I’d wanted to go there. I passed the days thinking that if Thomas was buried up there, and no one could know if he was or not because there were more children unaccounted for than had been found, I would be nearer to him, to where he might be. It was my best bet, and more than once I had my coat and headscarf on ready to go, before I remembered that he could be anywhere, and I might be wasting my time.
I did go to Wardle Avenue, though. Colin never knew, and I never told anyone until now. I set off one day to get some cow heel for Colin’s tea, and before I knew it, I was outside the ‘house of horror,’ as the papers called it. I’d caught two buses to Hattersley and stared out of the window in case anyone asked me what I was doing.
I was a bit of a celebrity in Ashton, on the market, mother of a missing lad, and all the stares and whispers told me that I wasn’t alone in my thinking that our Thomas had been another victim. Here, though, I was just another woman is a Mac and a headscarf, going shopping for her husband’s tea.
I’d walked along the street, my feet heavy, wondering if Thomas had been brought here, hoping I could feel something, something small to tell me that I was right, that his young life had ended here.
I wasn’t thinking about the how; that would come if they ever found him, his body telling another story of how he died. It was more the ending to our story, to the mother and son story that, for me, was left to carry on, day after painful day, until I knew where he was.
I stood outside the house for a few minutes, willing myself to feel him, that love flooding back from when he was a toddler shouting ‘Mam!’ all over Ney Street. That pride when he passed his grammar exams. The tears when he gave me a homemade Mother’s Day card, to me proof of our love for each other. I wonder for a moment why we have to send cards, why we have to have material proof of how much we care.
I’d loved Thomas with all my heart, and with all my soul, and I thought he loved me, which was why I was so sure he would never leave of his own accord.
I felt nothing except anger. Standing outside the house, I wondered how a woman could have been part of these horrors. Ever since I’d been a young girl I’d been keen on having a baby. I’d wanted a job as well, but my parents had other ideas. I’d met Colin early and we’d had Thomas and got married. Until that day when I went into labour, it hadn’t really sunk in what my life would be like.
I still thought I’d be a pin-up, like Betty Grable and Jane Russell, I wasn’t bad looking and my dad said that’s all I had going for me. I was a good speaker and looked all right in makeup, I’d even applied for a job at the General Post Office as a telephonist before I caught with Thomas.
Until I actually saw him, I couldn’t have ever imagined what it would be like to have a baby. Something changed inside me, I got a sort of determination that nothing would ever stop me from caring about this little thing, nothing would ever come between us.
His tiny fingers were curled round mine and I realised then what I was here for. I was here to have children and to look after them. I forgot about the GPO and my wonky writing and just looked after him. I fed him myself, and he’d look into my eyes and make gooing noises. If I thought I’d been in love before, I was now.
She’d never had that. And she snuffed it out for me. I felt sick and dizzy at the thought of another mother listening to her daughter dying, and my knees buckled. They’d tape recorded all of it, their screams and everything. It was no accident, something gone wrong. It was intentional; they knew what they were doing.
Now we all knew what they had done, here in this house. The mothers of the children knew, the fathers, and it became slightly diluted for those who didn’t have children involved. I didn’t know exactly how to feel, if the horror and anger I felt was right, but I knew one thing: I was in limbo. A mother without a child, with no idea where her child was. It wasn’t natural. Didn’t the world owe me that knowledge?
I knew that anyone who was part of it was equally responsible and that they should both go to prison; I never agreed with hanging, but now I wondered if an exception should be made for these two. It just seemed worse that a woman could do this.
Hadn’t she any maternal feelings? Had she been so taken by him that she’d do anything? None of it was normal. How could she stand by and watch him bury children? Take photographs? She’d denied it all, but just by knowing and being there she was guilty, wasn’t she?
And the sex. None of us ever spoke about sex. Not between adults and certainly not with kiddies. We all knew of someone who’d got an underage girl pregnant and she’d been whisked off and the baby adopted, or of a poor child who’d been messed about with.
We talked about it once, in hushed tones. This wasn’t the content for marketplace gossip. It was serious family business, often dealt with outside the law by uncles and cousins. But a woman? I’d never heard of that before. Someone who had the natural instincts, like we all have, for children. Even the women who I knew who didn’t have children had maternal instincts.
Why had she done it? I’d heard of women doing daft things for their lovers, their husbands, turning to drink and dancing till dawn, but this was unexplainable. I’d even heard of some funny bedroom goings on, what some women would do because their husbands liked it, to stop them straying, they said, but this wasn’t like that. The things that had happened.
They were the Devil’s work, and no amount of love and romance could explain it. Infatuation my arse. She was a grown woman, not a besotted teenager. It didn’t wash with me.
It was disgusting. My mind fought with itself over why it was more disgusting for a woman than for a man. Wasn’t it equally disgusting because kiddies were involved? But somehow it seemed worse. There’d be a confession and a short trial, then jail. The rumours were that these two had tortured and sexually abused in this house flooded back and the bile rose in my throat. What the hell was I doing here?
I rushed up the street, ashamed of my lingering at a place where those children had died so recently, looking back as a couple stopped outside the house. I hadn’t even brought flowers. In my keenness to grasp at my own feelings for Thomas, my hopes that I would feel him there, I’d forgotten to mourn other people. Colin’s words rung in my ears.
‘You’re obsessed, woman.’
All the way home on the bus I worried that I was, and that it was getting worse.
The Trial
Another six months went by, a Christmas and Mother’s Day. A set of carefully written cards stored in the top drawer of the sideboard.
I’d asked Colin to sign them, but he’d refused point blank. He was still out looking for Thomas, but we never talked about it. Instead, I scoured the newspapers for the object of my developing hate. I found pictures of her everywhere, her blonde beehive haircut and stern features reminding me of my Aunty Dot.
I cut out the pictures and burned them over the stove. I took the reports and glued them into a scrapbook that I would look at every night, searching for any clue that Thomas had been murdered by them.
Rumours of the trial had been rife. When we finally got the place and the date, there was much talk about turning up and throwing bricks at the van. I wasn’t the only woman consumed with hate for her, most of the street where seething for her blood. I kept quiet, going to Ashton Train Station as soon as I could to book my ticket for Chester.
On the day, I waved Colin off to work and raced to the station. I got there just before the van carrying him drew up. For a horrible moment I thought I had missed her, but soon it raced along outside the court, people chasing it and banging on the sides.
The windows were blacked out, but I still stood on tiptoes, wanting to get on a level with her, to try to catch a glimpse of her. I willed her to hear me, to hear my plea. What was I pleading for? I just wanted to know if they’d murdered my son. If he was buried up on Saddleworth Moor.
I felt a little bit woozy and I sat down as soon as the van had gone in. Soon, the people had cleared and workers walked past me, glancing down as I sat on the kerb.
A few reporters gathered to stare at me, asked me if I was the mother of a murdered child. I shook my head. I wasn’t. No one knew what had happened to my son. They dispersed, over to a café and two policemen were stationed outside.
I repeated this every day the trial was held. There was no need to rush home, because Colin had stopped coming home for his tea, telling me he was looking for Thomas, but I guessed he was round at his mother’s listening to her poison words about me and Thomas.
On the 6th of May they were both found guilty of the murders. There was an uproar in the court. It spilled out onto the street and flashbulbs exploded everywhere as the police team came out onto the street. I was standing at the side of the court door and I blinked as the explosions of light blinded me.
For two hours I was trapped behind a large crowd of people waiting around for the police, then the lawyers, then the families to come out. My train wasn’t until teatime, and I could get a later one if I missed it.
I sat on the pavement outside the court, waiting for her to pass in the prison van, like she had the previous fourteen days of the trial. Waiting to make that connection with her, to ask her if she had seen my son.
The crowds became thinner, then the reporters left, and finally the two policemen went off duty and were no replaced. It was getting dark. As I sat alone on the pavement, staring at the courthouse, I realised that I had no control over this situation at all.
Until the day Thomas had gone missing, I’d been able to lie in bed at night and bless everyone. God bless me mam and dad, me gran and granddad, Colin and Thomas. As I blessed each one of them, I pictured them in their beds, peaceful and asleep. My family in Chadderton, all living together in a semidetached. Colin beside me and Thomas in the next room, lying on his side with one foot out of the blankets. I liked that feeling of certainty, of knowing where you are, of safety.
Now, it was gone. When I imagined Thomas, there was a blank space. Even Colin slept who knows where; I always pictured him in the single bed at his mum’s. I always knew there’d be a time when Thomas left, and I might not know his exact whereabouts every moment of the day, and just before he went missing I had stopped worrying about him cutting his fingers off at the joinery.
Now I had no idea where he was. Other people would know him, but not me. I’d missed him growing up. From seventeen to twenty, out of his teens, shaving, meeting a girl, maybe having a kiddie. If truth be known, he was still a boy when he went.
He had a teenage air about him, a ruddy embarrassment if you mentioned girls, and a temper on him that was just like his dad’s. Not that he ever used it against me, not really. He looked at me like I imagined I looked at him; with pure love. Somehow his eyes softened and he’d bend over me as if he were protecting me. He’d carry my bags and hug me and kiss my cheek.
His red cheeks, his turning into a man, getting a job. His eighteenth birthday, my birthday cards that he always chose with care, and wrote that I was the best mum in the world. Mother of the groom. I’d never wear that hat I bought when he was just fifteen, the white hat I saw on the second-hand market, probably chucked out by some posh woman, made by a London hat firm.
I’d bought it with my bread money and carried it home like it was a tray of eggs. I’d thought what I could wear with it; anything would go with white. Thomas and Colin in suits, his fiancé in a white dress, silk most probably, and me standing proudly next to them in the photographs.
Then a couple of years later, at the hospital, when she had a kiddie, my grandchild. Would I be Granny or Nan? I couldn’t decide. All I knew was that life looked good, like our little family would grow and thrive and I would be surrounded by love. I’d missed it. It had been taken away from me. Or maybe he was dead. He hadn’t had an accident because they would have found his body by now.
I lit a cigarette and sighed. All the probabilities pointed toward him being murdered by these two and being buried. But because they hadn’t written his name on a random piece of paper, recorded his last screams, taken photographs as they abused him, or got caught killing him, I wasn’t allowed to say it. I wasn’t allowed.
More importantly, I wasn’t allowed to ask them. I wondered if, at any point, someone had asked either of them, to their faces, if they had taken Thomas Swain. Shown them a photograph. I’d asked the police, but they’d never told me the answer. Said they were too busy with the actual murders, and afterward they’d focus on Thomas’s case again.
The top and bottom of it was, no one cared anymore. Unless he had been a victim, no one cared. Colin’s mum headed up the ‘he’s buggered off with a girl’ camp, while a reporter had started a rumour that he was living in Manchester. Not that any of that mattered. I loved my son no matter what.
Don’t get me wrong, I often thought about the poor parents of those kiddies. I’d seen the Kilbrides since the discoveries and they looked like shadows, grey and pallid, bent over in their grief. Like the rest of us, shopping for the food we needed to survive, survive our children, in a world that shouldn’t be like that. I was as bitter for their lack of grandchildren as I was for my own.
I’d started to add the reports about the families to my scrapbook, hoping for a snippet that would lead me to another line of thinking, apart from the he’s dead/he’s alive confusion at the forefront of every day.
In my own life, I’d been cooking breakfast, dinner, and tea for three people every day and eventually I had to stop. One night I asked Colin if he’d be home for tea.
‘No, Bess. No, I won’t.’
‘So where are you having it, then?’
He looked up from polishing his shoes. I’d ironed all his shirts and they hung on the back of the chair. He picked one and pulled it on. When he didn’t answer, I persisted.
‘At your mam’s?’
He smoothed Brylcream over his hair and he looked handsome. He had a good colour and his clothes were smart, his shoes gleaming. He was wearing his good watch and I felt a surge of unfamiliar affection for him. I went to straighten his collar, but he edged backward.
‘Leave it, Bess.’
‘But you’re never here. I know you’re always out looking for our Thomas, and I’m grateful for that, but can we spend some time? You know just us two.’
He looked confused and his face softened.
‘All right love. On Saturday. We’ll go out on Saturday night. Make a change, won’t it?’ He pulled five pounds out of his pocket and gave it to me. ‘Here, on top of your housekeeping. Go and get a new dress. Something that fits you. And get your hair done.’
He grabbed his jacket and he’d gone. I went upstairs and looked at myself in the full-length wardrobe mirror. I knew I’d put on weight and my clothes were tight. My roots were inches long and my hair unkempt.
I felt a little bit excited and thought about the hairdressers, but then I felt guilty about wanting to do something without our Thomas. We should all be going out now, to the singsong at the Prince of Orange, or to the pictures.
Then I realised. Saturday was Thomas’s twenty-first. His special twenty-first birthday. I’d planned to cook a lovely dinner and decorate the house with bunting, just in case he came back. I’d gone into a wild panic, wondering if I should call it off with Colin, but something told me not to. Somewhere inside I knew that I still needed him, that if the worst happened at least we could share the grief.
I was equally determined to celebrate Thomas’s twenty-first. I’d been collecting little bits and pieces for a long while, blue ribbons and all the ingredients for the cake, which I’d already baked months ago. It was like a Christmas cake, but for a birthday, rich fruit and brandy and best butter. It was in the pantry, sitting under a Tupperware cake cloche. I’d wanted to get it right, and it said in the recipe that the longer you leave it the better it is. That’s what Colin had said about me once.
‘Like a good wine, Bess, the older it gets the better it is.’
I’d still celebrate. I was determined. After all, in my optimistic moments, I knew that he could knoc
k at the door at any time, or come striding through the back way. In my fantasies, I saw him in the kitchen making a brew, or knocking on the front door, I’d peer through the curtains and see him and his new wife with a pram. He’d tell me he couldn’t keep away and he was sorry and we’d all sit around and chat.
In my fantasy scenes, there was always one person missing. Colin was never there. I was still cooking for him and Thomas, doing their washing, but in reality, neither of them were really here anymore. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that Saturday would be make or break for me and Colin.
I decided to tone down Thomas’s birthday to a card and a cake, and concentrate on my date with Colin. I went and had my hair done, chatting about anything except the Moors Murders, as all the women in the salon knew better than to get me started. Then I picked a dress off the market and spent the rest of the money on a scrapbook and some notepaper. Finally, I picked up a lined exercise book. It was a children’s exercise book, with a picture of a nursery rhyme chicken on the front, but it would do for what I wanted.
As an afterthought, I got some prawn cocktail, steak and after eights for a special tea on Saturday. Thomas wouldn’t want party food now, not at twenty-one. He’d want proper, sophisticated food. Colin would think it was for our romantic evening, but it would do for if Thomas turned up.
The Separation
Saturday came and I had butterflies in my stomach. I’d seen Colin just after tea on Friday when he came home to change his shirt. I’d put his pools coupon on the kitchen table, ready for him to fill in, and he sat down for a minute.
I watched as he put the tiny crosses in the boxes. When we’d been married for ten years, we’d had a small win on the pools and gone on holiday to Margate. We’d been to Blackpool since, but never anywhere farther. I knew Colin wanted to go to France.
Random Acts of Unkindness Page 10
