The Love of a Bad Man

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

  The sex was better in the days following the murders. It was real man-woman sex, loving and brutal in equal measure. He was tender with me, too; so tender I felt I could weep. And yet, part of me saw his trembling, the flush on his pale cheeks, and wanted nothing of it.

  I began seeing Norman a month or so after Pauline. He was taller and handsomer than Ian, and a police officer — a fact that strangely reassured me. We had met when he saw me parking my van, and I saw right away the ring on his finger, and also that he was very handsome. His jaw was strong and square, and his chin had a dimple in it. Nothing like Ian, whose chin was weak.

  Because he was married, we would meet in secret and shag when he was off-duty. Norman liked that I wasn’t soft or clinging, that I didn’t press for anything more. He liked the interest I showed in his gun and taught me things — how to load and grip, and basic ballistics. He smoothed his big hands over my strong legs and said I would make a good officer, went so far as to bring me pamphlets from the force. When Ian saw them, he laughed and said I ought to try out.

  ‘That would be a thrill. And you’ll pick up a lot of useful information.’

  That set my mind against it, against Norman. Without even trying, Ian had made it all about him again.

  I started going to the pistol club soon after Norman. Because of his borstal record, Ian could never visit himself, but he approved of my going and started looking at guns for us to buy. He wanted a Luger, of course, like the German soldiers used. In the end, we settled for British guns: a Webley .45 and a Manchester-made target rifle.

  On the moors, we shot wild sheep. Ian joked that Jews would have made better target practice, but the sheep were practically the only creatures that ventured into our domain. I came to enjoy seeing them fall, their daft bleats and their woolly bodies dropping onto the heath. We did nothing with the carcasses, no burials or desecration, though sometimes we’d observe them weeks afterward, rotting slowly in the cold air. If they happened to fall on peat soil, they rotted more slowly still. It was good science, seeing that.

  I became a fair shooter with practice, though not as accurate as Ian. I was always what they call ‘trigger-happy’, wont to fire before I had my aim right. He tried to train this out of me but never completely succeeded, and part of him seemed to think it was a good thing anyhow. My reactions were quick, self-preserving, whereas there was always some likelihood of him freezing.

  He proved as much one idle night at Bannock Street. Ian was reading and I was cross with him, probably because he was being a right bigheaded prick, pouting and tilting his chin in that way of his. I had the Webley out and was sitting on the floor yogi-style, polishing it. Then, without even planning it, I had him in my sights.

  It was ages before he looked up, but I’ve never forgotten his face when he did. It was as if everything went out of him in a second — his breath, his blood, his wits, completely frozen.

  He called me some crude things after I tossed the gun aside — a ‘worthless cunt’ — and said he’d put me on the moors with Pauline if I kept acting out of line. I felt rotten about it, thinking of that dark place and the beastliness of lying there forever, but there was the softest flame inside me, too. Because I had him. In that second and for all time, I had him.

  I had hoped Pauline would be the only one, a moral experiment that, once executed, we would not need to repeat. Once it became clear to me that it was otherwise, however, I set my mind on making the next one better. Cleaner, more thrilling, more to his taste.

  The lads were Ian’s best work. John and Keith, November and June of the following year. If Ian was honest about it, he would have said it was lads he wanted all along. He was curiously timid about such things, however, and so was I. Looking back, I suppose I didn’t want to think about his inclinations any more than I had to.

  That they were lads, and that they were not known to me, made it easier. As sweet and lamblike as they were, the fact remained that they were lads, and Ian had been a lad too once. Also, I suppose some part of me liked it, how trustingly they got into the van with me. Because they wouldn’t have, if it had been just Ian. They would have been warned against strange men.

  Sitting in the van throughout, I felt less each time. I smoked, but not as much. I heard the winds, but not with any fear. I saw Ian coming back over the dark heath, after John, with the lad’s left shoe in his hand. He told me how it had come off and I felt something, but quashed it quickly. We had gone too far together for me to be squeamish.

  Ian was practically living at Gran’s with me by that third summer, Keith’s summer. There were the absences, of course, but he had started keeping many of his things there. His books, his Hitler tapes, his camera, some shirts and underwear. We had a black-and-white sheepdog together, Puppet. It was as much permanence as I could hope for, with a man like him.

  We never discussed marriage, except to mock the kitchen-sink drudgery of it and everyone who went in for it. Most of my friends from school were married by that time and pregnant with their first or second babes. My younger sister Maureen was in the family way with David Smith, a petty crim and a right twit, and had to marry him before it came out. That was more of a scandal than me and Ian going quietly to our office and picnicking every weekend on the moor, where no one else ever bothered going.

  We took Puppet with us, the camera, a radio, wine — always a lot of wine. In our sunglasses and sharp weekend clothes, we photographed each other among the rocks and vales. He was so handsome, so free, a king upon the heath. In my headscarves and short dresses, I was his queen.

  Those detectives who’ve been trying to read more into our photographs, the locations of graves and so forth, have it wrong. It was always about being in our domain, and they were only a part of that, no more significant than any rock or stream.

  We planned Lesley Ann for the day after Christmas, when Gran was staying in Dukinfield with my uncle. Ian spent the morning setting up the camera and lights in our bedroom. Blue photographs, he wanted. Other things, too. He didn’t tell me about the tape recorder under the bed. I think he got even more of a thrill from putting one over on me.

  Perhaps we both wanted a lass that time. Perhaps I wanted to prove that it wasn’t just a queer thing, that it really was about challenging the order of the world, the way we talked about. Perhaps he wanted some variety. What I do know is we both saw Lesley Ann at the same time and decided on her, the way we’d once decided on each other.

  A doll of a lass standing by the dodgems, looking up at the whirling fairground lights. Alone, but not unloved. We saw that even then.

  She went with us gleefully and, after all the horridness, we were snowed in: Ian, myself, little Lesley Ann in her shroud of bed sheets. The snow on the roads was too thick for us to drive out to the moor, and so we sat on the settee with a bottle of Drambuie, going over things quietly. We were tender with each other that night, more tender perhaps than we’d ever been.

  Of all the dreadful tests they did on me, after they first brought us in with regards to Edward’s murder, one of the worst was taking a sample of my pubic hair. I was not a natural blonde, of course, but it wasn’t just that; it was the invasion of what had always been between Ian and I. They were taking everything private and putting it under bright, hot lights, like a bad vaudeville play.

  From the sample, they were able to determine that he and I had not been intimate for two weeks. Why that was relevant to the investigation, I don’t know, but they seemed to enjoy telling me. They seemed to take any opportunity they could to undermine the tenderness that I had hunted down so determinedly.

  What he has done, I have done, I told them. For months, years afterward, that was all I said. Though it wasn’t the strictest truth, it was the deepest.

  My sister Maureen lost the babe she had with David Smith early in the new year. I thought it a good thing and hinted that she should divorce Dave, who was too childish to make much of a husb
and. If she had acted on my hints, it may have ended better for all of us. Then again, what attracted Ian to Dave may always have been there, waiting to come out.

  It was Ian’s idea to start spending time together, the four of us; one of those ideas he got out of the clear blue that he would not elaborate on, no matter how I pressed him. In theory, I was not against keeping company with my sister of a Friday night. What got me was the way Ian had of taking Dave into a corner and conversing with him in a low voice about our subjects — guns, Hitler, de Sade. Meanwhile, I was relegated to empty talk of shopping and Top of the Pops with Maureen.

  David Smith. Even now, I cannot picture him without a shudder. That greasy black mop. Those rings under his eyes, like he’d been knocked one every day of his life. Those full, slobbery lips, drinking our German wine and our Drambuie. He was seventeen, and thought a few break-ins and street fights made him hard.

  ‘I think that lad could be a killer,’ Ian said to me one night, after Dave and Maureen had crossed the street back to their house. ‘With the right education.’

  I told Ian to sod off and that he was daft if he thought so. He kept on it. On and on, until I reminded him of Leopold and Loeb, how things would have worked out better for them had Loeb been a woman. Ian didn’t disagree with me, didn’t have to. All he had to do was smirk in that smug bastard way of his, and my logic became void.

  In hindsight, there were many times when I was made to feel by Ian that my femaleness was something dull, fussy, shameful. Not intimate times, as one might expect — he was actually quite expert at overlooking it then, all the more as our fantasies progressed — but in commonplace moments, like those evenings with Dave and Maureen.

  I remember once I was giving Maureen a shift dress of mine that was too tight on the hips. She tried it on and did a turn for the chaps, who both nodded then went back to their talk. In that moment, I felt what a wretched thing it was to be not only females but also females of the same stock, who shared things like dresses and uncles and beaked noses, while these unrelated men shared whiskey and intimacies we could never know.

  Another occasion, I remember the chaps going out to take a piss in the alley while we remained inside. It was a miserable night, bucketing down, and when they came back in they were soaked through. ‘Why didn’t you just use the loo upstairs like normal people?’ Maureen asked them. They just giggled together, the bastards, and I knew immediately that the adventure of it was preferable to any warm, well-lit corner we could offer.

  I wasn’t involved in any of the planning for Edward. Partly because Ian didn’t care to involve me, partly because there was no plan. My clever clerk had decided to wing it, for the fresh thrill of it.

  I was there when he brought the lad home, though, under no duress: a gangly, limp-wristed lad the same age as David Smith. I hung back as Ian poured him wine and entertained him on the settee and, when he called for me to fetch Dave from across the street, I did. Furious as I was, there was something in me that burned to see Dave’s face turn green, to hand Ian the proof that I was far more capable than any slobbery-lipped git he might choose to piss down alleys with.

  ‘Ian has some miniature wines for you,’ I told Dave when he opened his front door, and even the sight of Maureen yawning in her housecoat, hair a black bird’s nest, did nothing for me.

  It was the messiest yet. Fourteen axe blows about the head and neck, though we didn’t learn the exact number until later. It is difficult for most people to imagine that kind of carnage, the almost surreal excess of it — blood on the curtains, tufts of hair in the fireplace, shards of bone scattered across the floor like beads. In the middle of it all stood Ian, shirt bespattered and a dark strand hanging over his forehead, but otherwise clean.

  We worked until four in the morning, getting rid of all traces of forensic. We did a fair job. If anybody skimped, it was Dave. He sat with us afterward in the curtained sitting room, sipping tea. His hands shook. Ours didn’t. Ian should have done him in then. He was a right twit, trusting David Smith.

  Perhaps it was wrong of me to love a tender man. Tender is so close to weak, and weak cannot be trusted. Weak is useless in a crisis.

  We had talked about what we would do if it came to it, going out in a blaze of gunfire then turning our weapons on each other. We would be brave and honourable like the Nazis in the bunker. It did not happen that way.

  I remember so clearly, how I came downstairs to see Ian sat on the settee. He was wearing only underwear and writing himself a sick note. He had sat up all night and was too tired to go into the office, he said. I looked at him, huddled with his biro and his writing pad, and wanted to hold him to my breast and nurse him, he seemed so tender. Then came the knock at the door and everything went out of him, the tenderness included.

  Some nights, when the pipes are clanging and the darkness too solid for me to see my own hand through, that old fear returns. I feel black things gathering above me, the fragility of roofs and walls. I am alone.

  My hair is back to its natural colour, dark as peat soil. I am heavy and dull, yet places within me remain soft. I like to go to the chapel and look at the waxy Christ faces, smell the incense on the air. I like to feel the organ notes tugging within me, stronger than any fear or desire. I like to think that we are all still children on this darkened earth.

  Charlie’s Girls

  We all leave home looking for something that isn’t there. Family, you could call it. Togetherness. Or maybe just plain Love. Whatever it is, it’s not waiting for us inside those little lighted boxes on their little green hillsides with their little flags waving in front. It’s not at our kitchen tables or on the laps of our daddies. And you better believe it’s not on our TV screens.

  Some of us come from afar, nasal New England toy towns and Rust Belt backwoods. Most of us come from closer. Santa Marina. San Gabriel. Redondo. You’ve probably seen us walking in the sunshine, tanned all year round, with our books pressed to our chests. We’re dreamy and don’t like chemistry or violin lessons. When we talk, it’s in dull, sultry tones; the heat that cracks the asphalt.

  Some of us are cheerleaders, choirgirls, homecoming queens. Some of us are wallflowers, just learning to let our hair down. We are all, without exception, beautiful — inside and out. Christ made us that way, but not the Christ you believe in.

  Our daddies are veterans. They have cruel, boring jobs like ‘headmaster’ and ‘stockbroker’ and ‘aeronautical engineer’. Our mothers are dead or homemakers. They care about Glo-Coat and cry every day of the week. There’s no Love there.

  It’s in Haight-Ashbury for a while, for those of us who get there early enough. After that, we have to look for it in wilder places, in the canyons and campervans beside the road. But none of us find it for real until Charlie.

  Because if Love has a human form, it’s him. A man of thirty-three with a cleft in his chin and all the darkness of locked prison cells in his eyes. He talks quietly, but everyone listens. He isn’t tall and strong like some G.I. Joe, but he doesn’t need to be. When he looks at us, it’s pure awareness, light coming to the surface and mingling with the dark, of which it is born and the same.

  And he knows us, body and soul.

  It’s all Love. Life or death, birthing or killing, it doesn’t matter. We killed them because we love them and now we’re standing in the living room, tripping over how good it looks. Rope hanging from the rafters. Bloody writing on the walls. Stuff scattered everywhere. Candleholders, ashtrays, matchbooks, potted plants. On the sofa, a big fat American flag.

  People think death is ugly, but if you look at it with pure awareness, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. Like all the sound and all the colour and all the beauty all at once. But the colours are fading on us and time is creeping back, oozy and slow to start with, then itching. We always listen to the animals inside our bodies, the writhing snakes and jumping rabbits and crawling insects. And they’re all
telling us one thing — vámonos.

  Out of that lit-up glasshouse, we run barefoot and night blooms around us, fragrant with hedges and bodies and blowing pine trees. The car is waiting at the bottom of the hill and Darling is clutching the wheel. Tex tells her to get over and she does and we all pile in, shivering in our wet creepy-crawlies. It’s wild how the blood chilled on us when it was so warm and groovy before. Kinda like cum, dribbling hot one second and Jell-O cold the next.

  We get naked as Tex winds the car around and around, past leafy clumps and freaky-tall palm trees and splashes of papery red flowers. There’s angry streaks all over our skin, running down our thighs and bellies. Sadie touches her red fingers to her cunt and says, ‘Aunt Flo is in town!’ which gets us all giggling. Then we get talking about what went down at the house.

  ‘That bitch pulled my hair,’ says Katie, who’s got the most magical brown hair, lush and long to her waist. ‘I got a killer headache.’

  Sadie tries to one-up her by telling how the big dude beaned her, but Katie won’t be beat. ‘Man, my bones hurt. I kept stabbin’ and hittin’ bones and now my bones hurt.’ That makes Tex laugh his big, hawing donkey laugh.

  ‘Y’all heard their bones crack when I kicked ’em? Kkkk-chhhh!’

  Darling is the only one of us without a story to tell, since she was on lookout the whole time. Tex wants her to get her hands dirty too, so he tells her to hop out at this big ravine. Then he peels off his creepy-crawlies and passes them through the window, motioning us to do the same. Darling looks freaked over how wet the clothes are, and even more when Tex hands her the gun and knives. ‘No one’s goin’ to see these for a million years. Get it?’

  We all watch Darling walk in the moonlight to the edge of the ravine. The backseat’s leather feels cool against our backs, sexy. She throws everything down, drippy with blood, then squints into the darkness. Back in the car, she shows us her red hands.