Evil Relations

by David Smith

  Gradually, Jack’s visits became more regular and he made an effort to establish a relationship with his son, although his attempts often fell short of expectations. ‘He’d roll up with a pocket full of money and presents for me,’ David recalls. ‘But they were daft things, like the time he’d been to Belgium and brought me a great stack of comics back. The problem was that the comics were foreign, Asterix and Tintin, and I couldn’t read the words in the bubbles over the characters’ heads. That was typical Dad: his intentions were always spot-on, and he was never anything less than generous, but he never got it quite right. There was a time when I desperately wanted a guitar and, sure enough, he arrived home with one for me . . . but it was plastic. A lovely little toy guitar, but I’d set my heart on a real one. On another occasion, I went for a walk down Stockport Road and in the hardware shop I saw a toolbox full of planes, saws, gauges and markers – all these fantastic hand tools in a smashing box. I was about eight then, and had started taking an interest in woodwork at school. I told Dad about the toolbox and kept on at him about it. I wanted it more than life itself – a typical kid with his heart set on something. Anyway, Christmas came: I woke up early and realised that Santa had been. I scrabbled about for my toolbox and, sure enough, there was a gleaming new toolbox full of plastic planes, bendy plastic saws . . . oh, the disappointment! But it was as much my fault as his, because I’d been so spoiled by Mum. She got me exactly what I wanted every time, but poor Dad always fell at the last hurdle.’

  At a loss for how to please his son, Jack frequently suggested a trip to Gorton’s Belle Vue, the vast entertainment complex that drew crowds from every corner of Manchester. Between its gates opening in 1836 and closing permanently in the 1970s, Belle Vue offered a variety of cheap, unrivalled attractions. Among its most popular draws were an amusement park and zoo, a circus, bars, dance halls, and a legendary speedway.

  David recalls: ‘Dad would pick me up – reeking of last night’s booze – and off we’d go on the bus to Belle Vue. I can see us both now, heading through the gates on Hyde Road and pottering about the zoo with its different animal houses, each with their own strong smell. Mum would give me a bag of bread for the elephants and I’d join all the other kids walking around the moat, waiting for a great long trunk to come over the water to snaffle the crusts. There were two animals I always visited because I felt so sorry for them: the polar bear who was stuck in a concrete pit with a pool of dirty green water at the bottom, and the tigon, which was a cross between a tiger and a lion. He had predominant stripes and was massive, much larger than either of his parents, and lived alone without a mate. I used to stand for a long time watching those two – the polar bear endlessly circling the pool on a concrete ledge and the tigon pacing up and down a cage that was barely as big as an outside toilet. I didn’t know what repetitive syndrome was back then, of course, but I felt such sorrow for them – kids and animals do have a natural affinity. That part of Belle Vue was terrible, but otherwise it was an amazing place to have on your doorstep. I loved the rides, especially the Bobs roller-coaster. I remember having to stand next to a measuring stick to get on that and being delighted when I could go on for the first time. Dad took me to the speedway as well, and the dog racing. They were good days, really.’

  He pauses and gazes outside, where the two dogs he and his second wife Mary rescued are stretched out in a patch of winter sunlight. ‘But everything was about to change and my world would never be the same again.’

  Chapter 2

  ‘From about 1954 until about April last year, 1965, I lived with my father at 13, Wiles Street, Gorton . . .’

  – David Smith, Moors trial at Chester Assizes, April 1966

  From David Smith’s memoir:

  I trust my mother. I trust everything about her: the stories she tells, the falsehoods that cover my birth and illegitimacy, the tale about her being a nurse at Manchester Royal Infirmary. We lie together in the attic, surrounded by photographs of her dead son, but I trust her love for me even when she buys me the biggest scarlet piano-accordion in the world, hoping I’ll learn to play it as well as Uncle Frank had done. It’s the real thing, that red-and-cream contraption, not a plastic imitation. I give it a cursory squeeze once or twice in front of her in the parlour, but it makes me feel something unnameable that I don’t want to feel so I smash it up, shouting, ‘I’m not Frank, remember!’ I trust her to understand, even then.

  I still trust her after I find out she’s lied to me. One afternoon I take it into my head to visit her at work. I’m about eight years old and get hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of corridors inside Manchester Royal Infirmary. I ask someone where I can find Annie Smith and they point me down another corridor. Off I go, expecting to find her in a crisp white uniform, leaning over some patient’s bed, and instead I turn a corner and there she is with mop and bucket, washing the floor. It embarrasses her, but doesn’t alter my feelings. It’s only a little white lie, that one.

  I go on loving her, untruths and all: I trust my mother.

  * * *

  At Ross Place Primary, David was entitled to free school dinners but couldn’t understand why he was singled out: ‘I don’t know why it bothered me so much – it wasn’t as if I was given smaller portions. But it niggled away at me and I asked Mum about it. She wouldn’t answer, so I kept on . . . and on. Until all of a sudden this hulking great skeleton came clattering out of the cupboard.’

  He shakes his head at the memory: ‘I nagged and nagged. In the end she just snapped and shouted: “Your mum’s not dead.” The authorities knew that Joyce had walked out, leaving me the child of a one-parent family. It took the wind from my sails, I can tell you. Until then, I’d always thought that Joyce was dead – because that’s what I’d been told. As soon as Mum uttered that line, I went berserk. I lashed out with my fists and feet and wouldn’t stop thrashing and kicking . . . I was really hurting her, and I meant to do it. In the end, she had to defend herself, so she pulled out a thin tyre from an old pram that had a couple of metal strands running through the rubber. And she dealt me a good dose. In every which way, it hurt. But she didn’t do it to be brutal – she did it to quieten me down. Mum had never struck me before, not even a slap on the legs when I was being naughty, and she wouldn’t have done it then had I not completely lost it. I bloody well deserved that hiding.’

  He regrets asking about the free dinner ticket even now: ‘I wish to hell I’d kept my mouth shut. Because once it came out, I felt cheated, especially by Mum. The unconditional trust I’d had in her crumbled a fair bit. I was in a terrible mardy for about a week afterwards and wouldn’t speak to her at all. Then I began calling her “Mrs Smith” instead of Mum. It took a while until things got back to normal. But if I’m truthful, I think that finding out about Joyce probably put that sizeable chip on my shoulder.’

  In the aftermath of the row, David refused to eat school dinners and Annie resorted to giving him the money for fish and chips. His behaviour became deliberately disruptive and there were angry fights with the form prefects. Even then, chances are that he would have settled down again eventually. Instead, what happened next changed the course of his life for ever.

  * * *

  From David Smith’s memoir:

  Events occur with bewildering speed. My cousin John, together with his brothers and the Duchess and Uncle Bert, move into a pub in the city centre. I miss them. John is the closest thing to a sibling I have and the Duchess is a second mum to me. She’ll appear again, many years from now, at times when I need a mother most. She’ll be at my side when Mum passes away and after the death of my daughter, Angela. The Duchess alone will understand and keep the secret of my soul when I’m charged with the murder of my father.

  But the other change, the great upheaval, happens not overnight but during it.

  I’m snuggled up and cosy in my attic bed when I hear distant noises, doors banging, and raised voices from two floors below. I think I’m dreaming until footsteps sound on the stairs, gr
owing louder, and then the bedroom door hits the wall. I hear the thud of a hand on the light switch and my sleepy eyelids burn as the overhead lamp goes on.

  ‘Quickly now.’ Mum reaches for me, lifting me out of the warm bed. I blink and squirm, swamped with confusion. She stands me to attention, spits on her hand a couple of times and wipes her palm across my hair to flatten its pillow-chafed untidiness. ‘Quickly now,’ she says again in an unsteady voice. ‘No fuss.’ Her eyes glisten with tears.

  She drags a blanket from the bed and wraps it around me so tightly that my arms are pinned to my sides. Fright stills my voice as I lift one foot and then the other to let her pull on my socks, followed by slippers. ‘Got to keep those feet warm,’ she mumbles, picking me up and carrying me down the two flights of stairs to the hallway. She leaves me there and disappears into the living room, swiftly closing the door behind her.

  Bewildered, I blink at the parlour door, where the gramophone sits gathering dust and the settee still bears the imprint of the last time I nestled into its flowery bulk. I stand wrapped tautly in my blanket, listening not to cowboy songs but to a hysterical crescendo of shouting from the shuttered living room. My eyes are drawn down the long hallway to the frosted-glass panels of the front door. A huge, dark shape lurches into view, rattling the letterbox.

  All at once, the shouting stops, the living room door opens, and I’m gazing up at my father. He has the knack all adults have of being able to alter his mood in an instant. He smiles at me and is immediately calm. I feel his large hand on my shoulder, as he guides me towards the stranger waiting behind the front door. Mum appears in the hallway, face drawn and eyes glittering with unwept tears. Grandad is nowhere to be seen.

  The stranger is a taxi driver, and in the thick darkness of the street he climbs behind the steering wheel of his cab while Dad pushes me towards the back seat, then turns to Mum. His voice is unemotional as he tells her, ‘I’ll call for his stuff sometime tomorrow.’ I peer out fretfully at her: she holds herself very still, silent and more serious than I’ve ever seen her.

  The taxi carries me away from her, towards a new life. Our moments in the parlour and the attic are finished; young as I am, I realise this as the hot stink of stale beer fills the air inside the car.

  Sometimes the big people really fuck things up for the little ones they’re supposed to love.

  * * *

  The taxi drove through the quiet, unlit streets for what seemed like an eternity to David. After a couple of left turns it pulled into a cul-de-sac and stopped outside the last house on the stunted street. Although David didn’t know it then, this was to be his home until he was 17.

  Number 13 Wiles Street was only two miles from the house he had just left in Ardwick, but it felt like another country; Gorton’s streets were tightly huddled, a red warren zigzagging off the main thoroughfare of Hyde Road, punctuated every few spaces by weedy crofts, small corner shops whose windows were grey with industrial dirt, and four-square pubs almost never known by their given names. Wiles Street was a dog-leg from Gorton Lane, where the reedy Gothic spire of the monastery pierced the skyline towards the city, and the rumbling brick-and-iron sprawl of the foundry lay to the right, with the shabby Steelworks Tavern between. Nearby was the Plaza cinema, known by local kids as ‘the Bug Hut’, for obvious reasons.

  David’s father bundled him out of the taxi. If another skeleton was rattling against the cupboard door, causing the family to panic, it was never allowed to break free: ‘No one ever came clean about why I was taken away that night,’ David affirms. ‘I was kept off school for a couple of weeks and wasn’t allowed to see Mum during that time. The older family members closed ranks on what happened and I never asked about it, either fearing the answer or expecting to be fobbed off. To this very day, I hate that house in Gorton; I hate every rotten brick in it with a passion.’ He shakes his head slowly, remembering: ‘I can still picture myself walking into it for the very first time . . .’

  * * *

  From David Smith’s memoir:

  The front door opens straight into the sitting room. No welcoming hallway, no cosy parlour, just a cramped room that remains dark even with the bare fly-bulb switched on. We go through to the kitchen – a rotten, dirty room with a pot sink, short drainage board and an old table and chair near a cast-iron fire that doesn’t look as if it’s been cleared since the war.

  The stairs in the kitchen lead up to two doors, two bedrooms. Dad flicks the light on in one and I gaze round fearfully at a small table covered in matchboxes and crumpled cigarette packets, and an unmade, sagging double bed. An old overcoat has been thrown on top of the coarse woollen blankets for extra warmth. Dad shows me the upstairs toilet: a foul-smelling, brown-stained bucket beneath the bed. I climb under the blankets as he gestures for me to do, trying to find a spot on the pillow that isn’t greasy with Brylcreem. He leaves the light on but goes out of the room and, to my surprise, I hear the door next to mine open, then two voices talking quietly. I can’t make out whether the second voice is male or female. When they fall silent, I listen to two sets of footsteps going down the wooden stairs, accompanied by the unmistakeable clipping patter of a dog.

  I can’t sleep. I pass the hours looking straight upwards, where a low-voltage bulb dangles at the end of its cord alongside a curling brown fly-catcher encrusted with dozens of tiny black corpses. The ceiling is a sheet of peeling whitewash whose damp patches form shapes I don’t like: a bearded man, an old lady with a crooked back, a menacing elephant I wouldn’t want to meet in Belle Vue.

  And when a pale glimmer of daylight unfurls across the rooftops I hear, for the first time, the sound of the monster.

  Quietly at first, clattering in the distance, its noise getting closer by the second. Then it roars beneath a bridge and thunders past the house, rattling windows like bones, billowing thick, acrid smoke from its metal bowels. The locomotive passes less than 50 feet from the house, leaving its clinging breath behind, clouding the windows, fighting to enter and fill every room with the strong smell of burning coke.

  The locomotive, I soon discover, is born out of the huge steel belly of the Beyer Peacock factory, 500 yards from Wiles Street. The building and its offspring form the thudding, filthy heart of Gorton.

  I fall asleep just after daybreak. When I awake, I look for Mum and realise with a slow, creeping dread that she’s not there. For the first time, I’m sharing a bed with somebody else and there’s a wide chasm between us. I know this man, I belong to him, but Dad is a prickly stranger compared to the love I associate with Mum. I want to feel safe and comforted; I want not only Mum but the Duchess too – I want to go home. I’m so frightened I can’t speak. I don’t know where I am. Where has my world gone? I can’t get out what’s building up inside me like the steam that screams from the passing locomotives: I want Mum.

  I keep the scream inside and let the locomotives rend the air instead.

  I sit at the table in the kitchen, hands away from the sticky plastic oilcloth. I’m still wearing my pyjamas and slippers, as I will for the next few days – Dad doesn’t bother to pick up my clothes for a while. I’m not on my own; an old lady is making me tea and toast. She owns the house and the first time I catch a glimpse of her outside my bedroom, I’m terrified. On the side of her head is a huge purple cyst. It isn’t her fault, of course, and I’m used to deformities in my small world – Mum’s hump that comes to a point between her shoulders and her wedding-ring finger that’s no more than half a stump – but Elizabeth Jones has a cyst the size of a cricket ball on her forehead. Even apart from that, she’s small and ugly, and in my young eyes she’s the Wicked Witch of the West. It was her voice I’d heard at the top of the stairs and her dog, Minnie, scrabbling on the wooden steps. I like animals but not Minnie, who sits by the fire on her fat haunches, baring her teeth every time I move. Miss Jones tries to be kind, but I’m too repelled by her appearance to respond. I don’t see much of her, though: she has a cleaning job through the day and in the eve
nings she drinks herself to oblivion at the Steelie.

  Dad keeps me under a sort of benevolent ‘house arrest’ for a fortnight, hoping I’ll acclimatise to the place, and him. We while away the hours playing noughts and crosses and snakes and ladders; he saves his clean shirts for the pub in the evening and sits opposite me in his vest and trousers, fingers mottled with nicotine. I feel slightly better when he collects my clothes from Mum: they’re at the bottom of my bed one morning, bagged up, neatly folded and freshly ironed. Among them is Geoffrey, a white plastic giraffe. In Aked Street, he used to listen to all my woes without saying anything in return. I’m ridiculously pleased to find my oddball friend tucked among the tops, trousers, underpants and socks.

  When Dad and Miss Jones are out, I stand on the doorstep gazing up and down the street, wondering which direction might carry me home. At one end of the cul-de-sac is a wall of railway sleepers and at the other, a corner shop. Sometimes, two children come out of the house next door but one to mine. The boy is fairly thick-set and wears National Health glasses with lenses like milk bottle bottoms. The girl is slightly older than me, but only by a couple of years; she has dark hair and a very sweet face. She smiles shyly at me. Her mother appears at the door to watch them leave for school. I hang back, embarrassed but curious.

  Slowly, I get into a routine, helped by returning to school. For a couple of weeks, Dad travels with me on the 109 bus to Ross Place and at the end of the school day he’s there again, waiting for me among the cluster of mothers. I’m still not allowed to see Mum, but he’s making supreme efforts to create something real for us. Wiles Street is a tiny house with tiny, dirty rooms; sunshine never enters it, but Dad proudly produces a television, a few new chairs and a clean single bed for me. I’m especially pleased with the bed because now I can sleep alone without his chronic flatulence and beery breath as a nightcap. He gets the place fumigated, too. Until then, I sleep on a pillow streaked with red squish marks and slithers from the infestation, and at night I crush bugs beneath my fingernails against the wall. Then the fumigator arrives, sealing up the house and bringing in a cumbersome contraption to smoke ’em out. The insects return later, though.