Christopher closed his eyes, but it was useless – he felt his knees lock.
‘This guy is strong and I can trust him,’ Adam continued, still in the silly girlish voice. ‘This guy will look after me – he will protect me against perverts and nasty men in raincoats, and murderers. I think… I think I’ll let him feel my tits.’ He jumped back and laughed.
Christopher shook his head, unable to stop himself from smiling. ‘You’re a lunatic, Adam,’ he said. ‘An absolute lunatic.’
Adam clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come on, you stiff bastard, let’s go and get pissed.’
In moments like this, Christopher said, he wondered whether it was Adam he liked so enormously, or Adam’s view of him. In Adam’s eyes, he, Christopher, was no more than shy, perhaps a little square but still, essentially, one of the boys. In Adam’s view, he, Christopher, was normal.
* * *
Despite Adam’s mischievous influence, Christopher studied hard. He still found refuge in solitude, books, his Top-40 tapes. ‘Denis’, ‘Sheena Is a Punk Rocker’, ‘How Deep Is Your Love’. He found St Urban’s in Headingley, resumed his weekly visits to church. He prayed for patience, lit candles for his mother, whoever and wherever she was.
Oh Lord, protect and care for my real mother, whose son was taken from her. Keep her in your light and let her know that I’m looking for her. Tell her I will find her, if not in words then in a feeling of peace. Amen.
The Sex Pistols went to number one, the students protested outside the Parkinson Building to show their support for the firefighters. He called Samantha Jackson, who asked him to call her weekly, for a chat, which he did. She was easy to talk to, easier over the phone. When he expressed frustration, she counselled him against rushing, against taking matters into his own hands. And still no word came from the Registrar.
December. A Christmas tree went up in the Union building, another outside the Queens Hotel in City Square. Another strike by the Ripper: Marilyn Moore, who survived. Christopher bought The Telegraph, The Guardian and the Daily Mail and cut out the articles relating to the attack. He bought a scrapbook and glued the cuttings in there, along with photocopies from newspapers he had found at Leeds City Library down in Calverley Street, covering the Ripper’s victims to date: Emily Jackson, Marcella Claxton, Irene Richardson, Tina Atkinson, Jayne MacDonald, Maureen Long and Jean Jordan, the woman Alison – or Angie, was it? – had mentioned in the pub.
Now that this last victim had survived, a nation pinned its hopes on her description of the man they were calling a monster, a coward, a psychopath. But her account, plus some matching tyre tracks amounted to nothing much. Not enough, certainly, to stem the fear that had infiltrated the mind of every female student on campus. At the Union, a minibus was organised to take women to their places of residence. Those who refused to be prisoners in their rooms collected in parties to walk to and from the pub. Stories abounded of women reporting their husbands, their brothers. Do you know this man?
Christopher fell into the habit of cutting out any newspaper clipping he saw – Mob Jeer Lorry Driver; Why Can’t They Catch Him?; Prostitutes Go in Fear – and into his cheap scrapbook he stuck them all. Sometimes, when he’d finished his reading, he would flick through the scrapbook, poring over the headlines and the words, the photographs and the photofits, imagining what dark details lay invisibly there where the grey newsprint smudged the thin white page. What secrets, what horrors.
Towards the end of term, he was walking back to Devonshire Hall when he was filled with that familiar feeling of knowledge. And sure enough, there in the pigeonhole marked H was a letter addressed to him. At the sight of it, his insides flamed, because he knew in that moment, he said, that the rag end of an old year was about to be brought to life with the promise of something new.
The envelope was large – three times the size of the standard rectangular official letter. There was another envelope too, white, squarer, upon which he recognised Margaret’s handwriting. He took both letters up to his room, placed Margaret’s letter to one side of his desk and held the brown envelope to his chest. On the bookshelf, Adam had rigged up a plastic Christmas tree, no bigger than a Tiny Tears doll. He had bought it from Leeds market for thirty pence. A lone strand of ratty silver tinsel snaked around its body like a helter-skelter, and disappeared down the back of the shelving. Christopher opened the large envelope and pulled out the pinkish document.
CERTIFIED COPY of an ENTRY OF BIRTH
Pursuant to the Births and Deaths Registration Act, 1953
Registration District: Liverpool
Birth in the Sub-district of: Liverpool
‘Liverpool’ was handwritten, in fountain pen. Below, columns – all filled with the same handwriting.
When and where born: Twelfth March 1959, Liverpool Maternity Unit
Name, if any: Martin Anthony Curtiss
Sex: Boy
Name, and surname of father: Mikael Dabrowski
I often think of him holding this handwritten document in his hands, of how he described that moment to me. His arm dropped to his side, he said, as if deadened by a hard thump. He had to steady his breathing, hand against his mouth. He could smell the ink in the sweat of his palms.
‘Martin,’ he whispered. ‘I am Martin.’
A memory surfaced, until now suppressed. A woman he used to see sometimes on Hestham Avenue when he was a boy. She wore a headscarf made of blue patterned silk or satin, tied under her chin, but that was all he could recall except that he did not recognise her as one of his neighbours. But now, seeing his name on the birth certificate, he remembered this woman, how she had talked to him once and made him afraid. He had been no more than ten or eleven and out on his bike – a second-hand Raleigh Chopper, the best thing he had ever owned. He had been cycling up and down the road, hungry and a little bored, trying to do wheelies like the other boys, when the chain had come off. He’d turned the bike upside down and rested it on its handlebars while he teased the oily links back onto the cog’s teeth. Someone had grabbed his arm, and when he turned, he saw it was the woman – he recognised her scarf.
She had called him a name, her grey eyes searching his.
‘No, sorry,’ he had replied, politely as he had been told. ‘I’m Christopher.’
‘Christopher? Are you sure? You’re not…’