Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Michelle, Fred West’s first grandchild, was born in June 1984, the summer he was laid off work. The wagon works went bankrupt that year after being in existence for a hundred years and employing Fred for the last ten; the site was slated to become a trading estate. It was a blow to everybody who earned a living at the wagon works but it was a very hard blow for Fred who liked so much to work. He depended on work. When he wasn’t at work he was working on the house. And he had his cobble work. His odd jobs and call-outs. He still did jobs for Mr Zygmunt’s widow and his son, Roger. But most of his work at that time was for Alex Palmer who had picked up three or four properties in Cromwell Street. Alex Palmer, who was of mixed race, had been a nurse at Coney Hill mental hospital. He had contacts. And he filled his houses with recently discharged Coney Hill patients.

  Fred did little fixing jobs for them and got to know some of them. He would see them surrounded by their belongings in their shoebox rooms when he went in to fix a fuse or a leak. A few of them became dependent, which he didn’t mind. He had the time. The bell would go at home at odd times of the night and it would be one of the Coney Hill people to borrow for instance a tea bag. A roll-up cigarette, say, or a tea bag. And Fred would be all yeah, come in. Opening the door and offering this sad and usually strange-looking person a drink. That was if Fred went. If Rose went it was a different story. If the bell went at eleven at night and it was one of Alex Palmer’s tenants asking to borrow a tea bag, say, Rose would go bananas without even opening the outer gate. ‘Fuck off, you nutter! Fuck off out of it.’ Scared the life out of them. One of Fred’s hard-luck stories. One of Fred’s down-and-outs. Who Fred came to resemble, as it happened, the longer he was out of a full-time job. He liked a routine.

  When Fred got depressed or had a strop on him he grew his hair. He didn’t bother cutting his hair. Chris Davis noticed this about him. Every time he let his hair go into a bush it was a reflection of his inner moody. He would have bushier hair at those times and he also had a bit of a beard with him. A scruffier appearance, anyway. Then he’d have his hair cut and he’d be back to his natural self.

  After the wagon works, work was sporadic. He liked a routine and he liked to work. Rose noticed that he got a lot more miserable than in earlier years. Although they didn’t physically fight like they used to, it seemed like nothing was good enough for him. He used to sit and watch the television with them but he didn’t do that any more. Unless it was the news. He liked a steady job as well as being a Mr Fixit man for Alex Palmer. Driving Alex Palmer around and about and sitting in cafés waiting until Alex had completed whatever business he was doing. This was being a casual. He didn’t like being a casual with time on his hands. So he started on the house. Again on the house. Another refit. Another rethink. Three years ago the children had been moved to the top from the bottom. They had been given the upstairs of the house. Which meant children running up and down all night to the kitchen and back. Non-stop traffic of children up and down the stairs and through Fred’s and Rose’s bedroom and through the tool room going to the kitchen and the bathroom and the toilet. So he decided to reverse it and put the children in the cellar and the downstairs rooms again. Confine them to the ground floor and the cellar and take over the first and second floors for Rose and himself.

  He was still pushing Rose out to go with other men at night and she was still having men come to her at the house during the day. But from around 1985 onwards she decided to put the Cromwell Street part of the operation on a more business-like footing. She decided that the men coming to see ‘Mandy’ from now on would pay. The money would go most of the way to making up the shortfall they had been experiencing since Fred had been forced to become self-employed. And to begin the move towards what was to become the house’s final incarnation Fred moved the four-poster bed into the top-floor front bedroom. The four-posted Black Magic bar would eventually be installed in the room underneath it, and Rose’s visitors would be taken into there first and offered a dirty video to look at and a drink. Fred had hidden microphones in the headboard of the heavy oak bed. And as soon as a red light went on in the family room to indicate Rose was with a customer, Fred would dive in there to listen in. The monitoring equipment he installed was primitive at first – baby intercoms from Boots. But rapid developments in the technology meant that it became increasingly sophisticated. He would progress to a multi-speaker transmission box concealed in the top of a built-in cupboard: he could turn the dial to choose which room he wanted to listen to. He would tape it all as well. There were two cassette tapes and the intercom coming in and he used to tape it. The older children knew it was all going on because they had to sit and listen to their father listening to their mother going with a man upstairs. He used to have this square intercom thing on a massive piece of cable and he used to make his tea and listen to it. He would sit on the sofa with the speaker next to his ear just listening. There was a squawk box with a cable coming out of it going to the master unit which was in the cupboard. And he would just walk round listening to it, sit down listening to it. And it was really loud. So everybody else could hear it as well. Everybody could hear it. Half the street could hear it. So it was impossible not to know what was going on.

  Heather and May and Stephen would have to listen to their mother making the noises she knew their father needed to hear. And if by some miscalculation Heather or May happened to be left in the house with their father on their own, he’d make them sit on the sofa and watch a porno tape with him. He would touch them. When the others were around he would chase Heather and May and touch them; grab their breasts or grab them between the legs. He was short but he was strong and he would get them and pin them to the floor with his body, grabbing at their breasts and grabbing them between the legs. This was often. Sometimes every day. He said he was proud of his daughters’ bodies. ‘What sort of girl is it that won’t let their dad touch them? Every girl should let their dad touch them.’ He used to call them bitches and frigid and Rose used to laugh. He used to call Heather a lesbian. ‘Did you know your sister was a lesbian? I caught her pissing on the bed.’ After she turned thirteen or fourteen he was always on at Heather about being a lesbian. About Heather hating men. About never wanting to be near men and hating them. And not surprisingly she did. Stephen thought so.

  After their mother turned what she called ‘professional’, May and Heather were given the job of answering the phone if ‘Mandy’ wasn’t available. They would have to answer the phone and make appointments and ask the men about the kinds of things they wanted and any special requests or requirements. Rose told them to ask these things and write the answers in the books provided. A black book for the black men; a red book for white people. It had their age, penis size, what position they liked and any special aids or requirements, and May or Heather had to fill that in. These men would tell them over the phone, unless they were regulars, when all that information would already have been recorded. Heather hated men. Just hated them. She couldn’t stand to be in a room with men. Couldn’t stand them near her. It showed in the way she acted. Stephen could read it in her face.

  *

  Being a married couple living in a single room with a baby, Anne Marie and Chris Davis were rehoused by Gloucester Council in 1985 on the White City estate. Although it wasn’t far away none of the West children was allowed to visit their half-sister. May had been given a beating for talking to Anne Marie in her bedroom at Cromwell Street after she came back. And they had been warned not to allow Anne Marie in if she called when neither Rose nor Fred was at home. The children would turn her away at the gate as they had been instructed to do by their mother.

  After Anne Marie had moved to White City, though, Heather and May and Stephen would sometimes sneak up to visit her. Chris Davis was in on his own doing some work on the house one day just after they had moved in when Heather came around. He was up in the loft laying a floor and Heather climbed up with him and said she’d had enough at home. She was miserable and she wasn’t going to ta
ke it. She said she was seriously thinking of leaving and going to live in the Forest. She had recently been on a two-week camping trip to Clearwell Caves in the Forest of Dean with her school. Which struck Chris as a turn-up for a start – Rose and Fred letting Heather out. And she had made her mind up that was where she wanted to live. On her own. In the Forest. FODIWL. Be a hermit. See nobody and be a recluse. And she meant it. Her face was clenched. Her nails were bitten to the quick. She wanted to live actually in the Forest so she could be totally lost. Away from everybody and all this. She seemed shaky and nervous. So he did the would-you-make-a-good-castaway thing to lighten it up. If she could trap animals, if she could skin them, what berries to eat, how to get fresh water out of a running stream. Told her about warm deer brains just after the kill. The most delicious thing you could ever eat. She got a bit squirmish but that was a relief, knowing what you could sometimes get with Heather. She was a difficult character. She could be cussed. When she was in a good mood, she was fun. But when she got a strop on, by God did she get a strop on. You took to the hills. Hell or high water, if she didn’t want to see you she would look straight through you. Chris Davis put a clown’s outfit on one day – tried it on one day. ‘I did everything but jump on her head, if you like. Looked straight through me as if I wasn’t there. Then again, if you’ve been molested, you switch off. That ability to distance themselves from reality.’

  Before she left, Chris got Heather to promise that if she did run away to live in the Forest, she would contact him so he could reassure Anne Marie she was all right, and she said she would. That was the agreement then.

  *

  Fred would never have bothered to take the family away if it was left to him. He liked Gloucester and he liked his house. But Rose nagged and nagged. So he bought a little two-berth caravan that he kept parked behind one of Alex Palmer’s properties at number 11, and in 1985 he swapped his old green Bedford for an ex-Group 4 security transit which he converted to a living van. He put in transit seats that clicked in and dark-glass windows and a table that would drop down between two benches to make a bed. He towed the caravan behind the living van and took the family to a holiday camp in Barry Island every so often. Occasionally they went somewhere different like Craven Arms in Dorset. Rose liked Cardiff Airport. She thought it was great parking up there and watching the planes coming and going. But Fred’s favourite was Barry outside Cardiff and they went there seven years in a row. One of these years Fred got Anne Marie and Chris and the baby to move in and house-sit Cromwell Street for a week for him while he was away. He had a lot of stuff in at the time, new videos and TVs and suchlike that he was ‘looking after’ and that were probably hot enough to cook eggs on, as Chris pointed out to Anne. Dodgy gear.

  Being back in Cromwell Street after she had got her own household going seemed to have a profound effect on Anne. It seemed to unhinge her, although ‘unearth’ was the word Chris used. It seemed to unearth her being back living there, even if it was only for a week. A hell of a change came over Anne. On the second or third day Chris had to pin her down on the breakfast counter because she was being so violent and moody. ‘It’s the place,’ she told him. ‘It gives me the shits.’ They were using the four-poster bed with the ‘Cunt’ sign on it in the top front room with all the magazines piled up in the corner. ‘Fucking weird bastards’ did cross your mind. They threw this video in. It turned out to be two females, one wearing a mask – a henchman’s mask; a henchman being an executioner. There was shitting involved. One female eating the other female’s shit. They switched it off rapidly.

  Poking around in the cellar one day, Chris discovered what he took to be a museum-piece chastity belt. The back part of the cellar was for the children; the front was for junk. In among all the tins of paint and wallpapering tables and junk and rubbish was what looked like a metal chastity belt – welded ribs of metal with a fabric tie-around belt. Anne Marie went extremely quiet, red-faced. She told him all about it within a week. Went into one of her talk modes. These periods of letting on or telling. ‘For Chrissake don’t do anything.’ Chris could see she was scared shitless. She was as white as a sheet. Red first then white and shaking. ‘He’ll come up here and kill me.’ That week was a fantastic horror week.

  *

  Anne Marie had a second baby at the beginning of 1987. Chris Davis wasn’t the father. She had had a holiday every year they had been together and it was always a boyfriend who took her. Chris accepted this and they were still in the house at White City and still together. After Carol was born, Anne had to have a hysterectomy, which meant no more children. And it was while she was lying in bed in her living room recovering because she was unable to climb stairs that she decided to arrange a confrontation with Fred and Rose and ask them to tell her why she had been abused as a child. The result was predictable: violent denials from her father – ‘I’m not standing here and listening to this fucking rubbish’; a lot of staring into the carpet and blank silence from Rose. Rose said she never wanted to see her again as they both stormed out.

  That happened in March 1987. Michelle had her third birthday in June, three months later. And in an attempt to mend the breach in the family, which she hated, Anne invited Fred to a birthday party for his first granddaughter on 17 June. Fred and Rose of course and all her half-brothers and -sisters. And to her delight they all came. They were all there. The whole clan. For all the time they were there, for all the clan to descend, it had happened only twice. But it was noticeable things weren’t well with Heather the minute they arrived. She was in a ratty mood. Hufty. A face like thunder. And she was being bullied by her father. Pushed by him to join in. ‘Don’t fucking stand there like a lemon.’ ‘Why don’t you just fuck off and leave me a-fucking-lone.’ She was never allowed out. None of them was allowed out. They were all basically kept at home.

  Heather was four months away from turning seventeen. She had left school a few weeks earlier and she had got good results. She had eight GCSEs and could have got a job if she had been interested but she seemed like she couldn’t be bothered to look. She was lethargic. She sat around the house all day staring into space. She had few friends. She had no boyfriends. Her father was still touching her and molesting her. Still raping her in the cellar where she had gone back to sharing part of it with May. Stephen was in the cellar as well. She said if a boy touched her she’d put a brick over his fucking head. If a man came near her.

  On the day of Michelle’s party, Heather seemed agitated. Also very distant. Heather was a quiet one anyway. But on that day, which was a Wednesday, she seemed particularly shut off and distant. Chris Davis had a friend, Charlie, with a video camera and he was going around filming. He filmed Michelle and her friends having their party in the house and in the garden. But for a lot of the time Heather stood with her back to the house at the bottom of the garden on her own and didn’t want to know. When Rose turned up she had been in a bit of a funny mood. She mentioned to Anne they’d had problems with Heather before they left, and Fred seemed to be keeping a close watch on Heather all the time they were there. Part of Heather’s agitation came from the fact that she had just found out who the father of two of her half-caste sisters was and realized that she was at school with one of his other daughters. Although she must have known it wasn’t true, Fred and Rose had always explained away their mixed-race children by saying they were throwbacks to Fred’s gypsy past, and that is what Heather had chosen to believe. When she found out the truth she had had a go at Suncoo’s daughter and Suncoo had come around to Fred and Rose and the result of it all was that Heather had taken the beating of her life. They wanted to keep the family tight. They didn’t want their affairs out in the street.

  At the party Heather stayed off on her own and was sullen and morose. Giving her mother looks like: Just you wait till I’m out of here. A major strop on. ‘Why don’t you just fuck off and leave me a-fucking-lone.’ There were complaints from next door about Heather’s language. It was a rough estate. It wasn’t Harrod
s. They were rough. But. They had several complaints from the mothers of the other children about the foul-mouthed swearing. A mule skinner’s ears would have been burning. Anne phoned up and said to Fred and them about it later that evening. And it was a day or two later Heather buggered off. 17 June 1987, Michelle’s birthday, was a Wednesday. 19 June 1987 was a Friday. And that was the day Heather threw her things together in a bag and got into a red Mini belonging to a lesbian and set off for Wales, if you believed Rose and Fred.

  *

  The day after Michelle’s birthday party Stephen played a mean trick on Heather. He told her to hang on to the metal grille in front of one of the electric fires in the cellar and stupidly she did and she ended up being hurled across the room. She got an electric shock and shot across the room. So she had already been crying when the phone went shortly after that at about nine o’clock to tell her that the holiday-camp job she had been given had fallen through and Heather really started crying then. She had found a job cleaning chalets at a holiday camp in Devon. It was the first thing she’d taken an interest in since she’d left school. A holiday camp in Torquay. She had found a way of leaving home and getting out of the house and now it had been snatched away from her. She cried. She crumpled up in tears. She sobbed all through the night.