Mother

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘Come on, Chris,’ she cried out to him. ‘Dance with me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes you can, don’t be soft.’

  She rounded the table and pulled him up, took his hand and put her other hand on his waist. She rocked one way, then the other, and despite himself, he followed her. He had no choice – she was leading. He thought, could not help but think, of Angie.

  ‘All right,’ he said, his voice loud under the low ceiling, and pushed Phyllis back from him. Determined to lead, to show her he could, he kept hold of her hand as he had seen Adam do with women in the clubs. She laughed and spun back, wrapping his arm around her as she went, then unwinding again, letting go of him. She continued to dance, waving her fingers at him as she backed away, laughing when she banged her backside against the dresser. The song changed – three beats in and she shouted:

  ‘ “Best of My Love”!’ Her voice was still high. There was real glee in it, he thought. ‘I love this one!’

  He did his best to dance alongside her. He had the beat but could not make it part of him like she could.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, taking his hands in hers and moving them in time, but at the sweetness of it, at her proximity and her joy, he felt himself beginning to panic. His heart raced, his eyes prickled. He could not look at her. After a beat or two more, he broke from her and went to turn down the music – blew back his fringe, as if out of breath.

  ‘You’ll wear me out,’ he said, sitting down at the table.

  She stopped dancing and came to join him. She sat down and drank her tea, and for a moment he was filled with regret at having spoiled her dance. The music had fallen away to no more than tinny percussion.

  ‘I’d like my name back,’ he said.

  She frowned, perplexed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought,’ he said, though the idea had only come to him in that moment, through a desperate need to divert her attention. ‘I want the name you gave me. That’s my name. My name is Martin. I’d like to change it by deed poll or however these things are done.’

  She nodded. ‘All right,’ she said slowly. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘You can still call me Christopher. Or Chris. Otherwise it’s too confusing for everyone. But officially, I’d like to be Martin.’

  She paused, smiled shyly. ‘I may as well tell you while we’re at it that David and I have talked.’

  ‘What?’ Hot dread flared up inside him – why, he had no idea.

  ‘We want the spare room to be your room.’

  He met her gaze, felt his brow knit. ‘I thought…’

  ‘I know it’s already your room, but what I mean is, I want you to keep your stuff in it in a more permanent way instead of having to clear out every time. If you want to put up posters, put clothes in the drawers, what have you… I want our home to be your home.’ She took his hand and held it in both of hers. ‘Have a think.’

  ‘I don’t need to,’ he said, feeling his face break into a smile, a great grin over which he had no control. ‘I would really, really like that.’

  For the rest of that week, whether it was building sandcastles with the twins at Freshwater West, picnicking at Barafundle Bay, or rockpooling at Cwm-yr-Eglwys, Christopher would catch Phyllis’s eye and she would smile and he would know that she, like him, was thinking about his room in her home – his home now. His family. In these moments, he said, his happiness threatened to overwhelm him entirely until there was nothing left of him but that: happiness, pure happiness, ephemeral as tears wept into the salty pools of the sea.

  * * *

  Christopher became Martin but remained Christopher, if that makes sense. He studied hard, as was his way, and often took work home, where he would study in the kitchen while the twins watched television or played in their room. Phyllis pottered about. She had moved her day off to Friday so the two of them could spend the day together. Silently she slid cups of tea or coffee across the table to him, laid a hand on his shoulder as she passed or gently scratched his head. She didn’t speak to him while he worked, but he could feel her near, and the thought of her helped him settle, and concentrate. Sometimes he would look up from his books and watch her work and be filled with the deepest sense of calm. When David got home, the mere sound of his key in the lock broke what was a kind of trance, as if to signal that here was a peace that could not last. David would always stop on the threshold of the kitchen, an indefinable expression crossing his face: disapproval, perhaps, though not as strong as that. Doubt?

  Suspicion?

  One weekend towards Christmas, Christopher arrived as usual early on Friday afternoon, expecting to spend the afternoon with Phyllis. He ran the length of Langdale Road and, breathless, rapped on the door. To his surprise, it was David who answered.

  ‘Here he is,’ he said, and though his voice was friendliness itself, Christopher sensed that something hid there, something intangible.

  Christopher smiled and threw out his hands. ‘I come empty-handed, but I can pop to the shop later and get some cans of lager or wine or whatever.’

  ‘Don’t be soft,’ said David, reaching out to give him his customary handshake. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  Christopher stepped into the house and took off his coat and shoes. David was waiting on the bottom step.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said, going ahead up the stairs.

  Christopher followed him up and along the landing to his own bedroom door.

  ‘There you go,’ said David, throwing open the door. ‘Surprise.’

  Christopher looked into his room, where a white desk stood against the far wall next to the window.

  ‘Got it from a mate,’ said David. ‘He had it in his garage. It’s been in our garage for two weeks. I’ve sanded it, painted it, varnished it. What do you think?’

  ‘Golly,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s a desk.’

  ‘Of course it’s a desk.’ David laughed, more than the remark deserved. ‘Can’t have you cramped up on the kitchen table, can we? Need your own proper study space at your age.’

  ‘I’m fine in the kitchen,’ said Christopher, realising the mistake as the words left his mouth. He turned to look at David, tried to meet his eye. ‘But yes, this is incredible. Thank you, thank you so much.’

  ‘Call it your Christmas present.’ David was still holding onto the door handle, his knuckles white. ‘Should keep you out of trouble anyway.’

  Christopher was not sure what trouble meant. He looked back to the desk, as if to appreciate it fully. The paintwork was meticulous – not one rogue drip, not even on the drawers. There was a dark green anglepoise lamp on the right-hand corner. Was that new? His typewriter had been put there too – also by David, Christopher supposed. The air thinned. He could feel David behind him, waiting for a reaction – another, better reaction.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, running his hand over the desk. ‘It’s so smooth. You must have worked so hard on it.’

  ‘I did.’

  Christopher tried not to drift away while David rattled on about grades of sandpaper, flour paper, the superiority of satinwood varnish over gloss.

  ‘Gosh,’ he said, and, ‘Really?’ and .‘Heavens, that’s really something.’

  He did not let himself say that he had no desire, no intention to work anywhere other than downstairs, in the kitchen, near Phyllis. Nor did he say what I believe he felt at that time: that he wished David would take the twins and leave him alone, alone with Phyllis, forever.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ritual helps. We are woken at seven on the dot – we have breakfast. Nurse brings me my meds and makes me walk around the yard. She links my arm. She chats about nothing. She has a son still living at home. Her daughter is pregnant. I’m still on suicide watch. Yesterday Nurse asked if I felt ready to put on some nice clothes.

  I brought my jeans out of the wardrobe and held them against me. They were far too big, of course. I mimed a belt and raised my eyebrows
in question.

  She laughed. ‘Nice try, my darling. But Nursie wasn’t born yesterday. Come on, let’s get you outside.’

  One pill, two pills, whee, down the throat. A tour around the yard. Coffee time. Routine, order, ritual.

  Ritual helped Christopher get through that second Christmas over at Margaret and Jack’s. Ritual gave him checkpoints, milestones to tick off; he only had to keep going until the next one. Midnight Mass, the exchange of gifts (he knew better than to try anything fancy this time and stayed away from politically explosive choices such as yellow cocktail mixers), Christmas dinner: No, the turkey’s lovely, not dry at all. He spent much of the time in the loft, where, after all, he said, they had put him, hadn’t they? It was no use staying downstairs. He barely spoke to his sister, and his brother, well, most of the time he just wanted to strangle him.

  On Boxing Day he left, pleading a heavy workload, and travelled to Runcorn. To her – Phyllis. It occurred to him that he should invite Adam, whose home life was so unhappy, to come and stay with Phyllis and the boys, but he did not. Back then he would have said this was because he didn’t want to impose. I know now it was more likely out of fear. Adam was so charming, so good with the ladies, and Christopher could not have borne anyone replacing him in Phyllis’s affections.

  * * *

  Christopher’s luck with women did not improve. As the academic year progressed, Adam still invited him out with the boys, still gave him pep talks while he, Adam, still scored more often than Kevin Keegan on a roll. A little before Easter, Adam announced that he had found a two-bedroom house for the third year, did Christopher want to share?

  ‘Of course,’ Christopher said.

  ‘It’s further down towards Armley but still Leeds 6,’ said Adam. ‘Two bedrooms. Easier to stick to just the two of us, isn’t it?’

  By then Christopher was supplementing his grant by working at the Hyde Park pub, up on Woodhouse Lane. Adam had talked his way into a job at the Warehouse club down on Somers Street and planned to stay in Leeds again over the summer. Christopher agreed that he would do the same, although he expected to spend a lot of time with Phyllis.

  One evening at the beginning of April, a pub customer ordered a pint of Tetley’s and, before Christopher could put out his hand for the money, followed it with: ‘Another victim.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  The man dropped the coins into Christopher’s palm. ‘Building society clerk. Not just the prozzies now apparently. Only nineteen, poor cow.’

  There had been no news of the Ripper over the last few months, and the talk at the bar had been that he had committed suicide.

  Clearly he had not.

  The next day, Christopher bought The Telegraph and scoured its pages, but the kind of information he wanted was not to be found. If the girl was not a prostitute, there would have been no financial transaction, surely? Had she agreed to sex, he wondered, and then changed her mind? Was that what had happened this time? Had she initiated sex, only to tell him to stop? He cut out the article and stuck it in his scrapbook.

  I could see that Christopher had become obsessed – that his preoccupation with the Ripper was more acute than it was for the rest of us. But I didn’t know about the scrapbook then. If I had, I would have worried more. Much as I loved him, if I’d known, I might even have contacted the police. But thinking about it, maybe I wouldn’t have, since it wasn’t too much later in the year that the famous tape made it onto the news and sent everyone in a different direction entirely.

  Christopher was in the library when he overheard two women whispering behind the bookshelf: They’re saying it’s him. He wrote those letters, now he’s sent them a tape. It’s been on the news. He packed up his books and hurried to the television lounge in the Union in time to catch the 5 p.m. bulletin. The lounge was full; he had to stand at the back, peer through the heads. The Ripper tape was the top story. The newscaster announced it gravely. The message appeared to be intended for Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who was leading the investigation. The police were appealing to anyone who recognised the voice to come forward.

  The newscaster paused. The silence in the room intensified, was replaced by the breathy background noise from the cassette. And then the voice: ‘I’m Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord! You are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are letting you down, George. They can’t be much good, can they?’

  The tape finished. Christopher bolted from the room, his heart pounding in his chest, his forehead slick with sweat. He headed for the Union bar, ordered a pint of Bass and drank half of it in one go. He was breathing heavily, almost panting. He downed the rest of his beer and ordered another, found his cigarettes and lit up. That voice. The Tyneside accent, the pitch, something in the way he phrased the question at the end.

  Adam.

  ‘No,’ he muttered to himself. It couldn’t be.

  But he had been questioned by the police. And his girlfriend or whatever she was had gone missing the night he was supposed to meet her, found dead near Oxley Hall soon after. Christopher remembered him joking about how getting laid was guaranteed, since that was apparently all she wanted him for.

  ‘I’m her bloody sex toy, man,’ he had joked, and Christopher had felt the burn of humiliation. Sophie wouldn’t change her mind halfway through, he had thought at the time. Sophie knew what she wanted, and Adam knew how to give her that very thing.

  But of course now she was dead, along with the others. And in one of the many crude pictures that had been shown on the news and in the papers, the Ripper had been drawn with reddish hair. Adam pulled women to him without a thought. And he was often out late at night – had been since Christopher had known him. This last year, when the Ripper had gone quiet, corresponded to when he and Adam had worked together in the Fenton. Adam would not have been able to get away so easily. And now, now when only the month before last the Ripper had struck again, Adam had taken a job at a club – unsociable hours, every reason not to get home until long after Christopher was asleep in bed.

  Adam didn’t go home in the holidays, he had a troubled relationship with his father, had once bragged that he could go from conversation to copulation quicker than it would take most men to eat a bag of chips. All his shared confidences – what if they were not real? What if they were an act, designed to manufacture intimacy, trust, so better to pull the wool over Christopher’s eyes? He had always wondered why Adam would choose him, Christopher, so dull and studious when he himself was so sociable, so full of chutzpah. Christ, he had even got Christopher to be his alibi! Was it possible that this whole time, Adam had been out there, in the dark, murdering women – women on the game and sometimes innocents, as they were called?

  He tried to stop his thoughts but could not. It was Adam who had suggested that just the two of them share a house. Fewer housemates – fewer witnesses. Adam had chosen Christopher not despite but exactly because of how he was, because he knew that Christopher would never twig what was really going on: too dim, too wrapped up in history and books, often absent at weekends. And the name – Jack. Where had he got that from? Why that name in particular if not because he had heard it from Christopher?

  ‘No,’ he said again, into his beer. ‘No, no, no.’

  * * *

  That evening, Christopher found the customary message on the table: Gone to work. Don’t wait up. See you in the morning. Adam didn’t even bother to write a note any more. He simply pulled this envelope out from the cutlery drawer where it now lived and threw it onto the table whenever he needed it. Christopher picked it up and put it back in the drawer, out of sight.

  He made tea with three teaspoons of sugar and took it upstairs to bed. The sweet heat soothed him, but he was still preoccupied. Perhaps bed would be the best option – go to sleep; forget about it. Things would look different in the morning.

  He got into bed but his eyes staye
d open as if pinned. Above him, on the slant of the roof over his bed, Stevie Nicks looked down from on high. Ah, Stevie. He got out of bed, slid Rumours from its sleeve and placed it carefully on the turntable. To the opening bars of ‘Second Hand News’ and with the album cover in his arms, he crept back across the room and lay once more in the darkness. The second track, ‘Dreams’. Stevie Nicks took him always to Phyllis, to that first meeting, to her car, to the two of them listening to that fragile, throaty voice. Stevie Nicks would lead you by the hand into the darkness – she would lay down her coat and have you lie on it with her. She would not tell you no when you were too far gone to stop. She would pull back her waistcoats and her skirts, she would unbutton her blouse made of cotton and shake her long wavy hair, and she would sing in that low voice with all its promises close in your ear, Stay with me a while…

  He set the album sleeve down; let it slide onto the bedroom floor.

  At 3 a.m., he woke. Something had disturbed him. A noise then: it sounded like a shoe dropping to the floor. Adam. Christopher lay for a moment, his insides knotted in angst, before throwing off the covers. Better to face him now, if only to reassure himself. Not as if he would sleep anyway. He crept downstairs. The smell of toast sailed up from the kitchen. Adam was whistling softly, tunelessly, all but hidden behind the kitchen wall but for the serving hatch. By the angle of his head, Christopher could tell he was spreading butter on his toast. He looked up, eyed Christopher through the frame of the hatch.

  ‘Why aye, Christopher Robin. What’s the matter – couldn’t sleep?’

  ‘No,’ said Christopher, inwardly reeling at the north-eastern accent – although it was possible the pitch was not as deep as the voice on the tape. You are no nearer catching me now… He pulled his dressing gown tight and tied the belt.