Evil Relations (17 page)

In daylight, Ian follows the many deep-sided streams and we traipse behind until he finds a spot he likes. We drink the wine and whisky we’ve brought with us, and the wind blows our cigarettes out. Occasionally we have a radio with us, but not often. There are rocks nearby, along the roadside, great lumps of black stone. If we come here at night, that’s where we go, clambering over those rocks in the solid darkness to a flatter spot. He wears his stock-clerk shoes; she’s in her heels. We look down across the vast, dusky valley to the reservoir far below, a pale sliver of water. We wrap ourselves in blankets, cold at first, then whisky-warm.

I live for this place, he tells me. It owns my soul.

At times, he’s a mad man, walking off very quickly, hands in pockets again, alone, searching. When we catch up with him, he’s breathless and smiling: a junkie who has taken his fix. His expression alters if he catches sight of someone else on the moor – hikers send him into a rage. But that only happens during the day. By night, no one comes here but us.

One afternoon in April 1965 we head to the moor and don’t return home until nine. We drink ourselves close to oblivion and play cards carelessly, moods slipping. Ian suggests going back to the moor. We crawl into Myra’s car and speed away from the lamp-lit streets to roads that are blacker than the wagons shunting past my window.

It’s very late now. We squeeze out of the car near the rocks, where the moon glimmers on the reservoir far below. We’re very drunk, especially Ian and me, stumbling about in the dark. Myra is carrying the blanket. I can’t see my hand in front of my face, but Ian strides off in a direction he knows well. His voice is thick with drink and whisky sloshes in the bottle pushed inside his coat pocket. We lurch from one bog hole to the next and my socks grow wet, Cuban heels sinking into the long grass. Every time one of us loses our footing, Ian swears, a habit he slips into when drunk. Often he stops, glancing across at the reservoir as if to get his bearings. Finally, he finds the place.

It all looks the same to me, but Ian is happy. We wait for the girls to catch up with us. He’s friendly, affectionate even, as we stand looking across at the gleaming water. His arm is around my shoulder, hand gently squeezing, soothing.

Myra unfolds the blanket and we sit down. I’m comfortable apart from my wet shoes and socks; all of us are warmly dressed. The girls share a flask of tea and talk about their mother and Angela and things of the past. I neck the whisky with Ian, listening to the drone of the girls’ voices, enjoying the sensation of the alcohol warming my insides, burning my throat and spreading to my head. Ian is on a roll, spouting again about the peace that this place brings him and cursing the maggots down in the city. I realise he still has his arm around my shoulder and I’m thinking:
this must be true friendship
.

The night just got darker and I didn’t see it.

* * *

Before that particular visit to the moor, in early 1965 David and his old friend Sammy Jepson almost came to blows when Sammy started a rumour that he and Maureen had slept together. Meeting him by chance soon afterwards, David landed a punch before Sammy ran off; he called at his friend’s flat in Longsight to settle the score once and for all, but Sammy managed to duck away from him and raced off down the street. At the same time, David’s old adversary Tony Latham was putting about a similar story about himself and Maureen. David had no doubt that both Sammy and Tony were lying over their involvement with his wife, but he was infuriated nonetheless.

Almost every weekend, Ian and Myra would drive over to see David and Maureen, bringing a generous supply of alcohol to drink late into the night. The girls usually fell asleep just as Ian was getting into his stride, expounding on his philosophies and talking about his time in Borstal. He was interested in David’s past misdemeanours, prompting him one evening with the words, ‘I believe you’ve got a record.’ Often in the early hours of the morning the two of them would go outside to urinate behind the lock-up garages opposite; Ian brought along David’s starter pistol (‘All lads had starter pistols back then,’ David recalls) to shatter the night air with a single shot.

Occasionally, David and Maureen stayed overnight in Hattersley. The neat, half-timbered house at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue had ‘all mod cons’ and was surrounded by a white picket fence with a front and rear garden. The road through the estate ran in front, sloping ten feet as it passed the house behind a brick wall. Directly opposite was the New Inn pub on Mottram Road, which Myra would sometimes nip across to for cigarettes. On the horizon and clearly visible from the upstairs rooms of number 16 were the dark contours of the moor.

While David and Maureen were waiting to hear about their own move from Gorton, on 25 April 1965 the life they had built together was obliterated by the sudden death of their daughter, Angela Dawn.

* * *

Something is about to happen; something unstoppable.

I’m getting ready for work. Maureen is in the kitchen, making my pack-up, and I spend the last ten minutes of my morning at home sitting on the settee with little Angela tucked beside me. Then all at once those minutes are gone – there’s no time left, Dad and me have a bus to catch. On the upper deck he reads his
Daily Mirror
and we talk about nothing. I work all morning without much thought and wait for tea break. Half the day is done and I’ll soon be home.

Then I get called to the office. I’m told to go to Ancoats Hospital; Maureen is there, but nothing to worry about,
she’s not hurt, just get yourself off.
I slope out of the factory and stroll to the hospital, puzzled but unconcerned, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon. At the enquiry desk, I ask for Maureen.

Somewhere there’s a clock ticking, but it’s about to stop.

A nurse approaches me quickly, guiding me by the elbow into an empty room. She tells me she’ll only be a moment. A moment. How long is a moment when it lasts for ever?

I stand, glancing about at the room, which seems to be for examinations of some sort. There is a couch with a roll of white paper at one end, and not much else, just a few leaflets in a rack on the wall and a trolley of medical odds and ends. I think I can still hear the clock ticking.

The door opens and the same nurse comes in with a doctor.

I’m asked my name and address and told to sit down. I refuse, not seeing the need to rest my legs. The nurse is holding a great wad of tissues for some reason. The doctor speaks quick and soft:
your daughter is dead. I’m very, very sorry.

Angela Dawn Smith, aged six months. Gone.

The clock stops.

I think someone makes me sit down, but I don’t remember moving, and my hands are full of tissues but I’m not crying.
We’ll fetch your wife
, they say and go out, closing the door quietly, leaving me alone.

My world detonates.

I smash the room to bits, destroying every last thing within it. Nobody comes in to stop me, even though they can hear it all. I’m spent and more broken than I’ve ever been. I can’t feel anything but a pain so acute that it makes me vomit.

Maureen appears, hysterical, a mess. Someone calls a taxi for us and not a word is said about what I’ve done to the room. In the cab, Maureen splutters through her tears:
morning feed, bath, changed nappies, afternoon nap in the cot, she didn’t wake up, I went in and I couldn’t wake her, she didn’t wake up, Dave, she didn’t wake up, she didn’t wake up.

At home, I don’t speak for hours. Maureen won’t leave my side: I move, she moves, I stand up, she stands up. It’s strange, what you do together in grief.

I remember my beautiful little girl, my baby on the settee, round-eyed and laughing. Ten minutes, hours ago. Poor Maureen has had the full horror to face and I wasn’t there. I feel a rage so deep it makes my head burst. I gather all of Angela’s clothes, iron them and pack them away into a suitcase. No one must touch anything of hers. When Maureen’s Auntie Ann turns up out of genuine kindness, offering to sort out my baby’s belongings, I shout at her to leave. Then I take the suitcase to a railway embankment and throw it over the fence with all the might I can muster.

John Lennon says only women bleed. He’s so fucking wrong.

They bring Angela home one night in the smallest of white boxes. We’re at Mum’s house, 39 Aked Street, unable to face living at Wiles Street once I’ve got rid of the suitcase.

I take Angela from the undertaker’s men at the door; she’s ours and we don’t need anyone else’s help. I carry her to the parlour, my special place, where Dad has prepared a table. For such a little box it’s very heavy . . . or perhaps I have lost all feeling in my limbs.

Maureen and I spend the longest and loneliest night of our lives in the parlour with Angela in her coffin. The next day Maureen is a girl no longer. The difference can be seen in her eyes: they’ve become dull and empty, and the light will never quite come back into them. Her normally husky voice is nothing more than a whisper. We both recognise that our first attempt at growing up and sharing love with each other and with a child of our own has been razed to the ground.

We don’t recover.

Relations and in-laws arrive to say goodbye to Angela. I find myself heading for the front door. Opening it, I stop and glance back. Maureen is standing at the end of the hall. She nods at me without a word and I step outside.

Hours later I’m flat on my face outside the house in the dark, pissed up like I’ve never been before. The lights are on behind the tightly drawn curtains. I press my skin to the cold concrete and listen to the voice of madness in my head:
well, Be-Bop-A-Fucking-Lula, this is the day the fucking music died, no more street jiving, no more giving a shit about the hair and the clothes, no more Jimmy fucking Savile, screw being a Catholic, who gives a fuck about Dylan and Lennon anyway?

I close my eyes tightly, knowing what’s behind the closed curtains. I blink and twist slightly on the ground, my cheekbone scraping against the concrete. There at the end of the street is my old school. Why can’t the clock start ticking again, but this time send the hands spinning backwards until I’m there in my short trousers, comics and sweets in hand, running happily around the schoolyard at playtime? I want to be small again, I want to stop this day from happening. Why me, why fucking me again? I want the pain to leave me, I want to beat myself to a bloody pulp. I want . . .

The front door opens and a shaft of yellow light spills out. I don’t look at the feet of the person standing there; I want it to be my mother, reaching down for my arms and taking me in for a steaming mug of drinking chocolate. Anger flares inside my stomach and erupts in my throat: fuck her too, for leaving me when I needed her most, fuck her for letting me grow up, for not stopping all the bad things, for not living long enough for us to grow old together. Fuck life and fuck death.

I close my eyes and think of that little coffin. Please take this pain away, someone.

Two days ago I held my daughter in my arms; she looked up at me through her long eyelashes and laughed as I squeezed her gently to me. I said goodbye to her that morning, but I didn’t mean it to be for ever. Give me those moments back, give them all back. Or just a week, a day, an hour . . . ten minutes in the morning. I hate God, there is no God.

I feel gentle hands on me, lifting me to my feet. I sob against her shoulder,
I’m sorry, I’ll be a good boy tomorrow, I promise
. She guides me upstairs, her arms around me as she pushes open the bedroom door and lays me down. I close my eyes as the world whirls into oblivion and Maureen tucks the blanket in around me, kissing me softly.

She waited up for me, alone with the box.

The white Morris pulls up slowly outside the front door. I answer Myra’s unmistakeable knock; she stands there silently, holding a huge bunch of flowers with a card:
Another little flower for God’s garden
. I let her in and wait for Ian. He sits like an effigy of himself in the passenger seat of the car, staring straight ahead, unmoving. I can’t work out what’s going on and turn around, heading back down the hall to join Maureen and Myra in the parlour.

Angela lies in deathly perfection in the open coffin. There is a moment, just a moment, when tears fill Myra’s eyes. She wipes them quickly away, muttering that we mustn’t tell Ian. Maureen helps her blot the smudges and applies a black pencil close to her lashes. I leave them to it, feeling for my fags as I pull open the front door again.

I light a cigarette and look across at the car, waiting for Ian to acknowledge me, but I might as well wait for hell to freeze over. I stand there, not even six feet from him, with my daughter lying in her coffin and he can’t even look at me. Instead he sits there motionless, an elbow carelessly resting on the open window, smoking too, his eyes fixed straight ahead. No ‘sorry for your troubles’; not even a nod. Nothing. Fuck all. The bastard just sits there, sucking it all in. He’s in
my
street, near my people, my blood, wallowing in my grief less than a dozen streets away from his own mother.

I smoke my cigarette down to the filter, then flick it into the street.

Myra emerges behind me, with Maureen. She is more composed now, hugging Maureen and nodding at me before climbing into the car and starting the ignition. Not a glance between her and him; they drive away facing the windscreen like a pair of crash-test dummies.

You knew I was watching you that day, Ian. You knew. And that’s when you decided what it was that you wanted, and how to make it happen. We stood there, two heartbreaks waving you off, and I know you were smiling as Myra turned the car into Stockport Road.

Another little flower for God’s garden.

* * *

‘The turning point was Angela’s death.’ David reaches for the mug of tea Mary has just made for him and clutches it with both hands. ‘That’s when Brady decided which way he was going to go with me. I’ve got no reason to believe that, other than a gut feeling, but I’m sure of it. That day, when he was sat outside the house . . . not even a nod of acknowledgement. I was looking right at the car, parked towards Ross Place, and he was drawing on his cigarette, blowing the smoke into the air as if I didn’t even exist. Did I mention it to him later? No. It wasn’t that I wanted to talk to him especially – I’d gone out to get some air that day, more than anything. It was just that complete lack of respect for Angela’s death and what we, as parents, were experiencing. As for Myra’s tears, that wasn’t anything in the grand scheme of things. Again, it was shown differently in
See No Evil
: she wasn’t weeping, it was just a couple of seconds of wet-eye, then “Don’t tell Ian” and she was gone. The card that came with the flowers was the most emotional she ever got over the death of her niece. They drove off, and that was it. Except it wasn’t, because Ian had already decided, there and then, to involve me in their little secret.’