‘Call it your Christmas present.’ David was still holding onto the door handle, his knuckles white. ‘Should keep you out of trouble anyway.’
Christopher was not sure what trouble meant. He looked back to the desk, as if to appreciate it fully. The paintwork was meticulous – not one rogue drip, not even on the drawers. There was a dark green anglepoise lamp on the right-hand corner. Was that new? His typewriter had been put there too – also by David, Christopher supposed. The air thinned. He could feel David behind him, waiting for a reaction – another, better reaction.
‘Thank you,’ he said, running his hand over the desk. ‘It’s so smooth. You must have worked so hard on it.’
‘I did.’
Christopher tried not to drift away while David rattled on about grades of sandpaper, flour paper, the superiority of satinwood varnish over gloss.
‘Gosh,’ he said, and, ‘Really?’ and .‘Heavens, that’s really something.’
He did not let himself say that he had no desire, no intention to work anywhere other than downstairs, in the kitchen, near Phyllis. Nor did he say what I believe he felt at that time: that he wished David would take the twins and leave him alone, alone with Phyllis, forever.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ritual helps. We are woken at seven on the dot – we have breakfast. Nurse brings me my meds and makes me walk around the yard. She links my arm. She chats about nothing. She has a son still living at home. Her daughter is pregnant. I’m still on suicide watch. Yesterday Nurse asked if I felt ready to put on some nice clothes.
I brought my jeans out of the wardrobe and held them against me. They were far too big, of course. I mimed a belt and raised my eyebrows in question.
She laughed. ‘Nice try, my darling. But Nursie wasn’t born yesterday. Come on, let’s get you outside.’
One pill, two pills, whee, down the throat. A tour around the yard. Coffee time. Routine, order, ritual.
Ritual helped Christopher get through that second Christmas over at Margaret and Jack’s. Ritual gave him checkpoints, milestones to tick off; he only had to keep going until the next one. Midnight Mass, the exchange of gifts (he knew better than to try anything fancy this time and stayed away from politically explosive choices such as yellow cocktail mixers), Christmas dinner: No, the turkey’s lovely, not dry at all. He spent much of the time in the loft, where, after all, he said, they had put him, hadn’t they? It was no use staying downstairs. He barely spoke to his sister, and his brother, well, most of the time he just wanted to strangle him.
On Boxing Day he left, pleading a heavy workload, and travelled to Runcorn. To her – Phyllis. It occurred to him that he should invite Adam, whose home life was so unhappy, to come and stay with Phyllis and the boys, but he did not. Back then he would have said this was because he didn’t want to impose. I know now it was more likely out of fear. Adam was so charming, so good with the ladies, and Christopher could not have borne anyone replacing him in Phyllis’s affections.
* * *
Christopher’s luck with women did not improve. As the academic year progressed, Adam still invited him out with the boys, still gave him pep talks while he, Adam, still scored more often than Kevin Keegan on a roll. A little before Easter, Adam announced that he had found a two-bedroom house for the third year, did Christopher want to share?
‘Of course,’ Christopher said.
‘It’s further down towards Armley but still Leeds 6,’ said Adam. ‘Two bedrooms. Easier to stick to just the two of us, isn’t it?’
By then Christopher was supplementing his grant by working at the Hyde Park pub, up on Woodhouse Lane. Adam had talked his way into a job at the Warehouse club down on Somers Street and planned to stay in Leeds again over the summer. Christopher agreed that he would do the same, although he expected to spend a lot of time with Phyllis.
One evening at the beginning of April, a pub customer ordered a pint of Tetley’s and, before Christopher could put out his hand for the money, followed it with: ‘Another victim.’
‘Oh yes?’
The man dropped the coins into Christopher’s palm. ‘Building society clerk. Not just the prozzies now apparently. Only nineteen, poor cow.’
There had been no news of the Ripper over the last few months, and the talk at the bar had been that he had committed suicide.
Clearly he had not.
The next day, Christopher bought The Telegraph and scoured its pages, but the kind of information he wanted was not to be found. If the girl was not a prostitute, there would have been no financial transaction, surely? Had she agreed to sex, he wondered, and then changed her mind? Was that what had happened this time? Had she initiated sex, only to tell him to stop? He cut out the article and stuck it in his scrapbook.
I could see that Christopher had become obsessed – that his preoccupation with the Ripper was more acute than it was for the rest of us. But I didn’t know about the scrapbook then. If I had, I would have worried more. Much as I loved him, if I’d known, I might even have contacted the police. But thinking about it, maybe I wouldn’t have, since it wasn’t too much later in the year that the famous tape made it onto the news and sent everyone in a different direction entirely.
Christopher was in the library when he overheard two women whispering behind the bookshelf: They’re saying it’s him. He wrote those letters, now he’s sent them a tape. It’s been on the news. He packed up his books and hurried to the television lounge in the Union in time to catch the 5 p.m. bulletin. The lounge was full; he had to stand at the back, peer through the heads. The Ripper tape was the top story. The newscaster announced it gravely. The message appeared to be intended for Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who was leading the investigation. The police were appealing to anyone who recognised the voice to come forward.
The newscaster paused. The silence in the room intensified, was replaced by the breathy background noise from the cassette. And then the voice: ‘I’m Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord! You are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are letting you down, George. They can’t be much good, can they?’
The tape finished. Christopher bolted from the room, his heart pounding in his chest, his forehead slick with sweat. He headed for the Union bar, ordered a pint of Bass and drank half of it in one go. He was breathing heavily, almost panting. He downed the rest of his beer and ordered another, found his cigarettes and lit up. That voice. The Tyneside accent, the pitch, something in the way he phrased the question at the end.
Adam.
‘No,’ he muttered to himself. It couldn’t be.