My darling boy. Your letter came this morning. Of course I recognised you in the picture! I’m sorry, I should have said. You have your father’s nose, I think. And he had dark hair too. My hair is brown – nothing special, I’m afraid, what you’d call mousy. Typical English rose, I suppose you’d say. I don’t tan and I go red in the heat. I can’t see much of me in your photo, but then I can’t see much of me in the twins. Everyone says they are the spitting image of David. My genes are obviously weak.
And don’t you be apologising for yourself – I won’t allow it! You sound perfect just as you are. You mustn’t feel like you need to be any other thing than yourself, do you hear me? No more apologies. I can’t be doing with fake people anyway. I get enough of airs and graces from David’s colleagues’ wives at the estate agent’s. They drive me bonkers with their holidays to Spain and their Mateus Rosé. Stuck-up lot. As if putting wine in a basket makes it a big deal, honestly. Listen to me. Now it’s me who is writing nonsense!
I think writing short and sweet letters is ideal. But let’s write lots! And yes, a meeting in February would be fabulous. The sooner the better, I say. I don’t see what’s to be gained by waiting. I’ve waited long enough! How does Saturday the 11th sound? If that’s too soon, don’t worry. We can make it later – it’s just a starting point. Let me know anyway. I will write again.
The thought of seeing you at last is too much to think about. Your photo is in a frame on my bedside table. I kiss it every night, but then I can’t get to sleep for thinking about you. I have imaginary conversations with you all the time – I can’t tell David for fear he’ll think I’m barmy. I lit another candle for you at the weekend. Our church is at the end of our road, St Edward’s – I think I told you that already. I try to go most Sundays if I can. Do you still practise?
I’ve enclosed a picture of me. It’s not very clear, but it’ll give you a rough idea. It was taken last year in Conway. As I said, I’m nothing special, just an ordinary human being – or human bean, as the twins say sometimes when they’re mucking about. And yes, we laugh in this house. I am glad to say that David brought laughter to my life a long time ago and that’s exactly why I married him. Don’t tell him I said that – it’ll go right to his head!
All my love, until we meet,
Phyllis xxx
Christopher wrote back by return of post, agreeing to the date. He kept his letter light, avoided the subjects that troubled him – his adoptive parents, his love life, sex. He could not tell her about Angie, nor about the only other girl he had ever touched – from the girls’ school one time at the youth club. He couldn’t even remember her name, only that he had spent a long slow dance to Chicago’s ‘If You Leave Me Now’ staring up at the cornicing in the church hall to avoid the smell of her greasy hair. He worried these things would make him sound weird, and with that monster on the loose – and in Yorkshire – she might think it was him. The idea filled him with a cold, sick feeling. The Ripper’s victims: bodies mutilated and abandoned in wasteland, behind cemeteries or left to rot in parks. When he thought of these women, these murders, these bodies, something dark niggled away at any peace, however short-lived, he might feel. He thought he knew what they meant by ‘bodies’, the fathomless dark the term concealed. All around him, he could sense the terror that still permeated the female student population, judging by the frenzied conversations he had overheard in the shuffle of the lecture halls, the squash of the corridors and the clatter of the university canteen. Normal women had been murdered. Normal women, just like them.
And if the victims included normal women, he wondered, was the Ripper a normal man, a man as normal or as troubled as any other – a man like him?
Sometimes, when Christopher thought of the killer referred to increasingly simply as him, he found himself unable to stop imagining how the circumstances had progressed from transaction, in the case of the prostitutes at least, to terror. The mere word – prostitute – provoked in him a strange mix of excitement and revulsion. He thought of dark streets, of the smell of rain and rotting rubbish, the whirr of refuse trucks in the small hours of the night. When he thought of the five-pound note the police had found in that handbag, he thought of other banknotes, grubby, crumpled, dug out from pockets and handed over, stuffed into cheap purses in haste. He thought, could not help but think, of a faceless woman in a damp alleyway, underwear yanked down and away, the monster’s trousers dropped, hairy white legs bent, knuckles bleached by the weight of buttocks, paler legs wrapped around the thrusting hips of a shadow man, the glint of teeth and eye all that was visible of his murderous grimace.
And then, what then? The climax, the aftermath – sensations he had (if he didn’t count Angie) only ever experienced alone, by his own hand. He knew at least the rush, what the French called the little death, and the melancholy that followed. But at what point did it turn for him, the Ripper? Or was there no such preamble? Did he attack them from behind, send them falling before they even knew he was there? Did he confront them and bare his yellow teeth? Or did he talk to them, flatter them, walk with them a while before turning, horribly, the knife raised in his sweating hand? Did he kiss them? Did they touch him? Did they caress him, the Ripper, as Angie had caressed him, Christopher?
At the thought of that business with Angie, he felt a fresh sting of humiliation. Her kindness had been worse than cruelty. Women had that power. They made you lose control. Maybe that was why the Ripper killed them – revenge for reducing him to his basest, animal self. Women were the authors and the witnesses of his shame and as such had to be terminated.
Something along those lines, perhaps, though Christopher was no expert in these matters. Adam was an expert. He appeared to have no problem with issues of the body, talked openly, proudly even, of his bowel movements and his sexual conquests as if they were no more embarrassing than eating a sandwich. He had finished with Alison now and had taken up with a language student called Rosemary, a very tall woman who made him look like some sort of garden gnome. These disparities didn’t faze him. He wore his charm as if it were the most comfortable old cardigan and took what came to him as his right. He was lucky. Like the first man on earth he often joked about, he had claimed his place in the world. His name fitted him perfectly.
Christopher sighed, locked in his private, interior world where such thoughts looped, dived and dissolved – looped again infinitely. There were things he would never tell anyone, not even Phyllis. For her, he would be everything she was hoping for in a son. He would be a boy she could not refuse. For Phyllis, he would be normal.
Chapter Eleven