Fullalove

by Gordon Burn

  Stires targeted as his victims young girls with ponies. The first two children suffered mysterious punctures and lacerations, but they – and their horses – survived the attacks. The third time he struck, though, Stires achieved what he had set out to do: girl and pony were both found dead in a field, with the pony’s cooling, milky-blue entrails coiled intricately around the girl’s neck. There were two more attempted murders, and two more actual murders conforming to the pattern of the first. Stires was arrested on his way home from the scene of the final killing, when police in a patrol car spotted him jumping a set of red lights and gave chase.

  First question: Did Rachel Stires, who worked as a part-time lollipop lady in the nearest village, know she had been married to a monster? First priority: pictures – wedding pictures, holiday pictures, childhood pictures, any pictures. A job for the cavalry. Get Robin Carson up there – like, yesterday – to hit her with his bullshit (‘He does a lot of shitting but his pants aren’t down,’ I happen to know is Tosser’s private opinion) and give her a yea good – yea good! – seeing to.

  In the immediate aftermath of the news that the caring koi-carp rearer and dog-walker, the motorbike tinkerer and Gloria Hunni-ford devotee with whom they shared their lives was also a masked rapist and dismemberer of little girls, a strange tranquillity, a kind of bliss even, often descends on women like Rachel Stires, as if the body was pumping out its own opiates or fogging narcotics and analgesics. It can take a week or longer (sometimes it never happens) for the anguish and self-chastisement to kick in, and for the low operatics of the TV miniseries and dramadoc to manifest itself. When he can get this to happen, Robin Carson knows he is getting close to hitting pay dirt, and to check-out time.

  Having extracted the subject from her home environment, with all its associations of familiar objects turned baleful and sinister, he commences the softening-up process the cult religions call love-bombing and Clit himself calls ‘TLC (‘tender loving care’). The consoling squeeze of the hand, the gentle stroke of the hair, the brushing of lips against forehead, the nuzzling of the ear … What started as a career-opening has mutated into an aberrant, highly esoteric turn-on. Carson has become addicted to the taste (he told me this; he tells everybody this; he dines out on the story) of licked-up salt snot and hot grief mucus and nectared/saline tears. He has become convinced the taste is hormonal, its aphrodisiac tang the result of some chemical released into the body – the morphising agent, perhaps – at times of soul-crunching suffering and trauma. If you could bottle it, he is fond of saying, it would make somebody rich many times over.

  Carson is a narcissist, numb with self-love. We have all grown skins, performance membranes, insulating layers; a dense wall of lontananza between ourselves and the world. But Clit is desensitised to a degree that makes the rest of us look like the Little Sisters of Perpetual Sorrow. He is icily detached, deficient in genuine feelings of sadness. He inflicts a rehearsed, facetious kindness in the same way that a torturer inflicts physical pain to get his victims to open up. And I am his collaborator; his accomplice in most regards. So what does that make me? Carson works the women over, coaxes them into a state of emotional free-fall, brings them on-side; but his talents end there. It is up to me to go in and point up the details of the broadbrush picture he will have provided, and package the out-pourings into some merchandisable form: ‘The meat’s on the hook, the money’s on the table.’

  It took the plods forty-eight hours of intensive questioning to satisfy themselves that Rachel Stires wasn’t implicated in her husband’s crimes. When they were sure, they installed her in the nurses’ hostel they had nominated as a safe house, where she lived in terror of being sniffed out by people exactly like us.

  It was hard to get near the Stires story. Everything was shut off. But through the girl on the till at the local ‘8–Til-Late’ who he was using to take his messages for him (it is never safe to have messages left at the hotel), Clit was introduced to somebody who knew somebody who knew where Stires’s wife was being mothballed.

  He hand-delivered the postcard of the giant reclining Buddhas of Polonnaruwa containing his usual snow-job to the nurses’ hostel on a Tuesday (‘You have to live your recovery. You are the programme’). By lunch time on Thursday, Clit and Rachel Stires were checking in under assumed names at the creeper-clad country hotel in Cumbria with the springer spaniels (mother and daughter) asleep on the steps and conical bay trees flanking the entrance and embossed matchbooks and Imperial mints and potpourri in venerable chipped bowls at Reception. It was the first of the five interchangeable establishments they checked into in the course of a week, always staying just one step ahead of the pack, who were in pursuit; and Rachel went on looking like a foundling, a member of the tragic army of the dispossessed, in all of them: uncomfortable with the menus and the deference and the carpeting (she had no carpets at home, except the narrow strip running in front of the sofa in the living room), she kept stealing away to have a brew-up with the pot-washers in the kitchen, or grabbing a duster and an apron and helping the chambermaids service the rooms.

  Back at the terraced cottage that she had moved into on the day she was married, she let Clit clean her out of snaps of herself and the ‘Gymkana Monster’ (Ronnie Duncan still claims the credit for this); he left with plastic wallets, laminated folders, a perspex cube that had stood on top of the television, hand-decorated albums. The heat had been taken off the house by then – there were a few stringers and agency cowboys lurking about – and I spent a couple of days taking down the ‘My life with …’ material that would be the selling point of the eighteen-page, through-colour, pull-out section that we were going to get on the streets within hours of Joe Stires being sent down.

  Rachel Stires was pleasant-looking in a skinny, country nutty, windburned lollypop-lady sort of way. She had her hair pulled back in a heavy pony-tail, and wore velour track suits and plastic flower-shaped ear-rings of the kind people used to throw darts and shoot down ping-pong balls to win at travelling fairs. I brought bottles of Blue Nun to the sessions, and she prepared trim triangular sandwiches garnished with potato crisps and cress and served with quality-weight paper napkins saved from one or another of the hotels where they had stayed. She had collected the matchbooks together in a soup bowl on the low table, where there was also a bowl of sharp-smelling pot-pourri with the satin bow from the original packet adrift in the middle of it.

  There were some tears, not many (Clit had drunk deep), as I led her through the high-and low-lights of her, on the face of it, not very eventful life, year by bald year, from the cradle to the Old Bailey, all the time of course hoping to draw out of her the authenticating details that would convince (a) Howie Dosson, and (b) the readers that they were getting the hot poop, and that she would divulge it to nobody else. (Joe Stires, ten years her senior, had set his wife on a pedestal, said he considered her a goddess. ‘When I married you, I reached for a star and a farmhorse like me could never keep up with a thoroughbred like you,’ he wrote to her from prison. He had a fetish about washing himself in Dettol and had been impotent for most of their married life.)

  At the end of the second session, she posed for a picture perched on the greasy arm of what had been her husband’s favourite chair. While the photographer was getting her to lower her chin, move her knee to the left a little, moisten her lips, I noticed for the first time that her wedding ring was missing from her left hand, although her fingernails retained their opaque rainbow shimmer. So when he’d got his snap, I switched the machine back on for a few more minutes and we covered that.

  It was as we were preparing to leave that she reached down behind the sofa without moving from where she was sitting and produced the tilt-headed cuddly toy which she asked us to place on the impromptu memorial to Roxanne Boothe, the last of her husband’s victims, something she didn’t feel able to do herself; the shrine was along a part of the rusticated fence surrounding the field where he had surprised the girl feeding her pony, and we had to pass it
en route to the motorway and the long drive south.

  We took a wrong turn four or five miles out of the village, and passed the same barn three times from different directions before finding ourselves suddenly merging right with the early evening traffic onto a sliproad of the M66. We rode in silence for some time, zipping down the fast lane, bullying the reps and snowy-shouldered middle-managers out of our way, feeling righteous, adrenalised, bringing home the bacon.

  It wasn’t until we pulled into the services that we saw the nylon-plush puppy sitting at a tipsy angle on top of the blanket thrown over the photographer’s tripods and titanium carrying cases to shield them from prying eyes. The blank, generic face inside the heat-sealed factory wrapping seemed to belong to this no-place of machine-vended convenience snacks and strategically racked impulse buys and urgent fluorescent colours; contiguous with the high-gloss, the pristine finish, the charged over-lit spaces. Cloned members of its tribe or batch were almost certainly on sale inside the beckoning, islanded glass box, waiting to do duty as comforters to choleric, fractious children on monotonous motorway journeys. It was impassive, inviolate; prescriptively winsome until moving lights, washing over the clear plastic wrap, fleetingly scrambled, unprettified, the features.

  When we were back in London, the photographer made a detour to drop me off where I live. ‘Don’t forget this,’ he called after me after I had slammed the door closed (a light went on in a window of the house opposite). He groped behind him in the dark, just the way Rachel Stires had done five hours earlier, and held the puppy aloft in his right hand above the roof of the car. I could have walked around into the road to get it, but instead I pressed myself against the near-side window and reached across the frosting metal until, as I now imagine it, I must have looked like somebody stretching for something that seemed in imminent danger of being snatched away.

  The cold of the street after the heat of the car had misted the inner surface of the bag – misted and moistened it like a microclimate of exhaled breath. It was as if there was something alive in there – some undefined yellow-orange thing, fat and plush – struggling to breathe. (Who wrote that our lives begin with a slither through a tight place and end with being pushed deeper and deeper into a black sack?) There was a card cheaply printed with a picture of bluebirds trailing satin ribbons taped to the cellophane protecting the dog. ‘A sweet little rose, loaned not given/To bud on earth and now blooming in heaven – I’m sorry. Condoalenses. R. Stires (Mrs)’, it said in fading blue biro.

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy together,’ the photographer shouted as he sped away.

  The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

  Reporting is a perversion of normal existence, Even was forever telling me. ‘You get to know them so that they feel relaxed with you, ask them questions you have no natural right to expect answers to, ask to see things you weren’t meant to see, they open a window on the most intimate parts of their lives, and then you walk away.’

  Walk, run, hop it, skedaddle. Sometimes empty-handed, sometimes not. The world rushes on, the urgency is redirected, the appetite for catastrophe finds a new focus. And as the tide recedes, it leaves in its wake the material evidence. Without intending to I have put together a yellow museum of my infidelities, hollow promises, rank opportunism, cowardice and bad faith.

  ‘History in a hurry’. This is the definition of journalism that those of us up to our necks in it in the trenches tend to cleave to. ‘Hot history’. It offers the promise of permanence to something we know is written on the wind; it gives a gloss of respectability to what is often no more than meddlesomeness; it sanctions the thrust forward to the next front, with no thought for the casualties we are leaving behind.

  To enumerate every item in my inglorious collection – letters unopened, unacknowledged and unread; pleas for help or information ignored; keepsakes unreturned; pictures cropped or otherwise mutilated beyond recognition, all of it dating back a dozen years – would take too long and would take self-laceration to the kind of lengths to which I am not prepared to go. But as a bore-sample of my crapitude and indigence, chew on these:

  – the videotape of the star boy footballer who lay down on a railway line after being dropped from the England under-15 team for an important home international, entrusted to me by his parents

  – the minicassette containing the last message left by their daughter on her parents’ answer machine before she, along with her husband and three children, was blasted out of the sky five miles over Lockerbie

  – a letter which ends ‘I do appreciate there is no reason on earth why you should in any way help me, but human understanding is a thing I still have great faith in’ whose substance I can’t bring myself to explore

  – a soapstone ring given to me by a girl fan outside a hotel, which I was supposed to pass on to David Bowie

  – a request (ignored) from a woman wanting to be put in touch with the old school friend she hadn’t seen for twenty-five years, whose daughter had just become the thirteenth victim of the Yorkshire Ripper.

  To this rancid pile, add the little dog whose fate should have been to end up in a farmer’s field outside Keighley in West Yorkshire, and then maybe as a mascot wired to the radiator grille of the refuse truck given the task, after a respectable interval, of clearing the memorial away.

  For two years the little dog lay ignored in a corner, slowly disappearing behind the layers of dust and the yellowing cellophane. He became a fixture. I didn’t see him. I soon forgot he was there. For the story of how he was finally sprung from this limbo-life to become my gris-gris or nkisi, my spirit-catcher, my boon companion and talisman, we have to go back more than a year.

  I had been to a leaving-party – the latest in a long line of leaving-parties for men my age and younger who had out-stayed their welcome and were scrapheap-bound. The party started in the upper room of an old haunt in Fetter Lane called The Tickle Pink, and moved on in due course to the Press Club. Around four in the morning, the die-hards (Myc Doohan, briefly off the wagon, myself and three or four others similarly placed) were heading for some dump in the Mile End/Stratford area run by the son-in-law or father-in-law or brother of somebody (we were all too crocked to remember who) travelling in the cab in front.

  We had stopped at a set of traffic lights in Queen Victoria Street in the City when the front of the taxi was lifted clear of the ground by the deep whump! of what, even where we were orbiting, we all knew straightaway was a bomb. The taxi windows, and the windows of the shadowed, institutional buildings closest to us, remained intact. But after a dangling moment of anticipation and terror, a blind hover in time, the cupric and opal and mercurichrome skins of the high-rises above and beyond us tightened and then bellied and ruptured to gorgeous and catastrophic effect: out of the vapours and dusts emerged stacks of brilliantly variegated tatters, like a finale at the autumn catwalk shows; like flesh hanging off a kipper bone. Before we had a chance to get our fists up to our faces to unpop our ears, the driver had locked into a U-ie, and was flooring the cab away from the danger zone.

  Whoa! Hey! Where-the! What-the! Whooooa! Stop! We fell over each other trying to get at the sliding glass panel behind his colour-drained head. We were sitting on top of a story. Here was a chance to delay our own evenings of mutilated Stiltons and sad vol-au-vents and sozzled speeches and dusty boards (and the shed-sitting, wood-whittling, golf-playing, post office-queuing years ahead). We skipped like five-year-olds towards the already paling pall of
smoke, beautiful against a murky orange dawn, the declarative sentences and stubby paras forming by force of habit in our pounding thick heads.

  The body-count wasn’t high (only one fatality, several lacerations, one serious). But there were important political implications and I was able to phone through some not-half-bad colour copy (paling pall, tragic tequila dawn), along with some eyewitness quotes, which made it into the late London editions.

  By then the adrenalin and the need to get a grip had burned off some of the alcoholic haze. I was at that dangerous stage where the edge put on the night before was beginning to give way to the thud of blood at the base of the skull, and the shakes; birds were singing, and reality was beginning to intrude. With Myc Doohan, I took a taxi to Smithfield market, where the pubs were serving breakfast and you could get a drink.

  The hours that followed are something of a blank. I remember the first port and brandy, and maybe the one that followed that. I don’t remember falling backwards off the stool while putting over a brief up-date on the scene at the devastation area as we had left it (Doohan apparently got to me in time to stop me cracking open my skull like a pumpkin, and finished dictating the remainder of what I was going to say without missing a beat). I have no recollection of the taxi ride to Seven Dials, or of being deposited in the room where I eventually, briefly, came to.

  I do remember working out, with the utmost difficulty, what time of day and where I must be: it was just beginning to get dark, coming up to the Happy Hour, with lights from the traffic filtering through the mealy calico blind and slipping over the cockerel-green painted walls, the plasterboard filling the space where a door had recently been, the pasted-on dado line, and the poster of a smoke-wreathed, curly-headed man I recognised as Lenny Bruce.