Between 12 January and 11 February 1978, Christopher and Phyllis wrote a total of ten letters each. During this time, the Ripper killed again: Helen Rytka, an eighteen-year-old prostitute from Huddersfield. Christopher cut out the relevant newspaper articles, stuck them in his scrapbook and returned to his letters to Phyllis. Writing to his birth mother, he told me, became his favourite way to wind down after an evening lost in medieval studies or the horrors of the Holocaust. With each letter came the momentary appeasement of his all-pervading desire to be in constant communication with her. But barely a day, sometimes barely minutes after he had written, the need to reach for her renewed itself, stronger still. It moved me to hear him say this. Love is where the idle mind travels.
And so, when the InterCity pulled into Warrington station at 2.25 p.m. on Saturday, 11 February 1978, Christopher found himself, rigid with tension, at the window of the train door. He had stood there since Manchester Piccadilly, unable to sit a moment longer, staring out of the window as if she, Phyllis, might appear skirting along the hedgerows like a phantom.
The photograph she had sent was indeed blurry. In one of her letters she’d mentioned that she hated having her photo taken and always looked a fright. She was, he thought, saying that out of modesty, but I know she didn’t have a high opinion of the way she looked. Despite the poor focus, Christopher thought the photograph showed a pretty young woman not too much older than him. She was holding an ice cream, though the sky at her back was grey, and her light brown hair blew up and across her cheeks in the wind. She was smiling, and when he looked into the photo, as he had done every day since, he imagined her smile was for him.
He had tied all her letters together using the scraggy tinsel from Adam’s miniature Christmas tree and stored them in a shoebox under his bed. A nightly routine had become to unwind the glittering thread, pick one at random and read it before he went to sleep, a routine that almost always finished in him taking out every one of the letters and reading them from first to last. He would close his eyes and think of her and him together, always sitting or lying close, hands clasped, heads bent in a soft apricot light. He wondered sometimes where this light came from, and what it meant.
He stepped down off the train and waited for the crowd to thin. One by one the horde dispersed until only one remained: a young woman in a burgundy wool beret, a woman once blurry brought suddenly and shockingly into focus. She was standing in front of a blow-up image of Jimmy Savile – InterCity. This is the age of the train – her face the very picture of anticipation.
‘Phyllis? Phyllis Curtiss?’
But she was already walking towards him. She wore bell-bottomed jeans like his and a long black woollen coat. She could have been another student, maybe a PhD student. Her arms flew out like wings, but almost immediately she clapped them to her sides as if she did not know whether or not to fly.
‘Christopher?’ Her hair was fair rather than brown as she had said, but her eyes were dark – brown, like his. Margaret’s eyes were blue – he shook the thought away. ‘Christopher, is it you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, almost too choked to speak. ‘Yes. It’s me.’
Her eyes shone, a rim of tears at their edge; her mouth pressed itself into a tight smile. She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring, her shoulders rising, her chest seeming to inflate. When she exhaled, she gave a short gasping laugh – of surprise, of joy, of something neither of them could identify but which filled the air, the sky, and on.
After a moment’s hesitation, she came forward. Her hands flew up and dropped and flew up again, and when she was close enough, she reached and touched him lightly on the arm, as if to check he was really there. He found himself unable to move, filled with a kind of burning. She stood back, straightened, gave another half-gasp, half-laugh. Her hair was not black like his but her nose was not thin at least, perhaps a little like his own, and her eyes were definitely brown and carried a smudge of grey beneath. He reached for where she had touched his arm and held himself there, as if injured. But he was not injured.
‘Here you are,’ she said.
He nodded, all ability to speak quite gone.
She reached up and placed a forefinger under the inner corner of his eye, then traced her finger down a little, the way a tear might run. As if suddenly aware of what she was doing, the intimacy of it, she withdrew her hand and placed it flat against her own flushed cheek.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Just … my dad used to say that my eyes had been pushed in with sooty fingers. And yours have that too…’ She covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes brimmed, overflowed at last. ‘I can’t believe it.’ She laughed that small gasping laugh again and took a step back. Her eyes did not leave his.
‘I…’ he began but could not continue.
‘Let’s get you home,’ she said gently, reaching into her coat pocket for a tissue and dabbing at her eyes. ‘To my house, I mean – if I can manage to drive. I don’t know if I can, mind you, I’m shaking like a leaf here.’
With her arm at his back, she ushered him out to the car park and then walked a little ahead. Every other step, she turned and gave a laugh, as if embarrassed or as if to apologise for something.
‘This is our chariot,’ she said, and stopped.
They had reached a bronze-coloured Austin Princess. The bodywork had rusted in patches and the black vinyl roof had started to peel. ‘Bit of a banger, but she goes.’ She unlocked the passenger door first, touched his arm again, the lightest tap, before making her way around to the driver’s side. In her wake, he smelled flowers, though he could not have said whether it was perfume or soap.
‘Get in,’ she called over the top of the car. ‘Excuse the mess.’
Inside, in the footwell, were six or seven green toy soldiers of the type he himself had played with as a child: no bigger than a thumb, their feet moulded to small flat rectangles so they could stand and fight. He guessed they belonged to the twins, whose names he had learned off by heart from her letters: Darren and Craig. Despite being messy, the car was comfortable, with soft rust-coloured velour upholstery. It smelled of sports kit, of trainers. There was a box of Kleenex tissues on the dashboard, four or five tapes in the square recess next to the gearstick, what looked like a woman’s handbag of tan leather on the back seat.
Phyllis started the engine. A blast of music came from the cassette player – French: Blondie, ‘Denis’.
‘Sorry,’ she said, turning down the music. ‘David tapes the charts every week for the car.’
‘I used to do that,’ he said, filled with inexplicable joy. ‘Every week.’
‘So you like music, then?’
‘Yes, very much. Do you?’