleeping and throw himself on top of them. He reached under their skirts and touched their breasts in front of the family and tried to pull their towels off them when they came out of the bathroom. When they complained he would tell them they were lesbians. He would keep a record of their periods and when he decided they were being what he called ‘hufty’ he would tell them they needed a good seeing to. They needed a man like him to sort them out. Heather and May made an arrangement to take it in turns standing guard for each other outside the shower. He used to come in and reach around behind the curtain and they wanted to try and put a stop to that. He used to sit them down and go on for hours about how fathers had to break their daughters in because boys of today didn’t do it properly. He used to say he wanted his daughters to have his baby. He’d say, ‘Your first baby should be your dad’s.’ He’d say, ‘Dads know how to do it right.’

  Anne Marie discovered she was pregnant in October 1983. It was four years since her ectopic pregnancy by her father. The baby was Chris Davis’s. And the families – Chris’s parents and Anne Marie’s parents, her father and stepmother – decided they should get married. The wedding took place at the Register Office over the park in January 1984, almost twelve years to the day since Fred and Rose had got married there, and Fred wore a tie for once in his life. Anne Marie wore a fluffy white jacket and a flower in her hair and carried a bouquet of artificial flowers. Rose didn’t attend. Afterwards there was sherry and snacks back at Cromwell Street and a wedding cake it proved difficult to cut. The icing was like rock. It took three knives. Chris joked about getting the chainsaw out. Chris was a big drinker. He would declare himself an alcoholic in 1986. Fred didn’t drink. He drank once a year at Christmas. He would have a sherry at Christmas with his dinner and it would last him all day. Then he would fall asleep on the floor.